The Big Kill

So What is Tommy Wu, with his Harvard M.B.A. and his Wall Street consulting job, doing in the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong, waiting for an Arab?

Tommy Wu has no cash, no savings, nothing but an American Express card and a pair of cojones the size of Kuwait. An oil squeeze is on, Americans are lining up for gasoline, and Tommy Wu thinks there is a fortune to be made with a quick oil deal. A Score. A Big Kill. Megabucks.

Hence, the Arab.

It is Tommy's notion that the Arabs are always looking for brokers, somebody to squeeze another dime out of a barrel of oil. In no time, he finds his man, a sheik with an allotment of crude, and the Arab is interested. If Tommy can supply a tanker, he can have 1,000,000 barrels a week. Tommy's cut is 25 cents a barrel.

Tommy then does serious hustling, overseas calls, overnight flights to New York. Through friends--you don't navigate Harvard and Wall Street without making some very able friends--and $50,000 in good-faith cash (don't ask how he arranged that), he lines up the tanker. The deal is set. He can just about smell the 250 K per week.

Suddenly, it is off. The Arab reneges. Tommy scrambles but cannot salvage the deal. He thinks he has been undercut by an Australian. He is out most of the 50 grand. But he laughs, his dark eyes dancing. He buys a round on his American Express card. What a try, what a stab. Almost rang the bell, almost made some real money.

That is no story, no fable. Tommy Wu (not his real name; other identities are changed as well), with his slight frame and irreverent laugh, lives and breathes and lusts after the big kill. He is not the exception but part of a burgeoning tide of Americans big and small, ignorant and wise, who are going for the big one. Theirs is the New American Dream: making big money--not just a quick $4000 to $5000 but 50 K to 500 K overnight.

Says Tommy, "I want to play when I'm young."

Everybody wants to play, from your neighbor who benignly buys lottery tickets to your cousin's lawyer who takes on whopping positions in soybeans. It's not a new or unusual urge but a rampant one, a financial herpes infecting the nation, nurtured on fear and greed, feeding on leverage and bald risk.

Maybe it doesn't come along every day, but so what? Once is enough. One big hit, a thunderous ring of the cash register to set you free. Enough cash in the larder so that you can snub your nose at inflation and the prime rate, sniff at the rent, chortle about your bad transmission, give the boss the back of the hand.

It takes one scoop of chili with all the beans. In whatever form: find it, win it, inherit it, marry it; even, at the very worst, work for it. (That's the Old American Dream, requiring determination, true grit, time: all those Horatio Alger traits.)

The New American Dream, however, says that you simply up and go for it. Right now. Using leverage, wits, capital--say, five, ten, 50 grand--and great quantities of guts. Look risk right in the eyeballs. No chance, no victory dance.

Then pick your game.

The lottery? Get in line. Games in many states and several countries. Weekly, daily, instant winners. (The ads say it's your ticket to Easy Street. Protectors of the public conscience complain that lottery promotions scoff at the work ethic.)

Casino gambling? Prettier girls, better odds (see the box on page 157). Tables available in Nevada, Atlantic City or on dozens of cruise ships.

Stock options or commodity futures? Hosts of brokers would love your account. Better yet, you go to the options or commodities exchanges, rent a seat, get in the pits and make your own trades.

Or maybe you've got a gimmick: a Rubik's Cube, a Pet Rock, a Trivial Pursuit. Or a computer program: a piece of software, a video game.

The list goes on, some items new, some age-old. A screenplay (hit or otherwise; just sell it), a song, a list-topping novel.

Or maybe you've got nothing but misery. So file a lawsuit. Weasel a mil from an insurance company (one third goes to the attorney--his big score).

Or you can turn to crime. Not nasty stuff that blots the neighborhood (though kidnaping for ransom is a seven-figure ball game) but ingenious scams against faceless institutions. Embezzlement, insurance fraud, that sort of thing.

And, of course, there's cocaine. Good as gold--no, better than gold. Ask John DeLorean. Or the man I'll call Larry Forbes.

A few years ago, Forbes was a passenger on a flight from Bolivia to Miami. It was the usual planeload, with the usual mix of tourists, businessmen, immigrants--and smugglers. These were not garden-variety smugglers with gems cached in the bellies of figurines but body packers--people who'd stuffed their own bellies with tiny balloons or condoms containing cocaine.

