James Barksdale, who had been chief operating officer at Federal Express, became president of McCaw Cellular in 1991.

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For the surviving ATT Long Distance business to reenter the wireless arena, it bought McCaw Cellular in 1994.

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McCaw, stung by the sale of his namesake, started Eagle River. (His brothers, who had lesser roles in McCaw Cellular, pursued other interests.) Weibling steered him away from unwise investments in Hawaiian luxury hotels.

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There was such an investment scramble that a slew of upstarts from McCaw Cellular to FedEx to Wal-Mart upended the Fortune 500, while labor unions found it difficult to prove their relevance in the context of twenty million new jobs.

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He dealth with some nasty characters, like Ivan Boesky and Victor Posner and Meshulam Riklis, but from his trading desk in Beverly Hills he also raised billions of dollars for Turner Broadcasting, MCI, Time Warner, Medco, McCaw Cellular and Rupert Murdoch's enterprises.

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McCaw recently put some of his lieutenants from the cellular days into a company called Nextel Partners, which develops second-tier markets and feeds the traffic to Nextel.

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While McCaw stews on what he could have done with his cellular gem, he has spent the ensuing years steering three seemingly disjointed communications ventures through his Eagle River holding company.

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