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New details emerged Friday in the shocking suicide of billionaire financier Thomas H. Lee — including how the onetime “envy of Wall Street” was found in his office bathroom with a single gunshot wound to his head and his Smith & Wesson revolver next to him, police sources told The Post.
The 78-year-old philanthropist and Clinton pal was discovered by a female assistant on the floor of the bathroom in his family office at the Fifth Avenue headquarters of his eponymous financial firm shortly after 11 a.m. Thursday, sources said.
The assistant went to look for her boss — a married dad of five who pioneered the leveraged-buyout industry — because he hadn’t been heard from, sources said.
First-responders found Lee, also a grandfather of two, lying on his side with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, sources said.
Life-saving efforts at the scene were unsuccessful, and Lee was pronounced dead at 11:26 a.m., sources said.
The revolver found at his side was registered and licensed to Lee in New York City, sources said. The pistol’s license was in the office at the time, they said.
The city Medical Examiner’s Office ruled Lee’s death a suicide Friday, listing the cause as a “gunshot wound of head.”
Lee — a Harvard grad and also an avid art collector who was on the boards of the Lincoln Center, NYU Langone and Warner Music — was worth an estimated $2 billion when he died, according to Forbes.
By the time of his passing, Lee’s onetime meteoric career had become a mere footnote in the leveraged-buyout industry he helped create, records show.
The well-connected financier had amassed a fortune, and then some, buying companies by having them borrow money to fund the deals, making them responsible for repayment. With that kind of leverage, a big win could result in giant returns.
He was considered the “envy of Wall Street” in the 1980s and ’90s, according to a Boston Magazine profile of his first wife, philanthropist Barbara Lee, in 2015.
His M.O. was to buy middle-sized firms and then grow them before selling them for hefty profits.
Lee’s lucrative deals included purchasing Snapple in 1992 and then reselling it to Quaker Oats two years later at 32 times the price — the kind of business savvy that made him “the inspiration for Oliver Stone’s ‘Blue Horseshoe Loves Anacott Steel’ from the hit ‘Wall Street,’ ” a source who knew Lee told The Post, referring to the code language used in the 1987 flick for character Gordon Gekko and a company he’s eyeing for a buyout.
New York state’s pension fund was Lee’s biggest fund investor for many years.
But the former Wall Street power player — who left behind his wife of 27 years, Ann Tennenbaum — faded in recent years into a background character in the industry he pioneered, having trouble raising the kind of money he was used to, according to public records.
A resident of Lee’s Sutton Place apartment building in Manhattan, who served with the Wall Streeter on the board there, told The Post on Friday that he was “shocked” by the investor’s death.
“I was in contact with him Wednesday — there was no indication [of strife], and I knew him for 20-23 years,” said the neighbor, who declined to give his name.
“I’m as shocked as anybody. He was an extraordinary person, successful, has a lovely family, and they’re all pretty damn good kids growing up, and they’re well-educated.
“You know, if you picked somebody [to commit suicide], I would have never picked him. He was very positive, very friendly, very nice guy.”
A source in private equity with ties to Lee’s business said, “It’s interesting that he [killed himself] at his firm.
“It looks like a big ‘f–k you’ to his partners,” the source claimed.
At the time of his death, Lee Equity Partners had spent a year raising a new fund. In December, the state of Alaska’s pension committed $25 million after investing $55 million in a prior 2019 fund, public records show.
The 2019 fund had previously raised $655 million for itself, still a relatively modest sum considering the multibillion-dollar intakes that Lee once commanded.
Meanwhile, the first firm Lee created and was no longer a part of, Thomas H. Lee Partners, or THL, raised $5.6 billion in 2021.
Lee had founded THL in 1974, only to split with the company in 2006 when his partners took over in what some considered an acrimonious corporate divorce.
Lee raised $65 million for his first buyout fund in 1984.
He once said he would only put down 10 percent of the buyout money and have the businesses borrow the rest in a leveraged buyout, or LBO. With that kind of serious leverage, he often reaped giant returns.
In 1992, Lee invested $30 million of equity to buy Snapple. He made headlines two years later when he resold the company to Quaker Oats for $1.7 billion, netting an estimated $900 million for himself and investors.
Quaker Oats subsequently struggled with Snapple after the purchase and quickly resold it.
In interviews, Lee described his company as a “deal factory.” Though not all buyouts were successful, the wins offset the losses.
His financial engineering continued throughout the 1990s, sometimes with spectacular results.
In 1996, he partnered with Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital to buy the credit-reporting company TRW for $1.1 billion in an LBO, beating out Great Universal Stores.
Seven weeks later, Great Universal, which owned a smaller credit-reporting business, realized it needed TRW and paid the private equity firm $1.7 billion for it.
But there were difficulties along the way, particularly with some of those closely working with him.
Lee clashed with his onetime partner, John Childs, who he thought was a bully, and eventually forced Childs to leave THL and form a competing firm in 1995, sources said.
Lee also didn’t see eye to eye with fellow Harvard alum Glenn Hutchins and forced him to exit the firm in the early 1990s, a source said.
Hutchins would later join Blackstone and help form the highly successful Silver Lake Partners.
Even earlier, several THL execs, including Christopher Clifford, Carl Ferenbach and Russell Epker, left the firm to form Berkshire Partners.
But the source who knew the philanthropic Lee also called him “one of the most generous, and kindest people [I] ever met.”
The uber-connected Wall Street titan was an avid art collector with an impressive eye for real estate, too.
“He was regarded as having one of the most admired houses in the Hamptons – Bill and Hillary Clinton were frequent guests, they would regularly stay there,’’ the source told The Post.
The Clintons famously holed up at Lee’s East Hampton pad after the bruising 2008 Democratic primary.
“He was a regular at Maidstone golf club,” also, the source noted.
Lee continued to make money, although in sometimes controversial ways, into the early 2000s.
In 2006, after he and several of his key remaining longtime partners split with THL, Scott Sperling took over the firm that still bore Lee’s name. Lee went on to form Lee Equity, and in 2008, it raised $1.1. billion.
But the success was quickly overshadowed when the retailer it bought, Deb Stores, went bankrupt, and fund returns overall suffered.
Lee Equity could not raise a successful second fund to weather the debacle the traditional way, so a secondary investor who buys stakes at a discount bought out existing investors.
There was more successful fund-raising a few years later, although it was still well below what Lee Equity attracted for its first fund.
In a statement yesterday, Scott Sperling said THL was “profoundly saddened by the unexpected passing of our good friend and former partner, Thomas H. Lee.
“Tom was an iconic figure in private equity. He helped pioneer an industry and mentored generations of young professionals who followed in his footsteps.”
In a statement issued Thursday, Lee family friend and spokesman Michael Sitrick said the Wall Street titan’s family was “extremely saddened” by his passing.
“While the world knew him as one of the pioneers in the private equity business and a successful businessman, we knew him as a devoted husband, father, grandfather, sibling, friend and philanthropist who always put others’ needs before his own,” Sitrick said.
If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts or are experiencing a mental health crisis and live in New York City, you can call 1-888-NYC-WELL for free and confidential crisis counseling. If you live outside the five boroughs, you can dial the 24/7 National Suicide Prevention hotline at 988 or go to SuicidePreventionLifeline.org.
Additional reporting by Tina Moore
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