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.
“Leo came roaring into the industry and became a great spokesman for TCI,” said Jessica Reif Ehrlich, the managing director of media and entertainment equity research at BofA Securities, part of the Bank of America. “There was no more important company than TCI. It was a big distributor with tons of investments in content.”
Mr. Hindery played the smooth, charming counterweight to the blunt Mr. Malone, a change-up that made TCI more responsive to customers, investors and regulators.
“Leo was more than I had hoped for, and he started to deliver the numbers we wanted, in part because he was such a great promoter,” Mr. Malone wrote in his autobiography, “Born to Be Wired” (2025). “He was the perfect antidote to the scorn I had shown for lawmakers in Washington, D.C.”
Mr. Hindery consolidated TCI’s operations by reducing its sprawling national footprint through joint ventures and cable system exchanges with other operators. He also sold some systems to cut debt, thereby pumping up the company’s stock.
Commenting on Mr. Hindery’s success, Paul Kagan, a media analyst, told The Los Angeles Times in 1998, “I think what he’s proven at TCI is that he can take over a very large company” and “turn it around to fit a more modern model.”
After fewer than 18 months at TCI, Mr. Hindery helped negotiate its acquisition by AT&T in 1998 in talks that began by exploring an early high-speed internet service.
“By May of ’98, AT&T had convinced itself, with John’s and my help, that we in fact represented an opportunity,” Mr. Hindery said in a 2001 interview for the Hauser Oral History Project, which focuses on cable-industry figures.
AT&T’s announced the acquisition in June that year, and it took eight more months for the companies’ shareholders and Federal Communications Commission to approve it.
Mr. Hindery went on to spend some eight months as the president and chief executive of AT&T Broadband, enough time to help fend off a bid by its rival Comcast for the MediaOne Group, the fourth-largest cable operator, which AT&T then acquired for $58 billion in cash and stock.
To persuade Comcast to stand down in its bid for MediaOne, the acquisition of which Mr. Hindery felt was critical to AT&T, he offered Comcast a “consolation prize” — the chance to purchase Lenfest Communications, a cable operator that Comcast coveted and of which AT&T owned half.
In his memoir, Mr. Hindery acknowledged that even as he shook hands on the deal with Brian Roberts, the president of Comcast at the time, he hadn’t informed Lenfest itself about the plan, though the company later agreed to it.
“I couldn’t gloat right then,” Mr. Hindery wrote, “but in my stomach I knew I’d just hit the ball right out of the park.”
Leo Joseph Hindery Jr., was born on Oct. 31, 1947, in Springfield, Ill., and grew up in Tacoma, Wash., with siblings. His father, Leo, was a manager at Sears, Roebuck in Tacoma; his mother, Marie (Whitener) Hindery, managed the home.
In a 1998 profile in The New York Times, Mr. Hindery described an upbringing without parental affection, one that left him feeling abandoned and driven to support himself. “I worked in shipyards full time to put myself through school,” he said. “I went to sea, and I drove trucks, and I picked crops. I did every crummy job.”
“The past hurts, and I don’t like it,” he added.
He received a bachelor’s degree in 1969 from what is now Seattle University’s Albers School of Business and Economics and a Master of Business Administration degree from Stanford University in 1971.
His first job after Stanford was as assistant to the chairman of Utah International, a San Francisco-based mining company; he rose to assistant treasurer. In 1983, he was chief financial officer of the securities firm A.G. Becker Paribas and then Chronicle Publishing, a media company whose holdings included The San Francisco Chronicle, in 1985. He acquired additional cable systems for the company.
Mr. Hindery started InterMedia in 1988 before moving to TCI and then AT&T, which he left after clashing with other executives. For seven months in 2000 he was chief executive of Global Crossing, an undersea cable operator, two years before it filed for bankruptcy.
In mid-2001, he was named the founding chairman and chief executive of YES, which was created to carry Yankees games and other sports programming. To operate, it needed distribution from cable systems in the New York area. But when YES went on the air in the spring of 2002, Mr. Hindery faced one major holdout: Cablevision Systems, with its 2.9 million subscribers in the New York metropolitan area. Reaching an impasse over pricing, the two sides took a year to reach an interim deal, and another year to make a long-term agreement. Mr. Hindery left YES in 2004.
Mr. Hindery donated heavily to mostly Democratic presidential and congressional candidates. He was an economic and trade adviser to Barack Obama when Mr. Obama was the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008, and chairman of the Smart Globalization Initiative at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy institute in Washington.
He married Ms. Wheeler in 2005; she is a daughter of the racing promoter Humpy Wheeler, who died in August. In addition to her, Mr. Hindery is survived by a daughter, Robin Hindery Enan, from an earlier marriage, to Deborah Bailey, which ended in divorce; two stepchildren, Adele Marchant and Jackson Marchant; a brother, Michael; a sister, Mary Ann Seiwerath; and three grandchildren. His first marriage, to Mary Hermann, ended in divorce.
Mr. Hindery took up racing as a pastime in 1993 after receiving a Christmas gift certificate to learn the sport at the NASCAR champion Richard Petty’s racing school.
“He called it the greatest midlife crisis ever,” Ms. Wheeler said.
He raced stock cars, Ferraris and sports cars on various circuits.
In one racetrack accident, in North Carolina in 1996, Mr. Hindery broke his neck and jaw when his car crashed into a concrete wall. Nine years later, he and his teammates Marc Lieb and Mike Rockenfeller drove their Porsche to the GT2 class title at the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race in France.
“Chief executives live in an artificially rarefied air of numbers and accomplishments, but you can’t bluff with impunity in a racecar,” Mr. Hindery told Bloomberg News in 2004, shouting over the sound of his 450-horsepower engine at Le Mans.
“Le Mans is bigger than any deal,” he added, “and it doesn’t care about shareholder value.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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