To a kid who grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood outside Chicago – his father drove a beer truck – West Point offered a free, first-class education. “It was the seminal experience of my life,” Malek says. At West Point he found discipline and the knowledge that high barriers can be climbed.

Malek named his company, Thayer Capital Partners, after Colonel Sylvanus Thayer, a West Point superintendent known as the father of the military academy.

After West Point, Malek went to Vietnam as an airborne Ranger attached to the Green Berets. Back home, he went off to Harvard Business School. There Malek and two friends decided the way to make it big was to buy a company. They scraped together $50,000 and bought a small hardware company in South Carolina.

Malek then moved to Los Angeles to work for McKinsey & Company. The hardware company languished. The three entrepreneurs decided that one of them had to take charge of the company. The other two agreed to share their salaries with the new CEO.

Malek drew the short straw and moved to Orangeburg, South Carolina. “When you’re 30 years old and following your dream, you do it,” he says. He turned the company around, the trio sold it and each emerged $1 million richer. It was the first of many buyouts that would mark Malek’s rise to the top in investment banking.

Along the way he took several detours into public service. In 1969 Robert Finch, then secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, asked Malek to help him improve the management of the department. Malek later wrote a book about the challenge of management in government, Washington’s Hidden Tragedy: The Failure to Make Government Work.

Malek was working in the Nixon White House when the President resigned. Malek returned to the private sector – this time with Marriott International. He rose to president of Marriott Hotels & Resorts, which reached more than $3 billion in sales and quadrupled its profits under his leadership.

In the 1990s Malek founded Thayer Capital Partners. The company managed buyouts of Northwest Airlines, Ritz-Carlton, and several Marriott hotels. Last year Malek stepped back from running Thayer. When it appeared that Washington would get a baseball franchise, DC mayor Anthony Williams asked Malek, a former owner (with George W. Bush) of the Texas Rangers, to put together a group to bid for ownership.

“It’s a good thing to do for the city,” Malek says. And besides, he loves being a part of the game.