High stakes and satellites: Portrait of a billion-dollar deal maker.

• Author: Keating, Stephen
• Position: Charlie Ergen, chief executive of EchoStar Communications Corp.

LANDING AT No. 22 on the 2001 Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans, Charlie Ergen, co-founder and chief executive of Littleton-based EchoStar Communications Corp., is in appropriate company.

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whom Ergen has bucked twice in his rise to the stratosphere of the satellite TV industry, is No. 21, and financier George Soros, a maverick of world finance, is No. 23.

CHAPTER 5: CUTTING CABLE

CHARLIE ERGEN WHEELED THE MARK V LINCOLN CONTINENTAL DOWN A DARK STRETCH OF COLORADO HIGHWAY PAST MIDNIGHT. Jim DeFranco, his business partner and poker-playing buddy, rode shotgun. Rumbling along behind the car was a trailer with a 10-foot satellite dish on its side, chained down, like a concave fiberglass sail. It was December of 1980. Ergen and DeFranco, both 27 years old, were about to crash into the satellite TV business.

Their first customer was a wealthy rancher in Pagosa Springs, a town in southwest Colorado, 25 miles north of the New Mexico border. The rancher asked Ergen and DeFranco to buy a TV set and bring it down with the satellite dish. They bought the TV set in Denver, but DeFranco's Lincoln was rearended by a car during the shopping trip. That ate up a few hours with police reports and frayed nerves. It was nightfall by the time Ergen and DeFranco got on the road with the satellite dish in tow.

Outside the town of Walsenburg, high winds caught the rigid hollow of the dish, torqued the trailer and broke it loose from the car's tow bar. Half their company's inventory lay sideways in the passing lane of Interstate 25. In shock, Ergen parked the car alongside the highway's sunken median strip. He said later it was the second-worst experience of his life, the first being his father's death.

DeFranco got behind the wheel. He backed the car up, then used the front bumper to slowly plow the crippled trailer and battered satellite dish into the shallow of the median strip. Then they drove silently into town for help.

This was not the bright start envisioned by the young hustlers.

Ergen and DeFranco had met three years before in Dallas. Ergen was a financial analyst at Frito-Lay. DeFranco was a wholesale liquor salesman whose previous gig was selling Kirby vacuum cleaners door-to-door. Ergen wanted to buy a color TV and heard that DeFranco had one for sale. DeFranco wanted $350 for it. It was a monster Zenith in a walnut cabinet with a stereo built in -- a real piece of furniture.

DeFranco turned the set on. The screen filled with a black-and-white picture.

"Where's the color?" asked Ergen.

"Oh, it just needs to warm up," said DeFranco, fiddling with the control knobs, telling Ergen how great the picture would be, how the color would pop in anytime now.

Who's this guy trying to kid? thought Ergen.

CHARLIE ERGEN GREW UP IN OAK Ridge, Tennessee, a Levittown of the Atomic Age. Along with Hanford, Washington, and Los Alamos, New Mexico, Oak Ridge was built and run by the U.S. government for the sole purpose of creating the Manhattan Project atom bomb for use in World War II. The government had seized farmland to build three facilities separated by ridges of the Great Smoky Mountains, with easy access to the hydroelectric power of the Tennessee Valley Authority. There was K-25, a gaseous diffusion plant. There was Y-12, an electromagnetic plant. And there was X-10, a plutonium plant.

The research operations were surrounded by a barbed-wire fence with armed guards in towers. The town itself was built 10 miles up-valley from Y-12. At its peak in 1945, the population was 75,000. Every man, woman and child had to wear an identification badge.

William K. Ergen worked at Oak Ridge as a nuclear physicist and specialist on reactor safety. He was a native of Austria who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Vienna. He immigrated to the United States prior to World War II as part of the European brain drain. He met his wife, Viola, in Minnesota, and they moved to Tennessee in the early 1940s. Most of William Ergen's work was classified, but at least one aspect of his research later became well-known: the "China Syndrome," describing what...