Reginald Lewis was brimming with excitement as he and his stepfather, Jean Fugett, Sr., drove up the New Jersey Turnpike toward New York City in the summer of 1968.
For him, as for so many others, Manhattan was the end of the rainbow. It was where he would meet his wife, raise a family, and build an international business empire. He had no way of knowing that, at the age of 25, his life was already half over.
He and Fugett entered the Holland Tunnel, cruised under the Hudson River, exited into New York City and promptly got lost.
Manhattan was a real scorcher during July and August of 1968. I found an apartment, a five-floor walkup on 21st Street on the west side of Manhattan. It had one bedroom and the rent was $150 a month. I could afford a lot more, since Paul, Weiss raised salaries to $15,000 in response to a move by rival Manhattan firm Cravath, Swaine and Moore—I’ve always had a warm spot for Cravath as a result. But the idea of saving as much as possible was irresistible. I did splurge on a stereo, about $1,500, and a few custom-made suits and shirts, items I’d always bought off the rack. I decided against a car because of the expense and inconvenience of parking.
I’ll always remember my first day at Paul, Weiss. I recall catching the E train at 23rd and 8th, getting off at 50th and Madison and then the feeling of walking up Madison Avenue to the firm’s office at 57th and Madison. The day was clear and sunny and everyone was in a hurry. The moment had arrived—it was time to get going.
One of the administrative people gave me some forms to complete and I met my deskmate, Mark Weinstein, who was starting the same day. He was kind enough to let me sit closest to the window without the slightest argument. Mark is now general counsel at Viacom and a good friend. Edward Korman was also beginning that same day and we have remained good friends. Ed today is a federal district court judge in New York.
The firm had decided to assign me to the corporate law department. Luckily for me, it was a very busy place and young lawyers were given a lot to do. Paul, Weiss had a reputation for being a “sweat shop,” but I found that to be completely unfounded. No one ever insisted that you stay late. However, they did tend to hire people who were generally ambitious and were just used to working hard. I got the feeling the place was well run.
The relaxed, cool attitude I had my first day at Paul, Weiss disappeared quickly and I began to feel really uptight. I felt a lot of pressure to prove myself and it affected my performance somewhat, but I stuck it out and pretty soon began to get the lay of the land, so to speak.
A number of people at Paul, Weiss went out of their way to be helpful. Leonard Quigley, who I think is one of the best corporate lawyers around, was especially supportive. Alan Thomas, one of the really fine men of the bar, Morty Rochlin, Neale Albert, Sy Hertz, and Charles Dickey all really tried to get me to relax and ease up a little.
I developed many other friendships among the younger associates. Ted Parnall, Phillip Kissam, Gary Schonwald, Bill Levine, Robert Smith, Mike Luey, Peter Haje, and Al Youngwood were all young associates everyone said had a light around them. Youngwood was especially nice to me. We’d all go out to dinner around 8:30 P.M. and Al would sort of hold forth among the younger associates.
I did the usual work doled out to beginning associates: Setting up corporations, preparing joint venture agreements, securities law filings, some not-for-profit corporate work. I worked on a series of transactions involving small venture capital type deals that were particularly instructive, and on several initial public offerings (IPOs) which were then all the rage. Len Quigley was an especially good teacher and the way he attacked problems and moved projects along was really good. I still use many of the approaches he took to get at the root of a problem.
Paul, Weiss was one of the elite, blue-chip, New York law firms but, in contrast to some of the others, it was relatively “democratic,” in the sense that it was more open to minorities of all stripes. On the average, the firm hired 20 to 30 associates fresh out of law school every year. Out of this group, maybe two or three would make partner.
Outwardly, Lewis was perceived by his peers as a bright, ebullient, outgoing individual. Mark Alcott, who interviewed Lewis, vividly remembers the Lewis of 1968. “He was much more mature than any of the other new candidates. Clearly ambitious. He had set for himself certain goals which he intended to meet. It was obvious that things had not been handed to him on a silver platter but, in spite of that, he had already achieved a lot.”
Lewis was in the corporate law department, which included such luminaries as Arthur Goldberg, Lloyd Garrison, and Theodore Sorensen. This must have been heady stuff for a fresh law graduate, even one from Harvard. But Lewis longed to be on his own.
The Paul, Weiss experience was a very good one for me. My skills developed and matured enormously, but at the risk of offending my many friends there, it was not an especially happy time for me and I never really felt at home or able to relax. This was undoubtedly more a matter of sensing my own shortcomings than any attitude or action by the firm itself. So after a couple of years I was ready to leave and maybe try to do my own thing.
In the summer of 1970, I got a call from Fred Wallace, a Harvard Law School graduate, class of 1964. I was familiar with his name but didn’t know him personally. Fred was working for Gene Callender at the New York Urban Coalition and had a mandate to create more housing for low- and moderate-income people. Fred wanted to recruit some lawyers in order to form a law firm to service this aspect of the coalition’s programs. Fred’s opening line was, “When are you going to leave that place and start doing something serious?”
We got together and the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of starting my own practice. Fred was offering a floor on income for a year or so and the coalition would pick up most of the overhead in exchange for getting a priority on its work. Not a bad deal.
When he found out about Lewis’s desire to leave, Leonard Quigley pulled out all the stops in an attempt to convince him to stay. He’d found Lewis to be a quick study, dependable and mature, and a proficient attorney. “You haven’t done every kind of merger deal, you haven’t done every kind of public offering, you haven’t done every kind of partnership agreement, so stick around and learn how before you go off and hang out your shingle,” he told the young lawyer.
Lewis listened politely for a few minutes and then replied quietly, “Nope. I know what I need to know.” He thought the world of Quigley, but Reginald Lewis was his own man and knew what was best for him. He could never settle for being a faceless Paul, Weiss drone no matter how well he was treated or compensated.
