Black Entrepreneurs Buy Nuggets for $65 Million

The Denver Nuggets of the National Basketball Assn. became the first black-owned major professional sports franchise when they were purchased Monday by Boston investor Bertram M. Lee and Illinois sports facilities manager Peter C.B. Bynoe for a reported $65 million.

At a news conference in Denver, Lee announced that David Checketts, former executive with the Utah Jazz, will become the Nuggets’ president and oversee the daily business operation of the club. Checketts, 38, also becomes a minority owner. But most of the franchise will be held by Bynoe, an executive director of the Illinois Sports Facility Authority, and Lee, who in May, 1988, was part of a group that sought unsuccessfully to buy the San Antonio Spurs for a reported $50 million. Both are black.

“We look on this as a business proposition, but we’re also sports fans--we see this as a challenge,” Lee said of the franchise that Sidney Shlenker, the current Nugget owner, bought in 1985 for $19 million.

Lee is president of BML Associates Inc., a Boston telecommunications firm, and a former president and shareholder of WNEV-TV in Boston.

Business associates said Lee, 50, earned about $17 million when he joined with a group of WNEV shareholders that sold about 40% of the station for $100 million at the end of 1986. BML Associates, which ranks 27th on Black Enterprise magazine’s list of the nation’s largest black-owned companies, also owns radio stations in Nebraska and Utah.

“Lee is an expert at investing other people’s money,” said Toye Brown, a longtime acquaintance who is president of the nonprofit social service agency Freedom House in Boston, which Lee once headed. “But he keeps his business very much to himself.”

“Peter and I are the largest shareholders,” Lee said. “There will be some other people involved, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to give the ownership breakdown.”