Someone else might have walked away, but Jackson was convinced that his idea still had value. He lined up some new investors and paid $225,000 to purchase the rights to VideoLan’s technology from a bankruptcy court. In 1998, Jackson started a new company, iGate. This time, he vowed to avoid the traditional routes of business development, which he saw as hopelessly compromised by racism. “I developed a bad taste in my mouth for venture capitalists,” he later said. He talked of raising “angel money from Africa and places like that—our people, if you will.” He hired a black president, Joshua Smith, who serves on the boards of FedEx and Caterpillar and once chaired President George H.W. Bush’s Commission on Minority Business Development.

By the late 1990s, most big businesses had already solved their last-mile problem by installing T1 lines, so Smith drew up a new business plan that targeted other markets, institutions that still depended on antiquated infrastructure: military bases, government agencies, public schools. Jackson predicted initial sales of $20 million a year, rising to $155 million by 2004.

But he wasn’t able to deliver on his projections. The company’s key component, a three-by-five-foot switch box that sold for $96,000, was cumbersome. “Newer technology would allow you to build that box the size of a cigar box, and he never got there,” says Jerry Galler, who headed iGate’s marketing. “And then, all of a sudden, we quit getting paid.” None of the multimillion-dollar contracts Jackson was always talking about ever materialized. Eventually, Joshua Smith left the company, and Jackson laid off all but one of his dozen or so employees, saying that iGate was $2 million in debt.

The company limped along, expanding and contracting as Jackson struggled to locate new sources of financing. He kept working to shrink and refine his products, with some success. (One independent test found that iGate’s system provided 13 times the bandwidth of T1 lines.) But Jackson knew that if he was ever going to succeed, he needed friends in government. He hired a consultant named Jack White, who’d once pleaded guilty to federal charges related to his role in a public-housing scandal. White was well connected in African American political circles, and he introduced Jackson to William Jefferson. The congressman immediately grasped the idea’s potential. He told Jackson that he glimpsed iGate’s future: military contracts to start with but also deals that would bring the equalizing force of the internet to poor people living in urban neighborhoods that had been overlooked by the phone companies, or in rural areas, or even in Africa, where broadband remained a technological pipe dream.

“Vernon thought that he had somebody that would watch his back, because he had the same interests and same color and could understand how Vernon felt, believing that he’d been screwed over by some majority people,” says Jackson’s younger brother Dean, a lawyer. “The irony, as I see it from the court papers, is that the very person he was trusting turned out to be the one that was trying to do him in.”

Much like Jackson, William Jefferson—known around New Orleans as Dollar Bill—had lived a life of unlikely accomplishments tempered by questionable business judgment. Jefferson grew up picking cotton in northeastern Louisiana but made it to Harvard Law. He rose rapidly in the political world but was dogged by scandals related to tax problems and real estate investments. In 1990, when Jefferson mounted a campaign to become Louisiana’s first black congressman since Reconstruction, opponents circulated mock banknotes bearing his face. Jefferson won anyway and went on to become a prominent Democratic voice on economic policy, particularly regarding trade with Africa.

Despite the superficial similarity of their backgrounds—they were both high achievers from large, religious families—the congressman and the businessman had very different temperaments. Jefferson was slight and distant. Jackson was bearish and voluble. Nonetheless, the two men formed what appeared to be a genuine friendship. In 2000, Jackson began traveling to Washington, reporting back to his friends in Louisville about his frequent dinners with “the congressman.”

“His ego was inflated by all that,” says Michael Valenti, a civil attorney who represented Jackson and iGate. “Vernon would say, ‘Oh, you can’t imagine all the people I am meeting on the Hill. This congressman is a very powerful person. He opened this door and that door.’ ”