David Siegel, the Orlando time-share magnate, was spending the day in the Bahamas as the guest of billionaire Joseph C. Lewis. As he relaxed in Lewis’ waterfront mansion, Siegel also hoped to get to better know his elusive neighbour from Isleworth, the gated development near Orlando where Lewis lives part time.
But on that warm day at Lyford Cay years ago, Siegel would glean few clues about what motivates the mysterious developer and currency trader.
“The TV was on everywhere, showing the currency prices. You know, that ticker-tape report that scrolls on the screen. Everywhere you went, in every room, he had them all tuned to the same thing. He watched that — all day long,” Siegel recalled recently.
Ranked by Forbes magazine as the world’s 486th-richest person, with a net worth of $1.6 billion, Lewis has lived in the Bahamas since 1979, when he left his native Britain and its high tax rates.
But for more than 20 years, Lewis has also played a quiet but significant — and increasingly public — role in Central Florida, buying land and country clubs, building a business empire, pumping millions into non-profit groups and stumping for high-profile projects.
Just last week, the State University System’s Board of Governors gave the University of Central Florida permission to build and open a medical school as early as 2008 — on land donated by Lewis at Lake Nona, a sprawling development he owns in southeast Orlando.
This week, Lewis is briefly in the spotlight as host of the Tavistock Cup tournament. It’s a $2 million, PGA Tour-sanctioned event described as the “ultimate turf war,” with pros who live in Isleworth, which Lewis also owns, battling pros who live in Lake Nona for money and pride. The private, two-day shootout ended today.
Lewis has a holding company based near his Isleworth home that controls dozens of companies, from restaurants such as the Napa Valley Grille to an English soccer team called Tottenham Hotspur.
But according to his executives here, Lewis makes most of his money in currency trading, similar to famed trader George Soros, and plows some of that into various investments using the local company.
Business leaders say Lewis has a rare combination of clout, cash and confidence to make things happen for Central Florida — and for himself.
“Joe Lewis is unique in today’s world. He is a dreamer who dreams big and has the will to make his dreams a reality, to his benefit and to the community at large,” said Clarence H. Brown III, a friend and chief executive officer of M.D. Anderson Cancer Centre Orlando.
Magnate shuns limelight: Lewis would not be interviewed for this report. His business associates say he rarely, if ever, talks to the news media. To paint a portrait of the elusive businessman, the Orlando Sentinel interviewed friends, neighbours, former employees, business associates and golfing pals, and examined his corporate holdings.
“He doesn’t like to be in the limelight. He doesn’t seek the limelight. But our mentor, and visionary, is Joe,” said Rasesh Thakkar, chief executive officer of the Tavistock Group Inc., the locally based holding company that includes more than 40 businesses and properties world-wide. Joseph Charles Lewis was born in 1937 (even his exact age is a bit of a mystery) in a working-class district of London where his father owned inns and pubs.
Lewis left school in England when he was 15 to work in his father’s business, learning the restaurant trade. He worked 14-hour days in the kitchen and as a waiter, taking on more responsibility and expanding the business in the 1960s.
Lewis built a collection of “themed” entertainment clubs in London, with elaborate props and costumed staff, that have been described as the forerunner of the modern theme-restaurant industry in the United States.
One of the enthusiastic young executives who toiled for Lewis in England in the early 1970s was Robert Earl, also of London. Earl would later run the Hard Rock Cafe chain from Orlando before starting Planet Hollywood International, a Hollywood-themed restaurant chain also based here. He is a neighbour of Lewis’ in Isleworth and for years employed Lewis’ nephew, Gerard O’Riordan, to help run his then-expanding collection of Orlando dinner clubs. In 1979, Lewis sold his family’s business in England, packed his bags and moved to the Bahamas. Although he’s still a British citizen, he is routinely referred to in that country’s press as a “tax exile” — the term for people who maintain residency in the islands and elsewhere to avoid Britain’s high taxes.
His estate on Lyford Cay, Nassau, sports such celebrity neighbours as Scottish-born actor Sean Connery of James Bond fame and fashion mogul Peter Nygard.
Lewis was soon travelling regularly to Orlando, in part because he briefly considered opening and running the English Pavilion in Walt Disney World’s Epcot. Although that deal did not pan out, Lewis took a liking to Windermere, an old-money enclave north of Disney with deep English roots.
He stayed, put down roots of his own and, for more than 20 years, he and his two now-grown children have been involved in everything from local philanthropy to Orlando’s unsuccessful bid for Scripps Research Institute.
‘A guy’s guy’: Lewis is complex, Thakkar said — generous, modest, athletic, devoted to his long-time second wife, Jane, and the two children by his first wife. He enjoys Broadway plays, watches the National Football League on television, and dines at a favourite Orlando restaurant: Seasons 52. The restaurant is owned by Darden Restaurants, whose chief executive is Clarence Otis, a friend of Thakkar’s and another Isleworth resident.
