Opponent Stresses Wall Street Experience

In the hyper-competitive and cutthroat world of Wall Street, Harry Wilson was a star.

In a meteoric 15-year career, he leapfrogged from one prestigious firm to another — Goldman Sachs, Blackstone Group and Silver Point Capital — earning more than $20 million and admiration from the industry’s power players.

“I would say that Harry was one of the top two or three people that came through Blackstone at his level,” said Bret D. Pearlman, a former Blackstone senior executive who spent 15 years at the firm and helped hire Mr. Wilson when he graduated from Harvard Business School. “He combined smarts with a tireless work ethic and had insights well beyond his years.”

Mr. Wilson specialized in restructuring troubled companies, and last year, with the financial crisis still reverberating, he set his sights on rescuing another floundering institution: New York State.

After leaving the financial world at 36and completing a much-praised turn on President Obama’s auto-industry task force, he decided to run for state comptroller, New York’s chief financial officer.

In dire times, he believed, voters would choose a financial professional to manage the state’s finances.

Mr. Wilson, the Republican candidate, who is financing much of the race himself, said that he intended to turn the comptroller’s office from what he has described as a backwater of state government into a powerful post that will play a leading role in cutting taxes and spending. He has been endorsed by The New York Times, The New York Daily News and The New York Post, but trails in polls.

While Mr. Wilson, who is 38, has boasted of his credentials as a financier, Thomas P. DiNapoli, the Democratic incumbent, has used those credentials to bludgeon him. He has painted Mr. Wilson as an out-of-touch hedge fund tycoon whose “Wall Street values” make him unsuitable for public office. In their only televised debate, Mr. DiNapoli cited “Wall Street” four times in a one-minute opening statement.

Even though Mr. Wilson calls Mr. DiNapoli’s attacks unfair, they have at times forced him to edge away from citing his own career. In a recent advertisement, he introduced himself as “a fiscal expert,” a clunky phrase that reduced his glittering résumé to a euphemism.

He has fought back, dismissing Mr. DiNapoli as a financial novice and seeking to link him to his predecessor, Alan G. Hevesi, who resigned in disgrace in 2007, by bringing up Mr. DiNapoli’s meetings with investment placement agents soon after taking office.

Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo cleared Mr. DiNapoli of any wrongdoing the same day that Mr. Hevesi pleaded guilty two weeks ago to taking part in a sprawling corruption scheme involving the public pension fund.

But Mr. Wilson, more wonk than firebrand, has struggled to gain traction, with a poll this week showing that most voters still were not familiar with him.

“He hasn’t succeeded in breaking through the clutter for the public to even figure out who he is,” said Scott Levenson of the Advance Group, a political consulting firm.

In white papers and policy reports, Mr. Wilson has outlined bold plans to revamp the comptroller’s office, winning praise from economists and pension experts. He wants to drastically expand the office’s audit function, throw out traditional accounting practices for public pensions that he says distort performance and lower the assumed rate of return on the fund’s investments.

Mr. Wilson’s campaign has money — $2.6 million on hand, compared with $1.4 million for Mr. DiNapoli, according to the most recent disclosure reports — and Mr. Wilson said he planned to increase spending in the final days of the campaign. Since January, Mr. Wilson has lent his campaign at least $2.75 million.

Although Mr. Wilson has been interested in politics all his life, his first taste of political campaigning has left him exasperated with the no-holds-barred tactics of a statewide race.

“Whether it’s accurate or not, whether it’s telling or not, he’s going to try to distort everything I’ve ever done in my life,” Mr. Wilson said of his opponent in a recent interview.

Mr. Wilson’s ascent follows an American archetype: the son of working-class parents; the first in his family to go to college; a self-made millionaire.

He traces his values not to Wall Street, but 200 miles north, to Johnstown, N.Y. a city of tanneries and textile mills, where he grew up watching his father work double shifts as a bartender and his mother, a Greek immigrant, fret over money.

The Wilsons’ life revolved around the Rainbow, a Main Street restaurant owned by Mr. Wilson’s uncle, Pete, where his father worked and where Harry helped bus tables and wash dishes through high school. The Rainbow also doubled as the clubhouse for the localRepublican Party, offering Mr. Wilson an early exposure to conservative politics.

From Johnstown, he went to Harvard, and then to Goldman Sachs, where he worked in the prestigious investment-banking-analyst program. He moved on to Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, a New York private-equity firm, before enrolling at Harvard Business School.

His business school classmates were impressed by his intelligence and exhausted by his appetite for endless study sessions. When his classmates gathered for goodbyes and toasts on the final day, Paul Lehman, a class officer, stood up to salute him.

Mr. Lehman held up a $100 check he had written on the spot, made out to “Harry Wilson for President.” The room rang with applause.

Despite his interest in running for office, Mr. Wilson’s experience growing up in a family that worried about its budget made him determined to earn a lot of money before entering government.

“If I was going to go into public life, I was going to build enough of a nest egg to take care of my family first,” said Mr. Wilson, who still looks the part of an investment banker, sporting Ferragamo ties and a Timex Ironman watch — both de rigueur Wall Street accessories.

After a stint at Blackstone Group, the world’s largest private-equity firm, where he worked on a team that pushed the firm into distressed-debt investing, he left to join Edward A. Mule, a mentor from Goldman Sachs. Mr. Mule was starting his own hedge fund, Silver Point, where Mr. Wilson went on to earn more than $20 million, according to documents released by his campaign. He left Silver Point in 2008 because he wanted to spend more time with his three young daughters (he now has four) and, he said, “I felt I was insufficiently giving back.”

He has maintained close ties to the financial elite, including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has endorsed him.

In January 2009, Mr. Wilson’s first foray into public life began with a blind e-mail offering his expertise to Steven Rattner, the high-profile financier then gearing up to lead the White House’s efforts to overhaul the auto industry.

Although Mr. Rattner had never heard of Mr. Wilson, he was impressed with his credentials and quickly brought him into the team. Mr. Wilson went to Detroit, where he worked grueling hours to restructure General Motors.

While Mr. Wilson’s highly praised performance earned him job offers he called “far more lucrative” than the comptroller’s office, he became fixed on the idea of helping to solve New York’s fiscal problems.
But his crash course in bare-knuckle New York politics — the taunts of “Hedge Fund Harry” and “Don Juan of Wall Street,” the false rumors that he was fired from his last job — has been disillusioning.
“I didn’t appreciate how broken this was until I was in it,” he said. “This is why good people don’t go into public life.”