Reginald Lewis, America's First Black Billion-Dollar Dealmaker, is Larger Than Life in New Book
NEW YORK, Feb. 4, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — A new memoir chronicling the dramatic life and tragic death of history-making, African American dealmaker, Reginald Lewis is to be released May 6, 2025.
From Manila to Wall Street: An Immigrant’s Journey with America’s First Black Tycoon, by Butch Meily, trusted public relations strategist to Lewis, details daring corporate takeovers, an over-the-top global lifestyle and the fatal brain tumor that claimed Lewis’ life at age 50.
Reginald Lewis overcame racism to succeed as a ground-breaking entrepreneur in the 1980s. He was the first Black businessman to consummate a billion-dollar leveraged buyout. He ran the largest Black-owned U.S. company, the first ever to produce sales of more than a billion dollars a year.
Reflecting on his time with Lewis, Meily shares both of their stories of private jets, a chauffeured Bentley, living in Paris and rubbing elbows with the major players in Wall Street history (Michael Milken, Drexel Burnham, etc.). He details the ups and down in the early days of PR and IPOs, ethical struggles, his own desire for riches and power, and choosing work over life.
Before his venture into leveraged buyouts, Lewis worked at a blue-chip Wall Street law firm where he practiced law but had been told that he would never make partner. He opened his own law firm and made his place in history soon thereafter. Shortly after Lewis’ death in January 1993, Harvard Law School, Lewis’ alma mater, named a building after him, the Reginald F. Lewis Law Center. Virginia State University, his undergraduate college, designated its business school, the Reginald F. Lewis College of Business, to him.
Meily currently serves as president of the Philippine Disaster Resilience Foundation, Ideaspace Foundation and QBO Innovation Hub.
Heliotrope Books, an independent publishing house, will publish From Manila to Wall Street: An Immigrant’s Journey with America’s First Black Tycoon, May 6, 2025.
“Butch’s memoir promises to make its mark doing double duty as a history of both a Black American and a Filipino-American who dared to dream the American dream,” says Naomi Rosenblatt, Heliotrope Book’s founder and manager. “We are privileged to be publishing it.”
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SOURCE Heliotrope Books
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