Title: Senior Vice President, Commercial Banking, Salem Five
Age: 55
Experience: 30 years
When Mark Leff’s longtime friend Len Gengel decided to build an orphanage in Haiti to memorialize his daughter Britney, Leff knew he wouldn’t be content just cutting a check. He wanted to put some muscle into it, too. Besides putting in man-hours rough-wiring the orphanage, the longtime banker also helped raise more than $40,000 to build out a media room and help put solar panels on the orphanage to reduce its electricity costs. Recently, he sat down with Banker & Tradesman to talk about some of his work with the Gengels and bankers doing well – and also doing good.
Q: Tell me a little bit about how you know the Gengels and how you got involved with the Be Like Brit foundation.
A: I’m the former president of the Home Builders and Remodelers Association of Massachusetts, and I was brought into that organization by Len Gengel, who is a builder out in Rutland. We began working on many issues that confronted homebuilders, particularly overbearing regulation … Len became a good customer, we financed a number of his subdivisions out in Rutland, so we became very close over the years.
He faced a terrible tragedy almost five years ago, on Jan. 12, 2010. His daughter [Britney] attended Lynn University. I knew his daughter, a lovely young lady with a lot of promise, and she was on a big humanitarian mission in Haiti. She texted her mother three hours before the earthquake, saying that she loves the people here, they have nothing, but they’re so happy, and I want to come here myself and start an orphanage.
Three hours later, she perished in the earthquake. They went through a terrible ordeal because she was in the Hotel Montana in Port-au-Prince, and at first, she was missing, and then the Gengels were told that she was alive … They went down, the Thursday after the Tuesday earthquake, hey went down to Florida that night, thinking that she was alive, and they were told that that wasn’t their daughter.
Finally they located her in the rubble of the Hotel Montana 33 days later. She had perished in the earthquake, but they had this text that talked about this dream of hers. Len is a builder, and one of the most incredible people you’ll ever meet, and he decided to make that dream a reality.
Q: How did you wind up in Haiti?
A: It was heartbreaking. I attended Britney’s funeral. I knew Britney, she was a lovely girl, and it was so hard to watch my friend go through that. But he had a dream, and I felt it was my responsibility, since he was a customer and a friend, to try to help him realize his dream.
Now, his dream wasn’t a small one. His dream was to build this orphanage that would house 66 children – 33 boys and 33 girls – and the 33 represents the number of days his daughter was missing before they found her.
Len doesn’t do anything 99 percent. It’s all 100 percent. He began building this orphanage, and he opened it in January of 2013, only two years from the beginning of construction.
I wanted to help. Salem Five was very supportive and gave him some early seed money to help him start to build the orphanage, but that wasn’t enough for me. I called him one day and told him I wanted to help him build the orphanage. There was dead silence on the other end of the phone, and I know what he’s thinking: “What good is a banker going to do me on a construction site?” He said, “You can’t just go to Haiti. You have to get shots.” I said, “Well, I don’t like shots, I’ll call you back.”
A month later, I called him back and said, “I got all my shots. When do we go?”
Q: Obviously, not everybody can go to Haiti to help build an orphanage, but you do work in a fairly generous industry.
A: I would say that the banking industry is probably the go-to industry for charitable contributions. Whenever there’s an event or a cause, usually a charitable institution’s first stop is the local bank. And every bank, particularly mutual banks and savings banks, they have really come to the table every single day, and they make a difference every single day. Bankers kind of have a stiff reputation, but they do come to the table and they’re very generous.
My livelihood and the bank’s success are dependent on strong customer relationships and dealing with really good people. I value that, personally, and when a friend of mine is in need, I try to help. That’s what this started out as, but it became so much more.
Leff’s Top 5 Other Most Rewarding Endeavors:
- Attracting premier customers to Salem Five.
- Conceptualized the Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research data base on local housing regulations.
- Leadership and presidency of the Home Builders and Remodelers Association of Massachusetts.
- Coaching his sons’ Babe Ruth baseball teams.
- Appointment to the Governor’s Special Commission on Barriers to Housing Development by then-Gov. Paul Cellucci in 2001.
