Alan “Ace” Greenberg, the man behind both the rise and fall of Bear Stearns, died on Friday. He was 86 years old.

Under Greenberg’s leadership Bear Stearns saw explosive growth, from a firm of 1000 employees and $46 million in capital in 1978 when Greenberg took over, to the fifth largest securities firm in the United States by 1993, with over $1.8 billion in equity. But Greenberg also personally chose and groomed his successor, James Cayne, who presided over Bear Stearns’ stunning collapse in 2008.

Known as “Ace,” because he loved playing cards and always kept a deck on his desk, The New York Times reports, Greenberg started at Bear Stearns as a clerk in 1948. He worked his way up through the ranks, becoming CEO in 1978. As CEO, Greenberg’s cost control measures became investment banking folklore. He reportedly once distributed a single-page memo  prohibiting the purchase of paper clips.

“To this day, I can’t throw a paper clip out,” Thomas Marano, a 25-year Bear Stearns veteran, told Bloomberg.

In 2008, Bear Stearns found itself over leveraged with basically worthless sub-prime mortgage securities, and a bank run drove it into bankruptcy. Though JP Morgan Chase took over the firm in a $270 million fire-sale, most of the 14,000 Bear Stearns employees lost their jobs.

Subsequently, Greenberg attempted to distance himself from Cayne, even blaming him for the collapse in a 2010 memoir.

By 2007, Cayne had become “more aloof and full of himself,” Greenberg wrote, according to Bloomberg. This “couldn’t help but impair certain business judgments.”