Marco Polo comes home: if Spirit was willing, the flesh couldn't be weak: How the Global TransPark lured a major aerospace manufacturer.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: COVER STORY - North Carolina Global TransPark - Conference news - Cover story

Lightning flickers in the Saturday evening sky as Jim Fain's flight lifts off late from Raleigh-Durham International Airport. Missing his connection in New York, North Carolina's top industry hunter dozes through the night slumped in a chair at John F. Kennedy International Airport. By the time his Air France flight thunders off the runway Sunday morning, it's midday in Paris, and the City of Light is aglow when he walks through the gate at Charles de Gaulle International Airport seven hours later. His luggage missing, he checks into a hotel, exasperated and exhausted. Up with the dawn, he pulls on his wrinkled khaki pants and a Lacoste knit shirt bought in the lobby shop. Smoothing his stale blue blazer, he thinks, "This thing could stand up by itself."

Monday-morning traffic is building along Rue de Courcelles, the road into Le Bourget Airport, where Lindbergh landed in 1927. It's opening day of the Paris Air Show, the aviation world's annual extravaganza, and crowds, mostly men in suits, scurry between pavilions. Flags and banners flutter over a bazaar of more than 2,000 exhibitors hawking everything from nuts and bolts to $350 million jetliners. Mingled among them somewhere are 36 industry recruiters and aerospace executives from Florida. Fain's rivals know why he's here. It's why they're here, too.

He finds the figure he's pursued relentlessly for six months. With a high forehead, bushy mustache and toothy smile, the executive is busy but cordial. Back in Kansas, he runs a company that's the world's largest manufacturer of airliner fuselages and parts. When Fain meets the man who's the face of the elusive Marco Polo, it doesn't matter that North Carolina's secretary of commerce is wearing no socks. He would have walked barefoot through snow to get here.

Nearly a year later, Michael Easley stands before about 400 executives, politicians and others in a hangar at the North Carolina Global TransPark in Kinston. Wichita-based Spirit AeroSystems Holdings Inc., the governor announces, will locate a complex worth nearly $600 million here. When it opens in 2010, it will provide 1,031-and eventually maybe 5,000-jobs that will pay more than $48,000 a year, double the average local wage. The 18-month project--code-named Marco Polo--to find a site could transform a poor, rural slice of Eastern North Carolina into an aerospace manufacturing hub.

As Easley speaks May 14, few know how close they had cut it. Six hours earlier in Toulouse, France, Spirit CEO Jeff Turner--the man Fain wooed at the air show--had signed a $2.75 billion contract with Airbus SA.S. to manufacture the center section of the new A350 airliner. It will be built here, in the 400,000-square-foot factory Easley is trumpeting. Fifteen minutes before the governor's announcement, Fain was on his cell phone presiding over a meeting to approve $20 million in job-creation grants for Spirit. Just 10 minutes earlier, huddled next door at the TransPark fire-and-rescue station, negotiators and lawyers for the Commerce Department, Spirit, the TransPark and other entities were wrangling over the wording of what some contend is the most important economic-development deal in Tar Heel history.

Now, winnowed from 10,000 pages of documents and dozens of interviews with key players and other sources, emerges the picture of the marathon, multimillion-dollar intrigue behind the announcement that pitted North Carolina against at least five other states--Florida, Texas, Georgia, Alabama and Kansas--and some of the world's most development-hungry countries: India, Malaysia, Morocco, Spain and Brazil were in the early running. Tar Heel economic developers, local officials, educators, business owners and others had been tapped for cooperation and commitments of millions of dollars without being told what they were supporting.

Executive Director Darlene Waddell was one of only two TransPark staff members privy to Marco Polo's identity, and she wasn't brought into the inner circle until six months after the courtship began. Information was dispensed on a militarylike need-to-know basis. "We all knew we didn't need to be messing with stuff we weren't directly involved in," says Gene Conti, vice chairman of the Global TransPark Authority, which the governor chairs. Adds the site consultant who represented Spirit: "The fact that it didn't leak was one of the greatest coups of the century."

Much of the action revolved around this man, Mike Mullis, and his Memphis, Tenn.-based J.M. Mullis Inc. For a year and a half, he dictated terms, dominated...