Yet the generous smile Lekach sports below a baseball cap carrying the Nimbus logo is somehow less than reassuring, despite the compellingly aeronautical scent of jet fuel and sound of roaring engines in the background. The odor and engine noise are from the diesel trucks pulling out of the Budweiser distributorship across the street. Where are the planes? Vern will build them. Of course. And the money to buy the planes? Ah. That money, according to a Nimbus press release, has been fully committed by a company called Dafin Asset Finance Ltd., an affiliate of Royal Bank of Scotland, a global player in aircraft finance.
It takes but one phone call to discover that Royal Bank of Scotland denies Dafin is an affiliate. A two-year-old outfit with a phone number in the Isle of Man -- a U.K. tax haven that functions like Bermuda or Panama -- Dafin has an office in Johannesburg. There one George Stander, identifying himself as Dafin's director of European operations, immediately agrees that little-known Dafin is not an affiliate of Royal Bank of Scotland. "I don't know where that came from," he says, adding helpfully that "it was in the [Nimbus] press release." Dafin, it turns out, has never financed a deal anywhere near this big. Is $1.2 billion in financing in place? Stander uses a Britishism to say it is too early to tell. "Still early days," he says, exuding a sigh of exhaustion with the whole subject that can best be described as Dickensian. On the phone you can practically see his finger pointing 8,000 miles across the Atlantic -- to Ilia Lekach.
In Fort Lauderdale, Lekach's finger points another 1,600 miles west -- to Vern Raburn. This game of "Who, me?" would be gut-splittingly hilarious were it not for the fact that so much is riding on it. What will happen to Raburn's vision if he fails? What will happen to our hopes of exiting airline hell?
"Dafin came to us by way of Eclipse," Lekach says in an accent so wildly unconnected to his markedly Slavic features that it is unidentifiable until he employs a proverb not out of Russia but from South America, where he spent much of his childhood before arriving in the United States at age 20. " El pez muere por la boca," he says. Simple meaning: the fish dies by its mouth. Implication: I'm keeping mine shut. Although he has practically committed suicide por la boca via el press release, Lekach's lips are now abruptly sealed. Not so his eyes, which are twinkling at full wattage, as if there is more to this than he is willing to say. Then he says it: "Besides, in the first year it's only 10 planes."
The ensuing silence is big enough to drive a Budweiser truck towing an Eclipse 500 through.
That the questionable financing was for 1,000 planes at least has the resonance of magnitude -- but 10 planes? Should not Raburn and Lekach have taken care to announce that detail? Maybe nobody asked.
For Nimbus, even 10 planes seems like a stretch. Having fallen below Amex's listing requirements, the company would probably have been delisted but for a waiver from the exchange. With almost $11 million in losses since its birth, in July 1999, as Take to Auction.com Inc., Nimbus at the end of last year carried on its books a $700,000 deficit in working capital, a situation that led its auditors, Deloitte & Touche, to note delicately in Nimbus's 2001 annual report, "Such matters raise substantial doubt about the Company's ability to continue as a going concern."
One thing is beyond doubt: Lekach has until the end of this month to come up with $11.75 million or lose his option on those 1,000 jets. OK, 990 jets after those 10 jets the first year -- but who's counting?
Ilia Lekach is counting, that's who. Without those jets he is the proprietor of a pooped dot-com. With them he is chairman and CEO of Nimbus, a veritable magnate in the nationwide air-taxi industry. "Nobody," he says, "nobody is going to take this away from me. I'm a hard man to take things away from."
An Order of Magnitude
From the time of the Wright brothers, the air industry has been amusing itself with the question, What really makes these things fly -- engine thrust or aerodynamics? Neither. The answer is money.
Eclipse's main competitor is another start-up. Safire Aircraft Co., in West Palm Beach, Fla., has 20 people working out of offices over, among other things, an upscale wineshop. In a business in which progress is measured in money, it is well behind. According to its CEO, Robert M. Kuhn, Safire has spent only about $10 million so far.
An aerospace veteran, Kuhn is beating the bushes for at least $100 million more -- possibly from the same sources as Raburn. Kuhn aims to produce a jet meant to seriously outperform the Eclipse 500 -- at a price only about $100,000 higher. The Safire S-26 will seat six comfortably -- and provide a toilet. (If you want one in Raburn's six-seater, you have a five-seater.) Kuhn is careful to modulate his criticism of Raburn's company. He knows full well Safire's success is predicated on Eclipse's: a mass market for Raburn's plane will create a slipstream for Kuhn's. "If Eclipse screws up," he says, "we're f***ed."
The battle for investment dollars drives both men, but there is a difference: Kuhn is a hired gun. Eclipse is not a job but Vern Raburn's life, ostensibly his last chance to join Bill Gates as the founder of a transformational industry, one that by order of magnitude (to use Raburn's favorite phrase) will change our lives -- and his.
Coo-uhl, We Need It
In Albuquerque, after a two-hour investor's-eye tour of Eclipse's impressive facilities, the touchy subject is raised. Raburn doesn't blanch but, as he notes later, "my irises flexed."
What the hell is the Nimbus business all about?
"We get calls by the dozens per day from people who want to do things with us," Raburn says. "Dafin came in and said we can raise hundreds of millions of dollars for you guys. We said, Coo-uhl, we need it .... Dafin said they finance airplanes. We gave them Ilia's name and phone number, and the next thing we know -- we had less than 12 hours' notice -- they [Nimbus] were sending out the press release [on the financing]. Well, we said, that's interesting -- hope it's true."
