For about six months I’ve been working on an article for Boston magazine on Buddy Fletcher, the Harvard alum and philanthropist known for, among other things, the Alphonse Fletcher Sr. University Professorship at Harvard, and a $50 million pledge to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. Fletcher was the first major African-American donor to Harvard College, and has cut a very high profile figure among the ranks of Harvard alumni in the past two decades.

As you’ll see from the article, Fletcher’s story is a complicated one, and his current financial health is very much in question.

Buddy Fletcher, according to his neighbors in the Dakota, wasn’t the wealthy investor he appeared to be, but the head of a financially opaque hedge fund who was struggling to pay his bills. The news traveled fast to Cambridge, where the question was nervously asked: Was one of Harvard’s highest-profile philanthropists not what he seemed?…