MBNA co-founder Lerner remembered for leadership, drive

MBNA co-founder, benefactor and football franchise owner Al Lerner was recalled Thursday as a man of vision and drive.

Lerner died Wednesday night at the age of 69. He reportedly had undergone surgery for a brain tumor last year.

Lerner, along with Charlie Cawley, a summer resident of Camden, helped launch the successful credit card lender MBNA, which employs about 4,500 people in Maine.

In recent years, Lerner was known as the owner of the Cleveland Browns, a National Football League franchise he bought in 1998.

Lerner acquired a controlling interest in Equitable Bancorp, Maryland bank, in 1982, according to MBNA spokesman David Spartin. In 1990, Lerner sold Equitable to MNC Financial, in exchange for MNC stock.

Within months, Lerner was called in to lead MNC, which was then reeling from big real estate losses. To raise capital for the struggling bank, Lerner decided to take its top performing asset, MBNA, public and put up $100 million of his own money to ensure that the stock offering would be successful, Spartin said.

Lerner became chairman of MBNA Corp., whose principal subsidiary was called at the time MBNA America Bank. Cawley had been running the credit-card division of the bank.

At the time of his death, Lerner was chairman and chief executive officer of MBNA Corp.

MBNA released a statement Thursday, saying, “All of us at MBNA have lost something that can never be replaced. It was Al Lerner’s vision, leadership, drive and reputation for integrity that made MBNA happen back in 1991.”

Cawley and Lerner built the business – which has been described as a bank without lobbies, loaning money through its credit cards – into a booming success. MBNA earned $1.7 billion in 2001, $1.3 billion in 2000, and just over $1 billion in 1999.

In 1991, when its stock was first offered publicly, MBNA had $7 billion in managed loans; it now has more than $100 billion in loans, making it the world’s second-largest credit-card lender.

The company employs about 25,000 in Maine, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Cleveland, San Francisco, Atlanta and in Canada, Ireland, England and Spain.

Lerner ranked 36th on Forbes magazine’s 2002 list of the richest Americans, with a net worth of $4.3 billion.

The son of an immigrant candy store owner, he began his working life as a furniture salesman, AP reported.

Passionate about Cleveland and the Browns football tradition, Lerner purchased the franchise rights to form a team in Cleveland, after its previous owner moved the franchise to Baltimore.

In June, Lerner and his family donated $100 million to the Cleveland Clinic Foundation after earlier giving $16 million; he also gave $10 million to University Hospitals of Cleveland; and $25 million to pay for Columbia University’s Lerner Hall.

In October 2001, President Bush named Lerner, a former Marine, to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

In a visit to Columbia, Lerner told students that “humility and competence” are the keys to success. That, and to “relax, don’t take yourself too seriously and don’t be self-important.”

Lerner is survived by his wife, two children and seven grandchildren. “He was our friend, leader and inspiration,” Cawley said in the company statement. “He will always be our hero.”