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Dakota board members said liquidity, not race, led them to reject Alphonse Fletcher Jr.’s bid to buy a $5.7 million apartment.Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times

A judge in Manhattan has dismissed a lawsuit brought by the financier Alphonse Fletcher Jr. against the Dakota building, ruling that Mr. Fletcher had failed to provide evidence that the celebrated building’s co-op board had discriminated against him because he is black.

The ruling was the latest in a series of reversals for Mr. Fletcher, a former Wall Street wunderkind who rose to become a prominent hedge fund manager and philanthropist but who has struggled in recent years, seeing one of his funds forced into bankruptcy and tax liens placed against some of his properties. 

That fall from grace began in 2011, when Mr. Fletcher sued the Dakota’s co-op board, which he had once led, after it refused to let him buy an apartment adjacent to his fifth-floor home. He accused the board of discriminating against him and other black and Hispanic residents, including the singer Roberta Flack. 

The suit touched off one of the ugliest co-op battles in the history of Manhattan real estate. The board members — many of them powerful business leaders in their own right — fought back, saying in depositions that they had rejected Mr. Fletcher because he had only $50,000 in liquid assets, millions in debt and mounting losses at his businesses. 

On Friday, Justice Eileen A. Rakower of State Supreme Court in Manhattan sided with the co-op board, saying there was not enough evidence of discrimination to warrant a jury trial.

The decision came six months after a jury in San Francisco ruled against Mr. Fletcher’s wife, Ellen Pao, in a much-publicized gender discrimination case against one of Silicon Valley’s venture capital firms, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The legal battles of the power couple had drawn national attention.

In Mr. Fletcher’s case, Justice Rakower wrote that he had failed to produce compelling proof that the board members had an ulterior motive for turning down his bid, while the board members had shown there were legitimate reasons to think he was in financial trouble.

Justice Rakower wrote that, while Mr. Fletcher clearly believed he had been rebuffed because of his race, his deposition was “devoid of any specifics and replete with conclusions.” She said he lacked hard evidence that the board had used his balance sheet as an excuse for rejecting him because of his race. 

“Fletcher’s subjective, unsubstantiated belief that his race played a role in the board’s denial of his application is insufficient to establish pretext,” she wrote.

Mr. Fletcher said he would appeal the ruling. He said the judge had excluded on technical grounds critical evidence, including a 126-page affidavit filed last March that contains emails and other documents Mr. Fletcher maintained proved his allegation that board members had conspired against him.  

“We expected that ruling because the court excluded our key filing that contradicts the Dakota’s explanations with evidence,” he said. “The judge should have considered the full record including the evidence detailed in the document she excluded.”

Lawyers for the Dakota, Christine H. Chung and John T. Van Der Tuin, declined to comment on the judge’s decision. Several members of the co-op board did not answer telephone messages left by a reporter on Tuesday.

Mr. Fletcher, 49, known as “Buddy,” has said in court papers that he had offered to pay $5.7 million cash for the disputed apartment and had intended to sell off assets to raise the money. He argued he had been treated differently than a white couple with similar income who had applied to buy an $11 million apartment around the same time.

But the judge wrote that she was persuaded that the white couple had provided the board with proof that their annual income was high enough to afford the apartment, while Mr. Fletcher had not.

Mr. Fletcher is no stranger to litigation. A graduate of Harvard, he started his career at Bear Stearns and then went to Kidder, Peabody & Company, where he managed a portfolio that reported $25 million in profit. In 1991, at 25, he accused Kidder of racial discrimination, saying it had reneged on a promised bonus. An arbitration panel awarded him $1.3 million but ruled Kidder had not discriminated. 

Later, Mr. Fletcher went out on his own, founding Fletcher Asset Management, and had success investing in cash-starved companies like Zenith. In 1992, after being rejected three times, he bought his first apartment in the Dakota, the ornate building on West 72nd Street that overlooks Central Park and is famous as the onetime home of artists like John Lennon, Lauren Bacall and Judy Garland. 

A year later, he signed a contract on a fifth-floor apartment for $1.3 million and was forced to sell the first one. Then, in 2002, he bought a second apartment in the building for his mother for $1.06 million. In 2006, Mr. Fletcher was elected the president of the co-op board, a post he held until 2009.

Lawyers for the Dakota argued in court that Mr. Fletcher’s claims of discrimination were hollow, given that the board members had approved him to buy apartments in the past and had even elected him president.

Mr. Fletcher, however, said in his lawsuit that while he had been president, he had come into conflict with other board members over what he perceived as racist comments made about prospective buyers.