Leo J. Hindery Jr., who ran Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI) when it was one of the nation’s top cable companies, helping to engineer its $59.4 billion sale to AT&T, and whose hard-charging spirit and passion for sports car racing culminated in a victory at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, died on Sept. 18 in Zurich. He was 77.
His wife, Patti Wheeler, confirmed the death, by medically assisted suicide. She said he had been experiencing severe pain from injuries caused when he was racing sports cars and from recent back surgery. He lived in Cornelius, N.C.
Mr. Hindery was known in the cable industry for his serial deal making, which peaked in the late 1990s and early 2000s at TCI, AT&T and the YES Network, the Yankees’ regional sports channel. In his 2003 book, “The Biggest Game of All,” when he described the traits of prominent dealmakers like the media magnate Rupert Murdoch and the former General Electric chief executive Jack Welch, Mr. Hindery was also writing about himself.
“You have to be able to think fast, move fast, and bluff with impunity,” he noted in the book, written with Leslie Cauley. “You have to have an iron stomach and an iron will. It doesn’t hurt to have a sense of humor, which can come in handy on those occasions when everything blows up in your face. (And if you do enough deals, it does happen, believe me.)”
Mr. Hindery spent years building the San Francisco-based InterMedia Partners into the ninth-largest cable company in the country, with 1.4 million subscribers. He sold the business in 1997 to TCI, which had 14 million subscribers. He then joined TCI, based in Englewood, Colo., as its president, hired by the cable pioneer John C. Malone, who stayed on as chairman.
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