Some of these human pharmacies were South American peasants who had been paid a pittance and had no idea that all that stood between them and agonizing death was a thin wall of rubber. Others, like Forbes, a young, middle-class Californian, knew all too well, but they had decided to go for it, to take the chance, move the snort and shit a fortune.

Forbes and a friend coated their throats with honey and swallowed 188 balloons. The balloons contained a total of one kilo of high-quality Bolivian cocaine they had purchased in LaPaz for $8000 (the cash advance from four MasterCards). In the States, they planned to sell the stuff for $100,000. "It was our shot," says Forbes.

And a good shot it was, except for one thing: The balloons they had bought in Bolivia were of inferior quality. By the time Forbes's friend, who had flown on ahead into Miami, got to Customs, three balloons had burst. He went into convulsions and died. Forbes made it through the next day but collapsed at the airline counter on his way to San Francisco. Several balloons in his belly were leaking, and emergency surgery saved his life.

Although Forbes was familiar with cocaine, he now claims that he was not a user or a wild-ass dealer. The score was to be a one-time event. He and his buddy planned to unload the stuff and buy an apartment building. "We had smalltime dreams," he says. "I figured I'd go for it. What the hell. A lot of people take chances and this was mine."

In Larry Forbes's scheme of things, the big kill assumed little pretension: I'll never get it if I don't go for it, so what the hell. Professionals couch it in more sophisticated terms: calculated risk, reason, rationale and research. Then they sit back and say, "What the hell."

Forbes also adhered to a rigid axiom of the New American Dream: Play big. "If you go small, you take the risk of getting caught," he says. "If you go big, you won't get caught."

•

There are other truths involved:

Time is everything. A big kill should not be a protracted enterprise; preferably, two weeks to six months. We're talking short-term profit. (There are those, however, who will dedicate two or three years to the dream. They are the big-score entrepreneurs, and they occupy the very upper level of the New American Dream Ethical Hall of Fame. More on them later.)

On-the-job opportunity is limited. Who can score: athletes, entertainers, inventors, creative artists, criminals, entrepreneurs, agents, marketing whizzes, high-risk financial traders (options, commodities), salesmen (especially real estate). Just by the nature of their businesses, they're in position to pull off sales, contracts or royalties that will break the bank.

Who can't score: doctors, dentists, shrinks, educators, accountants, lawyers (except for personal-injury lawyers, lawyer-agents, corporate-merger specialists, recipients of antitrust or civil suits).

Contrary to public opinion, most lawyers, doctors and dentists cannot make the big kill (doctors prefer the word score). They can amass huge sums in little bites--mostly by taking on huge case loads and/or performing costly and often unnecessary services. They are known to privately lament this cruel fact and are forced to hunt the score on their own time.

•

Fritz is a bright professional, a college educator in Ohio with expertise in technological fields. His prowess would be worth a fortune if he were employed in those fields instead of teaching them. In his mid-50s, Fritz remembers the Depression, though it is not an obsession with him. And while he is hardly a purveyor of the New American Dream, Fritz--tired of being so smart but not rich--went for it.

Single and comfortable after an amicable divorce, he got a hot tip on a stock from an unimpeachable source in an area of technology he knew something about. The tip concerned the buy-out of a small, over-the-counter high-tech company.

Fritz did his homework, researched the company and its directors, calculated every imaginable risk. Then he took $100,000--his entire mattress--and bought several thousand shares of the stock. If the tip were on course, he'd double his money; if slightly askew, he'd still reap a 50 percent profit. In mere months.

Then he waited, most of the time in nervous expectation, checking with his broker several times a day. When rumors of the buy-out leaked into the market, the stock began to rise and Fritz was ecstatic.

No inarticulate dummy, he describes the feeling: "It was the excitement of the hunt, the prey in sight, the anticipation of the kill. I felt lucky, even privileged.

"Ordinarily, you make money by working for it. You get a check. You know value. This was crazy. Like Christmas."

Then, for no apparent reason, the stock tumbled five points in two days, losing 20 percent of its value. Fritz panicked, called his broker by the hour, saw his net worth vanishing before his very eyes. His source told him to sit tight, however, that the deal was still on. It provided Fritz little solace.

