The Plundering Oligarch You Haven’t Heard Of

For such a busy bee, the private-equity oligarch Jeffrey Leerink has really managed to fly under the radar. No major media outlet in the Boston area, where he operates, has seriously investigated his role in any number of headline-grabbing scandals. You’ve probably never even heard of him, but he was a key player in the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and the financing of the now-bankrupt for-profit hospital system Steward Health Care. Now he’s hard at work trying to expand an ecologically disastrous private-jet airport.

In 2019, Leerink sold his private investment bank, Leerink Partners, to the infamous SVB for $280 million and stayed on to manage the bank’s securities arm. The rest is history: SVB’s March 2023 collapse and subsequent federal seizure was the largest bank failure since the 2008 economic meltdown. The whole sordid affair was a textbook example of a disaster that could have been averted had Congress not capitulated to the bankers that lobbied for deregulation.

As Leerink leaped from the sinking SVB ship, reestablishing Leerink Partners, he plundered from the fields of life sciences and healthcare. He handled financing for Steward Health Care, cofounded by the oligarch Ralph de la Torre. A cardiac surgeon, de la Torre was formerly CEO of Caritas Christi, a nonprofit hospital network of six acute-care facilities in eastern Massachusetts owned by the Archdiocese of Boston. In 2010, he brought in the private-equity fund Cerberus Capital to acquire the hospital network for $246 million and convert it to a for-profit system.

Rebranded as Steward Health Care with de la Torre as CEO, it acquired dozens of hospitals over the next decade, becoming one of the largest for-profit hospital networks in the US. Like other private-equity ventures in healthcare, Steward squeezed value from patients, workers, and communities, resulting in patient endangerment and bankruptcy. It sliced and diced assets, putting real estate into a separate venture called Medical Properties Trust (MPT) that charged the hospitals huge rents, contributing to their insolvency.

In 2020, Cerberus sold Steward to a physicians’ group with $335 million in financing from MPT. Steward’s leaders celebrated, paying themselves $111 million in dividends, with de la Torre treating himself to not one but two yachts with his windfall.

Within a year, Steward Health Care was headed toward bankruptcy, unable to afford the real-estate payments to MPT. The Boston Globe, which assigned its investigative Spotlight team to chronicle the unraveling of Steward, failed to mention the Leerink connection. But he was there.

When the Tennessee-based for-profit operator HCA Healthcare announced its plan to purchase five Utah hospitals from Steward, which ultimately was never completed, Leerink acted as an “exclusive financial advisor to Steward Health Care,” according to HCA’s website. (Leerink’s own website made a similar announcement in 2023, only to delete the post as Steward teetered toward bankruptcy.)

Now Leerink is spearheading an effort to expand the hangar space for luxury private jets at Hanscom Field, New England’s largest private-jet airport, located 20 miles northwest of Boston, which hosts an estimated 38,000 annual private-jet operations. A study that I cowrote found that nearly half of private-jet flights departing from Hanscom are for recreational or luxury travel. Leerink’s hangar expansion would facilitate an estimated additional 6,000 flights a year, releasing a “climate bomb” of emissions, according to Elizabeth Turnbull Henry, the president of the Environmental League of Massachusetts. To lead the project, Leerink has teamed up with Michael Argiros, a local Cadillac dealer. Neither has any track record in aviation.

A mighty grassroots coalition, Stop Private Jet Expansion at Hanscom or Anywhere, brings together 120 organizations from the region to oppose the expansion. It argues that private-jet pollution is indefensible on a warming planet—and that just as we should halt construction of new fossil-fuel infrastructure, we should stop incentivizing private-jet travel, one of the most polluting activities on the planet.

These and other broad objections from local communities and their elected representatives haven’t stopped Leerink and his team from forging ahead with the project. In their 2024 application for a state environmental review, they claimed that their project would actually reduce emissions by decreasing the frequency of “ferry flights,” in which pilots fly short distances to reposition the aircraft and park it. Massachusetts state Senator Michael Barrett lambasted them for this claim at a public hearing: “Please don’t erect these bogus environmental rationales for something that has nothing whatsoever to do with relieving the crisis that faces us in terms of climate. Just be honest about it. This is all about becoming a little richer yourselves by helping people even richer than you.” The activists won the first round of the state regulatory battle, with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts rejecting Leerink’s initial environmental plan. At a September 2026 hearing, Massport shared that Leerink and the developers are aiming to submit a supplemental plan and environment statement by the end of 2026.

One of Hanscom Field’s frequent fliers is Leerink’s fellow oligarch John Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox and The Boston Globe. The newspaper has conspicuously avoided probing Leerink’s role in the Steward Health Care debacle or the much-derided hangar expansion. Instead, it has published multiple puff pieces about him, including a July 2023 article exalting his recovery after the collapse of SVB. The Globe’s business reporter Jon Chesto fawned, “It’s hard to overstate how important Leerink and his team—with their deal-making skills and financial expertise—have been to the emergence of Greater Boston as the world’s epicenter of life sciences.”

Why has Boston’s biggest newspaper shied away from examining Leerink’s newsworthy involvement in the self-dealing of the superrich? We can only suspect that deep solidarity among oligarchs is forged in private-jet passenger lounges across the planet.