The Stubborn Eventually Prosper

When a beanbag salesman and a Nevada gambling man join forces to make millions off a Russian miracle fabric, something bizarre is bound to happen. It did, and then some.

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It's all gibberish to him.

Gary Teague doesn't understand a word the young Russian woman is saying, but as she teases that strange, beautiful fabric between her fingers, he's very certain of one thing: He's rich.

Or he will be, very soon. He thought he'd seen every fireproof fabric on the planet during his 20 years in the business, but until this October morning in 1992, he'd never come across anything like this shimmering miracle. And the price! Pennies on the dollar, by current market rates. He'll have exclusive rights to the best silica cloth in the world -- and it costs less than the crappier British stuff! The digit wheel in Gary's mind is spinning, adding more and more zeroes to his mental profit margin. You can't tell from his face -- that craggy cowpoke's mug is as stoney as ever -- but since he heard the price a few moments ago, Gary's cigarette has been frozen in midair, and behind those droopy eyes, he's now testing the word billion...

"Gary? What do you think of the price?"

"Um..." Gary's attention is jerked back to this drab St. Petersburg hotel meeting room by his translator and new best pal, Todd Breslow. He glances at Todd, whose boy-genius rumpledness leaves you wondering just how shrewd he is behind those thick glasses. He shoots a look at Mark Zilberov, the canny Russian engineer who helped arrange this meeting, and at the two Russian aerospace execs who've been sent to exhibit the fabric. Despite all the sharp minds around him, Gary realizes, he's the only one in the room, possibly the only one in the world, who has any idea of the fortune that can be hatched here. And for the time being, he's going to keep it that way.

"Tell her," he drawls, finally exhaling the lungful of smoke he's been holding while his thoughts race, "tell her that's a little high. Jesus Christ, that's high," he continues, bluffing so smoothly that not even Todd realizes it. "They'll have to come down a bit, but I think we can do business."

The meeting adjourns, then Gary hustles Mark and Todd upstairs to their suite. When he breaks the news, they're speechless: What just happened, Gary tells them, is the modern equivalent of discovering denim...or even vulcanized rubber. That fabric they've just seen? It's a piece of aerospace technology Gary never knew existed. It's as soft as linen, as tough as nylon, and absolutely fireproof. "You know the tiles they put on rockets to protect them on reentry?" Gary explains. "That's what we're talking about, in fabric form. You could make a shirt out of this stuff and run a blowtorch on it, and it wouldn't get singed. You can put it in kitchens, car engines, roof shingles -- anyplace you wanted foolproof fireproofing.

"The applications are endless," Gary concludes, "and no one knows that but us."

Such a thing was possible in 1992. Until the Iron Curtain fell -- a few months before this meeting -- the miracle fabric was a classified Soviet military secret -- meaning no one outside the Soviet Union knew it existed, and no one inside the Soviet Union knew why it existed. The factory workers were given product specs and a formula and told nothing else. Even the factory reps who'd just displayed it were in the dark: During the Soviet regime, they just delivered it to a specified military site and asked no questions. And the price is unbelievable. Gary had been paying 10 bucks a yard to the Brits, and this is going for 50 cents!

There's silence while his partners let their own digit wheels spin. Then Mark adds his own jolt. "You know," he tells Todd, who quickly translates for Gary, "this is just the receiving station." Somewhere in the remote Russian hinterlands are the factories that actually make the stuff. "So what if..." Mark may have come of age in the most bureaucratic culture in modern times, but it hasn't snuffed his native instinct for classic capitalist cost-cutting: So what if we go find the factories, Mark suggests, and dump the middlemen?

This is the beginning of their adventure. The founders of the newly formed Thermal Material Systems Inc. are about to endure Gulag scares, KGB surveillance, 30-hour train rides, miserable nights in unheated Siberian hotels, gallons of vodka, and nude, drunken, semi-mandatory plunges into the Sea of Azov before they get their hands on the miracle weave.

And then, of course, it really gets tricky. That's when Gary Teague will begin his 10-year lesson in all the imperfections that can infect a perfect plan, and begin assembling a bullet belt of the insights that helped save his chance of a lifetime from going the way of the Berlin Wall.

You can't stop taking chances

Gary, for all his gunslinger cool at the negotiating table, was in unknown territory when it came to Russian manufacturing. He knew aerospace textile, though -- he'd spent four years in the Air Force in the 1950s before going to work as an engineer for Lockheed Martin. He'd then tightened his focus even further, spending the next decade with Hitco, a world supplier of carbon composite and high-temperature materials for the aerospace industry.

By 1992, Gary had notched two decades as a top salesman in that weird, hybrid market of welders, furnace installers, and defense contractors. He knew every variety of product and all the customers -- and by 1992, he knew the market was drying up. "Everyone is selling the same old fabric to the same old customers," Gary thought ruefully. "The pipeline is jammed because there aren't any new clients for the old products, and no new products for the old clients."

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