"It was pure pain. A feeling of helplessness. No, it was worse; it was ugly. Like a visit from the evil gods. All those awful forces that made people laugh at you in elementary school. And that voice saying, 'Fritz, you always lose.' "

Then his source called and told him the deal was off and to get out. In frantic trading, Fritz did, just about managing to break even. But he was chastened and vowed never to do it again. Perhaps, he pondered, the big score was not meant for a person of his generation. A few days later, doctors told him that his white-blood count had soared, indicative of severe stress, or infection.

You may be wondering why Fritz's stockbroker did not dissuade him (though Andrew Tobias has advised in these very pages that that is not the true function of a broker). In fact, brokers, the same people (continued on page 156)The Big Kill(continued from page 94) who regularly witness carnage in the markets, are not immune to the play.

A. M. Bowler is a broker (not Fritz's) for a major New York securities firm. He is a glib, sanguine guy in his mid-40s who wisely counsels and services his clients with all the proven maxims of investing. In his own account, however, Bowler regularly takes wild speculative swings, usually in financial futures and stock and index options. He has made and lost $50,000 at a shot, learning each time, reminding himself that things go in cycles, that what he has lost he will make back and, he hopes, not vice versa.

Bowler believes it is the only way he will ring the bell, and nothing short of death or famine will curtail him.

"You take the most leveraged positions you can take, then play big. You have to put a lot on the line to make it. Small investments won't do it," he says. "For me, it's strictly an investment, not a gambling itch. After you lose, you go back to it. Everything moves in cycles. I regularly play something. But you have to remember that in the past ten years, the whole investment business has changed. It's now nothing but a crapshoot."

•

More truisms:

The road is the same, but the rides are faster. A dollar isn't a dollar but something like funny money because of roller-coaster interest rates and such nifty tax devices as depreciation, amortization and other "ations." Such heretofore stodgy financial vehicles as stocks, bonds and commodities are now open to wild leverage and speculation. (See "crapshoot" above.)

Risk is what you make it. To fully pursue the New American Dream, you have to not only enjoy risk but scoff at it. The what-can-they-do-to-me? mantle must be worn in place of responsibility, liability, self-imposed shame or similar emotional hair shirts. Such an attitude is easily assumed if you are a baby boomer or a Yuppie, those sublime creatures who have known no catastrophe in their lives.

•

Back to Tommy Wu. The fellow who nearly tapped a gusher with the Arab is a study in risk and the New American Dream. Born in Hong Kong, raised in Boston and educated at Harvard (source of his B.A. and M.B.A.), Wu entered the business world, in his own words, "risk-adverse." His credentials landed him a six-figure job on Wall Street by the age of 28. It wasn't enough; Tommy liked to travel and he liked to party, so much so that "at the end of the year, I had nothing," he says.

What Tommy needed was big money. The place to get it, he was told by a fellow Harvard man, was the pits, the commodity markets, that financial Disneyland of screaming and flailing and guys in colored jackets who make millions.

So Tommy borrowed $50,000 from his parents (his Chinese fortune, his mother told him, held that he would one day catch a fish bigger than the world) and a pair of friends. He rented a seat on the Chicago Board of Trade and began to trade U.S. Treasury bond futures. He traded fast and furiously, but he didn't trade well. In two months, the $50,000 stake was wiped out.

At that, Tommy did the only honorable thing for a man with no money and 50 K in markers owed to loved ones: He traded even harder. He scraped and clawed his way back into the black, ending the first year $60,000 ahead. More important, he learned the game. In his second year in the pits, he made a "few hundred thousand," and even more by his third year.

Today he trades in the Chicago bond pit and in silver futures on New York's Comex. But Tommy is bored. By his standards, he's done just OK in the pits. He's now looking toward new deals, new risk, real money.

His plan is to quit the pits--"Real estate," he beams--but before he goes, he may go for the bomb. He'll do so echoing the advice of body packer Forbes and broker Bowler: To score, you have to go big. In Tommy's words, "Do it to the limit, take home hundreds of contracts, tap out big. Hit them for $2,000,000 or $3,000,000 and the whole pit will stop and applaud. Owe them 60 grand and it's your problem; they'll use you as a dildo to pay it back. Owe them six mil and it's their problem."

