Both Hassell and Hudlow were surprised that no one at IPA headquarters had called to inquire why they were dissatisfied. Bharadwa did call Hudlow on December 20, more than two months after the survey analyst had visited Centennial, for an update on the IPA project, she says. Hudlow was stunned. She asked about his being put on notice and reprimanded. He told her that he knew nothing about it, that "he didn't have a clue," she recalls. When I called Bharadwa the same day, he declined to discuss his dealings with Centennial, saying they were confidential and adding, "I try to do a good job, and I don't want to jeopardize anything or anybody."
Eventually fed up, Doug Hassell halted the project after two weeks and stopped payment on his check. "A lot of this is just waste," he said.
If IPA is today a subject of controversy, it's nothing new. It has been embattled virtually from the moment, in the late summer of 1991, when Burgess and two other executives at George S. May International Co., based in Park Ridge, Ill., bolted from the company and created a competing business. A suit May brought in October of that year charged that Burgess and his cofounders, Bruce A. Tulio and Charles W. "Bill" Morton, and eight other former employees had appropriated trade secrets, including the alleged use of its forms and programs. May eventually lost that round of litigation, but there have been many others. At least a dozen suits filed by May or IPA (or individuals with those companies) since 1991 have set off legal fireworks in the Illinois courts of Cook and Lake counties, among other jurisdictions.
One early obstacle that had confronted Burgess and his fellow defectors was a noncompete clause in the employment contracts they had signed while working at May. It barred them for six months from enlisting with a May competitor after they parted ways with the company. When Burgess called a meeting with his colleagues from May at his apartment to discuss the possibility of starting a rival business, he didn't know how many of them would defy the covenant. He expected three May employees to show up. Twenty-two did.
A few weeks later IPA opened a small office in Wheeling, Ill. The whole of IPA's empire then encompassed "two desks and three employees. So you had to make sure you got there early enough to have a desk," Burgess recalls. Ian McLeod, one of the early May defectors, jumped ship to work as an analyst at IPA because, as he put it recently, he admired Burgess as a "very astute businessman" who brought "a lot of very talented people together." McLeod no longer works for IPA.
IPA's early years were a struggle for survival. So severe was the early cash crunch that the company had to rely for financing partly on the credit cards of two employees. One of them, Karen Marchesseault, sued IPA and Burgess, Tulio, and Morton to recover $40,000 in travel expenses charged to her American Express cards. An employee temp agency, a snowplowing service, a bank, and even IPA's former law firm were among creditors who sued to collect on IPA's allegedly unpaid bills.
Those suits were settled, unlike the rancorous one pertaining to May's alleged trade secrets. For a fledgling IPA to defend itself against the relatively deep-pocketed May proved to be a heavy burden. In the third month of IPA's existence, according to Burgess, the company's legal bill was $45,000; its revenues were $25,000. By the time a judge ruled in IPA's favor, that one legal entanglement had lasted more than two years.
IPA prevailed in spite of May's legal onslaught and, just as remarkably, overcame another albatross: the impaired reputations and creditworthiness of its cofounders. All three of them -- Burgess, Tulio, and Morton -- had criminal records. In 1989 Tulio had pleaded guilty in a Philadelphia federal court to having conspired with a drug dealer in the manufacture of phenyl-2-propanone (a key ingredient in methamphetamine, commonly known as speed) -- a felony. Morton had been convicted in 1988 in the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas in connection with the theft of Hummel figurines from three Pittsburgh stores -- a misdemeanor. (Morton retired from IPA three years ago, selling out his stake for $2.9 million, according to Burgess. Morton could not be reached for comment. Tulio left IPA after a dispute with Burgess in early 1992.) And Burgess's own career had been marred by trouble with the law.
Kim Hudlow called it quits just 10 hours into a 117-hour project. The consultants were just "regurgitating" what she'd already told them, she said.
Born on August 21, 1949, in Cranston, R.I., Burgess was selling eggs door to door by the age of 12. He ran a fruit and vegetable stand, among other jobs, to pay his way through school at Roger Williams College, in Providence, R.I., and the New England School of Law, in Boston. He didn't immediately work as a lawyer. A job he took as a soybean-meal trader for the Pillsbury Co., first in New York and later in Illinois, lasted three years, and he left under a cloud. Pillsbury sued to recoup almost $74,000 in commissions that Burgess had claimed, payments based on allegedly inflated trading profits, according to court records. The parties settled, with Burgess paying $10,000 to Pillsbury.
By then Burgess was practicing law in the quiet, middle-class Buffalo suburb of Cheektowaga, having moved back to New York in late 1979. He soon had a busy practice, says his former law partner Gary J. Wojtan. Burgess became known for his energetic, hard-hitting representation of women in divorce cases. "They'd meet him, and he had this impish smile, but he had this deep voice and knew where the bodies were buried," Wojtan says. An incident much publicized in Buffalo, however, tarnished his image. In August 1984 he pleaded guilty in Erie County Supreme Court to having patronized a 16-year-old prostitute at his law-office building, and paid a $500 fine. At the time Burgess and his first wife, Norma, had two small children.
