Baiting & Fishing Read online

Chapter 2

  Ray spent several hours reading and taking notes in a spiral school notebook, using several colors of ink and highlighters, according to a method he had developed over years of researching stories. It was almost midnight when he realized he had finished off the pitcher of tea and had to pee urgently. He turned off the computer, closed the notebook which was about half filled with scrawled notes he might or might not be able to read tomorrow, and got ready for bed.

  After checking the doors and windows, he lay down on his back with his hands behind his head. He was amazed to learn he had somehow completely missed the biggest corporate scandal of the decade. He was fascinated by the story. Knowing how it ended didn't make it any less intriguing, perhaps especially because his gut told him Steve Johnston was right. He had a very strong feeling that the ending everyone “knew” wasn't the “real” ending at all.

  At first glance, it seemed to be a garden variety corporate corruption story. Roland Wilson had presented himself to the world as an incredibly smart entrepreneur. Maybe that was true – at first, anyway. Wilson had understood the significance of the computer boom very early. While Gates and Balmer were building a software empire and Jobs was building a hardware empire, Wilson focused on components. He invested in companies that made all sorts of parts for electronic equipment: chips, circuit boards, wiring, cables. His companies made components used by both Mac's and PC's, as well as printers, fax machines, and later cell phones, digital cameras, video games and God knows what else. He hopped on the wireless bandwagon early.

  Wilson didn't make or manage anything at first: he just invested. He started his career as a CPA, and always had an accountant's mentality about business. The only thing that was important to him was the bottom line; he didn't care if the profit came from increasing sales or cutting expenses. At first, he invested his own money. Soon his friends and associates learned he was doing well, so they started investing in the same companies.

  Eventually he developed partnerships and hired fund managers to manage both his money and that of his other investors while he studied and picked the stocks to buy. After a few years of that, he started buying larger and larger blocks of stock until soon he owned all or most of the stock of many of the companies he invested in. He was very careful not to run afoul of anti-trust laws, so he created holding companies and worked through other entities when it appeared he was close to gobbling up too much of a particular segment of the computer hardware industry. Within a decade, there was probably not a computer or electronic gadget in the world that didn't include at least some parts made by companies Wilson owned or controlled.

  He could have continued what he was doing and competed with Warren Buffet for the title of worlds' greatest stock picker, but he could not resist the allure of creating his own empire. He decided to build his own brand of computers. He said he wanted to build small, basic computers that would be very inexpensive. He styled himself as the Sam Walton of the computer world. His plan was to make computers anyone could afford, and sell them to everyone. He concocted a grandiose plan to sell cheap computers to schools in the Third World. He advertised his company as essentially a humanitarian endeavor, offering the Internet and computer technology very cheaply to the masses, in particular the poor.

  He named his company Techtron.

  At the beginning Techtron appeared to be on the fast track to success. The computers were basic, and MacIntosh users in particular looked down on them, referring to them as the “AOL of hardware” but the American public loved the concept. Techtron did not expect to sell many computers in America, where better computers were available and people had the money to pay for them. Wilson's market was the rest of the world, in particular the developing world.

  Wilson took the taunts of the tech-snobs in stride and planned to laugh all the way to the bank. Since Techtron would buy most of its parts from other companies that Wilson owned or invested in, he stood to amass an enormous personal fortune whether Techtron itself made any money or not. Wilson always admitted to flirting with the monopoly line, but the Feds watched him closely and he was never caught actually crossing it. There were rumors of questionable business ethics and “creative accounting” early in Techtron's glory days, but in the post-Reagan era when corporate America was the new Wild West, and the business tycoons were the Cowboys, the analysts did not voice concern about behind-the-scene accounting technicalities, at least not as long as the stock was rising.

  Wilson hired the best technical computer designers in the world to build his computers. He built state-of-the-art factories in a dozen third world countries and made a big deal out of the fact that more than 85% of Techtron's employees had been previously unemployed and living in poverty. His computers were not fancy and they did not come with a lot of bells and whistles, but they were serviceable and inexpensive, and they were made by people many of whom were earning wages for the first time in their lives.

  When chips got small enough, Techtron switched to manufacturing exclusively laptops, designed with school children in mind. Wilson expected school systems everywhere in the world to line up to buy his computers. Initially, that was what happened. At one point, there was an 18 month waiting list; the factories, which had all kinds of start-up problems due to their remote locations and inexperienced work force, could not keep up with the orders. Soon the computers became unavailable for purchase by individuals, supposedly because there were so many schools and governments ordering them in lots of hundreds, or even thousands.

  Wilson and Techtron appeared to be headed in the direction of being one of the greatest corporate success stories in American history, with a cool humanitarian twist. Wilson styled himself as a sort of People's Capitalist. The press ate up his marketing promotions, and publicized him to the max. The American people ate it up, too. Roland Wilson became an instant cultural icon. Techtron's stock was one of the hottest stocks of the 1990's.

  Ray had a niggling suspicion that Wilson's humanitarianism was just an “act”. In its coverage of the story the American media, collectively, had decided that Wilson was basically a “good guy who went bad.” They interpreted his suicide as a sort of repentance in the end. The media read the entire Techtron story through that lens, and found some evidence to support the theory. Ray had to admit that could even have been the truth. Wilson certainly wouldn't be the first (or last) person in history who started out with a great idea to benefit humanity, and then got greedy.

  Ray, however, knew enough about how those “widely held” media assumptions originated to know it was rarely wise to trust them. He concentrated on teasing out the facts behind all the assumptions, and a slightly different picture started to emerge for him. It was not a clear picture. It was rather like like those “magic eye” pictures where what you can see depends on how you look at it. Ray had the growing sense that Wilson's humanitarianism was sort of a gimmick from the beginning but there seemed to be no real facts to support that. Ray's gut had been wrong from time to time. In this case he knew he was predisposed to try to look at things differently, so he wasn't too quick to trust his hunches.

  He decided to quit thinking about it and try to get some sleep.

  Just before he drifted off it occurred to him that he needed to come up with a story to write to justify his salary for the month. He would have to put the Wilson story on the back burner for a few days until he could earn his paycheck.