What Tommy Wu is describing is called An Argentina in the vivid jargon of the New American Dream. Here's a sampling:

The Big Score

The Big Kill

The Brass Ring

Ring the Bell

The Bomb

The End Run

A Monster

Go for It

Not less than $100,000 in one shot--$1,000,000 would be even better!

A DeLorean: "This stuff is better than gold."

Go for the Lear: Drug parlance for making enough to buy a Learjet, which enables you to fly snort in and out of any country

Jump on the Bus (a.k.a. Herd Whiplash): What happens when a bus carrying 12 people hits a pole and 200 show up in the emergency ward

An Oscar Gamble: Named for the Yankee outfielder who parlayed one good year (1977) of a journeyman career into a fortune; also known as A Bill Campbell, A Richie Zisk, A Wayne Garland, etc.

Tap Out: To trade big and lose it all (commodity slang)

An Argentina: A tap-out so big that it's more your lender's problem than yours

A Pet Rock: A fortune from a gimmick, out of business in six months

Hit 'n' Run: See A Pet Rock

Bulletproof: Your condition once you've made the Big Score/Kill/Brass Ring/Monster/Bomb/End Run/etc.

•

The New American Dream, however, is not the sole domain of body packers and wild market players. Ken Rosenblum got his big score to the tune of a little more than $600,000, and he has little in common with Larry, Fritz, A.M. or Tommy.

Rosenblum is a 43-year-old Chicago attorney who wears gray-flannel suits, smokes, drinks coffee, endures migraine headaches and drives sports cars, always with a phone cradled in his neck.

His field is personal injury and medical malpractice. He can give you odds on your misery. A child darter is tough. Elevators are horrible. Break dancing is chancy. Etc.

Rosenblum's forte is medical cases. He can read a medical record, spot a damaged aorta that doctors should have spotted and put a price on it. Earlier this year, he won his first big one, a case involving fetal distress that resulted in a mentally retarded, spastic, quadriplegic infant.

That case consumed Rosenblum for two years and nine months, from the day it came together--"I met with the people and I felt bad for them. I had the case reviewed by a doctor. He told me a mistake had been made. But I still couldn't put a dollar amount on it. It was big. I knew it was big"--to the moment the defendants settled for $1,900,000 (Rosenblum's fee was one third of the total). "It was the ultimate high," says Rosenblum. "I felt sensational."

He believes he earned every penny of it. He had to become a sleuth and an expert, slogging through the maze of medical jargon, lining up experts to make the case. He had to decide on settling out of court or gambling with a jury. ("Would I be a hero and ring the bell for all time? Or would I lose it?")

"It was an emotional roller-coaster ride, a case full of highs and lows. At one point, my expert flipped out on me. I flew to California to get another one--I was in the air 24 hours for a five-minute meeting--just to see if I had a case."

When he won, he called his wife and popped a bottle of Dom Pérignon. The office celebrated. He walked two feet above the concrete of LaSalle Street and bought a finer gray-flannel suit. "I took on a case and shot craps with it. I had the time of my life."

Then he crashed. "I went through a depression. I walked around like a caged lion. I couldn't get interested in anything.

"It does get obsessive, yeah. I still get nervous talking about it. I've got another big one on the tree...."

He claims the money allowed him to become more professional, to take on more challenging cases and not worry about the rent. He has since lost a big one, having invested a good amount of time and money in it. Yet he says that the big score did not distort his values, that he will not cut corners to get another.

"But I do lust after the big one. I am voracious. I am consumed by my work. I have no hobbies. This is all I do."

The license plate of Ken Rosenblum's Corvette reads I More X.

Rosenblum is not alone in his willingness to put in time and preparation for the big kill. Today, though, even the hard workers are likely to turn their backs on the traditional career paths.

"M.B.A. programs have long been criticized for being training grounds for big companies," says Carl Noble, an associate professor in Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management. "No more. In the past few years, I've seen M.B.A.s reject large firms to go on their own or with a small firm."

Part of it is due to a lust for the fast track, Noble says, but not all of it. "There's not all that much security in a big company. You see an International Harvester or a Continental Bank and you soon realize that the only security you have is between your ears."

