Thomas H. Lee, Boston investment pioneer, dies at 78

Thomas H. Lee, a pioneer of leveraged buyouts who launched his investing career in Boston, has died, a family spokesman said in a statement on Thursday.

The statement didn’t provide details, including a cause of death or where Lee died. Lee, who was 78, had an office and home in New York City.

“While the world knew him as one of the pioneers in the private equity business and a successful businessman, we knew him as a devoted husband, father, grandfather, sibling, friend and philanthropist who always put others’ needs before his own,” the statement said. “Our hearts are broken.”

Michael Sitrick, the family spokesman, declined to comment. Messages left with a spokeswoman for Lee Equity Partners, his New York-based investment firm, were not returned.

Lee started Lee Equity in 2006 after he stepped down as chairman and chief executive officer of Boston-based Thomas H. Lee Partners, the firm he founded in 1974 and where his success earned him the moniker “Boston’s Buyout King.”

In the 1980s and 1990s, Lee’s firm, along with Bain Capital, were Boston’s big stars in the then-emerging private equity industry. Lee was perhaps best known for making 10 times his money on the leveraged buyout of Snapple Beverage, acquiring the iced-tea company for $135 million in 1992 and selling it two years later for $1.7 billion.

Lee’s other big deals included the purchase, along with Bain Capital and Carlyle Group, of Canton-based Dunkin’ Brands in 2005 for $2.4 billion. The investors split a profit of about $2 billion when they sold the company.

Not all of Lee’s deals were winners. His firm was burned by the 2005 collapse of Refco Inc., a futures and commodities brokerage firm. Refco filed for bankruptcy after disclosing that its chief executive officer had hidden $430 million in debt for years.

Buyout firms typically acquire a company with mostly borrowed money, then seek to make it more valuable and sell at a profit. LBOs became controversial because the process of making a company more valuable sometimes included deep layoffs, even as the buyout firm pocketed dividends and fees.

But Lee didn’t get tarred with that corporate raider brush.

“He’s that rare thing on Wall Street — a genuinely nice guy,” Forbes said in that 1997 profile. “He is also a real innovator in the deal business.”

According to his company biography, Lee invested more than $15 billion over 46 years in hundreds of transactions. Before starting Thomas H. Lee, he worked at First National Bank of Boston in the high technology lending group, starting in 1966 and rising to vice president in 1973. Prior to the bank, he was a securities analyst in the institutional research department of L.F. Rothschild in New York.

Material from Bloomberg was used in this report.

Larry Edelman can be reached at larry.edelman@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeNewsEd.