Perseverance drives a political ambition

As a young medical student, Chris Gabrieli spent his free time racing to meetings with investors. His aging parents, Hungarian immigrants who had invested their life's savings in his father's scientific research, were edging closer to bankruptcy. Gabrieli was frantic to find someone to fund his father's work.

At last, some financiers agreed to put up some money -- as long as the young Gabrieli quit medical school and started what became a medical software business. The Gabrielis, who had dreamed of their son becoming a doctor since he was born, were devastated.

''Everybody was sobbing," recalled his older brother, John. ''It just seemed wrong."

Chris Gabrieli knew nothing about the business world, and he had no interest in it -- his heart was back in the lab. But, his brother says, he plunged in without hesitation.

''He just felt he had to do this," he said.

As a Democratic candidate for governor, Gabrieli, now 46, approaches politics with the same earnest single-mindedness of the young man who rescued his parents from financial ruin. Over the last decade, he has gradually left his own venture capital career and devoted himself to ''making a difference" in the public sphere. He has already spent more than $2 million of his own money, much of it on television ads that highlight his work on after-school programs and stem cell research. He has reduced his campaign slogan to a single word: results.

But Gabrieli has tried running for public office twice before, each time spending millions of his own fortune on sober, issue-driven television ads. His critics paint him as too longwinded, too wonkish, too cerebral to capture the public's imagination. Gabrieli admits he isn't flashy, but he says that his previous races sharpened his campaign skills. And he is convinced that this time, voters want a candidate like him.

Even as a child, Chris Gabrieli was dogged. Bored in the first grade, the 6-year-old boy lobbied his headmaster to let him skip to second. During a blizzard when he was 10 or 12, his mother looked out the window to find him driving the family car back and forth in the driveway, trying to flatten the snowdrifts so his father could pull in.

''It did help a little," Lilla Gabrieli recalls with a laugh. ''But it was scary."

After their tumultuous youth scarred by war and the rise of communism, Lilla and Elmer Gabrieli cherished life in a pleasant residential section of Buffalo. Friends recall the household's European feel -- serene, somewhat formal, filled with paintings.

His parents expected stellar grades, and Gabrieli delivered. His teachers remember him as an incandescent student. On the leafy campus of the private Nichols School, where the city's professional class sent their children, he excelled in every subject, from physics to French.

He was also known as a hyperarticulate child who, his art teacher said, ''would talk your ear off if you'd let him." Karl Spangenberg, his high school English teacher, said he was ''brilliant" in class discussions but could get carried away.

''In those ninth-grade years, you'd ask a question or two and you'd get a one- or two-word answer out of a kid, and that was good," he said. ''That was never an issue with Chris."

Though not a natural athlete, Gabrieli labored to become an excellent squash player, eventually earning a spot on Harvard's varsity squad. If Ed Paquette, a teacher and football coach at Nichols, had any concern about him, it was whether he could become more subtle -- ''maybe being smooth with a young woman, as opposed to being direct."

Gabrieli sailed through Harvard, majoring in history and science, with little time in the library. At the time, he said, he wanted to become a research physician.

''You could outwork him, but you could never do better than him," said Hartley Rogers, one of his roommates.

Among his roommates, Gabrieli was the guy in charge of dividing up the phone bill and making sure everyone paid his share. But he also had a spontaneous side: In their junior year, Gabrieli and his roommates took two all-night road trips to the 1980 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, N.Y., scoring tickets to the legendary US-Russia hockey game.

But his family's growing financial distress cast a long shadow over his future.

Elmer Gabrieli, a doctor who left communist Hungary after World War II, was a visionary scientist. Computers, he believed, could revolutionize medicine by helping doctors analyze patient records. In the 1970s, he stepped down from his faculty position at the State University of New York at Buffalo's medical school, sold his lab, and invested the proceeds in his work.

But it would be decades before technology caught up with his imagination. He had no income, and his savings quickly ran out.

His younger son took a semester off from Harvard in his junior year to help. But by the time Chris Gabrieli was in medical school, he was spending much of his free time searching for investors to back his father's research. The turning point came in 1983, when he was a second-year medical student at Columbia University.

