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twenty years old, talked her into posing nude in his studio (not that he owned one, but he rented a friend’s unused garage), and when no one would pay him what he thought was a fair price for his photos, he decided to publish them himself. He talked some acquaintances into pooling their money—he’d never had trouble raising money—and two months later published the first issue of
Suave
. He’d shared a dorm room with best-selling hard-boiled mystery writer Chuck Bestler’s son, got him to invest, and he in turn got Bestler to write the lead story. Blackstone had paid Bestler with 5 percent of the magazine, and Bestler, seeing gold in them thar hills, got all his friends in category fiction to contribute, at which point the magazine was a hit, and Blackstone, who barely knew one end of a camera from the other, hired a pair of top photographers who had their own stables of forty-two-inch models. And long before his twenty-second birthday, Morgan Blackstone was a multimillionaire.
    He’d never liked his name, so he created a new
persona
, dressed like a cowboy (but in cowboy duds created on Park Avenue in Manhattan) and signed all his ads and editorials “Bucky.” The name and image stuck, and he was “Morgan” only on contracts and tax returns from then on. By the time he turned twenty-three, Blackstone was bored with the magazine. He knew there were more important challenges out there, and he never wanted to become the eighty-year-old embarrassment Hugh Hefner had become, a withered old man pretending he was thirty-five and assuming that people still cared about his notion of the Good Life.
    There were a lot of interesting little wars going on, and a lot of puppet governments received hundreds of millions of dollars from their dark masters (or, in the case of the United States’ clients, their light masters), and he saw no reason why he shouldn’t supply some of their needs. So he put up a million dollars of his own money, then quickly raised another fifteen million (this time as high-interest loans rather than for pieces of his company) and was soon supplying arms to all interested parties.
    When he saw the negative publicity his business rivals were receiving, he sold out his interest before any of them could come to stand on his broad shoulders.
    Next came the invention of an engine that would run on water. It didn’t work, but he let Saudi Petrostock, National Dutch, China National Offshore Oil, American Petroleum, Royal Abu Dhabi, and Kuwaiti Oil Resource pool a quick two hundred million and buy it from him to keep it off the market.
    He began casting around for his next business, analyzed his successes, and decided he’d pretty much followed “Wee Willie” Keeler’s old dictum from a century earlier: “Hit ’em where they ain’t.” No one had started a successful men’s magazine for a decade and a half before
Suave
, no one had had the chutzpah to supply weapons to warring banana republics in
this
hemisphere, and no one had blackmailed or terrified the auto companies in more than half a century. You had to go all the way back to Tucker, which wasn’t quite the same thing since Tucker’s car actually worked.
    So Blackstone cast around for some other place where “they” weren’t, and it wasn’t long before he realized that the average state was a good five billion dollars in debt, and some of the larger spendthrifts, like California and Illinois and New York, were each well over fifty billion in the hole.
    How could they raise money in a hurry since the federal government wasn’t about to bail them out? Easy. They’d legalize gambling. There’d be a hue and cry from some of the more religious sections of the electorate, but some politician would point out that even churches hosted bingo games to raise money, and besides, the alternative was bankruptcy. And within a year, spreading money around various state capitals where it would do the most good, he had built luxury casinos in North