Fidelity says something different. According to spokesman Vincent Loporchio, Fanning worked as a console representative for two years. Console representatives do not make trades. ''They are responsible,'' Loporchio says, ''for watching customer call volume and routing customer calls appropriately.''

In the early 1990s, John Fanning bought a struggling computer business on credit, and it failed after two years. His next try at business began with his love of chess. A staff of Carnegie Mellon University graduates got small equity stakes in Chess.net, with Fanning keeping majority control of the online games firm. Fanning's dominant position was ''an invitation to disaster,'' says software engineer Brian McBarron. Coworker Matt Ramme says the team was too inexperienced to know that the balance of power should have been different; the staff had initially been overly influenced by what they thought was Fanning's past success. ''We were working for free, essentially,'' Ramme says.

John Fanning did some things right, including making a deal for referrals from America Online that brought in thousands of online chess players. The internal management was another story. The programmers soon discovered that the office rent and other bills were going unpaid, and even paychecks were erratic. Numerous lawsuits from the late 1990s show that Fanning's troubles extended beyond Chess.net. He lost two default judgments totaling about $44,000 for bad debts in 1999, and he was charged with assault with a deadly weapon after he attacked a maintenance man at his Hull condominium complex. Fanning later got the default judgments vacated on the grounds that the creditors had his address wrong. The assault charge was dismissed after Fanning completed pretrial probation..... Another fascinating angle to the foundation myth of our digital entertainment future.