House Of Cards

Rosen was an undergraduate at the University of South Florida -- paying his way by delivering pizzas -- when he spotted a posting that changed his life. Southwestern Co., a direct sales company in Tennessee, was looking for students to sell educational books door to door. The company has long been a training ground for politicians, including several governors and former independent counsel Kenneth Starr. Southwestern teaches disciplined personal habits -- rise early, dress neatly, work long hours, and never quit, no matter how much you feel like quitting -- along with practical sales techniques.

"We used to tape a $5 bill to the showerhead in our headquarters," Rosen recalls. "The alarm would go off. You leap out of bed. There would be three guys living together, and we would literally fight and tackle and run and cut each other off. You get to the shower, you are bleeding. But you get there first and get that $5 bill. It wasn't about the $5. It was about waking up in the morning getting ready to go."

In 1985, Rosen broke the company record for rookie sales. He left the university and stayed at Southwestern for a decade. By the time he left the company, Rosen said, he was making sales at one out of every 1.2 homes he visited.

He moved back to Chicago after his father suffered a heart attack -- and began to study political science at DePaul University. A professor arranged for him to volunteer with the Clinton-Gore campaign beginning in 1995. He turned out to be as good at asking for political donations as he was at selling books and quickly rose in Democratic fundraising circles. In 1999, Rosen, then 32, was tapped to be national fundraising director for Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign.

It was a job Rosen wouldn't have gotten, and couldn't have survived, if he hadn't spent a decade selling books, he said.

"Books for me are such a metaphor for the hard path, the romantic job, the adventure," Rosen said. Spending 13 hours a day knocking on strangers' doors, risking failure in order to

succeed, is a "lonely place at first," Rosen said. "Then it becomes a place you are comfortable. It instills great confidence . . .

"Someone once told me that they test tires on automobiles by driving them around the track at different speeds," Rosen said. "At 30 miles per hour, some flaws pop out. At 50 miles an hour, more flaws pop out. And at 120 miles an hour, most of the flaws really pop out. Over my 10 summers selling books, I was going 120 miles an hour. I was able to work out a lot of my flaws. I learned about my strengths."

He would need them. Rosen was about to travel warp speed down an unfamiliar road in a borrowed Porsche.

Peter Paul's life had spooled out like a B-movie, complete with the usual cliches: double crosses and death threats. So he was a natural to land in Hollywood. How he came within a Tinseltown air kiss of the leader of the free world is a little harder to fathom.

Paul began his career relatively conventionally as an international lawyer. But conventionality bored him. Paul had big ideas -- he once spearheaded efforts to build a world trade center in Miami -- and an entrepreneur's drive to turn schemes into empires.

In the late 1970s, Paul was convicted both of possessing cocaine with intent to distribute and conspiring to defraud the Cuban government of $8.75 million in a bogus coffee sale, court records show. Paul and his co-conspirators tricked the Cuban government into buying 3,000 metric tons of coffee beans from them, even though the conspirators didn't have the beans. They bought a freighter, allegedly to ship the beans, all the while planning to sink it -- holds empty -- and claim that the beans were lost at sea.