Since joining Blackstone, Mr. Middleton has been involved in a variety of transactions which include advising Verizon on the sale of its Hawaiian operations to the Carlyle Group, Alamosa on its sale to Sprint, Global Crossing on several strategic transactions, Alestra on its partnership with AT&T, and the formation of One Communications resulting from the three way merger of Choice One, CTC, and Conversant.

Before joining Blackstone in July 2003, Mr. Middleton was head of the Global Communications Group and Vice Chairman of Investment Banking at Merrill Lynch, where he worked on some of the largest transactions in the communications sector.  These included the merger of Bell Atlantic with NYNEX and, subsequently, GTE, as well as the merger of US WEST and Qwest. Other notable transactions at Merrill included the sale of Frontier Corp. to Global Crossing and the formation of the Verizon Wireless partnership with Vodafone. He also acted as an independent advisor to Qwest on the sale of its Dex directories subsidiary.  Prior to Merrill Lynch, Mr. Middleton was Co-Head of the Telecommunications Group at Salomon Brothers and concentrated on strategic privatizations worldwide.  Major transactions included SBC’s acquisition of Telmex and Bell Atlantic’s acquisition of Telecom Corp. of New Zealand.  He also acted as advisor to TelecomAsia in its sale of a strategic stake to NYNEX and to MATAV (Hungary) in its sale of a strategic stake to Deutsche Telecom and Ameritech.

Mr. Middleton graduated from Ithaca College and received an MBA from Columbia University School of Business as a member of Beta Gamma Sigma. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Nature Conservancy, is a trustee of the United Way of Pelham and is a member of the Advisory Council of the Northwestern University School of Communications.