I didn't deal with it very well. I wasn't sleeping, I started drinking, my wife and I were having problems at home. On many occasions I considered just quitting. I approached our president and said, "I can't take this anymore, it's killing me. It's killing my relationship. I'm physically deteriorating. I want to quit." He told me that if I quit, he could guarantee me that the chairman would put out the word on the Street and blackball me. There were threats that my name would be ruined, my career destroyed.

I was just waiting for the whole thing to collapse so I could get some relief. I knew it would not be pretty.

As it was a newly public company, now we had auditors in there. It was left entirely up to me to manage that whole process. I got no help from the president or the chairman. All I got was, "You better make sure they don't find anything. If there's anything to find, hide it — this is your ass on the line." It was the same with board meetings: Don't tell the board this, don't tell them that.

We didn't make it through one year as a publicly traded company before it all collapsed. The stock made a big run after we hit two quarters in a row. Then stuff happened, we couldn't make it, and it fell far below the IPO price. The audit committee came in and said, "We see what you've been doing, there are some questionable things going on here." Everybody got thrown out.

In many ways the job was a good experience. I traveled all over the world making presentations, meeting people, and wheeling and dealing. It was exciting, and I miss that action. But you start to believe your own crap after awhile. I could still give you verbatim the 10-minute pitch on the financials. I gave it to everyone, from one-on-ones with heads of major overseas banks to rooms with thousands of retail brokers.

The line between what is appropriate and what isn't can get really blurry — perfectly honest, decent professionals start to lose perspective on what is right, wrong, or in between when you've got a chairman screaming down your throat, investors and analysts and banks calling you, covenants up the wazoo. You start to accept things that any reasonable person would look back on and say, "What, were you out of your mind?"

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