Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? (41 page)

At roughly noon Paris time, Loida Lewis was advised by Estela Ilagan, the housekeeper, that Broadview and its multimillion dollar art collection were going up in smoke. “We started calling Lucien because we thought maybe Lucien had died in the fire,” Loida Lewis says of the horrifying moments after she and her husband learned of Broadview’s destruction. “We didn’t know what to say. Could it be that somebody evil wanted to destroy it because of racism?”

Lewis flew back to New York immediately. It was a tortuous flight given that he knew for certain that a magical place in his life was no more. As he flew over the Atlantic, Lewis pondered whether some nefarious person or persons had caused his misfortune intentionally.

Stoutt absolutely dreaded having to come face-to-face with his boss. Lewis exploded when he heard Stoutt had defied his directions and hadn’t stayed overnight in the house.

“You fucked up,” Lewis told Stoutt, each clipped word a scathing indictment that cut Stoutt to the core.

“Mr. Lewis, I know I did,” he answered contritely. After asking Stoutt where he had been, Lewis really didn’t have that much to say. No amount of talking in the world would restore his prized house or its artwork, or undo Stoutt’s actions.

Stoutt was eventually forgiven and still works for the Lewis family today. But on that day in November 1991—when the embers of Broadview were still warm—Stoutt would have been well advised to give his seething employer very wide berth.

Not quite sure if the town officials in Amagansett could get to the bottom of why his glorious home had been destroyed, Lewis called a powerful government official he trusted implicitly—New York City Mayor David Dinkins. Could Dinkins arrange for someone to come to his Long Island mansion to sift through the embers of a fire that looked suspiciously like arson, Lewis wanted to know?

Dinkins got on the phone to Police Commissioner Lee Brown who arranged for two city police arson investigators to drive 100 miles to the eastern tip of Long Island. But when they got to the fire scene, they held themselves out as a lawyer and an insurance adjuster working for Lewis.

Long Island police ran a check of the license on the duo’s vehicle, which looked suspiciously like an undercover cop car. A check showed that the car was registered to the New York City Police
Department. When the “lawyer and insurance man” were confronted a second time, they admitted that they worked for the city. One of them, Lt. Phil Pulaski, headed the city arson and explosion investigation squad.

The New York media had a field day raking Dinkins over the coals for sending city personnel to probe a buddy’s misfortune all the way out on the eastern tip of Long Island.

Loida Lewis was upset with the coverage of the fire by the media. “I feel that the whole thing was politically-inspired. The media were using the incident to get at the Mayor. Reg and I were and are New Yorkers. We had lived in the city for years. We voted there and Reg had paid millions in taxes. He asked the city to take a look at the fire and advise him as to who he should hire in terms of a top-notch arson expert. It’s just as if an American living in Timbuktu is mugged. The first thing you’d do would be to turn to the local American embassy and ask for their help,” she says.

Lewis himself was outraged at a tasteless
Fortune
article on the fire that had a picture showing the destroyed mansion. From Paris, he personally called the writer of the article, the managing editor and the publisher of the magazine to complain.

Lewis met with Tony and Joseph Fugett and several TLC executives regarding Broadview, but what could they possibly do? So Lewis got back on a plane and returned to France. He and his wife held each other tight for a long time in silence, as they realized that their beloved Broadview, the scene of so many happy memories, had been reduced to rubble.

“Reg loved that place,” Everett Grant says. “I think he was happiest when he was out there. That’s why when it burned down it was a great tragedy. You could see the pleasure that he took from the place.”

Suffolk County arson investigators, private investigators hired by Lewis, and agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms—sent by President Bush’s White House at Lewis’s request—combed through the wreckage of Broadview, as did mechanical engineers who checked what remained of the heating and electrical systems. Authorities never came up with an official cause for the fire, although an arson investigator Lewis hired determined that it started in the electrical system near the bar that in turn ignited the boiler room in the basement.

