Damon Mezzacappa, the former vice chairman of Lazard Freres & Co. who built the investment bank's capital-markets division in the 1980s and '90s, has died. He was 79. He died on April 14 at his home in Palm Beach, Florida, his wife, Katherine Bryan, said in a telephone interview. The cause was lung cancer.

Mezzacappa joined the firm in New York at the behest of then-Chairman Michel David-Weill to expand its business beyond mergers and acquisitions to include stock and bond underwriting and trading. He cut a deal with David-Weill, a French billionaire who controlled Lazard, that brought him annual pay of more than $12 million, according to the 2007 book "The Last Tycoons," by William Cohan.

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