they needed to see how Mandl performed through a couple of business cycles. Mandl himself was worried that the long-distance business would get its clock cleaned when the Bells entered the market and he would be blamed for it long before Allen ever stepped down. As it happened, Mandl and I were taking one of the corporate jets to a sales meeting in Maui immediately after the company's annual meeting in April of 1996. We talked about the meeting over drinks, and I said something like, "I'll bet Bob's glad he has only four or five of these to go." "What do you mean?" Mandl asked. "Well, Bob's made it clear that he doesn't plan to retire anytime soon and he's just turn- ing sixty, SO I guess he'll be around " "Four or five years?" Mandl blurted. His apparent shock and disbelief surprised me, and I tried to back off: "Well, maybe once things are moving smoothly "Nah. He likes his corporate jets too much. You're right. He won't leave early." I quickly changed the subject. What I didn't know-and Bob Allen wouldn't find out until mid- summer-was that Mandl had already begun thinking about leaving the company. Less than a month earlier, Mandl had received a call from a young headhunter named David Beirne, who just the year before had lured McCaw CEO Jim Barksdale to a then little-known company called Net- scape Communications. When Barksdale signed on, he received a I2 percent interest in the company, which was worth more than $100 million when it went public. Beirne promised Mandl something simi- lar in a brief meeting at the Westchester County airport in early April. Mandl had never heard of Beirne's client, the Associated Companies, but he agreed to meet in out-of-the-way hotel rooms and at his home Take Control outside Washington with its principals, Myles Berkman and Raj Singh. Berkman was an entrepreneur who had made a fortune buying and selling cellular systems in the industry's infancy. Since then, he had amassed licenses in thirty-one cities for wireless frequencies SO far up in the nosebleed section of the radi