One day in Chicago, Dave Bigg is about to drink a few beers with his buddies and divvy up Cubs baseball tickets when his cell phone rings. It’s the doctor, and he doesn’t like what he sees. Bigg’s biopsy looks...
Edra Blixseth has come a long way since she and her husband, Tim, declared bankruptcy in rain-soaked Roseburg, Oregon, in 1986. He traded timberland. She had owned a chain of four restaurants called Choo-Choo Willy’s. Today, Edra lives in a 30,000-square-foot...
For 11 years, John Kinnucan was a stock analyst, digging information out of low-level contacts in the computer industry and selling it to clients. Then in October two FBI agents dropped by his three-story house and home office in Portland, Oregon, threatened to...
Troy David Stratos, self-described movie producer and music impresario, was peeved. The limousine that had come to pick him up from his hotel in Switzerland was white, not black. Rather than sort it out himself, he called his assistant back...
Eve Mazzarella was a Las Vegas success story. The high-school dropout and former maid moved to the Nevada city in 2000 from Seattle, got a certificate from the ABC Real Estate School and started selling houses in what would become the hottest...
Danielle Chiesi spent a lot of time in hotel ballrooms and bars during the past decade. As an analyst at New Castle Funds in New York, she was a regular at conferences on technology stocks, where she could get face time...
Sam Byrne and Billy Collins had Pioneer Mountain at the Yellowstone Club to themselves, as usual. They were belting down the freshly groomed corduroy, carving fast, giant-slalom turns last year when–bam!–they collided, hard. The impact cracked both their helmets. Byrne, whose...
To Jean-Pierre Boespflug, French- born developer of a ski resort in the Idaho outback, the $250 million loan from Credit Suisse Group AG was too good to pass up. He wasn’t alone....
When Andre Agassi played professional tennis, he didn’t dare do anything that might get him injured. “I wasn’t allowed to go off a diving board,” he says. Lately, he’s taken a deep dive into real estate....
Tim Blixseth, a rags-to-riches timber baron, likes the good things in life, and he likes having them to himself. He lives on a private 18-hole golf course near Palm Springs, California. He also controls a ski resort in Montana called...