Who wanted to incur the wrath of David Colburn? There was so much to David Colburn, all of it so outrageous and comical and scary and brilliant and successful and charitable, that he almost defied human description. And yet there he was an open book, a raging, exploding caricature of a personality, a combustible force of nature.

A source who used to sit on the other side of the negotiation table from Colburn tells us that the ex-AOLer was an "evil fucker" who "scared the shit out of me, back in the day." Klein describes Colburn's negotiation tactics in a similar vein:

His was a bone-jarring negotiating technique that was filled with swearing and threatening. During one phone call in his office, he was heard yelling at someone, belittling him, tearing him down, screaming, "Don't be a fucking idiot!"
Someone, who happened to be passying by, asked another bystander whom Colburn was talking to.
"A client," came back the answer.
"David had such a reputation that you could always use his presence as a threat," said Neil Davis, a former senior vice president. "It was like, 'If we can't get over this issue, we have to get David on the phone' I could always invoked David as teh court of appeals."
"His presence just caused a ripple of fear," said an AOL official who worked for him. "You could always hear him coming."

Once worth an estimated $250 million, Colburn in May settled an SEC lawsuit alleging he and other former AOL execs schemed in 1990s to overstate AOL's earnings by some $1 billion.

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With its takeover of Time Warner Inc. imminent, AOL sought to maintain its breakneck growth in advertising and commerce revenue. AOL converted legal disputes into ad deals. It negotiated a shift in revenue from one division to another, bolstering its online business. It sold ads on behalf of online auction giant eBay Inc., booking the sale of eBay's ads as AOL's own revenue. AOL bartered ads for computer equipment in a deal with Sun Microsystems Inc. AOL counted stock rights as ad and commerce revenue in a deal with a Las Vegas firm called PurchasePro.com Inc.

None of the eight of the executives charged today remain with the company, now named Time Warner. Two of Colburn's most diligent henchmen, however, still do. Ron Grant, as AOL's COO, is reassembling a central dealmaking group akin to Colburn's business-affairs unit. Grant and Lynda Clarizio, the new head of AOL's advertising-sales group, Platform A, were recently praised by former executive Myer Berlow for having been "trained in Business Affairs." Some remember Berlow as being part of the problem.