Colleagues at Paul, Weiss were surprised when Lewis informed them of this decision. To leave Paul, Weiss for another top law firm, Davis Polk maybe or Cravath, Swaine, was understandable. But to leave an established firm two years out of law school to start your own firm?
“It was definitely a bold move. It made me nervous,” says Alcott. In fact, he cannot remember anyone else at Paul, Weiss who made a similar move. In hindsight, it is hard to imagine Reginald Lewis spending his career as a corporate lawyer at Paul, Weiss. Many in his Harvard class saw the firm and others like it as the pinnacle of success. But not Lewis.
In addition, something else had happened at Paul, Weiss that strengthened Lewis’s resolve to leave. A partner at the firm implied that Lewis might not make partner; however, he told Lewis that the firm could get him a teaching position in Connecticut if a career in academia appealed to him.
Lewis took the news calmly but it reaffirmed the correctness of his decision to go out on his own.
Building a successful law practice calls for something not taught in law school: The ability to hustle and self-promote. No one beats a path to an unheralded lawyer’s door. The phone is usually quiet and when it does ring, chances are a bill collector is on the other end.
Lewis realized all this when he left Paul, Weiss in 1970. As always, he had a plan. He joined Wallace and a handful of other attorneys in starting a black-run law firm geared toward business matters affecting New York City’s black community. The firm has the distinction of being one of the first black law firms on Wall Street—if not the first. Its name was Wallace, Murphy, Thorpe and Lewis, but in time only Lewis would remain.
The firm was located in Manhattan’s financial district one block from the New York Stock Exchange, on the 19th floor of an office building at 30 Broad Street.
I met the three other people Wallace had recruited, Charles Laurence, Rita Murphy, and Josephine Thorpe. Rita and Jo were especially bright and savvy, although they didn’t have a great deal of experience. Charlie Laurence was much older and had been a sole practitioner for many years in Brooklyn. Fred would also be a partner, but not share in any fees from coalition work. We took offices at 30 Broad Street.
Things worked pretty well and I brought a lot of value to the group. I spent my days on coalition work and in the evenings began meeting entrepreneurs and a lot of banking types. There was a ready market in black economic development work, essentially involving small business trying to raise capital. Nonprofits were also an active area. I began to develop some friendships and attract some clients.
I joined the Harvard Club and learned to listen to a lot of hopes and dreams. After a while, I became very good at separating the men from the boys, so to speak. I was also absolutely uncompromising about my fees. It’s hard not to laugh about it now when I think about how I had to fight for real peanuts, but it’s just part of the process.
In any case, the firm prospered. Rita and Jo decided to leave after about two years and Charlie Laurence became a judge. I’d had some nasty conversations with Rita and Jo before subsequently buying them out for about $30,000, which seemed like a fortune at the time. I also assumed all of the firm’s liabilities, which had been at the heart of the dispute and, of course, drove me up a wall. However, wise counsel from Amayla Kearse, whom I had retained, suggested that I pay them off and move on.
I had already hired Charles Clarkson as an associate and hired Diana Lee, who was then in her third year of law school at New York University.
I was already working about 12 hours a day and for the next year I must have kicked it up to about 18 hours a day during the week and 6 to 8 hours on Saturdays and Sundays. As I think back on it, it was probably driving everyone nuts, but we all had a good time and felt we were making something happen.
Within a few years, the client list grew to include General Foods, Equitable Life, Norton Simon, the Ford Foundation, and Aetna Life. We developed real expertise with small business investment companies and our practice was truly national. In fact, we did a couple of small international deals, too.
When Lewis was a child, his mother always told him: Mean what you say and say what you mean. The advice hit home. When Reginald Lewis told a client he was going to accomplish something, he delivered. And he did so sans hyperbole and overblown predictions.
Lewis’s drive and ego meant that there could only be one kingfish at 30 Broad Street. As he began to bring in more business, Lewis also began to flex his muscles regarding decision making. Sparks would fly when anyone dared to counter Lewis.
In 1972, the real estate work from the Urban Coalition began to evaporate because of problems inside the Urban Coalition. This development played right into Lewis’s hands. He was now the major revenue earner in the firm, or rainmaker, as they say in legal circles.
At this point, a new side of Lewis began to emerge, that of the tough, goal-oriented taskmaster. Lewis had a sense of urgency that many of his employees didn’t necessarily share. He would never tolerate their viewing his law practice as a mere job. Everyone had to give maximum effort all the time. Anything less would prompt Lewis to dismissively utter one of his favorite phrases, “That is not acceptable.”
Lewis’s all-time favorite target was Charles Clarkson, a white attorney Lewis hired in 1972 right after Clarkson graduated from Brooklyn Law School. The tone for their long relationship was set during their first meeting. Lewis told Clarkson he wouldn’t be able to pay that much; Clarkson replied he wasn’t making anything at the moment, so whatever Lewis could pay would be a 100 percent raise.
“Everybody was afraid of Reg over the years and it got worse,” Clarkson says. “He would treat the opposition with kid gloves and he would scream at everybody else on his side of the table. It was warfare all the time with Reg.”
Lewis and Clarkson had an unusual relationship, to say the least. Another lawyer who worked briefly with Lewis says Lewis was constantly threatening to get rid of the retiring, gentle Clarkson for reasons Lewis wouldn’t specify. But when Clarkson discovered he had a tumor on his spine, a malady that caused him to miss many months of work, Lewis told Clarkson not to worry about his job and to take as much time off as he needed to recuperate.
Clarkson had a knack for bringing out both the saintly Lewis and the bullying Lewis. Clarkson was employed by TLC Beatrice International as a consultant when Lewis died in 1993.
Diana Lee, a young law student Lewis hired from New York University, has less sulfuric memories of her days at 30 Broad Street. A Chinese-American, she got a job with Lewis in 1973 and worked with him until 1978, the year the law firm became known as Lewis & Clarkson.
