Losing Friends in Washington

NY Times

MZM Inc. has become radioactive to members of Congress, and that is not good for a military contractor that relies on the federal government for 99.3 percent of its revenue.

The company began to lose favor last month, when the Copley News Service said MZM's founder and onetime president, Mitchell J. Wade, had bought the home of Representative Randy Cunningham, Republican of California, for $1,675,000 in 2003 and sold it less than a year later for only $975,000, despite a real estate boom.

About the time Mr. Wade bought the house, MZM began to win Defense Department contracts that helped it triple its revenue last year.

Mr. Cunningham, a member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, denied any link between his support for those projects and his house sale to Mr. Wade - or his living on Mr. Wade's yacht when in Washington.

The Justice Department is now investigating. About the same time, another representative, Virgil H. Goode Jr., Republican of Virginia, offered to
return all the campaign cash he has taken from MZM, his biggest single contributor.

(Coincidentally, MZM has recently received $600,000 in state government aid to relocate to Mr. Goode's district from Washington.)

Mr. Wade recently stepped down as MZM's president. James C. King, a retired lieutenant general, is taking over the job. Mark A. Stein

HARD TO GET When he signed up as the chief executive of TiVo, Thomas S. Rogers, the former president of NBC Cable, did not agree to go to Silicon Valley cheaply, or even full time.

In a proxy, TiVo says it agreed to a $750,000 salary, a bonus of up to $500,000, a million stock options and 350,000 restricted shares. It will fly Mr. Rogers between his New York home and a company apartment in Silicon Valley, and cover undefined expenses "appropriate for a chief executive officer of Mr. Rogers's stature." Patrick McGeehan

CLOSE CALL He could not escape a prison sentence for his role in the insider-trading scandals of the 1980's, but Ilan K. Reich did escape an even worse fate while flying a small plane north of New York City on June 30.

Mr. Reich, who was a mergers lawyer in Manhattan before he was convicted in 1986 for passing tips on pending deals to Dennis B. Levine, used a full-plane parachute system to splash-land his single-engine craft into a pond near Haverstraw, N.Y. He had blacked out briefly and awakened with the plane in a nose dive.

After the plane hit the water, he broke open a window and climbed out before the plane sank.

As Mr. Reich lay in the hospital with a broken back, a doctor asked: "By the way, did you know you have a brain tumor?" Mr. Reich said the tumor, which is benign, probably caused his blackout in the plane. Patrick McGeehan