He found that McCaw had paging companies operating under 17 different names in 17 states.
McCaw is straying into a business that has destroyed billions of dollars of venture capital.
James Barksdale, who had been chief operating officer at Federal Express, became president of McCaw Cellular in 1991.
This portfolio appears to be the product of a grand strategy, but McCaw attributes it to mere happenstance.
McCaw has spent several years assembling extensive bandwidth in the 2.5 Gigahertz spectrum range.
But with good assets dirt cheap, McCaw can spring for a couple of aspirin.
Eight of its top managers are McCaw alumni (lawyers and engineers--the sales folks stayed away).
McCaw could still call it a victory, particularly given his spotty history and Clearwire's iffy prospects.
"You can imagine the amount of work that's gone on, that everyone's put in, " McCaw said.
Alberg still wants to take some chances and take McCaw alumni along with him.
Most of what's inside them is useful, even if McCaw radically alters Iridium's design.
McCaw figured he could get the whole thing for about 10 cents on the dollar.
Even McCaw was happy to walk away just as the situation was getting most interesting.
FORBES: Cash Poor Clearwire Is Rich In Technological Excellence
Rufus Lumry III, an old McCaw chief financial officer, runs angel firm Acorn Ventures.
Richie McCaw led from the front as usual and his back-row colleague Jerome Kaino was superb.
Since December when McCaw abruptly resigned from the Clearwire Board, he is no longer an insider.
Akerson took over Nextel and found that the faltering wireless firm, true to McCaw form, had 15, 000 pricing plans.
Except for Akerson, each of the eight other Eagle River partners has been with McCaw more than a decade.
The payout raised concerns that McCaw would have to scale back empire-building ambitions.
By last September McCaw had tapped Akerson again, this time to run Nextlink.
McCaw wants to bring the fastest communications to businesses by any means possible, everywhere on the planet.
So, in a depressed market, McCaw turned from being a seller to a potential buyer of Iridium.
On balance, McCaw has usually pulled his irons out of the fire in the nick of time.
McCaw is a visionary who is addicted to leverage and sometimes it comes home to haunt him.
FORBES: Sprint's Hesse Underbidding For Clearwire, Still Hopes Shareholders Can Be Duped
The question of why McCaw did what he did is the oddest thing about this exceedingly odd story.
FORBES: Cash Poor Clearwire Is Rich In Technological Excellence
For the surviving ATT Long Distance business to reenter the wireless arena, it bought McCaw Cellular in 1994.
FORBES: For ATT, It's Deja Vu All Over Again, Even The Same D.C. Courthouse
But the ancestors did not know about Paul Watson, Craig McCaw and the horrors of modern media attention.
Around the same time in 1995, McCaw went for Nextel, a fixer-upper with bad wireless service and a collapsed stock price.
But returning All Blacks captain Richie McCaw dived over for a converted score to make the half-time score 10-13.
According to SEC filings, both Craig McCaw and Ronald Perelman have used them.
FORBES: The Lauders did it. So did Craig McCaw and Ronald Perelman.
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