Lewis was pro-black in outlook, but when it came to business he hired only people who could deliver, regardless of ethnic and racial background. In the early days, his law firm was a rainbow coalition as he, Clarkson, and Lee worked long hours crafting deals. In time, Clarkson and Lee came to do the bulk of the legal work while Lewis concentrated increasingly on business development.
Lee recalls that on Fridays, Lewis would occasionally treat her and Clarkson to dinner at Mary’s, an Italian restaurant he loved in Greenwich Village. Lewis was also a tennis buff and began taking lessons at the Wall Street Racquet Club. Rather than go by himself, he dragged Lee along, too. Unlike Lewis, who already knew how to play the game somewhat, Lee was a novice and only lasted three lessons before throwing in the towel.
Lewis often used the tennis court the way some businessmen use the golf links to cultivate business contacts and hammer out deals. So he wasn’t above mixing business and pleasure if he could accomplish both without hurting the business side of the equation.
Clarkson bore the brunt of Lewis’s verbal tirades at 30 Broad Street because Clarkson tended to knuckle under meekly instead of standing up for himself, Lee says. She, on the other hand, had a tendency to yell right back at Lewis when she felt she was right, making Lee a less tempting target. Despite those occasional run-ins, “I actually thought he was very fair,” Lee says. “He was very tough and he really drilled into us the skills of being a good lawyer. He gave us excellent training.”
Lewis worked long hours all his life and set the pace for his employees, who both admired his stamina and resented the fact that they were expected to keep up with him. Robert Suggs practiced law with Lewis for half a year in 1976. “Most people give you a timetable to do something that has slippage in it. If you came back to Lewis in six months, there would be no slippage in his timetable,” says Suggs. “He was very focused and if he had 12 things to do to get to the next point, he’d do them in sequence. A lot of people bullshit and are vague and their story changes every time they tell it. He wasn’t bullshitting.”
Lewis was keeping impossible hours to make his law practice successful. “I never thought that Reg was a family man: He preferred staying in the office,” says Clarkson, Lewis’s partner of more than 20 years. “He always spent a lot of time in the office. A lot of times I would think to myself, ‘Gee, why isn’t Reg going home? What the hell’s he still in the office for?’ and I hated it, because I felt like I had to stay in the office as long as Reg was there.”
One day in 1976, Lewis left around midnight while associate lawyer Robert Suggs, who was working on a big financing transaction, left afterward around 3 A.M. After a few hours sleep and a quick shower, Suggs was back in the office at 7 A.M., while Lewis came in about 30 minutes later. When Lewis saw his young charge already at his desk and working, he smiled. “Had Suggs been in the office all night?” Lewis wanted to know.
When Suggs replied that he had gone home for a few hours, a look of disapproval and disappointment flashed across Lewis’s face. The display was probably for effect as much as anything else. Lewis was a master psychologist whose attorneys struggled to win his approval and praise. He was able to get maximum motivational mileage out of something as simple as a smile or two-word phrases such as “Excellent work” and “Great result!”
But it was the stick, not the carrot, that Lewis resorted to most often when he wanted to light a fire under someone. Reginald Lewis could be extremely intimidating and intimidate was what he did on a regular basis. Even so, anyone thick-skinned enough not to be rattled by his loud voice or his sarcastic comments usually found something instructive in his remarks.
Every now and then, a reflective, almost wistful side of Lewis would emerge. As early as 1976, he talked of wishing he’d taken more time to smell the roses, instead of being so success-oriented. He made that comment to a number of people over the years, up until the time of his death. But when those moments of reflection evaporated, as they invariably did, Lewis would put his nose back to the grindstone and work as though possessed.
Lewis was a well-rounded man, and was aware that many of life’s interesting, pleasurable experiences were passing him by. When one of his young lawyers mentioned having taken two years off to travel the world, a fascinated Lewis listened attentively to a blow-by-blow description of the adventure. The thrill of such a sojourn would have to be vicarious.
Lewis had a pronounced bias for substance over style. His law firm mirrored that. The decor at 30 Broad Street could best be described as utilitarian. The carpet was an unattractive orange and visitors sat on a plain black leather sofa.
The firm had four small offices, one for each attorney plus the odd additional lawyer who joined the practice periodically. There were also three secretarial bays and a conference room dominated by a large round table.
In areas where a direct correlation existed between money spent and money generated, however, Lewis went all out. His law offices had top of the line copier machines, which allowed him to turn around documents—the life’s blood of any legal practice—faster. That let him be more profitable than if he’d invested in fancy furniture and ancient copier machines that broke down all the time.
Lewis’s bread and butter in his law practice was an emerging market of big Minority Enterprise Small Business Investment Companies, known as MESBICS. Created by the Nixon Administration, MESBICS are basically venture capital firms formed by corporations or foundations. They operate under the aegis of the U.S. Small Business Administration.
For every dollar a MESBIC kicks into a minority-run company, the SBA matches that by investing or lending up to $3. This multiplier effect means that a MESBIC scraping together $1 million for a deal would have $4 million to pump into a business after the SBA’s contribution.
Part of the SBA’s loan is of a nonrecourse nature, meaning that if a company goes belly-up, its assets are liquidated to pay back the SBA. In time, Reginald Lewis became probably the top lawyer in New York City—and arguably the country—when it came to doing major MESBIC transactions.
Lewis’s negotiating skills were legendary. He routinely out-negotiated far more experienced negotiators when aiming to protect his interests.
“You had to fight and squeeze whatever you got out of him, and negotiate and manipulate and play every game you could,” says Suggs. “He was intensely competitive and he could not negotiate without trying to get as many marbles on his side of the table as he could get. He always drove the hardest bargain he could. He was looking long-term structurally and financially, but he wasn’t looking long-term in his relationships with people that he felt he could just use and, when they left, replace.”
