Rock Music’s Most Vile Villains #16 (Robert Morgado)

Worst executive ever! RAP SHEET: By the mid-’80s, Warner Bros. Music Group was the most successful record company in the world- and the hippest, too, with an impeccable roster of artists (from the Grateful Dead to Madonna) and top-tier executives who knew how to make both records and money.

     That prosperous era ended in 1991, when corporate hatchet man Morgado was appointed the company’s new chief and initiated a restructuring plan that would purge nearly every top exec. Warners soon slid into mediocrity and has yet to fully recover. After his 1995 dismissal, a Dutch analyst assessed the company’s music division as “practically worthless.”

THE DEFENSE: Has a sense of humor. He once admitted that Warners’ bloodletting made “Bosnia look like Shangri-la.”

QUOTE: “Why would a man burn down the most beautiful house on the block, with all the beautiful stuff still in it?” –Former Elektra chief Bob Krasnow