This was a bad situation. We’d been tried and convicted without even getting to testify. When no one at the FCC would even take my calls, I went into near panic. How could everyone in a large federal agency have been unavailable? Was there a kangaroo convention in town?

If this ruling quietly went through, we’d be destroyed. Everything I’d spent years building would be destroyed in an instant and no one would even know. Our lines would just go dead, and our customers would just shrug, think it was too good to last, and go back to using the high-priced monopoly. Good-bye IDT. Sayonara Howard Jonas. Next time, don’t go where you don’t belong and save everyone a lot of aggravation.

But I wasn’t going to go down quietly. No freaking way. If AT&T and the FCC were going to try to eliminate me, they were going to pay for it. If there’s one thing a rat or a government bureaucrat is afraid of, it’s a shining light. Sure, in the dark they’ll tear you to pieces. But have someone enter a room with a flashlight and suddenly they disappear. The press, I realized, was the searchlight I needed to stop any quick back-door deal. Once the press got into the act, we’d have to get a fair hearing. And a fair hearing I knew we’d win.

I called every important reporter who’d ever done a story about us or anything related to telecommunications, trying to convince them that AT&T’s petition to the FCC was big news. Most said it would be big news when the FCC ruled against us. For now, it was just a government filing. Don’t worry, they told me, when the FCC rules against you, we’ll do a really big story with photos and everything. Oh, great, I thought, we’ve made it. The New York Times is going to put our obituary on Page 1. What more could you ask for? Eternal fame? We didn’t care about eternal fame; we wanted to live. Better a story now in the back of the paper about the fight than a front-page story when it’s too late.

I kept looking for a way to make the story interesting. My only hope was the David versus Goliath theme. The poor struggling company versus the global behemoth. I invited reporters to our ramshackle offices just to see what a mismatch the fight was. If nothing else, I told them, it’ll give you a jump on your competitors for the big obit piece.

A reporter from Forbes took the bait and came to visit. The two-page Forbes story about the back-room deal came out a week before the ruling was to be issued. And guess what? No ruling. The commissioners, on reconsideration, decided to hear arguments from both sides before deciding. We’d dodged the first bullet.