[11] In August 1986, the RJR Nabisco board announced that F. Ross Johnson would replace J. Tylee Wilson as head of the company effective January 1, 1987.

[12] On January 15, 1987, the RJR Nabisco board approved a headquarters move from Winston-Salem to Cobb County, Georgia, north of Atlanta, where the company had rented space.

Bryan Burrough and John Helyar published Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, a successful book about the events which later became a television movie for HBO.

A fierce series of negotiations and proposals ensued which involved nearly all of the major private equity players of the day, including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Salomon Brothers, First Boston, Wasserstein Perella & Co., Forstmann Little, Shearson Lehman Hutton, and Merrill Lynch.

Once put in play by Shearson Lehman Hutton and RJR management, almost every major Wall Street firm involved in M&A launched frenzied, literal last-minute bids in a fog of incomplete or misleading information.

RJR's management team, working with Shearson Lehman Hutton and Salomon Brothers, submitted a bid of $112, a figure they felt certain would enable it to outflank any response by Kravis.

Time magazine featured Johnson on the cover of its December 1988 issue along with the headline "A Game of Greed: This man could pocket $100 million from the largest corporate takeover in history.

[15] As a result of the acquisition, RJR Nabisco divested the following divisions: Another major consequence of the buyout was that according to United States Department of Labor, in its report "American Workplace", over 2,000 workers subsequently lost their jobs, of which 72% were eventually replaced, but earning less than half of their previous incomes, suggesting that it took most of those who lost their jobs an average of 5.6 months to find new employment.

[26] In 2021, RJR Nabisco (before it split up) was listed in the Pandora Papers after the law firm Baker McKenzie set up shell companies in Cyprus.