Rich Man, Poor Plan

Allen Andersson Made a Bundle, Then Made Things Happen -- for a While -- in Honduras

Allen Andersson made a fortune. Three times.

Richer each time, and ever less interested in being rich.

It's almost all evaporated now, more than $300 million, but Andersson still sits smiling in the sunny living room of the Kalorama manse he can no longer afford. He blew his dough on things that make him happy and that he thought would make the world a better place, not on ephemeral luxuries -- look no further than the weary, 15-year-old black Honda Accord with the coat hanger for an antenna that he drives, when it's cooperating.

Instead, this "serial entrepreneur," inventor, investor, math whiz and philanthropist plopped hundreds of millions -- don't ask him exactly how many because "I don't like numbers," he confesses -- into intriguing but commercially dubious scientific research that thrilled his mind. He poured tens of millions more into building libraries for the poor in Central America, a vast charitable enterprise that he now hopes other foundations will help prop up because his business empire has been crippled by poorly performing investments and the credit crisis.

And then, there's one of his all-time favorite multimillion-dollar gambits, the time he played presidential kingmaker in Honduras . . . and won. Barely noticed outside Tegucigalpa, Andersson assumed a key -- many say decisive -- offstage role in the 2005 election of Manuel "Mel" Zelaya, the recently deposed president of Honduras.

As Honduras convulsed this month over Zelaya's ouster -- in his pajamas -- in a military coup, Andersson spoke for the first time about what he proudly describes as the "shenanigans" he orchestrated in the final days of the 2005 upset. It is a saga sprinkled with heaps of cash, private detectives, sting operations, attack ads, internecine squabbles and Andersson's epic grudge against Zelaya's wealthy, dashing opponent, Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo, whose last name means "wolf" in Spanish.

In short, Andersson had a blast.

"I just had a taste of blood in my mouth," he says, suddenly balling his right hand into a fist and bringing it crashing down onto a glass coffee table. "My mission was not to avoid poverty or bankruptcy or disgrace; my mission was to beat Pepe Lobo."

Starting Small, Thinking Big

Allen Andersson is one of those Washington characters who inexplicably remain invisible in a town otherwise obsessed with power players. He stands 6-feet-2 and walks with a shambling, loose-limbed, forward-tilting gait. He speaks softly, with a slight nasal quality to his voice, and laughs at himself constantly, merrily losing his train of thought without ever seeming to mind that he has.

At 64, the native of Cape Cod, Mass., calls himself "an imperfectly socialized person" and wears his wavy gray hair longish, the aging-hippie-who-made-it look. His shirt pockets are usually jammed with pens, and he favors what Teresa Calkins -- a media consultant he once hired -- calls coarse, "butt-ugly" ties. Andersson has globe-trotted with celebrities, but is so oblivious to pop culture -- he went several decades without owning a television -- that he has no idea why they are famous. Mike Farrell of "M*A*S*H"? "He's my friend, but I'm not familiar with his work." Bianca Jagger? "I don't know exactly what she is celebrated for."

For much of the decade, Andersson has been raining money on Central America, gleefully distributing his winnings from his early-2000s investment in Amylin Pharmaceuticals, a tiny, struggling company that caught his eye because of its innovative diabetes research. (He came across Amylin while evaluating drug treatments for his own daughter, Rachel, now 24, who has diabetes.) The 65 libraries he built in Guatemala and Honduras thrived as mini-community centers. But he had even grander plans.

"I thought I had discovered a way of really multiplying value in science," says Andersson, who still believes his approach would work during better economic times. "I decided that if I could make a couple billion dollars, I could do truly revolutionary things in Central America."