Van Etten buys his brand of Success.

Give Stan Van Etten credit. A lot of people who have been fried in the press grumble about what they would do if they owned a magazine. Van Etten went out and bought one.

In December, he held a press conference in Raleigh, announcing that he and a group of investors had purchased Success magazine for $5.75 million and were moving its headquarters from New York to Raleigh. Actually, what they bought were the assets -- the name, the subscriber list. The company that owned Success filed for bankruptcy last summer.

Given Van Etten's history, it's almost too easy to poke fun at this deal. After all, this is a guy whose last company, Raleigh-based network marketer International Heritage Inc., filed for bankruptcy after state and federal regulators accused it of being a pyramid scheme. Lie filed for personal bankruptcy in 1991 while working for F.N. Wolf & Co., a now-defunct penny-stock pusher, and making $192,000 a year. Among his debts were $72,502 he owed the IRS and $3,500 to a Bahamian casino. In 1994, a Raleigh Italian restaurant that hired him as a consultant, then made him COO, met the same...