Denis Newman, then with First Boston Corp., an investment banking firm, was among the investors who agreed to back the elder Gabrieli's research, which focused on developing a way for computers to translate doctors' notes into code that Elmer Gabrieli hoped could be used for diagnosis and treatment analysis.

But Chris Gabrieli's participation was non-negotiable, Newman said in an interview. The elder scientist, while brilliant, felt business pressures were ''just details," he said. ''And if you understood how important this was to society and medical progress, you wouldn't bother him with such details. Chris, even at his young age, was much more realistic about all this -- he was the horse we were betting on."

But his parents agonized.

''They were torn," recalls John Gabrieli, now an MIT professor who is one of the country's foremost memory researchers. ''On the one hand, things were really desperate. Their backs were to the wall, and they had been wonderful parents to us, and Chris had an enormous sense of responsibility to them. On the other hand, they were pulling him back from the very thing they'd dreamt about since he was born."

At Gabrieli Medical Information Systems Inc., Gabrieli says, he came as close to failure as he ever has in his life. The pressure was intense, full of 12-hour workdays, and, for a time, he said, he was ''probably depressed."

But desperation drove him to persevere. David St. Clair, a former executive at GMIS, recalls a hugely energetic young man whose office was a riot of scattered paper, and who seemed to leave a trail of papers in his wake.

''His father was absolutely the epitome of the mad scientist -- and I mean that in a loving way -- and Chris had to be affected by that," he said. ''[Chris] came to understand the power of ideas, that you could, in fact, dedicate your life to things that are bigger than you and important. But you've got to figure out how to make them actually work."

Eventually, Gabrieli did. With a team of programmers, he developed an aspect of his father's research to create a new billing software tool for insurers. By the time he left the company three years later, GMIS was breaking even.

The experience transformed Gabrieli from an academic whiz kid into a businessman who, in his family's eyes, had single-handedly saved them all. Instead of going bankrupt, his father drew a comfortable salary and continued his research in Buffalo.

To this day, his 79-year-old mother calls him ''Chris the Good."

In 1991, after a later CEO developed a hit product, the company went public. In 1997, the company was sold for more than $200 million, according to news reports at the time. The Gabrieli family owned only a small portion of the company by then, but they made millions on the sale -- enough for a comfortable retirement for his parents. (His father died in 2000, his mother lives in a penthouse apartment overlooking the Charles River in Cambridge.)

A partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, a GMIS investor and one of the country's top venture capital firms, was so impressed with Gabrieli that, in 1986, he hired him to work at the firm's Menlo Park, Calif., office. For the next 14 years, Gabrieli delved into the risky science of betting on ideas, specializing in drug development and medical services.

The job made the son of immigrants fabulously wealthy. He will not say how much he is worth, and he has refused to disclose his income tax returns (so far, Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly is the only gubernatorial candidate who has disclosed his), saying his finances should be private.

It was July 4, 1992. Chris Gabrieli got down on one knee and read a bit of prose he'd written, declaring that he would like to renounce his own independence.

''For a second I thought, 'Where is he going with this?' " recalls Hilary Bacon Gabrieli, a ginger-haired Harvard graduate and daughter of Boston's famous socialite, Smoki Bacon. When Gabrieli finally popped the question, his wife-to-be was so happy she started screaming.

They met at a Christmas party; after two weeks of dating, they were talking about children's names. By the time of the wedding, they had put in an offer on their first house, a brick mansion in Boston's Louisburg Square that is now assessed at $5.5 million. Hilary became pregnant on their honeymoon, and over the next seven years, they had five children -- John, now 12, Abigail, 11, Polly, 9, Lilla, 8, and Nicholas, 5.

Seven years ago, Hilary left her job as counsel to the state Senate Committee on Taxation to be a full-time mother. A nanny helps with the children (they famously lost one babysitter, Maria Grasso, after she took home $70 million in lottery winnings in 1999). Her mother, who lives a few blocks away, often drops by in the mornings to lend a hand.

