Bull Fighting

If Gregory Temel were writing this story, he'd probably use a lot of words like "weasels," "suckers," and "screw-ups." He'd surely poke fun at somebody. And he'd probably throw out a rhetorical question or two, something like: Which side of this gawdawful mess would you want to be on?

As the founder of BeyondTheBull.com -- an often irreverent, sometimes juvenile financial website -- Temel once described himself as the "Howard Stern of online investing." In his daily dispatches to subscribers, he referred to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan as "Greenslime." He picked apart the "piss-poor job" of the financial press. He warned those who didn't follow his stock picks that they'd be "road kill," "crushed like a bug on a windshield."

As he once summed up his philosophy for Crain's Cleveland Business, "My feeling is that people take this stuff way, way too seriously."

Temel, apparently, was one of them. On March 6, 2002, he was found dead at his Beachwood office, a single gunshot wound in his chest. On a table in the conference room where the body was discovered, police found a revolver and gun-cleaning supplies. The coroner initially ruled the death an accident; only later was the verdict changed to suicide.

By then it was too late to abate the intrigue. Temel's company, it turns out, was up to its armpits in debt. Since his death, more than a dozen suits have been filed against BeyondTheBull and its parent company, Executive Day Trader, as investors, clients, and banks attempt to recoup their money. Allegations of fraud, forgery, and false representation now pepper the legal proceedings. Even the FBI has taken an interest.

Such things aren't uncommon when a business goes belly-up, but they usually yield more tangible results. But today, a year after Temel's death, the only thing anybody seems to know about BeyondTheBull was that nobody besides Temel knew very much.

And though its failure wasn't the biggest or most prominent dot-com flameout, it may be the messiest. As one former investor sums it up: "It's a can of worms that won't fit into a 55-gallon drum."

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Those who knew Temel describe him as driven and personable, a "dynamic individual" devoted to work and family. He would usually wake before 5 a.m., so that subscribers could receive his newsletter by the time they got to work. Away from the office, he doted on his three children.

"His kids and his work -- that's basically his life," says Phil Rodopoulos, who started a web development business with Temel in the mid-1990s.

Temel was a self-taught stock picker. He never trained as a broker, never worked on Wall Street. After graduating from law school in the 1980s, he went to work for his father, W. David Temel, who had founded Hospitality Management Systems in 1985. The company managed economy hotels, mostly in Ohio, Kentucky, and Texas.

By the early 1990s, HMS was doing a nice bit of business, but the Temels had larger ambitions. In 1991, they formed a separate company to obtain the management contracts and franchise rights to more than 200 Knights Inn hotels, whose former management had fallen into bankruptcy. Almost overnight, the move put thousands of additional employees and millions in gross revenue on the Temels' books, transforming the family into national players in the hotel industry.

That wasn't necessarily a good thing. In 1994, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation filed a suit against the Temels' holding company -- Knights Lodging Inc. -- in an attempt to collect $24 million loaned to several of its hotels by a failed Missouri bank.

The Temels fought back, arguing that they weren't at fault because the bank hadn't held up its end of property and loan agreements. The move initiated a long battle with the FDIC -- a fight that foreshadowed some of the weirdness that would hang over BeyondTheBull.

In the fall of 1994, a federal judge ordered that Knights Lodging be taken over by a court-appointed receiver. When the receiver showed up at the company's Cleveland headquarters with federal marshals, he found more than the usual array of desks and documents; he found several weapons, including semiautomatic guns and hollow-point bullets.

Things got weirder. A month later, Ernst & Young, the accounting firm designated to audit Knights Lodging, removed itself from the case after an accountant allegedly overheard David Temel say that an Ernst & Young partner's testimony would "cost him his life." Temel later testified that he had actually said he was going to sue the accounting firm "for their lies."

The case dragged on for three years. A judge eventually ruled that Knights Lodging wasn't on the hook for the loans. But the damage was done. The tangle with the FDIC crippled business, and Knights was eventually forced to file for bankruptcy. Temel would later tell Crain's he learned a bitter lesson from the experience: "If the government wants a piece of you, they can own you."