“We wouldn’t be where we are without Mike.” The Mike referenced was the one and only Michael Milken, but what was said about Milken could have realistically been said by countless people.
Such was the reach of Milken. While entrepreneurs and CEOs get rich by democratizing access to formerly out-of-reach goods and services, Milken grew rich by democratizing access to incredibly-difficult-to-access capital for business visionaries eager to greatly enhance businesses with an eye on running them much better, or creating business sectors that didn’t yet exist. Milken didn’t care whether his clients were white, black, male or female, he just cared that they were capable, and that they had a viable plan for improving a business, expanding it, or both.
Which was why I was so eager to read Butch Meily’s new book, From Manila to Wall Street: An Immigrant’s Journey With America’s First Black Tycoon. Meily’s book would expand my knowledge of the individual (Reginald F. Lewis) whose own story made it into so many of the books (most of them shameful hatchet jobs) about Milken and his efforts to once again democratize access to capital.
Milken was the one who financed Lewis’s (“Reg” in the book) acquisition of the international portion of food conglomerate, Beatrice. The purchase price was $980 million. The number is small now, but at the time it was enormous.
It should be added that the times were different in 1987, when Lewis’s TLC (The Lewis Corporation) won the Beatrice bidding war. Lewis was black. It’s that simple. How to explain that nearly 40 years ago, people like Lewis were very much a rarity. This will be explained a little more several paragraphs down. But to explain it requires a little bit of backtracking.
Meily’s book is what would perhaps be referred to as a dual-biography? There’s Meily’s own immigrant story, and it’s paired in short-chapter style with Meily’s own fortunate pairing with Lewis as his public relations (PR) handler.
Meily’s work with Lewis (Lewis played quarterback at Virginia State, attended law school at Harvard) began with a call from Lewis’s wife, Loida, to Meily. Loida arranged for Reg to call Meily about PR support for his then unknown LBO business.
In Meily’s telling, it wouldn’t be easy work given Lewis’s “deep distrust for the white mainstream press.” In other words, he thought the press racist.
This was a problem principally because Lewis was going places. When he and Meily connected, Lewis had recently completed a very successful sale of McCall, a sewing company. TLC had purchased it for $22.5 million, and after fixing the company while opening all new sources of income (including greeting cards), Lewis sold it. Investors achieved a 90x return on investment. Lewis had hit it big.
Which is where PR comes in. Exactly because Lewis intended to build on McCall, he wanted his successful investment to be met with good media coverage. But for one thing: he instructed Meily “there’s got to be no mention in the story about my being black. This isn’t a ‘black’ business success.” Amen to that, but perhaps for reasons different from today?
That is so because Meily might agree that “black” today would lead any story like Lewis’s. But in 1987, perhaps not as much. Again, the world was different. It was hard to discern Lewis’s exact motivation from the book, but my own conclusion was that with Lewis fully intent on future LBO success well beyond the size and scope of McCall, he felt the need to keep the color of his skin quiet out of fear that "black" would limit the reach of his story, and worse, limit the range of financiers willing to back his next big deal. In other words, Lewis needed Milken or a faint facsimile of him, and good press coverage would enhance the odds.
Meily writes that he succeeded in scheduling Lewis to meet with Dan Cuff, a New York Times reporter. And Meily delivered because Cuff did. Ultimately the Times printed a story about Lewis, his acquisition of McCall, and the 90 to 1 return that he produced for investors. Meily had done good, plus he had a new client. Potentially a big one. That’s what Loida told him during their initial call: “Don’t worry, he’ll be a big client someday.” Which requires another backtrack, one that may raise reader questions.
As the subhead of From Manila to Wall Street indicates, Meily’s story is that of an immigrant. He came up in the Philippines. In Manila. About Meily’s origins, while one guesses they would seem impoverished by American standards (Meily indicates that a good-paying job in his native country in the ‘80s and ‘90s paid in the $6,000/year range), he grew up well to do. His dad had an ad business, his parents had a popular national column, Meily attended a private Catholic school in Manila, and then he met his eventual wife (Pam) at a party on New York’s Sutton Place that was put on by a cabinet minister under Ferdinand Marcos. Pam was the cabinet minister’s niece. The party was comprised of Filipinos “from good families.”
