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By Root 3251 0

came to Buffalo to fend off the charge of monopolist-as-liquidator, part of a team Munger had assembled from Los Angeles. Olson filed an affidavit that spoke of his client’s love of newspapers beginning with his inky-fingered childhood, and his role in the Sun’s Pulitzer Prize. The Courier-Express, meanwhile, had tried to be so clever as to run a flattering profile of every judge who might be chosen for the trial, “to suck up to the judge.”23 The case ended up being tried by one they missed. Still, fortune nonetheless favored the Courier-Express in the assignment of federal judge Charles Brieant of the Southern District of New York. Buffett had always prided himself on being able to size up a business very fast, from its balance sheet alone. In his first appearance in court in Buffalo, the Courier-Express’s lawyer, Furth, portrayed Buffett as someone who knew little of the Buffalo Evening News, having never inspected its plant and having failed to hire consultants to study the paper before buying it. Furth accused Buffett of having discussed whether the News would put the Courier-Express out of business, which Buffett denied. Furth approached the witness stand waving a copy of a recent, glowing Wall Street Journal profile of Buffett. His growing fame was about to be used against him as a weapon for the first time.24 Buffett had told the reporter how glad he was to be out of money management, his ego no longer on the line. But, in fact, with his newly heightened profile, his ego was now more on the line than ever before. In this story, his friend Sandy Gottesman had been quoted by the reporter as saying, “Warren likens owning a monopoly or market-dominant newspaper to owning an unregulated toll bridge. You have relative freedom to increase rates when and as much as you want.”25

Had he said this? Furth demanded in court.

No, well, Buffett responded, “whether it is like a toll bridge I don’t remember, but it is a great business. It may be better than a toll bridge in Fremont, Nebraska. I know a lot of honest people, but when they start giving quotes they don’t necessarily get them—”

Furth bore down. Did he believe it or not?

“I won’t quarrel with that characterization…. I would like to own one…. I have said in an inflationary world that a toll bridge would be a great thing to own if it was unregulated.”

“Why?” asked Furth.

Buffett looked at the judge, to whom he was trying to teach economics. “Because you have laid out the capital costs. You build the bridge in old dollars, and when there is inflation, you don’t have to keep replacing it—a bridge you build only once.”

“And you used the term ‘unregulated’ so that you can raise prices; is that right?”

“That is true.”26

Buffett now hung twisting in a net of his own weaving. A toll bridge, the Douglas Street Bridge over the Missouri River, was, in fact, a prominent feature of his youth.27 During Buffett’s childhood, Omaha had been torn for more than a decade over how to liberate the only route to Iowa from the toll-taker’s grasp. He and Munger later tried to buy the Detroit International Bridge Company, which owned the bridge that connected Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, but wound up with only twenty-four percent of the company.28

“It was one hell of a bridge. A thousand square feet, and it made more money…I was terribly disappointed when we didn’t get it. Charlie kept telling me how well off we were that we didn’t get it. Because, he said, what could be worse for your image than a guy who raised the prices on a toll bridge?”

Indeed.

“The judge didn’t like me. For one reason or another, he just didn’t like me. He didn’t like our lawyers either. Most people like Ron Olson, but the judge did not like Ron.”

Judge Brieant’s ruling on a preliminary injunction, which was issued in November 1977, said that the Evening News was perfectly within its rights to start a Sunday paper and it was in the public interest that it should do so. But Brieant, apparently taken with Furth’s exploitation of the toll-bridge theme, took off with it on a flight to the land of metaphor, lamenting