“He’s a guy’s guy,” Thakkar said, adding that Lewis has a golf handicap of 12 or 13 and the stamina of a man half his age. Sometimes, Thakkar said, Lewis will play a round and then insist on a tennis match, leaving younger associates breathless.
Lewis’ long-time friend and Isleworth neighbour Don Dizney attests to his athleticism — and his competitive nature. How competitive is Joe Lewis?
“He’s pretty competitive. Will he cheat? No. He’s really a fun guy,” Dizney said. “Mostly, we talk sports a lot around the club.” Dizney said he admires Lewis for his devotion to family, philanthropy and the fact that he truly is a self-made success. Sun Sentinel
“He earned it the hard way,” said Dizney, whose own low-key business style, passion for sports and early challenges — he was raised in a Kentucky coal-mining town — mirror those of Lewis.
Associates say Lewis is well read — and has a range of expertise.
“He has a command of everything from macroeconomics to geopolitics. He can talk one minute about rare 20th-century sculptures and the next about the infrastructure — highways, utilities — in multiple countries,” said Doug McMahon, a former New York advertising executive hired by Lewis 2 1/2 years ago to help market Tavistock and its growing stable of businesses.
Lewis enjoys flowers and greenery, regularly ordering employees to plant more trees in Isleworth. But he has a tough side, too. Some of those who in the 1980s and ’90s dealt with Lewis, Earl and Lewis’ nephew O’Riordan say they were shrewd negotiators and hard-nosed businessmen accustomed to the tough London club circuit. Known locally as “the Brit boys,” they were ambitious and clubby.
Stuart Appleby, an Australian PGA star who lives in Isleworth, said Lewis is “certainly not Donald Trump in terms of self-promotion by any means. He’s just not like that. He grew up overseas, started with nothing and built it up, but he never flashes it around. If he’s walking around the golf course, you would never know who he was.”
Tiger Woods, a long-time Isleworth resident and partner with Lewis in a Bahamas golf-and-resort development called Albany, said he has come to know and respect Lewis during the past decade — and considers him a business mentor.
“So any time I have any kind of business venture that I might be leery of, I can run it by him. It’s huge. It’s great to have people like that,” Woods said.
Isleworth is his backyard: Lewis calls Isleworth home about three months of the year. He lives part of the time at his 50,000-acre Argentine ranch, where his only son, Charles, also resides, and at his main estate in the Bahamas. He moves by private jet, helicopter and yacht.
“He travels the world,” said Thakkar, the Kenya-born chief executive of Tavistock. “He loves to be where the good weather is — good, but not hot.”
Lewis’ father died of cancer in 1987, the same year the Isleworth Country Club community opened near Windermere. Lewis built his English manor-style home there in 1990, on six Isleworth lots he had purchased two years earlier. Sales in the development were sluggish at the time; the original developer, sued for polluting nearby Lake Bessie in 1987, lost the case in 1990, pushing the property into bankruptcy.
Lewis bought Isleworth during those dark days from Mellon Bank, outbidding his neighbour Siegel by $5 million.
“I was already negotiating with the bank when he came in,” Siegel said. “That was the first time I’d ever heard of him.”
Siegel said he still thinks Lewis overpaid, though he concedes the billionaire revived the property’s fortunes. He also attracted marquee residents such as Woods, who is moving to Hobe Sound after about a decade in Isleworth, and actor Wesley Snipes — marketing coups that cost the development nothing.
“He will spend whatever it takes to make Isleworth very exclusive,” Siegel said, including shutting down the residents-only golf course every month to manicure the greens.
Dizney says Lewis has a deep love for and commitment to his adopted home, despite his penchant for privacy.
“He loves Isleworth” and “treats it like his backyard,” said Dizney, a horse breeder, sports-team owner and founder of United Medical Corp. “He brings in the [Orlando] Philharmonic Orchestra [for concerts]. Normally, a developer simply would not do something like that.”
Lewis bought Lake Nona in 1996, when that southeast Orlando development also was struggling. He has pumped millions into Lake Nona and Isleworth, restoring their reputations and giving him two of Central Florida’s premier gated communities.
He also has been generous to the surrounding community.
Lewis in 1997 gave $7.5 million to the local M.D. Anderson cancer centre, part of Orlando Regional Healthcare, to get that then-stalled project back on track. The centre in turn created the Charles Lewis Institute, in memory of Lewis’ father.
While Lewis is boosting nonprofits, expanding a stable of businesses, making friends in high places and finally becoming better known in his adopted community, he still remains an outsider to many.
Thakkar said it is unfortunate that Central Florida does not know Joe Lewis the way he does, after nearly two decades of working for him in Orlando, London and Argentina.
To know Lewis is to know a dreamer and doer on a large stage, he said.
But it is the directors of Tavistock who are eager for Central Floridians to know more about their mentor, Thakkar said. Lewis is no recluse, as he has been portrayed for years, but he has had no change of heart about revealing more of himself to the people of his adopted home, Thakkar said.
“We do good things,” he said. “We have nothing to hide.”
The Nassau Guardian
