NEW YORK - He liked to wear cowboy boots and was deeply religious. And for a time, Bernard Ebbers eptimomised the rags-to-riches American dream.
But following his conviction over the 11 billion dollar fraud that led to the collapse of his WorldCom empire in 2002, Ebbers is now a prominent member of the expanding US corporate villains club along with the chiefs of Enron and Tyco.
Ebbers turned a sleepy Mississippi firm into a US telecoms giant. Deal after deal made him a darling of Wall Street, but the deception of hiding the growing debt became too much for Ebbers, who now faces decades in prison.
Born in Edmonton, Canada on August 27, 1941, Ebbers' family moved south when he was a child. His father John became a business manager for a Christian mission on a Najavo reservation in New Mexico.
Ebbers was moderately good at basketball but only an average student and twice dropped out of university. He delivered milk and worked as a night club bouncer in Canada before giving school a final try at Mississippi College, where he concentrated on sports and going to chapel three times a week.
Ebbers graduated in 1966 and the following year married a Mississippi girl, Linda Piggott, and decided to make the South his home.
He worked as a basketball coach and teacher in a small town then quit to work at a clothes factory where he worked his way up to warehouse manager.
Ebbers' fortunes changed when in 1974 he bought a small motel. By the early 1980s he had turned it into a chain of nine motels in rural Mississippi and used it to launch his stellar telecommunications career.
He took over local long-distance reseller LDDS and throughout the late 1980s and 1990s merged with or bought dozens of rivals. As the AT and T monopoly was dismantled, Ebbers bought up spare telephone time and repackaged it at bargain prices.
By 1995, Ebbers had become a major player, paying 1.2 billion dollars for WilTel Network Services. He changed the group's name to WorldCom.
In 1996, Ebbers paid 14 billion dollars for MFS Communications and in 1998 spent 37 billion dollars on MCI.
"I believe God has a plan for people's lives, and I believe he had a plan for me," Ebbers once said.
"You'll see people who in the early days of WorldCom took their life savings and trusted this company with their money. And I have an awesome responsibility to those people to make sure that they're done right."
By mid-1999, WorldCom reached it all-time high of 64.50 dollars a share. Forbes magazine listed Ebbers as the world's 376th richest man with a fortune of 1.4 billion dollars.
President Bill Clinton gave a speech at WorldCom offices, saying: "I came here today because you are the symbol of 21st century America. You are the embodiment of what I want for the future."
But the success changed Ebbers. The local church patriarch bought a huge yacht and found a new wife. He also bought the 200,000 hectare (500,000 acre) Douglas Lake Ranch in British Columbia, the largest working ranch in Canada.
In 2001, Ebbers tried to buy Sprint, a larger rival, but was halted by regulators. Wider concerns about WorldCom's huge debt emerged however.
WorldCom made drastic efforts to cut costs, including sacking thousands of staff, and merging business units, but it could not generate enough income to keep creditors at bay.
Ebbers resigned in April 2002 after admitting borrowing money from the firm to cover losses he incurred in buying its shares.
Later the same year, WorldCom went bankrupt. Shareholders lost about 180 billion dollars and 20,000 workers lost their jobs. The company came out of bankruptcy last year, renamed MCI Inc.
People in Mississippi now call Ebbers "the Canadian," distancing themselves from his legacy.
03/15/2005 20:08 GMT - AFP