Sandy Lewis, the former Wall Street arbitrageur and son of Cy Lewis, the onetime senior partner at Bear Stearns, first met Leslie Wexner in the early 1980s when he was dispatched by Milton Petrie, another retailing mogul, to Columbus, Ohio. Petrie wanted to buy the Limited from Wexner, its founder and now the subject of much speculation because of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, convicted of sex with minors in 2008 and newly accused of sex trafficking, a charge to which he has pleaded not guilty.
Lewis and Wexner met alone in Wexner’s office. “We talked and it got very personal,” Lewis remembered. Finally, Wexner asked Lewis if he thought Wexner should sell the Limited to Petrie. Lewis told him no, which surprised Wexner since Lewis was working for Petrie to buy the company, now known as L Brands, from Wexner. Lewis said he didn’t think Wexner would enjoy working for Petrie. “I don’t think this guy is very good to people,” Lewis told Wexner.
The conversation had been very frank, and at the end, Wexner asked if there was anything else Lewis wanted to say. In fact, there was, Lewis recalled. “Get your mother out of her office across the hall,” Lewis told him. “Why is she there? Does she help you run this business or is she just a pain in the ass? I’m pretty direct. And I said, Les, I don’t have a good feeling about this, and your sister too…. I was being direct. And he knew what I was saying…. You’re a good guy, I like you. I don’t sense you as a troubled individual but if you keep your mother around here, God knows what that’s doing to you. Get her out of here. Just forget it.”
It was an odd first conversation, to be sure, but the two men hit it off. They were the same age, and Jewish men of the same class. They had a dinner a few times together in New York City. Wexner visited Lewis’s home, then in New Jersey, and met his wife and children. (Wexner did not respond to a request for comment.)
At one point, in April 1982, Lane Bryant Inc., the largest retailer for plus-size women’s apparel, announced that the Malsin family, which controlled the company, was taking it private in an $88 million leveraged buyout. As an arbitrageur operating his own eponymous firm, Lewis accumulated some of the stock of Lane Bryant, as would have been standard practice in those days in a takeover situation.
And then Lewis had the idea that maybe Wexner would want to buy Lane Bryant, upending the family’s plan to take it private. He called Wexner, who was immediately interested in the idea. “Les,” Lewis told him, “this takes real dedication. If you’re going to bust up a transaction like this, you’ve got to step to the plate and do whatever you have to do.” Wexner was on board. But the next day, Lewis was fired; he thinks another Limited C-suite executive blackballed him. The day after that, however, Wexner reinstated him on the deal.
They went full steam ahead to buy Lane Bryant, using a tender offer to buy stock in the marketplace. Time was of the essence and Lewis worked all weekend with the lawyers to prepare the tender offer, to put an advertisement in the newspaper about the offer and to launch the bid on Monday morning. Everything was set. All Lewis needed was Wexner’s final approval. But Wexner was nowhere to be found. “It’s Sunday and I cannot find Wexner no matter where I call,” Lewis said. Lewis was panicking. Through his friend James Robinson III, he arranged for American Express to provide a $100 million line of credit to support the tender offer. Finally, late Sunday night Wexner called him back. How are things, he wanted to know. “What you’ve done is piss me off,” Lewis told him.
Cooler heads prevailed, as did the Limited, which succeeded in buying Lane Bryant for $29 a share, topping the family’s offer of $24 a share. Lewis remembered that Wexner didn’t care about the numbers, which is more relevant than ever after Wexner released a letter on August 7 asserting that Jeffrey Epstein had “misappropriated vast sums of money” —at least $46 million—from him, and casting himself as just another of Epstein’s victims. “He didn’t understand the numbers,” Lewis said. “He’s never understood numbers. This is not his strength. This man is a genius at dressing women. This is a guy who feels what they feel. That’s his strength. And I figured that out when I first met him and I don’t know how he got that set up in his brain but in his soul, he has a sense of how people feel when they wear his clothing. And that’s a gift. That’s just what it is. Some guys write music, this guy knows how to dress women. He’s very, very talented.”
Lewis sent Wexner a bill for $750,000 for his help in advising the Limited on the Lane Bryant deal. Wexner did not respond for 47 days. And then paid the bill. “I was furious with him and he knew it,” Lewis said. He then bought the Limited deal team, including Wexner, expensive Vacheron Constantin watches. “There’s something with him and money that’s just unreal,” Lewis said. “And I couldn’t understand why he made me wait so long, but he did.” Wexner also invested money in Lewis’s firm, and became a limited partner.
Then Wexner asked Lewis to help him and the Limited buy Lerner Stores. With Lewis at his side, Wexner bought the company for $260 million, in February 1985. “Wexner was pleased,” Lewis said. But when Wexner asked Lewis to advise him on buying what was then the Victoria’s Secret catalog, Lewis turned him down. It was too small a deal and he didn’t want his firm associated with that kind of business.
Around the same time, Lewis became aware that Jeffrey Epstein had entered Wexner’s life, presumably to manage some of Wexner’s money, as has been widely reported. (As I reported two weeks ago, Robert Meister, a former vice chairman of Aon, the big insurance brokerage, introduced Epstein to Wexner.) Lewis couldn’t figure out why Wexner had turned to Epstein to manage his money when Lewis already had an unparalleled track record managing some of Wexner’s money—returning more than 30% a year to his partners for 10 years. (Later, Lewis would find trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission; he pleaded guilty to stock manipulation in 1989, and was barred from the securities industry. President Bill Clinton pardoned Lewis, and a federal court judge later said Mr. Lewis acted for all the right reasons. He was vindicated.)
Lewis says he thinks Epstein was a “con artist” who took advantage of Wexner’s personal weaknesses. “I can’t imagine, frankly, why a man of his intelligence would simply hand the controls over to another guy.” He said Wexner was always a lonely guy. “And this con artist, this fucking idiot, comes into his life,” he continued. “…My feeling is that he had been seduced. And I don’t mean seduced in a physical sense, I mean emotionally seduced out of his loneliness to trust this guy and he figures, he’s so fucking smart he can trust anybody.”
Wexner, he said, was “a shy man who got taken” by Epstein. Wexner was “so bright and so capable,” Lewis continued, “but the talents that he had, those kinds of talents are not financial talents. These are not numbers. He does not look at numbers. He doesn’t want to. What he’s thinking about is the art form of dressing a woman. That’s what he’s good at. That’s what he’s done.” Les Wexner, he said, “would not know a stock from a bond. He does not look at the markets. He does not look at futures or anything like that. That’s not what he does.”
Lewis said that Wexner was looking for a friend. “I really believe that,” he said. “And I think that when you see a man who is as bright as he is and he is looking for a friend and he picks the wrong friend, then there’s all hell to pay.”
There was one more thing, though. When Lewis was in the middle of his legal troubles, Wexner wrote a letter on Lewis’s behalf. Dated December 11, 1989, Wexner wrote, in part, “It’s hard to simply and accurately explain how you feel about a friend, so I’ve thought a great deal about my friend Sandy Lewis, what and how to express my feelings.” He wrote that he had known Lewis for 10 years, had spent time with his wife and in his home with his children, knew many of his friends, had been his financial partner and had hired him to represent the Limited “in trying and difficult” business negotiations. “There is no question that Sandy is a decent and honorable man,” Wexner concluded. “If I could pick one person to be my brother, without hesitation, I’d choose Sandy Lewis.”
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