J. Bruce Llewellyn, pioneering black businessman who led Philadelphia bottling co., dies at 82

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Pioneering black businessman Llewellyn dies at 82

NEW YORK — J. Bruce Llewellyn, who was once called an empire-building dealmaker and a savvy entrepreneur and forged a legacy to become one of the country’s most renowned and wealthy black businessmen, has died. He was 82.

His widow, Shahara Ahmad-Llewellyn, said Friday her husband was not a “monolithic businessman.”

“He was 6-foot-6, a big guy who at the drop of a hat would tell you a story and at the end of it you would be laughing so hard your sides would hurt,” she said in a phone interview. “It wasn’t just about the millions of dollars. He was a great guy.”

Llewellyn died April 7 in Manhattan at an apartment near the NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center where he was undergoing treatment, she said. The cause of death was renal failure.

Llewellyn was a legend in black business but had also marked decades in public service, including having taken on jobs offered by Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and as an advocate for higher education for minorities.

Early on, he left a career in government to pursue his entrepreneurial instincts with a competitiveness that was hinted at in many of his comments about business.

“My father used to tell me that this is a great country with great opportunity but that you’re going to have to work twice as hard to get half as much,” he told Black Enterprise magazine in a 1986 profile in which he was called “The Boss” and “The Deal Maker.”

He said he followed that advice throughout his career.

He became so well-known for his business acumen that he was asked in the 1970s by Jackie Robinson, a friend and founder of the Freedom National Bank in Harlem — committed to lending to black-owned businesses and homeowners — to help stabilize the foundering financial institution. Llewellyn joined its board.

His streak of success in business began in 1969, when he bought a 10-store chain of supermarkets and expanded it to 29 stores throughout Harlem and the South Bronx, making it one of the largest minority-owned businesses in the country. He went on to own a television station, WKBW-TV, in Buffalo, N.Y., an ABC affiliate, which he later sold, and to become a shareholder in a New York cable business.

But he was most successful in the bottling business.

In 1985, after selling the supermarket chain, he partnered with other black entrepreneurs and became the majority owner of Philadelphia Coca-Cola Bottling Co., which became the nation’s fourth-largest Coke bottler in the country under his leadership and among the nation’s largest African-American-owned businesses.

By the time he reached a deal to sell the company, it employed 1,200 people and had $540 million in annual revenue.

James Bruce Llewellyn was born on July 16, 1927, in Harlem to Jamaican immigrants.

At a young age, his parents moved the family to White Plains, a northern middle-class suburb of New York City that was a mostly white community at the time. After graduating high school, he served in the U.S. Army, and attended college on the GI. Bill and earned a law degree from New York Law School in 1960.

Besides his wife, he is survived by three daughters, a sister and a granddaughter.