Suggs left Lewis after receiving an offer representing a 60 percent raise over his $15,000 annual salary. Lewis offered to meet the pay increase for six months, to be followed by a review. But after having seen Lewis continually increase the timetable for making partner and seeing him balk on a promise to pay health care insurance, Suggs decided it was an opportune time to leave.
Like all new attorneys growing a law practice, Lewis had to beat the wolf away from his door at times. Plus, clients were constantly devising ways of wriggling out of his fee schedule, which always flipped the switch on Lewis’s volcanic temper.
So intent was Lewis on getting his practice up and running that he sometimes dipped into his personal savings account to meet payroll during his start-up days. At home, there were piles of returned checks stamped “insufficient funds.” Around this time, the wife of one of Lewis’s Harvard classmates was working in a doctor’s office where Lewis was seen. At one point, while Lewis was being examined by the doctor, Marion Auspitz took Lewis’s frayed shirt into another room and stitched the collar. When Lewis put his feet up on his desk, a Lewis trademark once he started running the show, there would be circles on the soles of his shoes where the leather was nearly worn through to his socks.
Lewis pushed hard to collect his fees. He knew he was good. Damned good and not to be hired on the cheap. He had no qualms with charging fees comparable to those of large white-run law firms.
In the typical MESBIC deal, the legal bill usually isn’t discussed up front. And an entrepreneur putting up $25,000 and getting $2 million was usually so happy that lawyers’ fees were the furthest thing from his or her mind. So, Lewis generally saved the best for last.
“I’ve seen some borrowers really wince when they saw his fee,” says Howard Mackey, the head of Equico, a major Lewis client and the largest MESBIC in the country at the time. “Personally, I never blamed him—I mean the man’s out there on his own and that’s his work.”
With his business savvy growing exponentially, Lewis came up with effective ways of making sure his fees got collected. He began to stipulate that clients had to pay his firm as a pre-condition to closing their financing transactions.
But there were still occasions when Lewis simply had to back down and reduce his bill after a client complained and the MESBIC involved didn’t go to bat for Lewis. He found this particularly galling, because most of the borrowers were black and Lewis knew they wouldn’t dream of trying to make a white law firm reduce a legal bill.
Every now and then, Lewis would butt heads with an entrepreneur as ego-driven and stubborn as he. One such instance was when he worked on a MESBIC deal making it possible for Black Enterprise founder Earl Graves to buy two radio stations.
Lewis demanded his fee at closing; Earl Graves said no—Lewis would be paid in 30 days. “That’s unacceptable,” Lewis replied flintily. “If we don’t get it, we’re not closing.”
If Lewis wanted a test of wills, Graves was up to the task. Graves got on the phone to the chairman of Equitable Life, Equico’s parent company, to complain about their intransigent attorney. However, only after Lewis received assurances from Equitable that he would be paid in a timely manner did he relent and close the deal.
Again, it was just business for Lewis. There were no hard feelings on his part. He’d gotten what he’d wanted, which was to be paid immediately for the hard work he put into Graves’s transaction. Graves came away with a heightened respect for Reginald Lewis—in fact, he was one of the first people to tell Michael Milken to keep an eye out for a budding business superstar named Reginald Lewis.
Equico president Mackey figured Lewis wouldn’t have the nerve to quibble with Mackey about money. Wrong. “I always found him to be kind of hard-boiled, and we spent some time arguing about fees. I got mad at him, because I put him in the position at Equico where he was doing all of our business. I figured the last thing he would want to do would be to argue with me, but he started in on me like anybody else. We worked it out, but that’s the kind of guy Reg was,” Mackey recalls.
Lewis didn’t even cut relatives slack. When his uncle James Cooper bought a Baltimore bail bond business, he hired Lewis to represent him. Cooper flew to New York, where Lewis ironed out the final terms of the sale.
Cooper got his bill and blanched. He asked Lewis, “Are you sure?” Yes, Lewis replied, his hefty fee was correct. There had been no error.
“Either pay me all of the bill or pay me none of it.” Lewis told his uncle calmly.
Cooper paid his bill.
After a few years, Lewis’s law firm began to prosper. In time, it pretty much cornered the market in terms of representing MESBICs. But Lewis was deriving something from his MESBIC work that would be far more valuable in the long run than income: He was amassing an incredible body of knowledge about how to structure corporate acquisitions through the use of debt financing.
Lewis was retained as general counsel by the American Association of Minority Enterprise Small Business Investment Companies and was shuttling down to Washington on a regular basis, attending meetings related to MESBICS.
He was staying abreast of the latest developments in this field and was also building his network of contacts. He made it a point to devour every piece of MESBICS literature he could get his hands on.
In Washington, Lewis frequently ran into childhood friend Dan Henson (to whom he had sold his first paper route). Henson worked for the SBA and later the Minority Business Development Agency. In “the mid- to late-70s, Reggie was getting pretty sophisticated in terms of his knowledge of how to do deals. He was learning the art of the deal,” Henson says.
With his overcoat draped over his shoulder and briefcase in hand, Lewis would stride into MESBIC meetings in Washington, make contacts, then dash out the door and head back to New York—sometimes after just an hour.
In 1970, the same year he left Paul, Weiss, Lewis encountered someone who became a major client, friend, and future business confidant rolled into one. Lee Archer had just retired from the Air Force and was put in charge of running General Food’s MESBIC, which was known as Vanguard. A no-nonsense former fighter pilot, Archer had been scouting around for a lawyer familiar with the MESBIC industry. Though Lewis had only two years of experience then, he came highly recommended to Archer.
The young lawyer dropped by Archer’s office, where the two men sized each other up. Lewis was impressive as usual.
“I decided he was just what I needed,” Archer recalls. “He knew a heck of a lot about venture capital and he seemed to have the personality to sit on the board. He was smart, he was straight-forward and honest. He liked the kinds of things I liked, like plays and concerts.”
Lewis was eventually named as legal adviser and member of the board of both Vanguard and a Specialized Small Business Investment Company formed by General Foods known as North Street Capital.
