He called Mr. Schwarzman back and told him he couldn’t do it. This was a man who turned down an offer to be Schwarzman’s No. Henry Schacht and immediately agreed to help, even though the actual assignment turned out to be a bit of a nightmare to execute. Mr. Lee, who was universally known as Jimmy, was the behind-the-scenes consigliere to the world’s top corporate chieftains, hatching mergers and public offerings for companies as diverse as General Motors, Facebook and Alibaba. He wanted the bank to be known for more than just making giant loans to finance leveraged buyouts. Working for Jimmy was not all fun and games, however. Jimmy was his usual charming self, extolling the virtues of Williams College and facilitating a dynamic discussion at the table about the virtues of a liberal-arts education. Some six months later, the news crossed the tape that Chase and JPMorgan would be merging and, assuming that I was not to be fired straight away, I would be returning to the fold. He was also Co-Chairman of JPMorgan's investme… Inside JPMorgan, Mr. Lee was the firm’s rainmaker and one of its longest-serving executives.
He also looked the part of a high-powered banker, with slicked-back hair, pinstriped suits and two-toned shirts with cuff links. He says Lee always stressed the importance of teamwork on a deal, telling colleagues, “It’s like Yankee Stadium here. He was then head of investment banking at Chase Manhattan Bank, which had merged with Chemical Bank—where Jimmy got his start—and the Chemical Bank guys had taken over. Jimmy, a fine golfer, even managed to beat everyone to win the top prize of the day, a new putter. He climbed the ladder to run Chase’s investment banking business and eventually rose to become vice chairman of JPMorgan Chase after the 2000 merger that created the company. He is widely credited as the architect of the modern-day syndicated loan market. After JPMorgan acquired Bank One Corp. in 2004 and Dimon became president and later CEO, the two formed one of the closest partnerships on Wall Street. Opportunities Amidst Unprecedented Volatility, Modern Slavery Act Transparency Statement. Mr. Lee was animated by the pursuit of the big deal, stoked by a competitive fire and a desire to be in the middle of the action. He felt that “what mattered is that you were on a team, you could only achieve as part of a team: He thought those were really important lessons for students to learn at Williams,” says Adam Falk, the college president. He went on a buying spree, trying to attract to Chase some of the best and brightest young M&A bankers around. Lee was just as loyal to Williams, his alma mater, where he met his wife, Beth. “As someone who started his brief Wall Street career at GE Capital financing LBOs, this was indeed a moment. I decided soon after this confrontation with Jimmy to move on from Chase. He advised on some of the biggest deals, including United Airlines’ acquisition of Continental, General Electric’s sale of NBC Universal to Comcast and the News Corporation’s purchase of Dow Jones. “I just loved hanging around with him.”. Lee, 62, died of a heart attack after exercising at his home in Darien, Connecticut, in mid-June. Rubenstein and Welch were among 46 honorary ushers, a group that included Michael Bloomberg, Henry Kravis of KKR & Co., Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone Group, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, Comcast Corp.’s Brian Roberts and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. “Jimmy was my closest friend in finance,” Mr. Schwarzman said. Congrats on the most important deal of the year.” Half a day later Jimmy replied, “You are a good man. That’s just the way he rolled. He loved chatting about his role in making these complex transactions happen. Yup that was a tricky night for me. Since Jimmy was truly a force of nature—a quality Dimon cited in a brief statement today—one could not but be struck by his overwhelming sense of confidence.
It seemed as if every titan in business and finance knew Jimmy, as they all called him, and they had nothing but praise for a man they considered an innovative financier and a friend. Soon enough, though, amid the sea of happy faces all proclaiming how fabulous the merger between the banks of Morgan and Rockefeller would be, I saw Jimmy. Wall Street has had few friends in recent years, which made the emotional response to the passing of James Lee Jr. — JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s banker extraordinaire — all the more remarkable. He was careful not to reveal just what was up, but you could tell it was major.
Within a week of my arrival at the firm, we were flying off together to Bermuda, on one of Chase’s private jets, to play golf with the partners of the Thomas H. Lee buyout firm. Jimmy.” That turned out to be our last conversation. He loved deals that were really complicated. When Lucent needed to restructure its complex businesses some 10 years ago, Jimmy got the call from Lucent C.E.O. Indeed, the last time I saw Jimmy was on April 9, the night before General Electric announced that it was getting out of most of its finance businesses. ... Jimmy Lee, top JPMorgan banker, dead at 62 By Post Staff Report. William Cohan, who once worked for the dearly departed JPMorgan Chase & Co. vice chairman, remembers a deal-making force of nature. He was also a close friend and adviser to the bank’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, whose office was just doors away from his. Rather, he maintained a consistent air of euphoria about the prospect of doing deals. James Bainbridge Lee Jr. was born on Oct. 30, 1952, in Danbury, Conn. His father ran the Frank H. Lee Hat Company and died of a heart attack when he was 47; Mr. Lee was 11 years old. No one was too little or too big,” Welch says. In the mid-1990s, Jimmy was intent on building up Chase’s investment banking business. He most likely would have become a billionaire had he taken the job, because it was long before that firm went public. It just seemed to be the smart thing to do. Jimmy loved the reporters who covered Wall Street. “That was really powerful,” says Andrew O’Brien, head of lending at JPMorgan’s investment bank, who had worked with Lee since 1992. He was a constant presence in the lives of moguls like Rupert Murdoch of the News Corporation and Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric. The freshest-and most essential-updates from Washington, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley. In 1999, I joined the old JPMorgan & Co., as a managing director and co-head of telecommunications and media banking. But Jimmy, being Jimmy, also wanted me to know that he was on working on an exciting new deal that would be all over the papers the next day.
during its initial public offering and had hoodies made for Facebook’s I.P.O. I was appointed a managing director and given the nearly impossible task of finding actionable acquisition targets for the big private-equity firms, his cherished clients. In 1994, as head of investment banking at Chase, Lee called Jamie Dimon out of the blue, deciding he needed to get to know the then-right-hand man to Sandy Weill at Travelers Group.