Moores says he has no interest in holding elective office, but that fantasy seems to return in cycles.
"In his mind," says Becky, "he thought it would be wonderful to be a senator. But practically, I don't think it would have been a job he could be happy doing."
Moores, meanwhile, hasn't removed himself from the business of business, and maintains 85 percent ownership of a software company called Peregrine. In line with its raptor name, the company has been hiring former BMC software writers who left BMC and appealed to Moores to start a new company.
"These are not normal human beings," says Moores of the software writers he cultivated. "These are really gifted, extraordinarily focused people. I created an environment where they could succeed. And a lot of corporations don't know how to do that."
When former BMC employees began flocking to Peregrine, the management of Moores' old creation didn't view the exodus in quite so beneficent a light. BMC has sued Peregrine in a Travis County court, claiming that Peregrine was setting itself up to compete directly with BMC by absorbing a company known as Bridge Transfer Corporation, and had hired away employees with proprietary knowledge of BMC's research. Bridge Transfer was producing a program that BMC management felt directly competed with its products.
With the former employees on board, charges the lawsuit, "Peregrine suddenly had direct access to the trade secrets that provide BMC with its competitive advantage in this emerging market." BMC lawyers requested a permanent injunction to prevent the former employees from giving BMC trade secrets to Peregrine. The suit is in the early deposition stage.
Since BMC is headed by Moores' handpicked executive Max Watson (who did not return a phone inquiry from the Press), the suit has personal as well as business dimensions. Moores is not named individually, but it's clear he's stung by the action.
"The lawsuit is a pretty ham-handed way to try to keep some ex-employees from earning a living," he contends. "I think they were a little paranoid. They were assuming that it's inevitable we were going to go off and compete with them. Well, we're not, and we'll get over this."
The elderly couple, Irish immigrants who came to this country in their youth, guided John Moores through their small Amherst, Massachusetts home, showing him pictures of their family. The year was 1976, perhaps not by coincidence the same year that would see Moores break away from his life of quiet desperation at Shell and begin laying the foundations for his future fortune. But at the humble abode of Anthony and Mary Broderick, he was unearthing the roots of his past.
The couple were Moores' paternal grandparents, who had last seen him at age three in San Antonio. "There was a picture on the wall of the Kennedy brothers," Moores remembers. "They were Catholic, so there was an icon, a picture of Jesus. And then there was a picture of a little girl, and I said, 'Who the hell is the little girl?' And they said, 'Well, that's your sister.' " Moores stammered, "Beg your pardon?"
After regaining his composure, Moores asked where she was, but the grandparents had no idea. The girl was the product of a second family Jack Broderick had created and then abandoned after leaving John and his mother.
"So then I really had to go to work," says Moores, who had done most of the sleuthing into his past himself, and had been thwarted by the sealing of the records of the proceedings that had severed Broderick's parental rights to John and his two brothers. Moores eventually contacted one of Jack Broderick's brothers, an English teacher on the East Coast, and located Sheila Broderick in New Jersey, where she worked for Revlon.
"She knew she had three brothers, which is more than I knew about her," says Moores, who has since forged a close bond with his half-sister and sees her frequently. "But she had no idea where we were or how to get in touch with us. You can imagine what an awkward moment all of that was."
Moores' search for Jack Broderick did not have such an uplifting conclusion. He found his father running a small print shop in Springfield, Massachusetts. Their conversation was short and strained. The man Moores found turned out to be someone to forget.
"The executive summary," he recalls with finality, "is he never quite got his act together as an adult, and it's hard to feel kindly about somebody who abandons a relationship with his children."
Yet callous acts can yield unintended consequences. That act of abandonment ultimately may have been the spark, the itch, that drove John Moores to refuse to settle for less than a fortune, and then feel obligated to give some of it away for the best possible reasons. And if an act of abandonment calls for punishment, what could be more painful for Jack Broderick than to know the child he once cast away now possesses a king's treasure, but has nothing to share with the man who brought him into the world?