But a year would pass before Lewis was made aware of that finding. Around the same time as the Broadview fire, he’d had his Bentley stolen from a garage on 23rd Street in Manhattan, and someone had removed a concrete lion that formerly graced the front of Lewis’s brownstone on 22nd Street. Lewis was positive that the three occurrences involving his property were related.

He hired Ed Gregg, a former captain with the New York City Department of Corrections who ran the protective custody unit, to be his family’s bodyguard and chauffeur whenever they were in New York. Twenty-four-hour-a-day security was instituted at Lewis’s Chelsea townhouse and maintained until the family moved out.

The week of Thanksgiving, Lewis took an ad out in the local East Hampton paper thanking the fire department for its help. He also sent individual turkeys to the local firemen who helped during the fire.

       
Taming a Business Behemoth

For those who thought Lewis had depleted his bag of tricks when he bought TLC Beatrice, Lewis had another one: He showed them he was one hell of an operator, too. Lewis had done it once with McCall, but that was akin to navigating a yacht, whereas Beatrice was more like the Queen Elizabeth II. This time, Lewis was strutting his stuff on an international stage. From his point of view, though, nothing really had changed. A billion-dollar company could be guided by the same principles that worked with a $51.9-million firm like McCall. You just had to do your homework, work hard, and have good managers working for you.

Lewis’s divestiture sales had transformed TLC Beatrice International Holdings, Inc. into an international food company whose operations are principally in Europe and are divided into two segments: food distribution and grocery products.

TLC Beatrice is the largest wholesale distributor of food and grocery products to supermarkets in the Paris metropolitan area, primarily through 418 stores operating under the Franprix name. TLC Beatrice franchises 383 of the stores and owns 35. The company also distributes food and grocery products in and around Paris through 95 stores operating under the LeaderPrice name. Of these, 49 are owned by TLC Beatrice and 46 are franchises.

TLC Beatrice’s grocery products segment is a major marketer and manufacturer of ice cream in Europe. These products are marketed
under well-known local brand names: Premier in Denmark; Artic in France and Belgium; Artigel in Germany; Sanson in Italy; Kalise in the Canary Islands; and La Menorquina in Spain and Portugal. TLC Beatrice is the No. 1 maker of potato chips and snacks in Ireland, under the Tayto and King brand names, among others. Finally, TLC Beatrice’s grocery products segment operates soft drink bottling plants located in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Thailand.

When Lewis began divesting himself of TLC Beatrice’s operating units in Australia, Latin America, and other international locations, many observers viewed him as a shrewd, callous LBO specialist who would break TLC Beatrice into small pieces, sell them, and enrich himself in the process. Sure Lewis had run McCall, the pundits said, but now he was at the helm of a billion-dollar, multinational firm with far-flung operations.

That Lewis knew little about the food distribution and manufacturing business was no handicap from his point of view. Lewis just took a deep breath and immersed himself in the challenge of running his new business. As at McCall, it was important that management share the Chairman’s vision. So Lewis took to the air, visiting his far-flung operating units regularly. Local managers were probably surprised by their omnipresent new boss and his boundless curiosity about their phase of his business.

For one thing, TLC Beatrice would be much more decentralized than McCall had been, giving more autonomy to local managers. The flip side of that was Lewis set higher performance standards than most of his managers were accustomed to.

Lewis taught himself the food business just like he taught himself the home sewing pattern business. The really significant difference this time was that he was spending incredible amounts of time on travel.

It started right after he moved his family to Paris in 1988. On Wednesday, October 12, 1988, Lewis left his apartment at 7:15
A.M
. and was on a private jet headed out of Le Bourget Airport by 8
A.M
. By 9:30
A.M
., Lewis was in Esbjerg, Denmark to meet with a manufacturing manager of one of his operating units, and to take a tour of the plant.

