Investigating the financial fraud and misguided power plays that brought down the telecom industry Once the foundation of the Dow and NASDAQ, the telecom industry has eaten up more capital than any other industry in recent history and has nothing to show for it. Today, it is by far the worst culprit in the spate of financial dirty dealings that have been splashed across the business pages, and yet the rewards reaped by top executives at many of these failed or failing companies have been inversely proportionate to their decline. Broadbandits takes readers behind the scenes to get the story they won't get in the media. Investigative reporter Om Malik follows the money trail and deciphers the actions and motivations of a generation of new economy "barbarians" that brought down this once lucrative industry. This intriguing book offers an inside look into the telecom bubble, with tales and anecdotes about mavericks who turned simple light and glass fibers into veins of gold, financiers who got greedy and fleeced unsuspecting millions, clueless venture capitalists who thought they'd tapped into the mother lode, hapless entrepreneurs who believed that they were changing the world, and self-proclaimed pundits who were cheering it all on from the sidelines. Broadbandits is a compelling account of the downfall of telecom giants such as WorldCom and Global Crossing, and will show readers how many telecom upstarts and veterans alike became victims of what one chief executive aptly described as "high-yield heroin." Om Malik (New York, NY) is a Senior Writer for Red Herring who focuses on the telecommunications sector. Prior to joining Red Herring in July 2000, he was senior editor at Forbes.com. His work has also been published in newspapers and magazines such as The Wall Street Journal, Business 2.0, Brandweek, and Crain's New York Business. For a very brief while, he was a venture capitalist. Even as the conspicuous dot-com bubble burst in March 2000, an even larger bubble was still forming that would bring disaster to the telecommunications industry. The race to develop broadband fiber optic networks is a story of overcapacity and overproduction with an all-too-familiar theme of greed and deceit that has left companies in shambles, employees without jobs, and investors swindled while executives cashed out with millions. Malik, a former senior writer for Red Herring and Forbes.com, reports on more than a dozen of these "broadbandits," such as Gary Winnick, cofounder of Global Crossing, who became a billionaire faster than anyone in U.S. history; Jack Grubman, telecom analyst at Solomon Smith Barney, who pocketed $100 million touting overpriced broadband stocks; and Bernie Ebbers, chief executive of Worldcom, who went on an acquisition buying spree until the company's financial dirty tricks caught up with him. Losses in this sector have approached a trillion dollars, reputations have been ruined, and the economy is suffering as a result, but disaster does make for interesting copy. David Siegfried Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved The latest in an increasingly popular string of works analyzing another burst bubble, this book takes on the demise of the telecom broadband industry. The author, formerly a writer at Red Herring and now an editor at Forbes, focuses on the individuals and corporations involved in some of the most egregious hypes and heists of the telecom industry. The individuals profiled include Bernie Ebbers (WorldCom), Phil Anschutz (Qwest), Gary Winnick (Global Crossing), Jim Crowe (Level 3 Communications), Ken Rice (Enron), Alex Mandl (Teligent), John Doerr (Excite@Home). Teddy Forstmann (Forstmann, Little & Co.), Jack Grubman (Salomon Smith Barney), John Roth (Nortel), Gururaj Deshpande and Daniel Smith (Sycamore Networks), and Vinod Khosla (Cisco). This is a lively work, though edging toward overblown, which delights in dishing the dirt on some once high and mighty industry giants. By providing background and details, however, it helps the reader connect individuals with corporations and gives insight into the tangled web that has now almost completely unraveled. Purchase where there is interest. ?Susan Hurst, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, OH ( Library Journal , June 15, 2003) "...This book offers a scathing analysis and a riveting read?a very readable book...it?s a must read" ( The Inquirer , 19 June 2003) Lenette Crumpler, a former employee of Frontier Communications, lost $86,000 of her 401(k) money. Paula Smith worked most of her life at US West and then lost her life's savings of $400,000 after Qwest took over US West. How and why did these employees find themselves in such an outrageous situation? To find the answer, Om Malik burrowed deep inside the so-called broadband bubble -- the colossal build-out of communications networks that accompanied the technology and investment boom of the late 1990s. He unearthed copious evidence of what he dubs, "broadband band