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Before the 1967 riots shattered its image, Newark was a place that many residents fondly remember. It was a place of neighborhood ball games in Branchfield Park and of a capella singers on street corners. It was a place where youngsters like Charles M. Cawley attended St. Benedict’s Catholic boys school and absorbed lifelong lessons of obedience and responsibility.

It was a place whose ambience Cawley, now the 62-year-old CEO of MBNA, the country’s largest independent issuer of credit cards, seeks to recreate by directing more than $27 million in charitable contributions to St. Benedict’s and putting up call centers in downtown Newark. “When an MBNA does this, it has a great impact for those of us who knew what the city was,” says Steve Adubato Jr., a television host and communication expert who grew up in Newark. “That’s why it’s a big deal.”

For Cawley, it’s also part of a pattern of spreading largesse he could scarcely have dreamed of as a door-to-door bill collector on Springfield Avenue in downtown Newark. Cawley has built MBNA offices in Camden, Maine, where he spent summers as a boy, and has helped revitalize downtown Wilmington, Delaware, where the company has its headquarters. A personal friend of George W. Bush and his family, Cawley and MBNA employees were the largest contributors to Bush’s 2000 campaign.

At St. Benedict’s, Cawley is far more than a remote benefactor. He is right at home sitting in the school’s cafeteriaÃ?a $1 million lunchroom that he donatedÃ?chatting with students. He is as comfortable there as in a clutch of schools in Maine, where Cawley has also been a contributor.

“He focuses with amazing intensity, following their grades, sending them congratulatory, handwritten notes and cards, calling in the evening and finding out where they’re interested in going to college,” says Philip Conkling, president of the Island Institute, a nonprofit devoted to conservation in Rockland, Maine. “He changes their lives by the intensity of his focus on what they need to succeed. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Each year this paper honors a business person who has made a substantial contribution to the community. For the changes that Charles Michael Cawley has orchestrated in Newark and St. Benedict’s, and for those undoubtedly still to come, NJBIZ has chosen Cawley as its Person of the Year for 2002. Past winners have included Todd Beamer, the hijacked September 11 passenger who said “Let’s roll” before helping to foil terrorists, and Peter Denton, the founder of the nonprofit organization Excellent Education for Everyone, who was named in 2000.

Cawley’s return to Newark was as welcome as it was unexpected. A 1958 graduate of St. Benedict’s, he reappeared in the early 1990s with an open checkbook to become the largest donor by far in the school’s 137-year history. Cawley and MBNA have financed or donated additions to St. Benedict’s that have ranged from the school’s first on-campus dormitory to a new field house and athletic field and an MBNA Career Development Center.

Last year MBNA came to the south side of Market Street, where Cawley built an MBNA call centerÃ?the first new downtown office building since the 1967 riotsÃ?while pointedly refusing any special tax incentives from the city. Construction on a second and third call center are underway. The complex, which is across the street from St. Benedict’s, is slated to employ 1,500 people, most of them Newark residents.

“We applaud companies for coming to Newark, but most of them have brought their employees with them,” says Christian M. Benedetto Jr., director of real estate services for National Redevelopment, a real estate brokerage firm in Newark. “MBNA is hiring people from the community.”

At once abrupt and giving, shrewd and capricious, temperamental and funny, Cawley can inspire awe from friends and observers. “This is not a mild-mannered man,” says Steve Adubato Sr., a long-time Newark resident who serves with Cawley on the board of St. Benedict’s. “But it’s great that he puts this ferocity toward areas that don’t deal with profit. He’s given meaning to that term ‘enlightened capitalism.’ Charlie shares his ability, his time, his wealth, his resources for the greater good.”True to form, Cawley declined to be interviewed for this story. He consistently ducks media contacts, cooperating only infrequently, as he did for a profile last spring in the Newark Star-Ledger. “In some ways he’s about as arrogant as you can get,” says Jonathan Epstein, a reporter for the Wilmington News Journal who has managed to brush elbows with Cawley only rarely in the past five years.

