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epilogue “nobody Was defending Us except Ourselves” In the happy glow that immediately followed his company’s profitable sale of the Lima refinery to Clark Oil, BP senior executive Ian Conn ventured to a Wall Street Journal reporter that the sale certainly seemed “the correct final chapter” to the story. Conn may have been an able businessman but he was not much of a historian. For history provides few final chapters to any story and even fewer “correct” ones. A decade later, a number of the key figures in the Lima/BP encounter —BrowneandBP,MayorBerger,therefinery,thecityofLimaitself—havebeen treated both well and ill by the intervening years, some in quite surprising ways.1 Formanyofthestory’sprincipals,thesubsequentdecadebroughtwell-earned retirement: Percy in the Cleveland area, Mullen in Colorado, and Judy Gilbert in Lima. Others resumed career trajectories in various sectors of the oil or financial industries. Daniel Groman and many of his colleagues continue to work at the Lima refinery. Robert Paisley left BP within a few years to take a senior position inthefinancialservicessector.Payne,theWassersteinPerellabroker,todayworks for an investment firm in Texas. Ohio newspapers continue to periodically run feature stories on various local companies—an aluminum panel business in Akron, a brass fittings manufacturer in Cleveland—that have achieved amazing turnarounds, partly because of the efforts of business consultant Schaefer, who would show up to coax workers into identifying ways they could improve productionandthencoaxmanagementintoimplementingtheirsuggestions .Others continued on with BP. Kuenzli, BP’s manager of the Lima refinery, relocated to the Gulf Coast to head up a BP refinery there, while “idea factory” Paul Monus moved to the Baltimore area to assist in BP’s initial ventures into solar energy.2 Fate has been less kind to David Stockman. Apparently invigorated by his foray into oil refining, Stockman left Blackstone in fall 1999 to co-found a buyout 241 242 ePIlOgUe firm called Heartland Industrial Partners. “I believe we are entering a golden age for the revival of industrial America,” he exclaimed. Through his new firm, he planned to raise $2 billion in equity capital to acquire and reenergize older industries throughout the Midwest. Initially the project seemed to go swimmingly . Within several years he had acquired majority ownership of Collins and Aikman, an auto-parts manufacturer, and in 2003 he moved to Troy, Michigan, to function as its CEO. Then things went sour. The American auto industry continued its long spiral into disintegration and took parts suppliers down with it. Stockman frantically tried to keep his company afloat, “juggling creditors and suppliers,” wrote journalist Greider sympathetically, “in desperate, impromptu arrangements,”butnoneofthemeasuressucceeded.InMay2005,theCollinsand Aikman board demanded Stockman’s resignation, and a week later the company filed for bankruptcy. Federal investigators began poking into Stockman’s efforts to keep the company alive, and in March 2007 indicted him in a Manhattan courtroom for securities fraud, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice. His case involved no fraud at all, he told the New York Times, but instead was merely “a dangerouscriminalizationofabusinessfailure.”Inhisdefense,asGreiderpointed out, not only did he not profit personally, but he poured $13 million of his own money and $350 million in Heartland funds into the firm in his efforts to save it. In January 2009, federal prosecutors dropped all charges against him, but, at age 62, his career seemed over.3 If guilty of nothing else, Greider noted, Stockman seemed guilty of “overabundantconfidence ”and“arrogantoverreaching.”Thesewerequalitiesthatpeoplein Lima would have recognized in several of the corporate executives they had seen come and go over the years, beginning with Benjamin Faurot, whose meteoric rise and fall in the nineteenth century began this story. Now, in the first years of the new century, they would watch the same arcing trajectory occur with one of the biggest players of them all, BP’s John Browne. In the end, Browne would not fall as far or as hard as Faurot, but as high as Browne had climbed and as powerful as he had become, Lima’s people knew he didn’t have to fall nearly as far to make an even bigger mess.4 For several years following the sale of the Lima refinery and the mergers with Amoco and Arco, BP in general and Browne in particular continued to rocket upward to unbelievable heights of wealth, power, and fame, an ascent that appeared at times irreversible. The thousands of former Amoco and Arco employees quickly learned what it was to operate by Browne’s way. He went after his new acquisitions with a meat-ax...

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