Alfred Lerner, the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of the credit card giant MBNA Corp., died Wednesday night. He was 69.
Mr. Lerner's Horatio Alger-style biography brought him from a modest upbringing in Brooklyn and Queens to the pinnacle of the financial services industry - and to fame in the sports world.
He helped bring professional football back to Cleveland, where he lived in his adulthood, when he acquired the ownership rights for the new Cleveland Browns franchise in 1998 for $530 million. (The old Browns had moved to Maryland three years earlier and became the Baltimore Ravens.)
Forbes magazine listed him this year as the world's 36th-richest person, worth $4.3 billion. He was also a philanthropist who gave money to his alma mater, Columbia University, as well as to the Cleveland Clinic and to George W. Bush's presidential campaign.
MBNA did not say how he died, but it confirmed reports that Mr. Lerner had surgery in May 2001 to remove a brain tumor and had been hospitalized off and on since. Charles Cawley, the president of the second-largest U.S. bank card issuer, has been named his interim successor, and the board plans to meet within a week to name a permanent one.
Mr. Lerner was the son of Russian immigrants who lived behind the candy shop they owned. After graduating from Columbia and serving in the Marine Corps for two years, he began selling furniture and investing in real estate with the money he saved from that job.
After making a career move into banking, he became the chairman of the Equitable Bank in 1981, which later merged with MNC Financial. He also became the chairman of Progressive Insurance Corp.
In 1990 MNC Financial was close to failure when Mr. Lerner spun off its profitable credit card subsidiary, MBNA Corp. - which then had $5.8 billion of receivables - in an initial public offering, of which he and Progressive bought 15% combined. Two years later, when Mr. Lerner sold MNC Financial to NationsBank Corp. (now Bank of America Corp.), MNC was worth 10 times what it had been at the time of the spinoff.
H. Rodgin Cohen, the chairman of the New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, said he had worked with Mr. Lerner for about 15 years and represented him throughout the problems at MNC Financial. "He was the best negotiator I have ever seen," he said.
Mr. Lerner had not been involved in MNC's day-to-day management at first, but he stepped in when regulators began talking about shutting it down, according to Mr. Cohen.
"It was Al who was able to come up with a plan and convince regulators that they shouldn't seize the institution," he said. "He said that the vast majority of people, when they negotiate, try to figure out what they want and how to get it. I try to figure out what the other guy wants and how to give it to him."
Mr. Cohen said that Mr. Lerner was actively on the job as recently as August, when he was involved in formulating MBNA's response to proposed new banking regulations on credit card issuers.
Mr. Lerner is survived by Norma, his wife of 47 years, two children, Randy and Nancy, and seven grandchildren.