Lewis participated in an incredible 64 business deals funded by General Foods. Being on the board also meant Lewis got a piece of the action in some of the transactions, including a movie by the name of “River Niger,” which was financed by $40 million in MESBIC money. Lewis and Archer both owned the rights to the music in that movie.
When black-owned Johnson Publishing and another company made individual bids to take over Essence magazine, Lewis and Archer possessed just enough stock to hold the crucial swing votes to approve or kill the deal. Lewis believed that Essence was already well managed and in excellent hands, so he and Archer nixed the takeover attempt, even though they would have profited handsomely if they had sold their stock.
By helping block the Essence takeover, Lewis had thwarted the ambitions of the then-wealthiest black man in America, John Johnson, who owns Johnson Publications and publishes Jet and Ebony magazines. (Lewis would later supplant Johnson at the top of the Black Enterprise list of the 100 largest black-owned companies with his acquisition of Beatrice International.)
Lewis and Archer worked well together in that they were somewhat similar: Both were formal, rather reserved, and not given to wasting time when there was business to be taken care of. Occasionally the two would disagree. Nevertheless, Lewis later named Archer to the board of directors of both McCall Pattern and TLC Beatrice International.
Word of mouth about the quality of his legal work was starting to bring dividends for Lewis. In 1973, Lewis managed to snare the largest MESBIC of them all—Equico Capital Corp., a subsidiary of Equitable Life. Then-Equico president Mackey felt Lewis’s work was head and shoulders better than that of Equico’s own in-house lawyers. Mackey wound up funneling Lewis all of Equico’s work.
“He was very thorough,” Mackey remembers. “He was always what I call a businessman’s lawyer. Some lawyers basically were so conservative they would spend most of their lives telling you what you could not do. Reg’s attitude and approach to doing work was to figure out how to get done what it was you wanted to get done. And the quality of documents, in terms of making sure you were well protected and that you had proper covenants in your loan agreements, was good.”
Lewis often went above and beyond the call when it came to helping his clients. Mackey had a car with Washington, D.C., license plates that New York City police loved to ticket for not having New York tags. When Mackey’s citations reached a critical mass, Lewis agreed to accompany him to the city parking violations bureau, where Lewis successfully negotiated a 50 percent reduction in Mackey’s large fine.
Years later, when Lewis tried to take Beatrice public in 1989, with Merrill Lynch as the primary underwriter, Lewis made the black investment firm Pryor, McClendon, Counts & Co. Inc. an underwriter as a favor to Mackey, who was employed there.
As had been the case since high school, Lewis still had an affinity for fine clothing, when he could afford it. One of his shopping excursions led him to a small, black-run clothing store in Manhattan named LeMans Haberdashers. Lewis was impressed by the cut of the clothing, which came primarily from Italy and France, and by the manner in which it was displayed.
The LeMans visit started an interesting business and personal relationship with the shop’s three proprietors, including Kermit Morgan, that generated more than its share of laughs and heated discussions.
Lewis felt comfortable around Morgan, a fellow black entrepreneur fighting to make a living in the rough and tumble of New York City. Morgan found Lewis to be very funny, ambitious, and committed to helping other black businesspeople.
Lewis would always exhort Morgan to give back to the community by helping other black entrepreneurs who had the potential to excel, but hadn’t been exposed to essential contacts or financing sources. Lewis envisioned a network of black entrepreneurs that would be able to prosper by sharing information and helping others avoid pitfalls.
Morgan recalls that as far back as the early 1970s, Lewis was setting aside time to share his business expertise with black businesspeople, free of charge. But he was doing it quietly and selectively. Nothing was more valuable to the discerning Lewis than his time: It couldn’t be wasted on someone lacking a total commitment to achieving success.
If Lewis harbored expansion-oriented dreams for himself during his days as a lawyer, he also had them for some of his clients. Lewis was impressed with LeMans, which had two stores in Manhattan. But Lewis envisioned it becoming even grander. He and Morgan butted heads constantly over whether the business should expand beyond its two locations and beyond targeting black consumers.
“We argued all the time,” Morgan laughs. “He wasn’t right all the time, although he thought he was.”
Using his contacts, Lewis enabled Morgan to open a third store in Columbia, Maryland, an affluent, largely white bedroom community between Baltimore and Washington. The store did poorly and eventually closed.
“I guess what we learned from Reggie was to think large, because he had more exposure than we to raising capital and he stressed thinking on an international level,” Morgan says.
More than a decade before Lewis purchased Beatrice, the seeds of doing business on an international scale had already taken root. In 1974, Lewis helped LeMans get $500,000 for business expansion purposes, a transaction Lewis “put together rather simply, based on his contacts,” according to Morgan.
Lewis was more than just another attorney who drafted contacts or reviewed leases. He was always prodding Morgan to accompany him to the Harvard Club, or to wine-tasting sessions, activities the down-to-earth Morgan hated. Lewis wanted to introduce Morgan to influential white businessmen who might prove valuable to both of them later on.
“But it just wasn’t my style,” Morgan says. “He meant well and he wanted to expose us to big money, he really did.”
Their business relationship ended on an unhappy note. Morgan’s version is that he and his two companions—while generally very impressed with Lewis’s work—felt he was just a tad too nice when negotiating with LeMans’s business opponents. More than once, Lewis was reminded that he was being paid to represent LeMans, not the other side.
Charles Clarkson questions Lewis being too “nice” while negotiating for a client. “That would have been out of character for Reg,” Clarkson says. “He was always very zealous when it came to representing a client.”
But it says something about Lewis that his friendship with Morgan survived even after their business relationship broke up.
Lewis’s prestige was burgeoning; his income was rapidly growing. However, despite all this and his Harvard law degree, the fact that he was black meant he could be “put in his place” within a matter of seconds.