So believes Philip J. "Tim" Eynon, a 30-year-old M.B.A., native of England, who turned down three lucrative job offers from big firms to take a stab at a dream. Eynon and three other Northwestern M.B.A.s formed Alcar Software and work 100-hour weeks to perfect a software package that analyzes corporate mergers and strategy.

"Those offers were nice--an up-front salary, play the corporate game and five years from now, I'd be earning $100,000," says Eynon. "At Alcar five years from now, I expect to have $1,000,000."

Even as the figure leaves his lips, Eynon is quick to qualify: No, it isn't just the promise of riches; yes, it's the chance to start your own company; yes, it's the chance to avoid corporate anonymity; yes, it's the chance to inject personal ethics into business.

And $1,000,000 is just for starters. "With it, I'd be bulletproof. I could take some chances. Maybe even do it again."

•

For every worker there is a sandbagger, and the New American Dream breeds them in spades. For that we can only blame insurance companies, those faceless behemoths that possess so much gravy.

From "D. B. Cooper," America's first and most celebrated skyjacker ($200,000 in $20 bills), to Milquetoast embezzlers and scamsters living down the block, insurance companies are fair game. The thought of nicking the Good Hands or the Fireman's Hat makes the average mope paying a $200 deductible stand up and cheer. And scheme.

In 1981, a heavily insured 44-year-old man in Kansas City went on a fishing trip to Ontario and presumably drowned. Two years later, he was found in Maryland, having gone through about half the $500,000 his wife had collected from the insurance company.

In Milton, Florida, the mother of a paralyzed 19-year-old boy insured her son for $108,000, then took him on a canoe trip in his leg braces but with no life jacket and pushed him overboard. While the woman awaited the jury's decision on her fate, she was arrested on charges of attempted murder and insurance fraud for planting a bomb in her fiancé's auto a year earlier.

In Freehold, New Jersey, 19 people were charged last January with killing ten race horses to collect $226,000 in insurance.

In San Jose, California, a 48-year-old former Lockheed employee collected $210,000 for the loss of his foot in a motorcycle accident. Investigators then proved that the man himself, with the help of his girlfriend, had chopped off the foot.

If would-be dreamers aren't contemplating bogus deaths, real murders or dismemberments, they are simply saying that they're sick and tired and can't take it anymore. So they just out and out take it, in suitcases, and take off.

One day in July 1983, Steven Hadley, 35, husband, father of two, a ten-year branch manager of the John Deere credit union in Waterloo, Iowa, decided he couldn't cope with life. His solution was to pack $1,300,000 in payroll cash into a suitcase--about 160 pounds heavy--don a wig, leave his wife a terse letter, buy an airplane ticket under a false name and disappear. The FBI is still looking for him.

On the Columbus Day weekend of 1977, someone at the First National Bank of Chicago--probably an employee--collected exactly $1,000,000 in $50 and $100 bills and left the premises. One employee refused to take a lie-detector test, was fired and has been under FBI surveillance. In 1981, $2300 in $100 bills taken from the bank was found in the possession of a suburban Chicago man about to make a cocaine buy. The man was not the bank employee, and he refused to say where he had gotten the money. It smelled, Federal agents said, as if it had been buried. The statute of limitations on the bank theft expired in 1982.

•

It's tempting to consult authorities to figure out if things today are any different from yesterday. The authorities have tidy, if insightful, things to say. Houston psychologist Norman Kagan says the urge to score on the part of professionals is nothing short of the "death of idealism: the notion that developing a reputation as a professional is less important than becoming rich.

"When I was young," Kagan, 53, goes on, "being brilliant at what you did was more important than being successful."

Now he sees bright psychology students spurning academic groves in favor of clinical work. The goal is transparent, Kagan says: to get a private case load and the attendant fees.

Perhaps it's no coincidence, then, that business school professors find their students interested not in growth and development but "in the end run," the block-busting business venture, the overnight success. Law professors see few students entering the practice of law to better society but many pursuing the profession's most lucrative (and, often, most boring) niches. Finally, it is no surprise that modern psychoanalysis has strayed from its preoccupation with the neurotic in order to concentrate on the narcissist.

But the question is far too important to be left to the experts. Ask, instead, a guy like Bill Veeck, entrepreneur, showman, sage and author of, among other tomes, The Hustler's Handbook.

