11 who make it happen. (key employees who facilitate media deals at financial services companies; includes related table of stock and equity-linked offerings)(The Deal Makers)

Nancy Peretsman

Allen & Co

When Nancy Peretsman joined small investment banker Allen & Co. two years ago, it was the third time she had worked for Herbert Allen Jr.

The first two times were not quite as glamorous: She housesat for the firm's chairman while she was in college in 1976, and then she landed an internship on Allen & Co.'s arbitrage desk while she was in business school two years later.

The jobs got progressively less relaxing. After a stint at a now-defunct firm and a long run up the ladder at Salomon Bros., she returned to Allen & Co. in 1995 to become one of a bevy of executives chasing media deals.

The move was something of a culture shock. Peretsman had spent most of her finance career at one of Wall Street's top deal machines that pursues all kinds of stock, bond and merger deals, engineers exotic derivative securities and trades billions of dollars worth of paper for its own account.

She jumped to a stripped-down boutique known for quietly building relationships with top media moguls and for being in the right place when the right time comes to merge their companies.

Allen is famous for one of the most exclusive retreats in corporate America, his annual summer camp for rich media boys in Sun Valley, Idaho. The investment conference regularly attracts the biggest of media bigwigs, such as Viacom's Sumner Redstone, Time Warner's Gerald Levin and Ted Turner, News Corp. 's Rupert Murdoch and Microsoft Corp.'s Bill Gates.

The quiet approach works. It was at Allen's retreat that Walt Disney Co. Chairman Michael Eisner coaxed Capital Cities/ABC Inc. Chairman Tom Murphy into selling his company for $19 billion. (Allen's fees amounted to just a few million dollars.)

Allen bankers spent years cultivating Seagram Corp. Chairman Edgar Bronfman Jr. and HSN lnc. Chairman Barry Diller, advising both on major takeover deals. When Diller and Bronfman decided last May to put Seagram's TV production and cable network operations into Diller's hands, Diller turned to Peretsman to help the process. News of neither deal leaked out beforehand.

"We're not playing a market share game. We do what we do in a limited way, and we hope we do it better than anybody else," Peretsman says.

--John M. Higgins

Alan Mnuchin

Bear, Stearns & Co.

There's a particular reason Bear, Steams & Co. was chosen to try to sell Court TV. It's because investment banking chief Allen Schwartz can move smoothly among the three bickering partners--Liberty Media Corp., NBC and Time Warner Inc.--gaining each one's trust and being regarded as an honest broker.

If the partners had simply wanted to auction the network, "it might have been someone else," says one executive familiar with the process.

That matches Bear Steams' reputation on the street. Although the firm is primarily a …