A deep pocket of support

As a boy, Sean Healey lived in cookie-cutter base housing with his Marine Corps officer father and the rest of his family.

But last year, Healey the adult could afford to rip out the foundation and framing for a $2 million vacation home he and his wife, Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey, were building in West Windsor, Vt., and reposition the house for a more picturesque view from what one neighbor described as a ''starter palace" on a 134-acre hilltop lot.

Few voters know Sean Healey or have even seen him, and his name will not appear on the November ballot. But Healey looms as a major factor in this year's campaign for governor. With his enormous wealth ready to help the candidacy of his wife, he is the Republican campaign's secret weapon.

The emphasis is on secret. Both Healeys refused to talk to the Globe for this article. Spokesmen said Sean Healey and his business are separate from the campaign, even though it is clear he is willing to spend some of his millions to help her win, and a top executive at his asset management firm is also chairman of the state Republican Party.

In many ways, Sean Healey is one of those classic American success stories: Brainy middle-class guy works hard, earns two Harvard degrees, marries an intelligent, pretty Harvard woman, and becomes fabulously wealthy at a relatively young age.

Since his transient boyhood as the son of a military man, Sean Michael Healey has traveled a distance not measurable in miles. Born in California, he grew up on or near Marine installations in California, North and South Carolina, Virginia, and Louisiana.

Today, the onetime military brat, who turns 45 next month, is president and CEO of a phenomenally successful corporation, has a net worth of at least $100 million (about $75 million of it in stock options from his company, Affiliated Managers Group), and, with his wife, owns a trophy home in Beverly on the North Shore's ''Gold Coast," plus expensive vacation retreats in Vermont and Florida. He has even purchased fine homes for each of his divorced parents, mother Yvonne, who lives next door to the Healeys in Beverly, and his father, Michael, who remarried, in Venice, Fla.

Yet, friends say, money and success have not really changed the man. ''He's the same guy I met back in September of '79," Kary Mack of New York City said of his roommate for three years at Harvard College and close friend ever since. ''He's a really good soul." (Healey asked Mack and four others to talk to the Globe.)

AMG is the source of Healey's wealth. The Beverly-based holding company controls 26 privately held companies that manage about $184 billion in assets. Since AMG went public in 1997, the split-adjusted value of a share of its stock has skyrocketed 560 percent. It nearly doubled in the past year.

Soaring with the stock price has been Healey's worth, on paper at least. Today, the net value of his options rises or falls more than $1 million with each dollar increase or decrease in the value of a share of AMG stock. Mostly, it increases. As of Friday, the share price had jumped $46 in the past year, closing at $103.

Healey, who besides stock receives salary and other compensation that has averaged almost $3 million in recent years, holds options on more than a million shares, according to company filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That's on top of about 365,000 share options he has exercised in the past 11 months to net about $18 million in profit (the difference between the value of the stock when the options were awarded in prior years and the price at which they recently sold). That's more than enough to bankroll a gubernatorial campaign. In her 2002 campaign for lieutenant governor, Kerry Healey spent $1.8 million in personal funds. (Her running mate that year, Governor Mitt Romney, holds the record for a statewide race, expending $6.3 million in personal funds that year.)

AMG has been a sensitive subject for the Healeys, particularly since the state inspector general's office in 2004 criticized the firm's $1.2 million in state tax credits tied to the move of its headquarters from Boston to Prides Crossing, not far from the Healeys' home. Awarded in 2001, two years before Kerry Healey took office, the tax credits were approved under a program designed to stimulate economic development in blighted areas. Prides Crossing is an exclusive residential neighborhood, and AMG built its headquarters on the site of a burned-down mansion, set back from the road in an enclosed 89-acre estate.

While asserting it had exceeded its obligations under the program, AMG nevertheless returned the money to the state last October because ''the controversy is a distraction to our business and risks impugning our corporate image and reputation." Beverly Mayor William F. Scanlon Jr. said AMG has been a good corporate citizen, contributing to local causes, and the improvements have quadrupled the annual local property taxes paid on the property, to $259,000 this year. Since the move, AMG has added 46 jobs, more than the 30 pledged. There are now 66 employees working at the headquarters.

The palatial headquarters stands as a monument to the company's extraordinary success in less than 13 years of existence. Conceived and founded by William J. Nutt, former president of The Boston Co., AMG improved on the business model of acquiring small and mid-size asset management firms that offer an array of investment styles and services. Instead of buying a company outright, AMG acquires a majority stake and leaves plenty of equity and incentive for managers, who are allowed to operate independently of the parent company.

AMG companies include Friess Associates and its Brandywine funds; Tweedy, Browne Co.; and Third Avenue Funds.

AMG carefully selects the companies it acquires, then adeptly reinvests their large cash flows to create even larger profits, according to independent financial analysts who have followed the company for years and asked not to be identified.

