"I'm John Burgess. I'm Here to Help You"

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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.

That incident didn't cost him his lawyer's license, only a suspension, but the Grievance Committee of the Eighth Judicial District of New York was soon investigating at least 20 complaints his clients had lodged against him. The most serious charge: $40,000 inexplicably missing from an escrow account of a deceased 38-year-old nurse's estate that Burgess had represented. Burgess was disbarred and convicted of attempted grand larceny. He paid a $1,000 fine.

The roller-coaster ride of his life reached a nadir on May 2, 1989, when he and Norma filed for personal bankruptcy under Chapter 7. The following year he and Norma were divorced. (He met his second wife, Dana, who is 30, in the early 1990s after she came to work at IPA.)

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