"Yellow Kid Weil would be a lamb today," says Veeck. (Joseph "Yellow Kid" Weil, a dapper, ingenious con artist active in the Twenties and Thirties, once said, "I never cheated an honest man, only rascals. They wanted something for nothing. I gave them nothing for something.") "He'd get creamed by the semilegitimate scams going on now," says Veeck, who made his first killings as a kid selling refreshments to Al Capone and his boys at Wrigley Field.

"Today, making it seems to refer primarily to money. The emphasis is on winning rather than enjoying. We used to say, 'Let's have some fun and maybe make a few bucks.' Now it's the other way around."

In baseball, Veeck's former garden, that means "there are very few Pete Roses or Phil Cavarettas around." But plenty of lawyer-agents. "When lawyers discovered sports, the A.B.A. put up a new building."

Veeck can and will go way back.

"Society until the mid-Twenties was still based on family, not on money. Then things started to change: the flappers, café society. Yet even in the Depression, if you didn't have a job, you were embarrassed. It was a sign of moral weakness.

"Today there's no such feeling. Society owes it to us for being here. The Government owes it to us. We've become more litigious. It's not a difficult jump, then, to want to be rich quick, to make an overnight killing with no effort. Look at the lotteries. The bigger they get, the greater the number of people who charge in.

"I could hazard a guess as to why. Maybe it's because we're less inhibited."

It may be as simple as that. Talk to anyone over 35 and he'll tell you that money was not something his parents talked about in the home. God forbid that you divulge your salary or what you paid for your home. Children who asked their parents if they were rich were told that they were rich in love. Those same kids played sand-lot ball and yearned to be Mickey Mantle or Rocky Colavito, memorizing their averages like Bible verses. Today, kids recite Dave Winfield's salary figures and aspire to the kind of package the Padres gave Goose Gossage.

Another ingredient may be the Sir Edmund Hillary/Mount Everest syndrome--make the score because it's there. But no matter how you explain today's attitude about money, one thing's for sure: The fire is fueled by publicity. Big money--funny or otherwise--dominates the news, in salaries and royalties and in profits to individuals, teams and corporations. Contract negotiations get coverage heretofore known only to the Scopes trial. Movie stars and ballplayers publicize salaries to enhance their worth and their bargaining leverage. Office workers and schoolteachers and cops follow suit. Parade magazine runs a cover article on salaries, complete with names and photos of average Joes. Every citizen knows his net worth, reads The Wall Street Journal, wonders whether or not he needs an agent.

•

Final truisms:

Times haven't changed. The urge to hit it big and feel no pain has been with us since Eve went for the apple. Fear and greed still motivate investors young and old, big score or less.

Times have changed. The big kill is coated with adventure and pure blithe spirits: Nothing bad will happen; nothing ever has. The big kill is underpinned with heavy-lidded fatalism: If I don't take a shot at it, I'll never make it. The big kill relies on cockeyed optimism, the unshakable belief that it will hit.

•

Says Larry Forbes, who carries a scar running from his sternum to his groin as a reminder of his body-packing experience, "I just couldn't see any way it wouldn't work. To be frank, it does work. It's done all the time."

Says Fritz of his stock speculation, "You don't even think of the down side. You put pain out of your mind."

Says broker A. M. Bowler, "If you take a big loss, you know you'll get it back. You live day to day."

And so it goes, cutting across age groups, class lines and professions, all pervasive and increasingly respectable, cloaked in the status of an inalienable right, that all men shall be able to go for the big score.

As Tommy Wu would say, "Ever tell you about the time I sold a half million pairs of Red Chinese shoes to a guy in New York? Wow. Made money on that one."

"To fully pursue the New American Dream, you have to not only enjoy risk but scoff at it."

Figuring the Odds on the New American Dream

lotteries have to tell you they're a long shot; with others, you usually find out for yourself

The big kill wouldn't be either big or a kill if it didn't have scintillating odds--the kind that paralyze widows and orphans but cause friskier souls to salivate. Long and longer, slim and none--those kinds of odds.

Odds are readily available for such legal long shots as lotteries, less so for financial instruments and not at all for such shots as inventions, screenplays and cocaine caches.

