Beatrice International Chief Is Ill : People: Reginald Lewis, one of the 400 richest Americans, has brain cancer. His brother, Vice Chairman Jean S. Fugett Jr., is running the nation’s largest black-owned firm.

Reginald Lewis, chairman of TLC Beatrice International Holdings, the nation’s largest black-owned business, has been hospitalized with brain cancer and is in a coma, the company said Monday.

Lewis’ brother and the company’s vice chairman, Jean S. Fugett Jr., was named last week to head a new office of the chairman to run the New York-based food processing and distribution firm during Lewis’ illness, the company said.

Lewis, 50, developed the transition plan, which was completed last week and approved by the privately held company’s board, said company spokesman Rene Meily.

Meily said Lewis had been developing a plan to create an office of the chairman before he learned he was ill, but put the finishing touches on the plan last week as his condition worsened. The company declined to provide further details on Lewis’ illness or prognosis, citing his family’s desire for privacy.

A Harvard-educated lawyer, Lewis made his fortune by engineering the 1987 leveraged buyout of the food giant, then known as Beatrice International, for $985 million. His net worth was estimated by Forbes magazine last year at more than $400 million, placing him in the ranks of one of the 400 richest Americans.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, who runs a school for chief executives at Emory University in Atlanta, said Lewis is widely admired by his peers, both for his achievement in turning Beatrice around and his success in overcoming the racial barriers that have prevented all but a handful of other blacks from attaining similar success in the financial world.

“You name the challenge and his life demonstrates that he beat it,” Sonnenfeld said. “His accomplishments in breaking into a financial world and the consumer products industry that were not traditionally open to blacks were extraordinary.”

Viewed as a model for minority and white entrepreneurs alike, Lewis has been widely in demand for speaking engagements, for which Sonnenfeld said he rarely took gratuities. Lewis has given millions to charity and is honored each year by Black Enterprise magazine as the head of the largest black-owned business in America.

Last year, the firm had earnings of $1.54 billion and profit of $51.4 million. TLC Beatrice markets and distributes ice cream, snacks and other grocery products in western Europe. Beatrice International is different than Beatrice, which sells such products as Ready Whip and Peter Pan peanut butter in the United States.

But the self-made Lewis, born in Baltimore and married with two daughters, has been criticized as moody, stubborn and difficult to work with. Two presidents have quit TLC Beatrice in the last four years, and one of them is suing Lewis for breach of contract.

But Lewis’ supporters say he had to play hardball to get where he did. And with a succession plan intact, analysts said TLC Beatrice could maintain its hard-won stability in the event of Lewis’ death.

Fugett, 41, has been a member of TLC’s board and its management committee since TLC acquired Beatrice in December, 1987.

The company said in a statement that Fugett, an attorney, “has spent much of his business career at his brother’s side, handling numerous financial, transactional and trouble-shooting assignments.”

“I know the objective for the company was that the management would always work for the benefit of all the company’s constituencies--the family, the shareholders and all of our partners and employees,” Fugett said in the statement. “Our goal will be to maximize returns from each of our business units, consistent with what’s best over the long term.”

Other members of the chairman’s office and their new titles are Albert M. Fenster, 40, executive vice president for finance and legal affairs; Dennis P. Jones, 41, executive vice president for operations; David A. Guarino, 28, senior vice president for strategic planning and project finance, and Brenda C. Harper Vandamme, 32, vice president for French operations.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.