With FDIC Help, John Kanas Remakes Subprime Lender BankUnited

John Kanas was grilling burgers for dinner on the porch of his Long Island home in May 2009 when the call came. An official at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. told him he and his private equity partners had won the bidding to take over BankUnited, a Florida lender that was sinking under the weight of its subprime mortgages. Desperate to avoid liquidating the bank, the FDIC had accepted Kanas’s terms, in what would come to be known as one of the sweetest of sweet deals made during the crisis. There was just one catch: Kanas and his team had to take over the bank at 8 a.m. the next morning. “I was stunned,” Kanas says. That night, he hopped on his private jet and flew to Miami.

With the FDIC deal providing a floor under future losses, Kanas, 66, started to rebuild BankUnited from a risky mortgage lender into one of the more profitable and best capitalized banks in the country. “We have a lot of money, and we make a lot of money,” he says. Now the $12.7 billion bank is pushing into New York, opening branches and luring staff from rivals. A veteran New York banker, Kanas is betting he can regain footing in the biggest and most competitive market in the country. “It’s been a pretty big turnaround story,” says Brady Gailey, an analyst at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods.