Relentless and Rewarding

Moelis & Company, founded in 2007 by the longtime investment banker Ken Moelis, has a reputation for being a demanding place to work, in large part because its main business — advising on mergers and acquisitions — can be grueling, especially in the weeks before the announcement of a deal, when financial and legal terms and conditions must be negotiated. According to some of the anonymous comments about the working conditions at Moelis, found on the website Glassdoor.com, it’s not a place for the faint of heart. “Expected to work obnoxious hours even by banking standards,” wrote one full-time employee in May who nevertheless likes the place. And Mr. Moelis himself is a man in a hurry. Moelis went public in 2014, just seven years after its founding. Mr. Moelis owns nearly $1 billion worth of stock in his company.

According to John Hughes, his son Thomas generally liked his job at Moelis, relentless hours aside, and found the work rewarding and stimulating. To make up for his absence at the Easter brunch, Thomas had planned a short vacation to Bermuda. After a few work-related postponements, he finally made it to the island on Thursday, May 21. He stayed until Sunday but never was able to play golf or visit the beach. He ended up stuck in his room working on his computer.

Early the next week, he headed to Cleveland for work-related meetings. He returned to New York on the night of May 27 and apparently went out drinking. Around 2 a.m., the doorman let him into Ocean Luxury Residences, at 1 West Street, where he lived.

Mr. Hughes had struggled with substance abuse since high school; he was kicked out of Taft, the boarding school, for using cocaine, his father told me. After entering a rehabilitation program, Thomas transferred to Canterbury School and started to excel academically, his father says. At Northwestern University, he had lots of friends, was a member of the squash team and majored in economics. He was especially gregarious. “He was kind of a big presence kind of a guy,” John says. “You noticed when he came in the room.”

Image Thomas Hughes with his older brother, John III, during a family trip to Paris in 1991.

Finance was the Hughes family business. After a three-year stint on Wall Street, John took over his father’s small bank — Sleepy Hollow Bancorp — in 1986, and sold it to Tompkins Financial Corporation in 2008, before the onset of the financial crisis, for $30.2 million. So it was not surprising that Thomas was interested in finance. During college, he had internships at JPMorgan Chase and Ameriprise Financial. He graduated, in 2009, into a terrible job market but managed to get hired at Duff & Phelps, a boutique advisory firm, doing valuations and appraisals for small deals. Restless for big-time Wall Street investment banking, Thomas landed analyst positions at UBS, the big Swiss bank, and at Citigroup, where he was promoted to third-year analyst. “He seemed to enjoy it,” his father says. “I never heard a peep of complaint out of him.”

In 2014, Thomas moved to Moelis, which he figured would be more prestigious and less bureaucratic than Citigroup. He was hired in May and promoted to associate, a rare feat for someone without an M.B.A. His father says he was well reviewed in December and received a bonus in the $400,000 range, on top of his $100,000 salary. John says he was amazed by his son’s compensation. “My jaw dropped!” he says. “I kept my mouth shut, but I said, ‘Hey, that’s good. They must like you!’ ” (Moelis declined to comment about Thomas’s compensation or work-related activities.)