Leveraged Buyout Titan Thomas H. Lee commits suicide in his Fifth Avenue office

Financier Thomas H. Lee was found dead in his Fifth Ave. office on Feb. 23rd of a single gun shot wound to the head that the medical examiner ruled was a suicide.

An assistant discovered Lee in the bathroom of his Fifth Ave. office. with his Smith & Wesson revolver by his side, the New York Post reported.

Lee was pronounced dead on the scene. He was 78.

Known for a string of successes in the finance world, Lee was worth roughly $2 billion at the time of his death. He was best known for his pioneering work in private equity, among the first to initiate leveraged buyouts. Leveraged buyouts involve borrowing money to acquire a company and using the company’s own future earnings to pay off that loan. This new financial instrument was key to Lee’s success; among other achievements, he purchased Snapple in a leveraged buyout in 1992, took in public in 1994 and and then sold to Quaker Oats for $1.7 billion, 17 times what he initially paid. Thomas H. Lee and its investors made close to $1 billion in the deal.

One deal that did not work out very well for him was the backing of the National Enquirer parent company, American Media. He joined with Evercore in the initial $850 million deal in 1998, but both financial titans saw their investments wiped out in one of American Media’s periodic reorganizations. (American Media eventually became part of a company controlled by Chatham Asset Management, which recently sold off the National Enquirer).

He also invested in financial services company Refco, which declared bankruptcy amid a slew of lawsuits after its CEO Phillip R. Bennet was found to have hidden $430 million in bad debts in 2005. Bennett was eventually charged and pleaded guilty to a variety of fraud charges and sentenced to 16 years in federal prison.

That fiasco helped trigger Lee’s departure from Thomas H. Lee & Partners in 2006 but he went on to found a new investment firm Lee Equity Partners.

His original firm was renamed THL Partners which released a statement after his death. “We are profoundly saddened by the unexpected passing of our good friend and former partner.”.

More recently, the financial upheavals of the past three years made it difficult to raise new money for acquisition funds.

Still, at the time of his death he had an estimated net worth of $2 billion, according to Forbes with homes in Sutton Place and East Hampton and Boston. He was pals with Bill and Hillary Clinton and Hillary was said to have recuperated at Lee’s Hampton’s estate after losing the Democratic presidential primary to Barack Obama in 2008.

The Harvard graduate (class of 1965) made one of the largest donations by a living person when he donated $22 million to his alma mater. He was also reported by the New York Times to have been a major philtanthropic backer to Lincoln Center, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Jewish History.

His romantic life was also complicated. He divorced his first wife in 1995 and a woman who he had an affair--who was a franchisee in his disastrous Diet Centers investment--had claimed, without much evidence, that he was laundering money through her franchise.

He had two children, Zach and Robbie by his first wife, Barbara Lee.

Lee is survived by his second wife, Ann Tennenbaum, whom he married in 1996 and they had three children, Jesse, Nathan and Rosalie.

Michael Sitrick, a PR executive and longtime friend said the family is “extremely saddened” by his death. “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.