Not to worry. With the help of experts, observers, players and actuarial statisticians (a.k.a. number crunchers), reporter Conan Putnam and researcher Jackie Johnson got a fix on just what the odds of the big kill--that is, making anywhere from a quick $100,000 to $1,000,000--can be.

Some of the figures are based on hard data. Others are guesses, but educated ones from experts in the field. As always, of course, you must factor into the equation your quotient of talent, energy, guts and luck--and the likelihood that the Customs agent is drowsy.

Inventions. Build a new mousetrap, patent it, then sell it yourself or to a corporation. Eighty thousand patents are issued a year, and the National Patents Council bets against your becoming rich. $$: unlimited. Odds: 1600-1

Marketing. A doll, a rock, a game that every kid wants; the American Entrepreneurs Association estimates that five percent of 1,000,000 ideas gets marketed; .5 percent of those go gold. $$: unlimited. Odds:

A. Getting off the ground ...............19-1

B. Hitting it big ...............199-1

Screenplay. Going from your legal pad to the screen. Everybody's writing one, but just 14,000 are registered annually with the Writers Guild of America. There are 300-400 movies made each year. $$: $36,000--$500,000. Odds:

A. If all movies were made from Writers Guild scripts (they're not) ...........46-1

B. If they were made from all scripts written (they are), say, 100,000 masterpieces ..........332-1

Best seller. From your word processor to the New York Times list. Forty thousand books published annually (of, say, 1,000,000 submitted), of which 130 hit the list. $$: $60,000--$1,000,000. Odds:

A. Of those submitted ...........7691-1

B. Of those published...........306-1

Hit song. From the jingle in your head to the top ten. Of 125,000 songs copyrighted annually, about 100 make it. $$: $100,000--the sky. Odds: 1249-1

Lotteries and sweepstakes. A new house, a check every year, etc. $$: $100,000--millions. Odds:

A. Sweepstakes (varies with number of entrants) ..........28,000,000-1

B. Lotteries (varies with number of tickets sold) ........3,500,000-1

Casino gambling. The game, the edge--a dollar when you lose, 95 cents when you win. $$: How hard is it to turn a $5000 bank roll into $100,000? We pitched the question to Danny Sheridan, author of the weekly sports-odds newsletter Sheridan Specials. Odds:

A. Craps ...........100-1

B. Roulette ..........500,000-1

C. Slot machines ............2,000,000-1

D. Baccarat ..........200-1

E. Keno ..........1,000,000-1

F. Blackjack ..........1000-1

Financial vehicles. Stocks, options, commodities--requiring knowledge, timing, leverage and capital. $$: unlimited. Odds:

A. Stocks (not for the fast kill, unless you're trading on inside information--a sure thing if what you have is really inside info, an incalculably less sure thing--or get lucky with a new issue)

New issues (quadrupling your money on a $25,000 investment over one year) ..............10-1

B. Options (quadrupling your money on a $25,000 shot)

Traders...............25-1

Public................100-1

C. Commodities (quadrupling your money on a $25,000 shot)

Top traders.............maybe 10-1

Public ...........all bets are off

Venture capital. A hamburger joint called McWhat? You pay to play. The investor needs $50,000--$500,000 to get into a professionally managed fund. Payday can be even bigger. $$: $50,000--$50,000,000. Odds: 5-1

Personal-injury suit. Misery, then a lawyer (one third of the settlement) to prove it. $$: One study puts the average state settlement at $4500, Federal at $21,000. But a top Chicago personal-injury attorney says that of 28,000 dispositions in his county in one year, 20 were for $1,000,000 or more. Odds for that kind of score: 1399-1

Insurance fraud. Rumors of your death are premature; getting caught means jail. Info from Insurance Crime Prevention Institute--you may want to consult a candid underwriter. $$: unlimited. Odds: at least 500-1

Bank robbery. That's where the money is. Penalties: exploding money, FBI tail, death in a hail of bullets, jail. $$: $1500 or less from each teller; unlimited if inside job. Odds:

A. Armed robbery ..............3--1

B. Fraud or embezzlement ..........better

Cocaine smuggling. Penalties include jail, death by unsavory types, FBI stings. For every pound the Feds grab, six reach the market place. Then it gets hairy, but that's another statistic. $$: $100,000--$120,000,000. Odds: 1-6