In Snyder’s version, his intelligence came from the very top. In late August 2003, he had a conversation with his friend Peter Koepke, a onetime ­Warner Music executive. Koepke told Snyder he had learned something startling from his friend Roger Ames, then Warner Music C.E.O.: that Time Warner would probably pull the plug on the B.M.G. deal and instead seek an outright sale of the music division. “So I called Dick that same day,”Koepke recalls, “and said, ‘Why don’t you make an offer for Warner Music? It will be for sale, and nobody knows it yet. If you get moving, you’ll be in their doors doing due diligence for five days by the time other people know.’” Koepke says Snyder phoned him an hour later to say that the wheels were in motion: He’d informed Bronfman, who had already called Time Warner C.E.O. Dick ­Parsons and left a message for Ames. “All you’ve got to do is look at the phone records,” says Koepke.

Fuhrman claims that Snyder wasn’t involved in the minutiae of the deal, which Snyder doesn’t dispute. His value to Bronfman was in his connections and savvy, he says, not in his skills as a spreadsheet jockey. It was virtually impossible for any potential investor to access Warner Music’s financial data without ­obtaining Parsons’ approval. But according to someone close to the negotiations, Warner Music C.F.O. Helen Murphy’s office provided the Bronfman team with numbers while other investors were left high and dry, and Snyder takes credit for making that happen. Says the insider, “I’m sure every private equity firm was talking to Rob Marcus every day. But that’s different from convincing Dick Parsons to let you see the financials.” (Through a spokesman, Parsons declined to talk about the matter.)

Whatever the truth, Snyder will surely find himself facing a battery of witnesses at trial who will insist that he had nothing whatsoever to do with the deal. “I was involved in nearly all aspects of the Warner Music Group transaction, and from everything I saw, Dick Snyder did not conceive of or play any meaningful role in the deal,” says investment banker Alan Mnuchin of AGM Partners.

On November 24, 2003, when it was announced that Bronfman’s group had beat out rival EMI to buy Warner Music, Snyder and his wife joined Bronfman’s Lever House contingent and their spouses for what he refers to as a victory dinner. “Edgar stood up and gave me a big hug,” says Snyder. “We were all saying, ‘We did it! We did it!’ And we did. The odds were unbelievable.” (Bronfman’s camp says this is another of Snyder’s exaggerations, and that while a dinner did take place, it was a last-minute decision to grab some chow, not a formal gathering.)