Even in informal settings, Gabrieli approaches the children's education with intensity. He has traveled with the older ones -- to Costa Rica with John to learn about the rain forest, and to the Galapagos with Abigail to explore the wildlife. A history buff, Gabrieli sometimes comes racing in late to Sunday dinner, handing out pages of ''This Day in American History" or ''This Day in Massachusetts History" fresh off the printer, set to lead a family discussion on the topic at hand.

''He's so interested in history and so into the facts," Hilary Gabrieli said with a laugh. ''Their eyes are glazing over. . . . I'm like, Chris, move it along."

By the time he was in his mid-30s, Gabrieli seemed to have it all: wealth, a happy marriage, a growing family.

One spring evening in 1998, Robert J. Haynes, the president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, was circulating at a political fund-raiser at the Hibernian Hall in Watertown. He watched a tall, prematurely gray man standing stiffly amid it all.

''I noticed that he was -- how do I put this politely? -- he was like a bird who fell out of his nest," Haynes recalled. ''I said, 'Chris, you're running for Congress. You have to introduce yourself to people and tell them you're a candidate and express some interest in the people you meet.' "

Up to that point, Gabrieli's political involvement had been a few rungs higher. In 1992, at a friend's invitation, he joined CEOs For Clinton, and eventually raised thousands for moderate Democrats in the Democratic Leadership Council. After helping Mark Roosevelt's failed gubernatorial campaign against incumbent William F. Weld in 1994, he played a central role in the leadership of MassINC, a bipartisan think tank.

Though the venture capital business was red hot, by the late 1990s, Gabrieli's focus had changed. He had discovered, Roosevelt reflected recently, that ''the problems that most engage his intellectual imagination are public sector problems." After years of backing other people in both business and politics, he felt ready to bet on himself.

In 1998, when Joseph P. Kennedy II decided to step down from his Eighth Congressional District seat, Gabrieli bet big. It became a legendary race, with nine names on the ballot. His head full of DLC ideas, Gabrieli was as confident -- and as naive, he admits now -- as a first-time candidate could be.

''It was wild," John Gabrieli recalled. ''He had no political background. But it was almost hard to believe he wouldn't do this outstandingly as well."

Gabrieli wanted to be the issues candidate. But by the end of a campaign in which he spent nearly $1,000 a vote to finish sixth, he became better known as the money candidate. The label followed him into his 2002 campaign for lieutenant governor, when as Shannon O'Brien's running mate, he poured almost $5 million into a campaign they eventually lost to Mitt Romney and Kerry Healey.

His second loss, Gabrieli admits, had him ''feeling a little sorry for myself for a while." Eventually, he rededicated himself to the issues that moved him most -- especially education. He threw himself into the Massachusetts 2020 Foundation, a nonprofit he founded in 2000, which has focused on expanding after-school initiatives across the state. Among many other initiatives, it has helped raise $26 million for after-school programs in Boston. He remains an adjunct partner at Bessemer but since 2000 he has devoted himself full time to his public sector pursuits, which have also included work on economic development and promoting a bill last year to endorse embryonic stem-cell research.

Gabrieli last year toyed with the idea of running for governor but decided against it.

In January, Reilly suggested they run as a team, and Gabrieli was interested. But when Reilly selected state Representative Marie P. St. Fleur as his running mate, Gabrieli decided to launch his own candidacy.

For the last two months, he says, he has spent most of his days calling and meeting with delegates in hopes of getting the 15 percent support he needs at the state Democratic Party convention on June 3. After a long day on the trail, he'll unwind by playing a round of online Literati, a word game similar to Scrabble.

Gabrieli gets prickly when pressed on his enormous personal contributions to his campaign, and he protests that pundits who say he's boring haven't talked to his volunteers. On the stump, his words run together, almost as if his mouth can't keep up with his brain.

But he has learned the trick of making an informal speech to a small group sound conversational, tossing in a ''You know?" or ''Right?" And he is talking about people -- the struggle facing parents of diabetic children, the chance to lead a state of more than 6 million residents.

''I think it would be the most incredible opportunity imaginable," he said as his campaign RV rumbled through the rain the other night.