Back at the 1990 debt crisis, just when one thought even Murdoch couldn't get any more complicated (the public debt crisis; the equally intense private debt crisis in the Murdoch family companies; the secret BSkyB merger talks; Michael Clinger on the run), in the middle of the tightest spot that Murdoch had ever been in, he was doing another deal. He was secretly negotiating to buy his sisters out of the family company, Cruden. There was a poignant moment when his nephew Matt Handbury came to see Murdoch in June 1991, when both men knew Handbury could have been the News Corp. heir, but also that he never would be. Murdoch's heirs were still in school.

The chapter goes on to look at the way Sir Keith Murdoch's will left control of Cruden evenly balanced, but how Murdoch slowly took it over. The narrative here is interspersed with the only piece of published writing by Anna Murdoch, in which she talks directly about her own sexuality, her frustrations and the future of her children. The chapter concludes with the deal Murdoch finally thrashed out in the early 1990s to buy his sisters out of Cruden. Now how was he going to pay for it?

Chapter Seven: Herb Allen's Porch

We skip to July 1996. Herb Allen is America's leading merchant banker to the media. His media conference each July at Sun Valley, Idaho, is a compulsory way station on the information highway. It's where the big deals are done, where you see all the big animals together. It's all about appearances, Media Moguls at Summer Camp. Vanity Fair made the conference famous. The question is whether the conference means anything, whether it is just another media construct—because the media giants who gather there in 1996 have no idea about the tidal wave of change that is about to hit them. Neither Herb Allen nor Rupert Murdoch has ever touched a computer.

Amid the hype in 1996, Murdoch does a $2.5 billion deal with Ron Perelman of New York, to buy his New World television stations. Perelman has Murdoch over a barrel and forces the price up. Then the focus goes back to Los Angeles, where both Murdoch and Perelman are desperate to keep the deal secret, though for different reasons. Perelman was sure he had screwed a great deal out of Murdoch, but if the news leaked Murdoch might be able to rewrite the terms. Murdoch knew the way that the deal was set up, Perelman was going to lose money, so he needed it all signed up before the news leaked and Perelman realised what was going on.

In the end Murdoch outsmarts Perelman to force the deal price back down again. But in the process, Murdoch puts his own family buyout deal— and his succession strategy for his children—at risk. This is a bigger gamble than anyone realizes, and Murdoch takes it without a blink.

Chapter Eight: The Apple Fumble

Murdoch's other piece of business at Sun Valley in July 1996 was to sit down with Gerry Levin and agree on a deal in which Time Warner would carry Murdoch's Fox News on its New York cable systems. But Levin changes his mind at the last minute, and triggers a turf war.

Murdoch has been trying to get back to New York ever since he sold his penthouse to fund the first leg of the family buyout after the 1990-91 debt crisis. The first battle was for the New York Post, which was about to go bankrupt until Steve Hoffenberg, who had been running America's biggest Ponzi scheme, stepped in with a bid that turned into a spectacular gunfight with Abe Hirschfeld, an eccentric parking lot developer now in prison for conspiracy to murder a business partner. At the end of it, there was only one man who could possibly save the Post, and politicians of every stripe were begging Murdoch to take the paper back. Murdoch won that round, but lost the next one when he failed to convince Time Warner to run his f/X cable channel. So the fight for Fox News unfolded in October 1996.

The fight was already over when Murdoch had to go to Australia for the News Corp. annual meeting, where he announced that News Corp. was planning an IPO for its Israeli encryption business, News Datacom. This turned out to be a really bad idea.

Chapter Nine: Wired

Back in 1995, a News Corp executive had held a secret meeting at the Four Seasons Hotel in London with an Israeli lawyer who said that the old head of News Datacom, Michael Clinger, was still running a huge fraud against the group. News set off on an international manhunt to track Clinger down through the tax havens of the world. Clinger retaliated by offering to help the Israeli tax office with information about how News Datacom paid so little tax. When Murdoch announced in October 1996 that he was about to float News Datacom off into a public company that would be beyond the reach of Israeli law, the Israeli tax office panicked and within days had staged a raid on the News Datacom offices, with a search warrant that authorized them to question Rupert M urdoch. But after the furore died down, nothing more seemed to happen.