The vision to build wealth: a financial journalist deconstructs the making of a media mogul.

The Billion Dollar BET: Robert Johnson and the Inside Story of Black Entertainment Television by Brett Pulley John Wiley & Sons, Inc., April 2004 $24.95, ISBN 0-471-42363-7

Robert L. "Bob" Johnson became the world's first African American billionaire in 2001 when he sold BET, the cable channel he founded in 1980 with a $15,000 loan, to Viacom for $3 billion. Author Brett Pulley, an accomplished business journalist who has worked for both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, is now a senior editor at Forbes magazine. Like his subject, Pulley is also a black man.

But as a well placed business reporter, he covered Johnson and BET during critical points in the ascent of the mogul and his media companies. Pulley wrote the Forbes cover story ("Cable Capitalist") once Johnson leapfrogged Oprah on the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in America. Pulley understands both the love and contempt BET garnered among the black audiences and also how Bob Johnson's building his empire is a uniquely American story. (He compares Johnson to a "modern-day Citizen Kane.") In just 200 well-paced, crisply written pages that you might be tempted to consume in one sitting, Pulley's tells this compelling story, fully contextualized with critical business and personal details.

Johnson did not cooperate with Pulley on this book, so Johnson's direct voice in this narrative comes only from Pulleys previous interviews with him for magazine stories. The "unvarnished, inside" quality of this narrative originates in Pulley's two years of reporting and research, which entailed more than 75 interviews, some with people whom Johnson had specifically asked not to participate--former employees, industry colleagues, associates and family members, including Johnson's now ex-wife, Sheila, to whom he was married for 33 years. The Johnson he reveals is "a man disarming with his warm manner and charm, but beneath the surface is singularly focused, icy and relentlessly stubborn ... [with] an ambition and fiery determination that burned so hot that friendships were shattered, family relationships destroyed, and hearts broken."

Like John H. Johnson (no relation), the pioneering black media mogul and Ebony magazine founder, Bob Johnson came up from southern rural poverty in the segregated South. He was born the ninth of 10 children in Hickory, Mississippi, on April 18, 1946. By the 1950s, the Johnson family had moved in the rural town of Freeport, Illinois, where Johnson got his early work experience and education. He was an honors graduate of an integrated high school that was 90 percent white and applied to college because of a persistent English teacher. He attended the University of Illinois at Champaign, where he majored in history, pledged Kappa Alpha Psi (and was subsequently expelled for a hazing incident, but restored to membership years later).

He also met the woman he married in 1969, Sheila Crump, the daughter of a suburban Chicago neurosurgeon. As a newlywed, Johnson found a job teaching school on Chicago's South Side to be near his wife, who was still completing her undergraduate degree at Illinois. In 1972, Johnson completed a master's degree in public administration at Princeton University.

He and his wife moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Urban League. He was press secretary for Delegate Walter Fauntroy, the first person elected to Congress to represent the District of Columbia in 1971. On the hill, he learned about the cable business, and eventually was hired away as a lobbyist by the National Cable Television Association. BET was born when Johnson asked a cable entrepreneur who was trying to launch a network for the 50-plus audience if he could take his business plan for the senior network and replace "senior" with "black" and change the numbers accordingly.

Johnson's business life is filled with boldly opportunistic moves like this one, which is what capitalism is all about. He also proved to be a master salesman traveling the country to get cable operators to pick up his service. He acquires critical business mentors and investors like John H. Malone, who teaches Johnson what he needed to know about market finance to take his company public and then to take it private again. In fact, Johnson becomes the master of strategic alliances, forging important relationships with Time Warner (through which he acquired Emerge magazine), and ultimately Viacom's Sumner Redstone and Mel Karmazian, who made hint a billionaire and a Viacom stockholder, but not a board member. Two embarrassing incidents of embezzlement, stubbornly keeping his cable network on the low-budget, moneymaking tip despite continuing criticism of its programming, the uproar over his firing Tavis Smiley all form the underside of Johnson and BET's story. Thanks to Pulleys carefully crafted chronicle, we have a truly balanced view of America's first black billionaire.

Susan McHenry, BIBR's founding editor and editorial director, was part of the founding editorial team of Emerge magazine, which she left when Johnson moved the editorial offices from New York City to Washington. D.C.