''It's an ingenious concept," said one analyst. ''They're creative, they know what they're doing, and they're good at it," he said.

''It's somewhat of a unique business model," one analyst said. In acquiring companies, AMG offers a win-win ownership-succession planning solution for principals of these partnerships, he said. ''The principals receive liquidity for the equity they have built up over the years, and equity is then put into the hands of younger people to drive it."

Sean Healey has been there almost from the company's beginning, but his career path to business success followed a detour from his early desire to become a law professor.

Growing up in a household that often moved and where his father was posted overseas for long stretches -- in Okinawa, and in Vietnam during the war with an artillery unit -- Healey developed valuable life skills at an early age, said Regan Asnes, one of his two younger sisters.

''It was hard to be constantly moving," she said. ''You'd either sink or swim. It was a daunting experience." But even as a young boy, Healey showed a prodigious work ethic and ''a sense of duty and obligation," she said.

''Living on a military base where most of the fathers were away, Sean and a lot of the other boys felt they were the men of the house," remembered Regan, an event planner and mother of two who lives in New York City.

At Harvard, Healey concentrated in American history and literature. A three-sport athlete in high school in Oceanside, Calif., Healey, then at 158 pounds, wrestled varsity at Harvard all four years but was overshadowed on teams that featured a future All-American, an Olympian, and an Eastern regional champion.

''We were the fanatical wrestlers, but he was much more balanced in life," recalled Paul Widerman, who was an alternate 118-pounder on the 1984 US Olympics team and is now an entrepreneur in the fitness equipment business. ''Sean was quite good but he liked to wrestle, rather than make it his life."

Healey was Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard, before earning a master's degree in philosophy at Ireland's University College Dublin on a Rotary scholarship. There he renewed an acquaintance with another Rotary scholar, Kerry Murphy, a native Floridian who had been a year ahead of him at Harvard and was in a doctorate program at Trinity College in Dublin. The relationship quickly became serious, and they were married in 1985, when Sean Healey was at Harvard Law School.

''He could have been an excellent lawyer, but he was somebody who wanted to go out, be in charge, and not be the lawyer on the side," recalled a classmate, Eric Rakowski, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a trustee of two AMG funds. Between his second and third years in law school, Healey worked at Goldman Sachs, the prestigious investment banking company in New York, and became a full-time associate after receiving his law degree.

''Sean worked extremely long hours there," Rakowski said.

After eight years, Healey was on a partnership track as a vice president in mergers and acquisitions, and Kerry Healey was working part time as a consultant out of their Brooklyn apartment, raising their children Alexander, who is now 14, and Averill, now 11. ''He was extremely successful at Goldman, but it meant he didn't see enough of Kerry or his children," said Rakowski, who, like several Healey friends interviewed by the Globe, came from a modest background to become successful.

In 1995, a venture capital firm introduced the young dealmaker to Nutt, who had recently started AMG with three employees. It was a good fit, but a risk. Healey brought his young family to Massachusetts. He started as AMG's executive vice president, became president in 1999, and added the title of CEO last year.

A registered Republican, Healey never expressed much interest in politics, friends said, except to support Kerry Healey's career, which began inauspiciously with lopsided defeats in 1998 and 2000 campaigns for state representative from Beverly before the triumphant 2002 race as Romney's hand-picked running mate.

Sean Healey is a trustee and treasurer of Shore Country Day School, where his children are enrolled. Larry Griffin, Shore's head of school, described him as ''very committed" and said both Healeys are ''highly involved in their children's lives" at the Beverly school.

Healey is also a trustee of the venerable Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. The Healeys and AMG are major donors to the institution, which has long been a beneficiary of the philanthropy of Cabots, Saltonstalls, Endicotts, and other famed Brahmin families.

''Sean's a hard worker and headed our strategic planning exercise, which took a year and a half to create a 20-year plan," museum director and CEO Dan Monroe said. He also described Healey as a collector of contemporary art (he owns a few paintings).

''People don't fully appreciate that he's a very charitable guy who doesn't look for a whole lot of credit," said Patrick T. Ryan of Beverly Farms, who coached the Healeys' son Alexander in the local youth lacrosse program, and last year became a member of AMG's board of directors. Ryan, CEO of Wakefield-based PolyMedica, a healthcare products and service provider, often plays tennis with Healey or fishes with him on Healey's boat, a sporty Grady-White.

Like his father, Healey has become an avid hunter, takes hunting trips to various Rocky Mountain states, and once shot a bull elk during a guided hunt on Ted Turner's Vermejo Park Ranch in northern New Mexico.

Looking back on the result of the gamble to leave Goldman Sachs for AMG, Healey's law school friend Rakowski said: ''It's turned out better than anyone expected. Now, he almost has the best of all worlds."