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"Ross was able to convince a new branch manager ((who has since died)) that I shouldn't get the money," recalls Campbell. "He convinced management that he could walk on water. He is a master salesman. He really thought a lot less of me because I let him do it. I was just so aghast that he would have the audacity to even suggest it -- and doubly aghast that the new manager went along with it. After that, I wouldn't touch anything he got close to." Hard feelings aside, Campbell plans to vote for Perot in November. "I still don't like him," he says, "but I've never seen anybody who could accomplish as much as this son-of-a-gun could."
Join Me -- or Else. Merle Volding, a former IBM manager, knows what it's like to cross Perot. He recalls that Perot quit IBM in June 1962 on a Friday afternoon, then turned up the next morning at Volding's Dallas home and spent several hours trying to persuade him to join EDS in exchange for a one-third share. "I ended up telling him that he had a good idea, but that, 'Let's face it, you and I are so different, it wouldn't last six months,' " recalls Volding, now 68. "He got upset that I turned him down." Volding, meanwhile, had been promoted to marketing manager in Dallas, and was responsible for helping IBM salesmen protect their accounts from rivals like Perot.
Later that same year, Perot wrote to IBM chairman Thomas Watson Jr. accusing Volding "of all kinds of unethical things" in preventing his upstart company from competing against IBM, says Volding. Big Blue, having faced antitrust + charges before, in the 1950s, started an investigation but soon cleared Volding of any wrongdoing. "Ross knew damn well I wasn't unethical," he says. "I think he was just trying to get IBM to pull back and give him a free hand in signing up our customers. He used threats all the time."
Lining Up His Ducks. One former salesman, Ted Smith, now 59, recalls that shortly before Perot left IBM, he admitted to Smith that he had three contracts already signed up -- with GRC, Southwestern Life and Blue Cross-Blue Shield of Texas. A former IBM executive maintains that he has firsthand knowledge that before quitting, Perot sold additional IBM equipment to at least two of those entities, collected sales commissions and then had those firms cancel the orders once he left IBM. What's not known, he adds, is whether Perot had these clients lined up when he sold them the equipment in the first place. Charles Bridges, a former executive with Southwestern, says that Perot may have sold and then canceled "minor pieces of equipment" but that he "did not take unnecessary orders in order to pad his account." Bridges adds, "The problem I had with Perot is that if the game doesn't go the way Ross wants it to go, he keeps trying to change the rules so that he wins."
Dear IBM: %$ % %$!!*&!! Perot's relationship with IBM continued to be turbulent long after he left the company. In the late 1960s Aubrey Wilson served for nine stormy months as the EDS account manager for IBM, whose business with Perot was expanding. Wilson, 67, recalls being confronted with a stream of complaints from Perot. "He had his whole organization geared to route even the slightest provocation to his personal attention so that he could file a formal complaint," says Wilson, who retired from IBM in 1990.