Meet the Jackie Robinson of Wall Street:
In 1987, a little-known New York lawyer became a master of the universe when he led a takeover of the food conglomerate Beatrice International, creating the first Black-owned billion-dollar company. Robert Smith, Michael Milken, Henry Kravis and others recall the life and legacy of Reginald F. Lewis.
The Beatrice buyout would put Lewis among Wall Street’s most elite dealmakers, including Nelson Peltz and Michael Milken. The junk bond king of Drexel Burnham Lambert, was already a friend and mentor to Lewis—and in the case of Beatrice, a key investor. And as a young man with a taste for the finer things in life, Lewis already looked like he had already arrived. In high school, he favored tweed jackets and thin British neckties, and in his senior year, he had also used his savings to buy a Hillman convertible, making him one of the few students on his campus to own a car.
That success didn’t come without a price. A perfectionist, who was known to grade the people in his life on an A to F scale Lewis worked 18-hour days and expected his employees to keep up or face one of his verbal tirades. “Reg was very intense and difficult to work for,” recalls one of his longtime business partners, Charles Clarkson. “He would snap in a second, screaming at everyone who had happened to be there if anything went slightly wrong—and I had happened to be there a lot.
But Lewis was already masterminding his masterpiece. Two weeks before the McCall deal closed, a colleague at Bear, Sterns mentioned that KKR was selling Beatrice International, which had $2.5 billion in sales, through an auction conducted by Morgan Stanley and Salomon Bros. Milken’s support eased KKR’s concerns and after increasing its bid to $985 million, Lewis’s TLC beat out other financial heavyweights and eventually signed an agreement to buy Beatrice.
The relentless climb to the top, however, was taking its toll. By Thanksgiving 1992, Lewis began to have vision problems in his left eye and flew back to New York from Paris—where he was living in an apartment in King Louis XIV’s historic Palais Bourbon—for a thorough physical. The news was devastating—the 50-year-old CEO had an inoperable brain tumor and wasn’t given long to live.
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