None of what’s been written should be construed as a knock on Meily. Immigrants are treasures, and he loved himself enough to try and create a better life in the United States, a place where “you can do anything you want as long as you don’t bother people.” That’s what one of Meily’s California cousins told him, and it sounds right to this day. Americans aren’t broadly libertarian by persuasion, but by genetic design.
Meily’s first U.S. stop was Gainesville, FL where he attained a graduate degree, and eventually New York. It wasn’t a glamorous life. Shabby apartment, limited money, after which his description of 1983 New York was surely apt: “muggers patrolled the streets while recent residents of mental wards haunted subway stations” that stank of urine.” But it was the United States.
Meily applied for jobs everywhere, eventually got into PR for a relative unknown in the space, and then Burson Marsteller, one of THE public relations firms. Then the aforementioned call from Loida. How it came about elicits a little bit of skepticism?
While Loida was a Filipino like Meily, how was the connection made? The easy guess from here is that as someone from a good family, perhaps Meily was better known than he let’s on? The question is asked because when Meily and Reg finally started working together, Reg was already being chauffeured around New York City in a blue Bentley. He was established, at which point it’s hard to imagine he needed Meily to open the door to the New York Times and Cuff.
Or maybe not. The ‘80s were nothing like the 2020s in a technological sense. Perhaps it was more difficult for people outside of media and PR to meet the people within it. Someone being driven around in a blue Bentley arguably has PR by virtue of the car, or has numerous PR types courting him? It’s a long way of saying that there were passages in Meily’s book that would have been improved by more description. It's hard to imagine a cold call from Lewis's wife sealing a life-changing working arrangement for Meily.
Whatever happened exactly, McCall led to the attempted and ultimately successful Beatrice LBO. For those not familiar with LBOs, Meily explains it like this: “The buyer only put in a small amount of actual money; most of it was borrowed and then repaid with the sale of the purchased company’s assets.” About Meily’s description, no doubt he would freely acknowledge that the whole process was and is quite a bit more complicated, as in it takes a lot of work to either improve assets for sale, to find the right buyers for assets, and realistically both.
Which brings us back to Milken, and the best part of the book. In Meily’s words about the financier, “All an entrepreneur needed was a letter from one man saying he was highly confident that the transaction could be financed. The letter wasn’t legally binding but Milken’s imprimatur was so respected, that was all that was required to clinch a deal.” Yes! What a hero Milken was and is.
Crucial about Milken was that he could write his “highly confident” letters precisely because he knew the companies he was financing the purchase of better than the buyers he was backing. Milken’s letters carried weight because investors deeply trusted the business worth of anyone Milken would back. Only in academia and among pundits is money ever “easy.” In the real world, it’s incredibly difficult to attain.
It was even difficult to attain through Milken. As in, if you wanted Milken to finance your deal you had better be maniacally devoted to your correct vision. Put another way, Milken’s “highly confident” letters are legendary, but the unseen with then is surely vast. Stop and think about how many individuals went to Milken (or never got in to see him…) with grandiose visions of him financing their dream, only to be turned down. Meily surely alludes to all of this.
In short, it was no certainty that Milken would finance Lewis. The “revolutionary” out “to evict the staid old corporate patricians and let in the tumultuous horde” asked Lewis tough questions. Meily reports about Milken that he “later said that he was surprised that Reg knew more about Beatrice than he did.” Which was really something. By all accounts Milken’s knowledge of the acquisitions he was financing was vast. It all speaks to what an impressive business mind Lewis must have had.
Despite that, race still entered the discussion. Milken’s lieutenant, Peter Ackerman, told Reg that “you’d be the first black man to be a member of our little club.” Reg happily replied, “Hell, why are you bringing up my ethnicity, Peter? I don’t bring up your Jewishness.” Again, the world was so much different in 1987.
