Bank of America took his chemical analysis and pharmaceutical research business in 2011. At age 56, he carried his belongings out in a cardboard box.

Now, Thanedar is back on top again, and he wants St. Louis to know it.

After hitting bottom here, he started a new chemical analysis business in Ann Arbor, Mich. He sold a controlling stake in it to a private equity firm last month. His 50 employees will get a new boss.

“Over the years, he’s become very successful and grown very rapidly,” said Dan Foss, a bank vice president who approved loans to Thanedar’s Michigan company. “He’s paid everything off.”

If there is a lesson here it’s that — even in late career — it’s possible to start over again. Thanedar feels he’s proved that. He has another Ferrari and another mansion — half the size of his old one, but with a 120-seat theater for Indian arts performances.

“I kind of made my point. I made it happen,” he said. “This is still a proud story for a St. Louisan.”

Thanedar’s story started in a small town in India, where his father worked as a clerk in the Indian courts. His parents, five daughters and three sons lived in a 700-square-foot home with no running water. The bathroom was outside.

Thanedar was of the Brahmin caste, and menial labor was considered beneath them. But he took a part-time job as a janitor while in high school, and used the money to buy extra food when his father sent him to the store.

“I did not tell my family I was doing janitorial work. He always thought I was a good bargainer,” he said.

He went to college, which was cheap in India, and got a job in the Indian nuclear industry. He came to the U.S. for graduate school in 1979, earning a Ph.D. at the University of Akron.

He took a job at Petrolite in St. Louis in 1984, but it left him unsatisfied. He jumped at a chance to buy a small testing laboratory, Chemir, for $75,000 in 1990.

Chemir Analytical Services was mainly a chemical and material analysis firm. It functioned like an emergency room for companies with failed products and complex technical problems. For instance, a big beer company wanted to know why drinkers who popped open a can found a thin film over the beer. Chemir found a problem with the lining of the can.

By 2008, Thanedar had raised Chemir’s revenue to $67 million from $150,000, with an annual profit of $12 million. It had 500 employees.

Thanedar found the good life. He drove a Ferrari. He built his 13,000-square-foot mansion on three acres in Ladue.

In happier days, Thanedar took a Show-Me St. Louis Channel 5 news crew on a tour of a house with seven bedrooms, a pool with seven fountains, an elevator, a 160-inch TV, a stage and dance floor. The interior was “like a cruise ship” he said, joking that all he lacked was an ocean. “We built it to be a party kind of place,” he said on television.

He hosted Indian arts performances at his home.

What happened next might be called a case of hubris, or perhaps just optimism. But it sent his business crashing down.

He borrowed $24 million to go on an acquisition spree, buying seven companies. He gave the bank his personal guarantee, pledging everything he owned.

The Post-Dispatch chronicled Thanedar’s troubles in 2011. At that time, Chemir’s president, Dave Riggs, praised Thanedar for building a good company over 15 years. But he said Thanedar “took his eye off the ball” in the the firm’s last years.

With things going well, Thanedar had started to take things easier, spending more time in Florida and leaving day-to-day decisions to others. That came back to bite him.

Among the acquisitions was Azopharma, which did early-stage development for drug companies. Things went well at first, growing to $55 million revenue in 2008 from $1 million in 2003.

In 2007, a potential acquirer offered him $132 million for it.

Then came the financial crash and the Great Recession. That drained the appetite for risky research among pharmaceutical companies, and Azopharma began losing money.

His loan came due and he couldn’t pay it. “I worked 18 hours a day and kept telling the bank to give me time and we’ll get enough money for all of us,” Thanedar said.

But the bank’s patience ran out. It convinced a bankruptcy judge to appoint a receiver to sell the business. Thanedar was out the door.

“They could have come back and taken everything,” he said. “I was thinking I may not be able to send my sons to college.”

Azopharma had 350 employees. “They closed the doors and sold it for $2 million,” said Thanedar.

But Chemir was still making a good profit, and Thanedar fought in bankruptcy court to prevent it from being sold off cheaply.

In the end, the bank got enough money from the sale to cover the entire debt, and then some. Chemir was sold to EAG Laboratories, and its labs are still operating in Maryland Heights.

“I’m no longer filthy rich,” Thanedar told the Post-Dispatch in 2011. But he certainly wasn’t poor. He had a 3,200-square-foot condo in Florida and “a few million” dollars not taken in the bankruptcy.

That would have brought a very comfortable retirement, and he tried it for a while. “I got bored,” he said. He felt “terrible” about ending his career with a failure. “It just didn’t feel right.”

He decided to start over again, and he hoped to do it with his son, who had just graduated from the University of Michigan. His son didn’t want to leave Ann Arbor — his girlfriend was still a student there — so Thanedar headed north.

He bought equipment from a failed chemical company and started Avomeen. He picked the name because no one was using it and it started with an A, putting it higher in alphabeltical listings. “I just made it up,” he said.

His new firm was very much like Chemir, a solver of problems for clients.

One customer made frozen hash browns for sale in supermarkets. Mysteriously, the batches began to smell and taste of bleach, and supermarkets began dumping them. Avomeen, which employs 22 Ph.D. scientists, traced the problem to a defoaming agent used in washing the potatoes. The company had recently switched suppliers.

Foss, a vice president at Old National Bank in Ann Arbor, met Thanedar when he applied for a loan. He wanted to buy a building and equipment.

“He took me to a completely empty warehouse. It had been abandoned. It was rainy, and there was running water pouring through the building,” Foss said. “Eighteen months later, everything was up and running and it was beautiful.”

Loan applicants must present a business plan, showing how the company will grow and make money. Bankers are usually skeptical.

“You never believe them. But his was spot on,” Foss said. Thanedar says Avomeen has $12 million in revenue and is profitable.

Thanedar sold last month a controlling interest in Avomeen to High Street Capital, a Chicago private equity firm. Thanedar said he couldn’t disclose the price. But he said this: “After the bank’s receivers foreclosed on Chemir and sold it to EAG for $23 million, I was driven to create a new company with valuation higher than that of Chemir. And I wanted to do it in a fraction of time it took to build Chemir. The recent transaction allowed me to accomplish both of these goals.”

Now 61, he’s thinking, “What do I want to do when I grow up?” He says he may just make movies in India.