A native of Massachusetts, Cawley attended St. Benedict’s and graduated from Georgetown University, where he has served as a director. Cawley and former MBNA chairman and CEO Al LernerÃ?the 36th richest American according to a Forbes magazine article last SeptemberÃ?launched the company in 1982 in an abandoned A&P in Delaware. MBNA grew rapidly alongside the likes of Citibank, Capital One and American Express by embracing affinity marketing. It has teamed up with 5,000 organizations, including the National Football League and major league baseball, 500 colleges and countless professional groups. (Lerner, who owned the Cleveland Browns football team, died of complications from brain cancer in October at the age of 69.)

The success of MBNA, which had $2.69 billion in revenue last year, $98 billion in managed loans and 28,000 employees, made Cawley a millionaire many times over. He pulled down $28.7 million in overall compensation last year and has never been shy about spreading money around.

Cawley and his colleagues are known to be “a bit excessive, spending on yachts, cars and expensive country club memberships,” as one source puts it. A resident of a posh section of Wilmington known as “MBNAville” for the executives who live there, Cawley also owns two estates on the shores of Camden, Maine, where his grandfather once owned a dress factory. He is a dedicated collector of artwork, tin soldiers, first editions and classic American cars, some of which are on display at MBNA’s headquarters. (Cawley’s wife Julie reportedly limits his car collection to no more than 100 autos.) When MBNA employees get married, they can check out a carÃ?say a 1959 white Chevrolet Impala convertibleÃ?to use as a limo.

Cawley is deeply religious and remains close to his grown children. He told the Star-Ledger that his mother went to Mass every morning and spent the rest of the day volunteering. “From her I learned that giving money is easy,” he said. “Giving of yourself is hard.”Cawley’s own giving includes political contributions and he encourages MBNA employees to do likewise. They contributed some $240,000 to George W. Bush’s election campaign and Cawley himself reportedly added $36,910 out of his own pocket.

Cawley is not loved everywhere he goes. In Maine, where MBNA employs 5,000 people in nine municipalities, the company has virtually remade some areas marked by its signature marble white buildings with green awnings. “They have so much money and they’re in such a hurry to do things,” Elizabeth Parker, an environmental activist in Camden, complained to Mainebiz, a biweekly newspaper. “They’ve given Camden a corporate look.” Ron Huber, a Rockland resident who has opposed the MBNA expansion, maintains a Website called www.mbnasucks.org.

In Maine, MBNA has contributed to libraries, firehouses and schools. Conkling of the Island Institute in Rockland met Cawley five years ago when MBNA helped fund a program to save the state’s lighthouses. MBNA has since focused much of its giving on 14 island schools, extending grants and scholarship programs.

“So many charitable institutions are not very user-friendly,” Conkling says. “Everybody’s at them and they end up having to build walls to keep people out. MBNA is really the reverse. Its corporate philosophy of customer service permeates the organization.”

Back home, MBNA has surpassed DuPont as Delaware’s largest employer. MBNA employees get paid maternity, paternity and honeymoon leaves, as well as health club memberships and grants for education. “DuPont is still a big supporter of different things in the community, but now so is MBNA,” says Epstein of the News Journal. “It’s been a changing-of-the-guard for the past few years.”

MBNA and its five-building headquarters have played a major role in reshaping downtown Wilmington. The company contributes to schools, libraries, theaters and museums. Cawley encourages his employees to volunteer and many do, serving as tutors, mentors and teachers’ aides at local schools. Their service has helped Cawley win several philanthropic distinctions, including the Josiah Marvel Cup that the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce bestows on citizens who have made outstanding contributions. Among the speakers at the 2000 award dinner honoring Cawley was then-Texas governor and presidential candidate Bush.

Cawley has cultivated a long-standing relationship with the University of Delaware, donating money for new campus facilities and establishing mentoring and scholarship programs. It came as no surprise this month when Cawley and MBNA gave the university $20 million to name its business school after Lerner.

In Newark, Cawley stands ready to help students at St. Benedict’s. They can intern at MBNA and attend MBNA-sponsored camps and NASCAR races. “A lot of people say Charlie Cawley’s business genius is that he has an incredible eye for talent among the people he hires,” says Conkling. “Charlie takes that same incredible eye and applies it to kids and sees enormous potential where others don’t. That, in the ultimate sense, is going to be his legacy. Hundreds and hundreds of kids whose lives have changed radically.”

It’s a legacy that began with one boy immersed in the values of the Benedictine monks on the streets of Newark. And it stems from his longing to live out those values learned in the past to help improve the present.

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