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Also, Zintgraff says he could improve CI's earnings per share (assuming there are some earnings) by permitting existing shareholders to use their stock to purchase units in the new offering, thereby reducing the amount of common stock outstanding. The axiom here is: The next best thing to a larger numerator is a smaller denominator.

Zintgraff also talks about setting up the old corporate shell of Specialty Chemicals, the erstwhile minority wholesaler, as a financial planning group. CI could then pay Specialty fees out of the money raised through the offering, which would flow back to Cheraical Investors, Zintgraff explains, thereby converting equity to profit.

Another capital-raising possibility Zintgraff has in mind is an advertising limited partnership. Investors would put up cash to fund a national advertising campaign for specific Mystik products. The payback would come in the form of royalties paid as a percentage of any increased sales of those products for a specified time. The deal would benefit CI in two ways. It might, of course, help to sell more tape. It would also help the balance sheet for 1983, still heavily weighted with debt, if the cash from the limited partnership were deposited with CI, say, late in the year and no expenditures were made until 1984. The money is not exactly equity, like money paid for company stock, but it isn't debt, either. Zintgraff calls it "equitylike."

Still another plan that Zintgraff discusses involves creating a new corporation, taking it public through an in-state stock offering, and using the new equity to buy the assets of CI's Veterinary Science Division, freeing CI from that cash drain.

Ling's admirer and biographer, Stanley H. Brown, conceded that the great man was a horrid manager. But, he wrote, "to ask how he managed his companies was almost to miss the point of what he really was doing."

Ask Zintgraff what he is really doing and he will say he is building a business. How big? Press him for an answer. "Big enough," he says finally, "to be independent of the vagaries of the marketplace . . . I don't know. As big, as successful as I can make it I guess . . . I don't know what you're getting at. It's really the process that intrigues me."

LTV generated $3.75 billion in sales in 1969, the year Jim Ling lost control of it. For all the size his strategies had built, profits remained elusive, and Ling was toppled as part of someone else's elaborate and unsuccessful scheme for boosting the market price of LTV stock. Within a few years, the company and the man, once the stuff of headlines, passed into dim memory.

Zintgraff is an enigma, a 39-year-old entrepreneur of potential fame whose former associates are already mourning his anticipated failure with genuine, if premature, sympathy. They would really like him to succeed, but they can't see how he will.

"Look," says Darrah, "at what Zintgraff has been doing for the past seven years: raising capital, acquiring businesses, scheming for new financing. None of that is running a business . . . If he would just get good people to run the companies and leave them alone, he'd be a rich man today."

"By God," says J Wood, Zintgraff believes "everybody else ought to just do what he says . . . He really thought business is negotiating contracts. He never thought about having the right people and treating them right. If he'd just let other people use their brains, too . . . When I first started [in 1976], Gary said, 'You go out and hire 10 people. If each of them sells $100,000, we'll do $1 million.' I said, 'Hey, what are we going to sell? We need cars for them; they need meals; we have to pay these people.' He said, 'You just hire the people, and I'll take cure of the rest.' We started out just selling toilet-bowl cleaner, that sort of thing. One day I got a call from Eli Lilly. They had four Custom Chemical Lab salesmen there in the office and none of them knew each other . . . There was no planning.

"Yes, when it comes to financing he does well. He just doesn't have a good personality for people unless he wants to. He can wine and dine you and impress you, but then he can be uncaring . . . I was asked to stay, but I'd been promised more money. He keeps trying to hire that cheap person . . . Gary was always trying to beat you out of something. He always felt like people were trying to take something away from him.

"He means well, but . . . it bugs him that people think differently than him. He believes that if the boss says it, you go along with it. He felt like people were devious and trying to get rid of him . . . He sure destroyed an excellent company [Specialty Chemicals] . . . If we could have kept going, we'd be in the neighborhood of $15 million, $17 million, maybe $20 million today. Now he's sold it for zip and got no cash for it. He slowly destroys these companies he buys . . . It's sad . . . It's a little bit of sour grapes, but not a lot. We just think it could have been a lot better . . . . Bill Mays pleaded with Gary -- 'Just back off and let me do what I do well.' Bill thought the company and 16 people were worth more than the feud . . . The night Bill quit he worked until 7 p.m. to be sure he left things right."

Jim Burnette says Zintgraff has "about run his course in making mistakes. He'll run through all his capital and become just one more statistic." John Darrah gives CI six months before the company goes to bankruptcy court. No, says a former controller, Zintgraff will survive if only he can learn some patience. "Maybe," he says, "Gary should read about Ray Kroc [of McDonald's Corp.], who was nobody until he was 52 or 53."

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