He left Denmark at 11:30
A.M
. for a 12:15 ETA in Dortmund, West Germany to meet with some local managers there and to tour another of TLC Beatrice’s plants. At 2:15
P.M
., Lewis was back on the jet, where
he had lunch as he flew to Paris. This was not an unusual itinerary. In seven hours, Lewis had been to three countries before returning to Paris. Granted, European countries are close to one another, but even continual short-distance commuter hops in the United States take their toll after a while.

On December 6, 1988 at 7
A.M
. Paris time, Lewis flew to Zurich to pick up two business associates. After a 10-minute stop in Zurich, Lewis jetted back to France, where he touched down at Strasbourg Airport at 8:30
A.M
. in order to tour the headquarters and warehouse of the SES supermarket chain, a TLC Beatrice business in northeastern France that Lewis eventually sold.

At 2:30
P.M
., Lewis flew back to Zurich to drop off his passengers, then flew into Paris at 4
P.M
. After a half hour layover to refuel, there was a flight back to Strasbourg to pick up TLC Beatrice President Bill Mowry and TLC France executive Daniel Jux. The men flew to Heathrow Airport in London where Lewis attended a business meeting before flying back to Paris at 7:45
P.M
.

The return flight marked the end of a grueling 131/2 hour day that saw Lewis make 15 takeoffs and landings in the course of hopscotching between three countries.

The following day, Lewis’s 46th birthday, he departed from Paris at 8:30
A.M
. headed toward Brussels Airport, in order to visit a unit of TLC Beatrice’s Artic ice cream division. At 1:15
P.M
., the Chairman and CEO of TLC Beatrice was leaving Brussels Airport on the flight path that would take him to Dublin Airport, so he could visit the Tayto potato chip company in Ireland.

Lewis was back in Le Bourget Airport in Paris by 5:15
P.M
. Taking it relatively easy on his birthday, Lewis had only worked a 10-hour day.

In spite of the frequent travel and long hours, Lewis loved living in Paris. He felt more comfortable there than in the United States.

In Europe, the major difference is there is less overt hostility that’s purely based on color. As you know, you can be insulted anywhere, but I’ve always been treated very well in Europe. Here in this country, there is a certain conspiratorial desire—regardless of what you do, how much you earn, you’re still black. And that’s meant to demean.

But it only demeans you if you allow it to. You encounter a little bit of racism in individuals from time to time, but you have to be careful
because some of that can be self-generated. Sometimes, a guy may just be a jerk. Or maybe he doesn’t like the tie that I have on, or maybe he doesn’t like my suit. Or he may just be jealous that I’m worth a few hundred million dollars. It could be anything.

Regarding American bigotry, the legacy of slavery would certainly have to be a major factor. And I still get angry about that. It is a fact that a mediocre white kid has a lot better shot than a mediocre black kid. And there’s this hypocrisy within our culture that somehow African-Americans have not achieved as much because somehow it’s our own fault. I mean, it’s such a vicious lie.

In fact, Lewis felt the media regularly gave short shrift to the African-American community, and not just on business issues.

Some writers have tried to put a twist on some of the noteworthy things that African-Americans do, or else they don’t quite want to acknowledge them. They have a limited number of people they have a big vested interest in. Probably even a notion of white superiority. You can chronicle the achievements of African-Americans in so many different areas whenever the barriers have been broken. Look at the arts, certainly in athletics—even in business. And this has happened over significant periods of time.

I remember a few years ago when a kid who was African-American, and part Filipino, won one of the Olympic fencing championships. Well, that couldn’t get any kind of really significant play. At one time here in New York City, the No. 1 chess player, a kid of African ancestry who was 12-years-old, was the national champion and received little if any publicity.

The media are truly not interested in promoting those types of stories.

Lewis once told Beatrice’s public relations person, Butch Meily, “Every African-American male who’s worth anything has a sense of anger built up in him against society.” And Lewis used to chide Meily, who was born in the Philippines, about being far too idealistic regarding the state of race relations in the United States. “He often accused me of not understanding America and how deep the racism is here,” Meily recalls.