article: This son of a Suffolk trawlerman has ruled Formula 1 for nearly 40 years with a combination of astuteness, cunning, sharp practice and sheer intellectual power arguably unmatched across business and sporting worlds. He has turned what was essentially a minority activity for enthusiasts into the most-watched global sport outside the Olympics and football's World Cup. Along the way, he has made enemies and won admirers - sometimes in the same person - but standing trial on bribery charges in Munich in August presented him with one of his biggest challenges yet. A challenge that could have seen him imprisoned for a decade. In the event, Ecclestone paid a German court £60m to end the trial, in which he was accused of paying a German banker £26m to ensure that a company Ecclestone favoured could buy a stake in F1. Under German law Ecclestone was able to pay to end the trial. His personal wealth is put at $4.2bn by Forbes. In the normal business world, any chief executive who is the subject of such serious criminal charges cannot hope to hold on to his position. But this is not the normal business world and Ecclestone is most certainly not a normal businessman. Any chief executive who has referred to women as "domestic appliances" or praised Adolf Hitler for being "able to get things done" would have been shown the door with a haste to match the indecency of the remarks. Not Ecclestone, who survived those particular storms - and many more. Why? Probably because of his remarkable achievements, his all-pervading influence in F1 and, since the sport began trading as a commodity, his success in making money for his bosses. That last attribute may yet keep him in a job, now that the criminal bribery case has ended, which was more serious than a related civil case in London's High Court, which has now been dismissed. His boss - CVC chairman Donald McKenzie - has, before now, told the High Court that Ecclestone would have to be sacked if he was convicted of a criminal offence. There is another case pending - and related - in the United States, where financial firm Bluewaters has sued him, claiming it was the highest bidder in the sale of F1 in 2006. Whether any of this is the end of the road for a man of rare influence and notoriety or not, it has been a long one. Ecclestone's journey began in the 1950s, when he was a less-than-successful racer and then a manager of promising British F1 driver Stuart Lewis-Evans. When Lewis-Evans died in a fiery accident in 1958, Ecclestone disappeared off the motor racing radar for the best part of a decade, re-emerging in the late 1960s as the manager of another promising driver, Austrian Jochen Rindt. By then, Ecclestone was already very wealthy, although some way off the billionaire he is today. A former used-car salesman, he has a standard answer to anyone wondering where the money came from: "Property." But many have speculated whether he might have earned the money
summary: With Bernie Ecclestone, the myth is so much wrapped up in the man that it is often hard to separate fact from fiction.