Earlier than the period of swashbuckling company raiders rained riches and concern on Wall Road, there was Thomas H. Lee.
A personal fairness titan sooner than virtually anybody else, Mr. Lee, by his agency, Thomas H. Lee Companions, cemented Boston as a hub of financiers who took over firms, slashed prices and resold them shortly for revenue. Acquisitions of firms like Snapple, Houghton Mifflin and a slew of lesser-known names made him a billionaire earlier than a string of high-profile misfires compelled him from his agency.
Mr. Lee died on Thursday in New York Metropolis at age 78. The town health worker mentioned on Friday that the trigger was suicide with a firearm. A spokesman for Mr. Lee’s household offered no different particulars.
Even amongst rivals within the strong-shouldered non-public fairness world, Mr. Lee retained a popularity for congeniality.
“I used to be at all times impressed by his optimism and people-oriented method,” mentioned Steve Pagliuca, co-founder of a rival non-public fairness agency, Bain Capital. “He was a kinder, gentler private-equity individual.”
Mr. Lee, referred to as Tommy to mates, was born into nice wealth, which he parlayed into even better wealth. His grandfather Robert W. Schiff, an immigrant from Russian Lithuania, based the Shoe Company of America, which was as soon as credited with promoting 15 p.c of all footwear within the nation.
Whereas his father joined the household enterprise, Mr. Lee set out on his personal. Armed with $150,000 from an inheritance, a mortgage from his brother and a personal training that included a level from Harvard, he began his personal enterprise in 1974 within the nascent world of leveraged buyouts.
This wasn’t the extraordinary work of shopping for up shares or bonds. Buyout companies raised cash from buyers, pledged the funds for loans after which used the borrowed cash to take over firms. The aim was to seek out fast value financial savings within the companies, usually by layoffs or different company restructuring, after which flip them for revenue, which Mr. Lee usually did with spectacular success.
If a facet impact was that the businesses usually floundered later beneath the debt that Mr. Lee and his colleagues loaded on them, the buyers have been lengthy gone by the point of these reckonings.
Whereas rivals targeted on the largest targets attainable, Mr. Lee chalked up victories with midsize targets. He organized acquisitions of firms just like the GNC vitamin retailer chain and the lingerie maker Playtex. In maybe his greatest identified coup, his agency purchased Snapple for $135 million in 1992 and offered it simply two years later to Quaker Oats for $1.7 billion, greater than a 30 occasions acquire.
Simply $28 million of the Snapple funding got here from Thomas H. Lee Companions’ personal coffers.
It wasn’t solely the uncooked numbers that set Mr. Lee aside. Essentially the most well-known buyout professionals relished their function as so-called raiders who might go away a few of the greatest firms in company America quaking. Well-known names of the period like Michael Milken, who was later jailed on securities fees, and Henry Kravis made for colourful, intimidating characters in books like “Den of Thieves” and “Barbarians on the Gate.”
Mr. Lee went in one other route. His vice was cigar smoking and his interest was golf, hardly memorable logos amongst financiers. The headline with a 1993 profile of Mr. Lee in The New York Occasions summed up a standard view of him: “In Takeover Video games, Good Guys Don’t At all times End Final.” The article described him as having “the air each of a tireless salesman not at all times forthcoming and of a professor keen on explaining complicated points.”
“I’m a pleasant man,” he mentioned in an interview for that article. “I’ve by no means been poor, and I don’t really feel I’ve to show myself.”
However within the latter years of his profession, Mr. Lee stumbled. His agency wrote off its funding within the fallen commodities dealer Refco after its chief govt was found to have hidden big quantities of debt, an embarrassing setback that value buyers a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of {dollars}. Mr. Lee left Thomas H. Lee Companions in 2006 amid reported disagreements with its executives, and the corporate modified its identify to THL Partners.
He briefly began his personal hedge funds earlier than closing them amid steep losses just a few years later.
He’s survived by his spouse, Ann Tenenbaum; 5 youngsters, Jesse, Nathan, Rosalie, Zach and Robert; and two grandchildren.
In his later years, as an avid donor to New York cultural causes, Mr. Lee retained his wit. While accepting an award in 2014 for donations to the UJA-Federation of New York, he earned roars of laughter from the group on the St. Regis Resort in Manhattan in telling a tongue-in-cheek story of “the primary buyout,” involving an organization proprietor and his acquisitive new son-in-law.
“It occurred at an excellent occasion like this,” Mr. Lee mentioned. “An incredible man was being honored.”
In case you are having ideas of suicide, name or textual content 988 to succeed in the Nationwide Suicide Prevention Lifeline, or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for an inventory of extra sources.
Hurubie Meko contributed reporting.
