William Floyd Weld (born July 31, 1945) is an American Republican politician and the former Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, serving as the state's 68th governor from 1991 to 1997.
While governor Weld appointed his chauffeur Joseph Lawless as head of security at Massport. Although Weld resigned in 1997, Lawless was still there on September 11th 2001
Weld joined the New York Private Equity firm Leeds, Weld & Co. in 2000 until his exit in 2005, when the company's name was changed to Leeds Equity Partners.
In May 2002 Rudi Giuliani chaired the board of Leeds Weld. Other board members include Colin Powell.
The Board of Advisors of Leeds Weld Equity Partners IV, L.P. also includes: Richard W. Riley, former U.S. Secretary of Education in the Clinton Administration and former two-term governor of South Carolina; Lamar Alexander, former U.S. Secretary of Education in the first Bush Administration and former two-term Governor of Tennessee; Thomas F. McLarty, III, Vice Chairman of Kissinger McLarty Associates; Richard I. Beattie, Chairman of the law firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and former General Counsel of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare during the Carter Administration; and Barry Munitz, President of the J. Paul Getty Trust in Santa Monica, California and former chancellor of the California State University System.
Weld's first wife, Susan Roosevelt Weld, formerly a professor at Harvard University specializing in ancient Chinese civilization and law and then General Counsel to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, is a great granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt. They married on June 7, 1975, and had five children (David, Ethel, Mary, Quentin and Frances). They divorced in 2002. His second and present wife, the writer and novelist Leslie Marshall, is a former daughter-in-law of Ben Bradlee of The Washington Post. Weld was a principal at Leeds, Weld & Co., which describes itself as the United States's largest private equity fund focused on investing in the education and training industry. Weld co-chaired the Independent Task Force on North America under the Council on Foreign Relations, which studied the integration of the USA, Canada and Mexico.
Weld was the chief executive at the school, Decker College, until 2005, when he officially stepped down to launch a bid for governor of New York.
Decker College, now closed and declaring bankruptcy, was raided by federal education officials and FBI agents in mid-October amid complaints including student loan fraud.
“We’re talking millions of dollars that were literally stolen out of taxpayer’s mouths that went into Weld and the Woodcoxes’ pockets,” said Johnson, referring also to Decker College’s primary owners. He said that it was routine practice for college officials to transfer digital forgeries of students’ signatures from one document to another, in an effort to expedite the admissions process.