Most amusing article about an Eph in finance in the last ten years? This one from December 2001 about Jimmy Lee ‘75, one of the most important and successful bankers of his generation. Highlights:

“Jimmy is a relationship man” said Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.’s Henry Kravis. “In fact I’m having breakfast with him in a few days. Most relationship bankers are like concierges. Jimmy comes up with solutions: He is a full-fledged investment banker.”

…

Last week, at a leadership conference in midtown, striding back and forth across the stage, Phil Donahue-style, the 49-year-old Mr. Lee, well under 6 feet, seemed much the smaller man than his suspender-snapping, deal maker image. His thinning gray hair was cut short, and he was attired in the most conservative of blue bespoke suits. A chunky gold ring glimmered as he waved his hands under the lights.

“At the time I’d been running our business in Australia,” Mr. Lee said, relating to a new audience that moment when he had stopped being a Wall Street drone and instead started his ascension in the syndicated loan business. ‘I didn’t like my job or my boss. I knew, too, that there was this guy Bill Harrison at the bank who was an up-and-comer. One August morning in 1982, I just walked into his office and said, ‘My name is Jimmy Lee. You don’t know me, I don’t know you very well, but I don’t like my job or my boss and I want to work for you.’”

The story is revealing in a number of ways, as it speaks to Mr. Lee’s notorious infighting skills and his ability to cultivate those mightier than he.

…

Soon after he was appointed managing director at the bank in 1988, he began wearing the famous dollar-sign suspender. For his 40th birthday, he bought himself a Shelby Cobra; he grew his hair long, letting it flair, Michael Douglas-like, over his ears and touching it up with a bit of gel.

And then there was the trail of bosses he left in his wake, although his ultimate boss, Mr. Harrison-now J. P. Morgan Chase’s C. E. O.-has always been a fixture in his life. Indeed the joke has always been that the shortest job on Wall Street is being Jimmy Lee’s boss. Mr. Lee just hated to lose. If it meant having to be a bastard every now and then to get there, so be it.

“Jimmy once said to me, ‘It’s not about money, it’s all about power,’” said one former colleague.

…

And last year he was paid more than $30 million in cash and stock to stay put.

Others counter that the leopard does not so easily change his spots. Said one former colleague, “Someone at Chase once said, Jimmy is like a crocodile: He sits there with his eyes just a bit above the water saying, oh yeah, come just a little bit closer .”

Question for our finance professionals: How much money does Jimmy Lee have? Note that, because he is not one of the top five officers of JP Morgan, the bank does not report his income even though he is almost certainly one of the top five money makers. Indeed, during the great credit bubble of the last 5 years, Lee has almost certainly done extremely well, even if doing so required a bit of brown-nosing and conceirging.

I assume that much of Lee’s compensation was in Chase and then JP Morgan stock, but I do not see him listed as a major holder in Bloomberg. Is that because the bank does not need to report his holdings on a Form-4 since he is just an employee and not an officer? My guess would be that his net worth is around $50 million, i.e, about what Chase Coleman ‘97 and Andreas Halvorsen ‘86 earned each month in 2007. Lee’s former boss Williams Harrison currently owns around $75 million in JPM while his current boss, Jamie Dimon, controls about $150 million.

Read the whole thing below.
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Today’s reading assignment for the students in Frank Morgan’s MATH 373 is the recent New Yorker profile of Stephen Schwarzman. Excerpt, commentary and an appearance by legendary Eph banker Jimmy Lee ‘75 below the break. Pictures too!

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Everyone catch the Eph in the lead story in the Wall Street Journal today on Citadel’s investment in E*Trade?

On Monday, Nov. 12, Kenneth Griffin was boarding a plane to New York when he received an urgent call from Joe Russell, a lieutenant at Mr. Griffin’s big hedge fund, Citadel Investment Group. Shares of online broker E*Trade Financial Corp. were plunging in value, and Citadel, a holder of E*Trade shares and debt, was losing money rapidly.

