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payment on the $48,000 car. The paperwork on the sale listed two buyers: Chess.net parent Multimedia Engineering Corp. and Dakhnovsky. But only Dakhnovsky’s signature appeared.

Fanning and his young charges raised $500,000 in seed funding from a Salomon Brothers executive and others. The employees got small equity stakes, with Fanning keeping majority control of Multimedia Engineering. That was “an invitation to disaster,” McBarron said. “He doesn’t really inspire trust.” Ramme said that the team was too inexperienced in business to know better and had initially been overly influenced by what they thought was Fanning’s past business success. “We were working for free, essentially,” Ramme said. Fanning “stopped talking to me because I was the least tolerant of his bullshitting.” Ramme was the first to leave. When Dakhnovsky also quit, he left the new car behind, and Fanning gave it to Shawn. But Fanning also stopped making payments on the car, and the financing company came after Dakhnovsky, tarring his credit record to this day. After about a year, the car was repossessed.

Fanning was committed to the chess company, and he did some things right. The technical system was solid, Fanning hired other world-class chess experts, and he made a deal for referrals from America Online that brought in thousands of new players. The internal management was another story. The programmers soon discovered that the office rent, other bills, and even paychecks were going unpaid. Aydar in particular confronted Fanning about his concerns over where the money was going. “Obviously, the money was misspent,” Dakhnovsky said. Fanning reassured the programmers that a good man was handling the books—none other than Jack Nevil of Cambridge Automation, Aunyx, and the $7 million judgment. Aydar wasn’t impressed, especially after he went late one night with Fanning to bail Nevil out of the local jail.

Fanning also mixed his personal and business affairs. As late as August 2000, a lumber-supply company won a $1,934 default judgment against John Fanning in small-claims court after “MM Engineering” failed to pay what it owed. The judgment still hadn’t been paid nearly a year later, according to lumber-firm president Bill Mischel. And billing records from 1997 show thousands of dollars flowing back and forth between Multimedia Engineering and the personal credit card of Fan-

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