The happy news is that Reg secured the “highly confident” letter, at which point the work became even more difficult. Milken’s letter was based on Lewis and his colleagues locating liquid buyers to pre-sell certain Beatrice assets for several hundred million ahead of financing. And that was assuming their bid would win. Crucial about winning was that they couldn’t overpay, and they had to do this without knowing what others would bid. In Meily’s words, “In a very real way, everyone’s job was on the line.” If they merely lost the bid, they would lose out on much more than Beatrice. There were enormous costs associated with preparing a bid, conducting due diligence, employing the right people for due diligence, etc.
As readers already know, TLC won. At the time, Meily was still working for Burson, but eventually Reg hired him full time at Beatrice. And as Lewis would largely operate what was an international corporation from Paris, Meily was earning over $100,000/year (this was the late ‘80s, keep in mind) 11 years into his time in the U.S. A great immigrant story to say the least!
Not only was Meily earning good money, he was flying back and forth (New York to Paris) for work, all the while staying at impressive Paris hotels. Happy ending and all that?
Most certainly in a very real sense. Not only had Reg Lewis succeeded in a major way against all odds, but he lifted Meily in the process.
Still, readers can perhaps imagine it wasn’t all glamorous. Really, how could it have been? Exactly because Lewis achieved something so remarkable against the most challenging of odds (what you just read really has nothing to do with race), it couldn’t be that he was just a normal, humble, happy man. Meily is clear that Lewis was paranoid, worked everyone (including Meily) in his employ endlessly, and berated those who worked for him in brutal fashion.
One of Lewis’s investment bankers, Cleve Christophe, eventually quite TLC (and the potential for high payouts related to Beatrice) because “I can no longer look at my wife and two kids with self-respect if I’m willing to accept this shit for money.” Lewis cut off the health insurance of another employee right as his wife was having a baby, and then a long-time butler at his Fifth Avenue apartment was let go without warning, and at an advanced age such that finding new employment would be difficult.
When Lewis's biographer asked Meily about her subject, she prefaced it with “He wasn’t a nice guy, was he?” Plainly Lewis wasn’t, but it’s no insight to say that people like Lewis and Milken make the world go ‘round. Reading about Milken, and what he meant to Lewis, is a cruel reminder of another unseen: what would Milken had achieved if he hadn’t ever been wrongly imprisoned on the weakest of weak charges?
What’s nice about Meily’s book is that he’s so reverential about what Milken accomplished as a financier. This is important, mainly because it’s popular to this day for people to talk about all the “good” Milken has done since imprisonment. The narrative is shameful. Milken’s greatest achievements were what took place before his success got him locked up. To read Meily’s book is to develop the happy sense that he agrees. Good.
It all speaks well of a quick book, one with lots of interesting stories, and lots of interesting stories told in quick fashion. Readers will have fun, but for a couple of quibbles.
About them, it’s possible they’re nothing. Questions about how Meily and Lewis were connected were already raised. There’s also the matter of his Amagansett mansion, Broadview. It burned down in 1991 and Lewis was devastated. Worried that it was arson, Lewis even asked Meily to call the Bush (H.W.) White House in hopes of getting the best investigators. Meily reports Lewis saying “We know Andrew Card. He’s pretty close to President Bush. He was once his chief of staff and now he’s the Transportation Secretary.” Except that Card was George W. Bush’s chief of staff, and H.W.’s Transportation secretary. When Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? (Lewis’s biography) was released in 1995, Meily reports that Neil Cavuto interviewed Loida about it on Fox Business News. Except that the business channel was rolled out in the 2000s. Fox News itself didn’t start until 1996.
The Card mix-up is easy to imagine, while the one involving Cavuto is easy to chalk up to hazy memory? Still, how did Meily’s own editors and his own PR not catch these things? It’s not fair to him if only because it perhaps calls into question the validity of other memories in the book.
None of this subtracts from the book in total, but it has to a little. And needlessly. These slipups should have been caught. Sadly, this is the present and future of books. With budgets shrinking all the time at publishers, the funds available for editors shrink too. There’s a reason editors have always edited, but now writers have to be editors too. Which means we have this. Butch Meily has written an uplifting book that could have been better. That’s the way it is.
