Paper, scissors - and stones.

• Author: Lamme, Robert
• Position: Lithotripters Inc. CEO William R. Jordan

How Bill Jordan cut deals with, other docs to become king of the kidney-stone crushers and a low-profile political power.

At the age of 5, a raging fever put William R. Jordan in the Wilson hospital and set him on his career path. "They didn't have any private rooms, and they put me in the female ward," he recalls. "I was absolutely petrified with all these old crones all around me. I said, 'Dad, I gotta get out of here.'"

There wasn't a thing his father could do. "Then the doctor came in and started barking orders at the nurse. 'Get this kid out of here.'

"When you're 5, you think your father is the most-powerful man on earth. But the doctor walked in and in five minutes had me out of there." Jordan decided that was the job for him. "Anyone powerful enough to do that has a pretty good thing to do."

Jordan became a doctor. But nowadays his authority extends far beyond any hospital ward. As CEO of Lithotripters Inc., a group of limited partnerships, he employs 200 and oversees the operation of 29 mobile kidney-stone crushers worth about $1.7 million each. There are also two fixed-site machines, in Billings, Mont., and Las Vegas. His company is the largest operator of lithotripters in the country, with 10% of a U.S. market estimated at $800 million a year.

That's his business. His hobby is armchair politics. According to the Durham-based Institute for Southern Studies, which publishes Southern Exposure magazine, Jordan, 53, marshals a group of givers who provided more than $200,000 to political campaigns and committees between 1989 and 1995, including $108,270 to Gov. Jim Hunt, $18,230 to Lt. Gov. Dennis Wicker, $18,250 to state Attorney General Mike Easley and $29,660 to the state Democratic Party. In 1993, he was appointed to UNC Chapel Hill's board of trustees - a plum traditionally reserved for the governor's most-generous donors.

"I've contributed to Lauch Faircloth as well as Jim Hunt," Jordan says. "My only agenda in politics, quite frankly, is the university. I gave to Jim Hunt because I happen to think a lot of him, and I thought Jim Gardner [his Republican opponent in 1992] was a perfect swine."

For a guy with a multimillion-dollar business, the ear of the governor and a seat on the university board, you'd think more people would know who Bill Jordan is. But he's largely unknown to political insiders in and around Raleigh. "Don't know anything about him," longtime lobbyist Zeb Alley says. "This is the first I've heard of him," says Rand Coble, director of the Raleigh-based North Carolina Center for Public Policy Research.

"He's one of those guys more people ought to know about," says Charlotte developer Johnny Harris, who served with Jordan on the UNC board. "He loves to face situations that other people have sort of given up on or where the problem's too big."

It suits Jordan that he's not widely known. His low-profile in politics is similar to his business bent. Why make a lot of noise when you can be quietly successful?

There's not much in his upbringing that hints he would one day build a big business or mix with the state's power elite. His father, Edward B. Jordan, ran Jordan Construction Co. in Wilson, which his oldest brother, Ned, runs today. His mother taught English at Atlantic Christian (now Barton) College, but only after her four sons and a daughter had grown up, he adds.

He went to Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., where he was a less-than-stellar student. His first semester, he had an excuse - a bout with mono. "The next semester I goofed off. So...