“We need to focus on this fast,” said Mr. Russell, Citadel’s head of credit investments, relaying word that an analyst report suggesting possible bankruptcy had sent shares of E*Trade reeling.

“Let’s go,” Mr. Griffin shot back, as he authorized a plan to begin buying up millions of shares of E*Trade.

Heroic hedge fund manager bestrides the world of finance, righting wrongs and buying distressed assets.

By late October, E*Trade had hired advisory firm BlackRock Inc. to assess the damage to its mortgage portfolio, according to a person familiar with the matter. And on Nov. 1, E*Trade’s Mr. Caplan made a key call: to J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. banker James B. Lee, also a bank vice chairman. “We need you to take a hard look at our options,” Mr. Caplan said, according to people familiar with the matter. By this time, Mr. Caplan had already retained longtime banker Jane Wheeler at Evercore Partners to work on a rescue plan.

That would be Jimmy Lee ‘75, leading Eph banker of his generation. (Previous Lee posts here and here.) Who do you think these mysterious “people familiar” are and what is their motive for talking to the Wall Street Journal?

About a week later, on Nov. 9., Mr. Lee and a team of bankers flew to E*Trade’s Arlington, Va., offices to lay out the options. Two potential bidding groups were at the top of list. One was Citadel, and the other was the duo of brokerage firm TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. and private-equity fund J.C. Flowers & Co.

Also that day, E*Trade’s top executives huddled to assess their rapidly deteriorating mortgage portfolio. “We honestly can’t predict with any certainty where this is going anymore and we just shouldn’t even try to peg the bottom anymore,” a weary Mr. Caplan said to the executives. The firm then issued another profit warning and dismissed a top trading executive and members of his team.

Experienced finance people are wondering at this point about who is advising whom and how they are getting paid. Is Jimmy Lee getting paid by E*Trade? Whether or not a deal goes through? Does he need to split the fee with Jane Wheeler who is, fairly obviously, not a source for the story? Not being a banker, I am confused. Comments welcome from our Ephs in finance.

By the middle of November, the crisis was starting to wear on Mr. Caplan. The E*Trade executive, who lives on a sleepy tree-lined road in Bethesda, Md., took up temporary residence in New York on Nov. 9 and was working round the clock.

“I just really want this company to survive,” Mr. Caplan confided to J.P. Morgan’s Mr. Lee early last week. Mr. Lee, people familiar with the matter say, encouraged him to stay the course, telling Mr. Caplan, “You are doing the right thing.”

And, if you don’t do a deal, I don’t get paid! Or is that a cynical interpretation? Did JP Morgan get paid for this transaction? By Citadel?

But the best part is how a private conversation between Kaplan and Lee makes it onto the front page of the Wall Street Journal. You think Kaplan “confided” in Lee within earshot of anyone else? I’ll take the other side of that. I bet that only Kaplan and Lee know what was said, that one of them told their flunkies, those unnamed “people familiar,” to go talk to the Journal reporters. Was it Lee or Kaplan and, even more interestingly, why leak it?

Left as an exercise for the reader.

What does Jimmy Lee ‘75 have in common with Katie Couric and Chipper Jones? A mention in the New York Times!

In addition to large paychecks, people like Katie Couric of NBC, the Atlanta Braves third baseman Chipper Jones and James B. Lee Jr., a J. P. Morgan Chase investment banker, have something else in common.

Under a proposal by the Securities and Exchange Commission, their entire pay packages may be made public, along with those of the senior executives at the companies where they work.

Buried in the proposed reporting regulations - the most significant overhaul of compensation disclosure rules in more than a decade - is a change in whose pay packages companies will now have to make public.

Current rules require that companies disclose the compensation of the chief executive and the next four highest-paid executives in management. The new rule, which is expected to be adopted in a few months, will require companies to disclose the pay, severance, bonus, stock and option grants, and retirement packages of the chief executive, the chief financial officer, the next three highest paid executives - and as many as three other employees who receive more than any of the first five.

