VESTAVIA HILLS, Ala. — It felt like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
When Dr. Ralph de la Torre, a brash and brilliant son of Cuban immigrants, jetted into the Birmingham airport in 2015, he was a man with a vision for the struggling Steward Health Care chain, a new approach that could vault it from its roots as a network of Catholic hospitals in Massachusetts to a for-profit giant of national and even global importance.
He couldn’t do it without money. That’s where a business executive raised in small-town Alabama came in.