Denunzio was forced to turn down the offer because he was helping his mother in the family real estate business at the time.
Shortly after graduating, he joined Kidder, a firm with Wall Street roots in the 1820s, and was assigned to the Chicago office as a stock and bond salesman for institutions in Ohio, Michigan, and Kentucky. .
In 1954, he married Jean A. Ames, whom he met while vacationing in Connecticut. She passed away in 2020. In addition to his son Peter, he is survived by two other sons, David and Thomas, and eight grandchildren. He lived in the Riverside neighborhood of Greenwich.
In Chicago, Mr. DeNunzio thrived in an era of high fees and fixed fees, but soon grew tired of the monthly long drive to New York for family reasons. Four years later, he returned to New York to work for Kidder’s syndicated arm of Wall Street. There, he gathered underwriting partners in offerings of new securities, mostly bonds.
Led by Albert H. Gordon, the investment luminary who rebuilt Kidder after the Wall Street crash of 1929, Mr. DeNungio rapidly climbed the corporate ladder, becoming president in 1977 and chief executive officer in 1980. became a person
By then, not only was Mr. Siegel’s ill-gotten gains, but the company, which relied on traditional brokerages and underwriters, was in trouble.
“We looked like a mid-sized company in a country of giants,” DeNunzio recalled in a 2019 interview at the Princeton Club in Manhattan, noting that he could compete for funding for giant projects. “Marty’s resignation upset us,” he added, referring to Siegel. “Perhaps we should have moved sooner to build the capital.”