Once a casually dressed Lewis came to 30 Broad Street on a Saturday to do some work. Lewis nonchalantly nodded to the security guard as he strolled past his desk. The guard ordered him to stop and state his reason for being in the building.
Lewis was justifiably outraged. Sensing the challenge was really about race as much as anything, Lewis felt the blood rushing to his face. Hassling a person on his skin color made as much sense to him as discrimination based on shoe size or the shape of one’s earlobes. Could anything be less germane to a person’s intrinsic worth?
“Reg was very sensitive about that,” Charles Clarkson says. “He had a sense that he was black all the time and people treated him a certain way and he was always on guard. It was a big part of his life.”
Still angry hours after the incident, Lewis mailed off a strongly worded letter to the building manager. Lewis knew nothing would come of his complaint, but failing to vent the rage eating away at him would be unhealthy and to stay passive in the face of bigotry would be untrue to himself.
One night, Lewis was changing a tire on his Mercedes outside of his Manhattan brownstone. Two city policemen pulled up behind Lewis’s car and ordered him to spread his legs and place both hands on the hood of his vehicle. Lewis protested that not only did he own the Mercedes, he owned the brownstone, too. After the cops were shown the registration for the car, they apologized and drove away. Lewis later told a friend that during the confrontation he couldn’t help but think, “I pay more in taxes than these guys make in salary.” Wisely, he did not articulate that observation.
When confronted with racism, Lewis’s response was to meet it head on. If he felt a maitre d’ placed him too close to the kitchen, or that a waiter delivered indifferent service, Lewis would buttonhole the manager and bring it to his or her attention. Once when a taxicab passed him by in Manhattan, Lewis set out on foot after the offending driver. Sprinting at top speed along a New York City sidewalk packed with people, Lewis edged close enough to the cab to write down its number on a scrap of paper. He folded it, put it in his wallet and dashed off an angry letter to the city taxicab commission the same day.
Lewis brought the same intolerance for bias to the workplace. “He never tolerated even a hint of condescension or bigotry in his personal or his business dealings,” TLC Beatrice General Counsel Kevin Wright says.
“I will not tolerate racism anywhere, from anybody on any joke or anything,” a deadly serious Lewis once told his brother, Tony Fugett. “I will stop the president of the United States if he makes an inappropriate statement and tell him that it is inappropriate right then, at that point in time. Period.”
Lewis didn’t care for discrimination in any of its ugly manifestations or guises, including homophobia. A month before he passed away, he and his family had scheduled a skiing trip in Vail, Colorado, and had put down a $16,000 deposit, when an antigay law was passed. Even though his youngest daughter, Christina, wanted to go skiing badly and Lewis had to forfeit $16,000, he canceled the vacation, rather than be a party to a discriminatory situation.
One sunny weekend morning in 1982, Lewis and a classmate from his Harvard days, Bill Slattery, were driving from Manhattan to a summer camp in Massachusetts. Lewis’s daughter Leslie was a camper there, as was a daughter of Slattery’s. Lewis was in the passenger seat of Slattery’s car, which was new, and Slattery’s son was in the back seat. As they rode along a heavily traveled Connecticut road at a 56 mph clip, they passed a state trooper parked under a tree. The trooper immediately pulled out and settled in directly behind Slattery’s car.
After a cat-and-mouse routine that went on for three miles, the trooper finally turned on his siren and flashing lights. The lawman left his cruiser, made an exaggerated display of adjusting his gun holster and started walking toward Slattery’s car. Lewis turned to Slattery and said, “See what it’s like?” There was no sarcasm or anger in his voice, just a trace of resignation. The trooper wrote Slattery a ticket for speeding, a citation he and Lewis felt was unjust, and got back in his patrol car.
“There was no question in my mind or my son’s mind or Reg’s mind that if Reg hadn’t been in that front seat, he wouldn’t have stopped us,” Slattery says.
Luckily neither of Lewis’s daughters were with him, because he didn’t want them exposed to racism, even though he knew it was inevitable. When Christina was still a little girl, he took her to see “The Nutcracker” at New York’s Lincoln Center one Christmas, and she asked an innocent question about something taking place on stage. An elderly white woman behind Lewis remarked that Christina needed to be quiet and Lewis turned around and leveled the woman with an acidic retort and a withering stare. He felt badly about it afterward, but still believed the woman would have remained quiet had an inquisitive white child asked the question.
In a perfect world, Lewis would have preferred simply to be a human being. Not an African-American or black man, just a man. That’s why he strongly resisted attempts to put him on a pedestal as a black role model. “I’m not going to carry my race on my shoulder,” he once told a close confidante. “If I can be helpful to others, that’s fine, but I’m not going to do my work because I am a role model for all African-Americans. That’s bunk. I’m not responsible for anybody’s life, I’m responsible for my life. And I’m responsible for realizing my own dreams.”
To write Lewis off as someone preoccupied solely with making money would be grossly inaccurate. He was far too multifaceted for that, as his dealings with Benjamin Chavis demonstrate. Chavis is currently the Executive Director of the NAACP, but when he and Lewis met in 1971, he was a young civil rights activist.
Chavis was on the staff of the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice, which had offices in Manhattan. The commission was looking for a legal counsel and someone had mentioned Lewis, even though he was a corporate lawyer. “We wanted a sharp, African-American lawyer who was fearless and Reginald Lewis was recommended to us on that criteria,” Chavis says.
He went over to 30 Broad Street to check out Lewis, who was equally curious about the commission and the range of civil rights activities it handled. The first thing Chavis noticed was that Lewis was sporting an Afro. Chavis was also pleasantly surprised to find that Lewis knew how to “dap,” as the intricate handshakes many black men greeted each other with during the 1970s were called.
“In our first encounter, he made me understand in no uncertain terms that he was from Baltimore, he was from the community and he knew what hard times were and he knew the plight of the African-American community,” Chavis remembers. “And even though he had become relatively successful, he had an undeniable urge in ensuring that the civil rights movement in the 1970s would be effective.”
