In 2011, as the Wall Street firm he founded went public amid allegedly stripping companies for parts, wiping out small-time investors, and misleading its own customers about fees, Leon Black threw himself a sixthieth birthday party. The two-hundred-plus guests dined on steak, crab cakes, and foie gras; Black’s wife was dressed by fashion designer Vera Wang, and Elton John gave a private performance.
Total price tag? Nearly $3 million.
As founder of the massive private equity firm Apollo Global Management, Black has long been a public face of the industry, which is known for buying up companies in health care and far beyond, running them into the ground while milking them for profits and delivering questionable returns, alongside high fees, to investors and pension fund owners.
But newly released government files on financier and sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein — a close confidant of Black’s — reveal the other half of the private equity playbook: how Wall Street moguls at the helm of these firms spend the obscene wealth they’ve made from allegedly exploiting companies, workers, consumers, and pensioners.
In the case of Black, one of the world’s richest men, that apparently means throwing multimillion-dollar parties, amassing a trove of world-renowned art, and spending more than a billion dollars on personal expenses in five years, according to previously unreported documents from the Epstein files reviewed by the Lever.
“You have a private equity billionaire who’s buying Picasso while the firm that he founded is running companies into the ground,” said Matt Parr, communications director for the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a watchdog organization that has closely tracked Apollo’s work. “While Black was getting rich, his private equity firm was poorly running hospitals and health care facilities and poorly running companies that have affected people all over the country.”
Black was a longtime associate of…
Auteur: Freddy Brewster