The proposal permits companies to omit the identity of any the three highly compensated employees and simply list their job titles. But it is likely to sweep in stars like Ms. Couric, Mr. Jones and Mr. Lee as well as highly successful bond traders, top salesmen, studio heads, financiers and athletes.

Of the three, I would wager that Lee is paid the least, but we will know soon enough. The Alumni Office will be more than a little interested. And, to counteract my reputation as a rightwingnut, I’ll point out that my suggestion on how to deal with execessive executive pay is much more radical than any Democratic proposal.

James Lee ‘75 — universisally known as “Jimmy” — got a brief mention in a New York Times article today on the soon-to-be completed merger of JP Morgan Chase and Bank One. Lee is one of the most senior and successful Ephs in finance and seems to play the roll of senior statesman, on occasion, at JP Morgan.

“The guy is a rock star,” said James B. Lee Jr., a vice chairman of J. P. Morgan Chase, as he recounted how Mr. Dimon helped land a big underwriting deal recently, even before the merger becomes official.

Lesson: It never hurts to say nice things about your new boss, especially when the New York Times is calling!

Their dinners finished, Mr. Dimon and Mr. Harrison stepped up to the lectern for a closing interview, conducted by Mr. Lee. “Tell us some personal things about yourselves, Jamie and Bill,” Mr. Lee said.

After a brief pause, Mr. Harrison talked about growing up in North Carolina, coming to New York, all the blind dates he went on before marrying at the age of 42 and how his daughters, 11 and 13, greet him when he arrives home in Greenwich, Conn: “Hey, Billy boy. How were things at the office?”

As the crowd roared with laughter, Mr. Dimon took his turn. He recalled the reaction of the eldest of his three daughters when he told her that he had been fired from Citigroup. “Can I have your cellphone now? I guess you won’t need it,” she said.

Lee is maried to Elizabeth (Brownell) Lee ‘75 (or at least the alumni office has them as residing at the same address). As always, we are big fans of Eph marriages.

Given Lee’s success in finance, he becomes a candidate for the role of mystery donor for the new INSERT YOUR NAME HERE student center. Recall my guess that:

we want a very rich but not shy Williams grad from a not-wealthy family without a history of major gifts to the College, probably not a current trustee, perhaps approaching a major reunion.

Lee and his wife are coming up on their 30th reunion. Investment bankers like Lee are definately not known for their, uh, shyness. It is not clear if Lee is wealthly enough to be able to afford a $15 million donation. His compensation in 1999 (the last that I can find on Bloomberg News) was only $12 million. Then again, he seems to have received a $14 bonus for 2000.

More on Lee can be found here:

James B. Lee, Jr. is Vice Chairman of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Chairman of the Investment Bank, North America. He is responsible for Morgan’s relationships with many of its most important investment banking clients and supervises many of their strategic transactions. He chairs the bank’s Commitment Committee, Conflicts Committee, Executive MBA Program, and its National Advisory Board. He is a member of the Executive Committee, the firm’s policy-making group. He also helped develop and run LeadershipMorganChase, the company’s leadership development initiative.

Mr. Lee joined Chemical in 1975 and held various assignments in specialist lending areas until 1980, when he established and ran Chemical’s merchant bank in Australia. In 1982 he started the bank’s loan syndications unit in New York, and went on to build and run Chemical’s and then Chase Manhattan’s investment banking business. He was named Vice Chairman of the firm in February, 1997.

He was named one of American Banker’s 1992 “Forty Top Bankers under Forty Years of Age.”

In another Williams connection, Lee makes a couple of appearances in Bethany McLean’s ‘92 excellent Enron book, The Smartest Guys in the Room. Lee comes off quite well in a story with very few sympathetic characters. He both sensed early on that everything was not quite right at Enron and, mostly, avoided throwing good money after bad at the end.