Lewis and Chavis were instant friends. Lewis constantly admonished Chavis, who frequently traveled to the South to confront segregated school districts, to “Be careful. Watch your back. Who’s watching your back?”
In 1972, Chavis was one of the Wilmington 10, a well-known group of activists arrested while fighting school desegregation in Wilmington County, North Carolina. Their bond totaled $500,000. In New York, Lewis helped the Commission for Racial Justice raise the bond money for the defendants.
Lewis was not the trial attorney for the Commission for Racial Justice, but he was the backup attorney. On one occasion in December 1972 when the primary lawyer was occupied with another matter, Lewis unhesitatingly took a tour of the front lines in the fight for civil rights. Chavis’s presence was demanded in a Wilmington County courtroom for a bail hearing and Lewis volunteered to accompany him. Another black attorney, Irv Joiner, went with him.
They boarded a Piedmont Airlines jetliner from New York City to North Carolina and settled in for the flight. Not knowing what to expect, Lewis felt a mixture of excitement and trepidation, although outwardly he showed no emotion. The men were fully aware that their lives might be in danger once they reached North Carolina and there wasn’t much conversation among them on their way down South. As the plane glided in for a landing, Lewis looked out the window and saw scores of uniformed sheriff’s deputies standing on the tarmac, holding loaded shotguns. “These people don’t look too friendly,” he said to no one in particular.
Everyone else on the jet saw the armed posse, too, and sensing that the three young black men wearing the Afros might be the focus of all the attention, they scurried off the plane and down the jetway ladder as soon as the wheels on the Piedmont Airline jet stopped rolling. The flight crew wasn’t far behind, leaving Lewis, Chavis, and Joiner alone on a now deathly quiet aircraft.
Out the window, they saw a tall lawman about 6-foot-5 and wearing sunglasses emerge from the sea of uniforms outside the plane. From the way he carried himself, the deference displayed to him by the deputies and the slightly impatient pose he struck that contained a hint of malevolence, everyone on the plane knew he was the sheriff.
Lewis was very concerned by now, and his face showed it, but he wasn’t about to be cowed. Reginald Lewis had a knack for digging deep within and rising to occasions. If ever there was a time to conjure up that ability, this was it. He stood up and moved to the aisle of the jetliner.
“I’m your lawyer, follow me,” he instructed Chavis confidently. Lewis, Chavis, and Joiner slowly walked down the aisle of the plane, out the door and down the ladder, where the sheriff was waiting at the bottom of the stairs.
Lewis took his time going down the stairs, as did Chavis. As soon as they got to the tarmac, the sheriff reached around Lewis in an attempt to grab Chavis, pushing Lewis aside slightly. “Wait a minute! Don’t touch him,” Lewis told the sheriff forcefully. “I’m his lawyer. . . . Who are you?”
A look of incredulity registered on the sheriff’s face. Dressed in full law-enforcement regalia, right down to his shiny silver badge and brimmed colored hat, he had expected Lewis to meekly step aside and surrender Chavis. The possibility that Lewis would resist and actually dare to challenge his authority hadn’t entered the lawman’s head. “I’m the sheriff,” he said, thrown off balance momentarily.
“Well, let me see your identification,” Lewis ordered. The sheriff compliantly did as he was told, reaching into his back pocket, fishing out his wallet and holding out his ID for Lewis. “I thought what Reggie did took a lot of guts,” Chavis says. “It just disoriented the sheriff. From that moment on, Reggie was sort of in control of the situation.”
Chavis was put into the back seat of a squad car accompanied by Lewis, who demanded that Chavis not be taken to jail but directly to a magistrate. His request was granted and Chavis was taken before a magistrate who posted a $100,000 bond that Chavis met, securing his release. Chavis told Lewis that he was going to stay in North Carolina and hold a rally that night.
“Hey man, come on now,” Lewis said. “We got you out on bond—you need to leave Wilmington.” But Chavis insisted on staying and asked two of his assistants to drive Lewis to the airport in Raleigh.
Lewis took out one of his business cards, scribbled something on the back and handed it to Chavis. “If you’re going to stay, here’s my phone number,” he said. “Make sure you call me no later than midnight to say everything is all right, okay? Watch your back, man.”
Lewis also challenged the state of North Carolina’s policy of investing bond money. He succeeded in forcing the state to pay the interest on the bond to the Wilmington 10 defendants. Some members of the predominantly white United Church of Christ who had been opposed to the church posting bond for the Wilmington 10 dropped their opposition when they learned the church stood to benefit.
Reginald Lewis may not have walked picket lines, but there was little doubt where he stood when it came to the civil rights movement and its quest to have all U.S. citizens treated fairly and with dignity.
“In order to get in a position of economic parity, you’ve got to fight abject discrimination and Reggie understood that,” Chavis says. He and Lewis remained close friends. In 1992, Lewis lobbied vigorously to have Chavis elected as head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Chavis won election to the post in 1993, not long after Lewis’s death.
“He was a regular brother, he was unpretentious,” Chavis says. “A lot of times people surround themselves in their wealth and become pretentious. Reggie wasn’t like that. Reginald Lewis was the kind of friend where the friendship was not based on political expediency and it was not based on popularity, it was based on genuine respect.”
“He was very interested in ensuring that young people, particularly African-American youth, be given a fair chance at life itself,” Chavis says. In the final days before Lewis’s death, Chavis served as his spiritual adviser.
Away from his office, Lewis had begun to hang out with a select group of young, black businessmen involved in the world of high finance. It was inevitable that they would encounter each other at some point, since the number of influential black businessmen in Manhattan in the early 1970s could be counted on one hand. One was Cleveland Christophe, an executive at Citibank who Lewis had met in 1970 when he did some legal work for Soul-Stop, a Harlem fast-food restaurant that Christophe owned.
