Leonard I Green

Leonard I. Green, founder and partner of the West Coast's largest leveraged buyout firm and chairman of the board of the Los Angeles Opera, died in Ocotber 2002. He was 68. Green died of complications from heart surgery in Venice, Italy, where he was on vacation. Known as a pioneer in the friendly takeover, Green co-founded a New York investment banking partnership in 1969 -- Gibbons, Green, van Amerongen -- that specialized in management-led, nonhostile leveraged buyouts Green opened a California office of the firm in 1980, then left the company in 1989 to establish his own Los Angeles-based firm: Leonard Green & Partners. Among the companies the firm acquired were Carr-Gottstein Foods Co., Australian Resources Limited, Big 5 Sporting Goods and Thrifty Corp. In 1986, Green became a founding director of the Los Angeles Opera and served as its president and chief executive from 1998 to 2001, when he was elected chairman. He oversaw a doubling of donations from $8.5 million in 1998 to $17.7 million this year and personally gave more than $2 million. In 1998, he helped recruit tenor Placido Domingo as artistic director. Green met his wife, Jude, a Michigan physical therapist, during an Aspen, Colo., ski trip in 1994. They were married in 1995, and in June 2000 Green filed for divorce. A breach-of-contract suit filed by Jude Green, in which she claimed that Green had promised to provide lifetime financial support, was dismissed in May 2002, said Leonard Green's attorney, Dale F. Kinsella. Green also sued his ex-wife -- for $25 million for defamation. The suit was to proceed to trial after the conclusion of the financial portion of the couple's divorce proceeding. Records provided details of a boardroom struggle within Green's firm over his decision to invest $300 million of client funds in the financially troubled Rite Aid drugstore chain despite his partners' misgivings about the company's financial standing and a potential conflict of interest involving Green. A Philadelphia native, Green earned a bachelor's degree in economics from Cornell University in 1955 and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Graduate School in 1956. In 1965, he received a law degree from Loyola University in Chicago. He is survived by his daughter Suzanne, his son Steven, and a grandson.