Aside from earning his MBA at Rice in 1983, Bainwol has been a political animal ever since.

When he wasn't working in the Senate or at the Republican National Committee, Bainwol spent two years representing corporate technology, defense and healthcare giants like Microsoft Corp., Lockheed Martin and Schering-Plough at the D.C. lobbying firm Clark & Weinstock.

It was his work at the National Republican Senatorial Committee that earned him the admiration of Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), the committee's chairman at the time. There he established more than ever his ability to respond to the demands of many different and occasionally competing interests.

"Mitch was a critical part of my campaign," said Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), who ran against Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) before Wellstone died in a plane crash weeks before Election Day. "Mitch was in many ways kind of my rabbi or teacher."

World War Music

The RIAA's chief concern these days isn't its public image, which is fairly dismal among Internet users and privacy rights advocates. The group long ago stopped playing nice and adopted a no-holds-barred philosophy in its race to defeat the online pirates who it claims are robbing music companies of sales.

There are more than 57 million Americans swapping digital music files on the Internet, according to the Boston-based Yankee Group research firm. The RIAA estimates that its biggest members -- Universal Music Group, Warner Bros. Music, BMG Entertainment, Sony Music Entertainment and the EMI Group -- are losing up to 10 percent of their annual revenue as a direct result of online piracy.

Forrester research analyst Josh Bernoff said in a report this week that the industry lost $700 million to file sharing in 2002. More importantly for the RIAA, Bernoff found that of the 20 percent of Americans who use file-sharing services, half bought fewer CDs after they began downloading pirated songs.

The record companies spin a standard mantra: stealing is stealing, whether it's done in the spirit of Robin Hood or Al Capone. Recording artists and the companies that back them, they say, deserve to profit from their work, just like any other business.

The RIAA's chief weapon to date has been the subpoena, which the group uses to force Internet service providers to cough up the names of suspected music pirates. The group sent out more than 1,600 of them this summer, and the first lawsuits are just around the corner, an RIAA official said. Some of the subpoena targets are inveterate practitioners of copyright infringement, while others are hapless teenagers whose even more hapless technophobe parents had no idea what their kids were doing online.

Critics like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge take issue with the group's legal tactics. Many disaffected music buyers further complain about what they see as the over-inflated cost of buying music and an industry that, until recently, refused to embrace the Internet as a distribution medium.

Into this conflict steps Bainwol, who after stepping down from his position earlier this year as chief of staff for Frist -- now the Senate majority leader -- was ready to work hard but in somewhat more comfortable circumstances.