Another member of Lewis’s circle was Travis Bell, now deceased, whose Daniels & Bell investment house was the first minority-run member of the New York Stock Exchange. There were other members of the elite group, including Thomas Bourelly, a University of Chicago graduate whom Lewis helped buy a food company in 1975.
They used to gather periodically at one of two uptown jazz clubs or at each other’s homes to discuss their hopes and dreams, as well as the horror stories that only young black men working in a white-dominated financial world could fully appreciate.
“We came to the scene when banks were talking about their urban divisions financing barber shops and barbecue pits, so it was important for us to get to another level,” Bourelly says. “We talked a lot about our future, the things we could do, our responsibilities to our society and to our people. We used to share each other’s contacts, which was quite important.”
Lewis, Bell, and Bourelly also had a professional relationship, because Lewis was the attorney for Daniels & Bell, and Bourelly ran the firm’s holding company. Lewis helped Daniels & Bell do a leveraged buyout for a chocolate company, one of the first LBOs ever pulled off by a black business.
Bourelly remembers that Lewis the lawyer was very smart, tough, and a stickler for details. “You didn’t have to worry about being blindsided once Lewis had gone over a business agreement. He’d usually catch potentially harmful loopholes and put in clauses protecting against contingencies most businesspeople never thought about.”
“Reginald Lewis was an open, generous friend who didn’t brook people wasting his time and who abhorred mediocrity,” Bourelly adds.
In any group made up of bright, aggressive individuals, disagreements are bound to occur and Lewis’s group was no exception. They gravitated to each other for their collective betterment, but their internecine clashes sometimes got in the way of what they could accomplish.
Lewis had his share of disagreements too, but no more or fewer than anybody else. “When you got into an argument with Reg, you came out of it pretty bruised. The guy knew what he stood for and fought for his views and positions,” Bourelly says. “When he became rich and powerful, he tended to be a little bit more self-righteous.”
However, even after Lewis captured Beatrice, he never forgot his friends from his early days in New York. And he always returned their phone calls promptly, whether he was at 40,000 feet in his corporate jet or in Paris.
In 1975, when Bourelly bought Chicago-based, Allfresh Foods with $ 1 million in MESBIC financing, he did so with Reginald Lewis acting as the lawyer in the transaction. Because Lewis had worked so hard to make the deal a reality, Bourelly paid him his fee and gave him a 10 percent interest in the company.
Later, in recounting to a friend that Bourelly had given him a 10 percent stake, Lewis said, “You know why the man did that? Because the man is smart.” Allfresh was later sold at a profit.
Christophe introduced Lewis to a young Chase Manhattan executive named Hughlyn Fierce. Christophe boasted to Lewis that Fierce had the authority on his own signature to make loans up to $500,000. Without batting an eyelash, Lewis asked for a $25,000 unsecured loan on the spot.
Fierce was taken aback and turned Lewis down. Not only could a bus run over Lewis five minutes later, Lewis had no proof he could repay a loan for $25,000. They were soon going at each other, oblivious to Christophe who stood by shaking his head and wondering why he had introduced them.
“What Reg had done was to fundamentally put me in the position of having to defend why I would not do it,” Fierce recalls. “Reg thought it was absolutely incredible that I would not be willing to make him a $25,000 unsecured loan. This from a guy who has the temerity and gonads to open a Wall Street law firm, when other brothers I know just want to join a law firm!”
As 1979 approached, Lewis was ready to move out of 30 Broad Street. He had outgrown his small offices and needed more space. At one point, part of the floor Lewis was on was unoccupied, so he asked the landlord if it was possible to use some adjoining empty offices for storing documents. What started as storage space was quietly turned into working offices for Lewis’s practice until the landlord caught on. Now, with his lease up, Lewis was looking to lease offices with a little more panache and class than his dowdy quarters at 30 Broad Street.
Lewis had grown immeasurably both as a lawyer and a businessman during his nine years there. Maintaining a viable law practice had been a real struggle the first six or so years. Each MESBIC only generated about three deals a year, so Lewis was constantly hustling to ensure a steady stream of business. When times had been hard, Lewis and his attorneys even resorted to handling home closings to keep money coming in. And Lewis alone brought in new business.
Lewis hadn’t forgotten all the nights he’d spent beating the brush for clients while the other attorneys were comfortably ensconced in their homes, eating dinner. Nor had he forgotten the times he was forced to use his savings so everyone else would have a paycheck.
Years later, Lewis could still recall for associates the occasions he had missed holidays because of work. There were times when he would find himself at an airport trying desperately to catch a late night plane back to New York in order to spend Christmas at home with his family, a holiday he never missed.
Lewis wound up doing MESBIC transactions for 14 years. But he began to feel more and more that he was trapped in a legal ghetto. Looking back, his accomplishments were remarkable. When he joined Wallace, Murphy, Thorpe and Lewis in 1970, he was just a bright young lawyer with two years of experience and no clients. Within a few years, his work was so highly respected that he had some corporate clients that large law firms would have coveted. But it wasn’t enough.
Even though transactions involving MESBICS were often worth millions of dollars, that made no difference—the deals were marked, “For Minorities Only,” and therefore second class as far as Lewis was concerned.
“Reg always hated the idea of using race to get business,” says Clarkson. “It really irked him a lot. He got visibly angry, particularly when companies talked about hiring him because he was a black attorney.”
Besides, bigger things were brewing. In the late 1970s and 1980s, merger and acquisition fever took hold of corporate America. But instead of being at the table with the big boys, Lewis had his nose pressed against the window. His rightful place was to be shoulder-to-shoulder with the white attorneys doing the big transactions, not working with companies fighting for financial crumbs, relatively speaking.
I was feeling pretty good about my situation, but knew that the best this would produce was good income. The more I got involved in business acquisitions, the more I believed this was the area where I could make my mark. I began to search about for deals, while keeping the law firm intact to pay the bills, too.
Lewis was again restless and he began to look elsewhere for his next business conquest.