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(SARASOTA, FL) - Jordan Fishman is an unassuming American, the product of a hardworking father and years of toil in heavy industry. At 73-years old, most men would be retired and spending more time fishing than worrying about the future.

But not Jordan Fishman. He can't.

He made the mistake of trusting Sam Vance, a man he had known and employed for almost 35 years. In 2005 Vance, conspiring with others, stole Fishman's family business, his father's legacy and the calm life in retirement the inventor so richly deserved.

Even his marriage of 47 years fell victim to the conspiracy.

For six years, Fishman has fought in courts across the country and meetings around the world to recover what was rightfully his. Vance and the two global businesses he conspired with - a Chinese conglomerate and a Dubai tire distributor - have lost at every turn. A 2010 court ruling found them liable for stealing Fishman's unique tire designs and producing counterfeit replicas of Fishman's unique tires from the designs.

The court ordered the Dubai and Chinese companies to pay $26 million in restitution to Jordan Fishman. Instead of paying, they have appealed the decision to another court, which could take years to resolve.

"They've stolen everything from Jordan Fishman: his business, his marriage, his retirement, his life," said a source close to the inventor.

"It is very clear that Vance and his international co-conspirators are working hard to make sure Jordan dies before he ever gets paid back for all this suffering."

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Louis Fishman worked in the Chicago scrap yard that his father had started in 1902 after immigrating to the United States from Russia. Louis went into the scrap rubber business with his father and brothers in 1937. The discarded automobile and truck tires they collected were stamped into auto parts - gaskets, washers, muffler supports, truck flaps and more. During World War II, the company made boots and re-liners that added life to worn tires.

It was hard work, dangerous work and very dirty work - a hardscrabble living eked out of other people's scraps. But Louis Fishman and Company was already successful by the time Louis' only son was climbing all over piles of tires stacked four stories high. Jordan had picked up his father's workaholic habits at 13 years old; the skinny teenager worked for 25 cents an hour picking parts and hauling 1,500-pound bales of rubber around the factory.

"My father raised us in a small Jewish neighborhood where everybody worked their tails off," Fishman said in a recent interview. "I didn't know any other life."


WATCH THE SMOKE, NOT THE FIRE

In the early 1950's, the family company shifted into molding rubber products as the auto industry moved away from stamped parts. Still, much of the goods they sold were made from the discarded tires stacked high behind the plant.

It was the winter of 1958 when Jordan saw his father worried sick that all their hard work would go up in smoke. Somehow, the towering pile of tires had caught fire and the flames threatened to engulf the entire operation. Black smoke cloaked the neighborhood and the workers fled the yard as Chicago firemen fought the blaze day and night.

"Every day I watched my father watch the fire," Fishman said. "He didn't watch the flames as much as he watched the smoke. The wind off Lake Michigan was blowing in the right direction, preventing the fire from spreading to the manufacturing plant. He knew that the wind could shift any moment, and if it did, the business and our family would be wiped out."

But the wind didn't shift and two weeks later the firefighters had doused the blaze. Young Jordan Fishman learned a valuable lesson that fortnight: keep an eye on the smoke, not the flames.

"You really have to know where things are going, not where they've been," he said.

Fishman was still in school when the fire burned, studying industrial design at the University of Illinois in Champaign. Fishman saw the wind shift in the marketplace, too.

Pneumatic tires had dominated the marketplace for more than half a century - air-filled tires that would often go flat when used in harsh industrial truck applications. Every time a forklift had to be stopped for a tire change, time and money were lost. Fishman and his father saw this as an opportunity.

Louis had an idea, and Jordan designed a molded solid tire and made the first drawing while he was in class learning how to make blueprints. They mounted the first prototype on a trailer and pulled a 1,200-pound bale of rubber behind Louis' car towards the Chicago skyway. The trailer tires quickly got too hot and actually exploded - they were lucky they weren't killed.

The young college student changed the design, changed the drawing and changed the mold. He put holes in the side of the tire to cool it but decided the new invention would only work at slow speeds - perfect for forklifts and other industrial applications.

"Everybody said it was a crazy idea and couldn't be done, but I wasn't smart enough to know that," Fishman said. "So I thought - why not?"

"I made an ugly drawing, got an even uglier wood pattern made and found a small cast iron foundry to make the first mold casting," Fishman said. "I picked up the two raw mold halves in the trunk of my car, took them to a machine shop and had them turned down on a lathe. I had no clue what a mold even looked like but I spent days sanding the rough casting so the tire would look finished."

But the "crazy idea" worked. The solid pneumatic forklift tire replacement was a niche product and it sold like hotcakes. They molded the tires out of scrap rubber at three cents per pound in half a dozen sizes and the product quickly became 80 percent of the family business.

Fishman got married to his childhood sweetheart, graduated from college in 1959 and tinkered with the designs to perfect the products. After his father, a consummate salesman, taught his son the trade, Fishman started to spend most of his life on the road.


"YES YOU CAN, WHY NOT?"

A few years into his traveling days, Fishman went to a West Virginia coal show and met two brothers who had designed a system to transport coal underground without rails. Their three-foot high electric battery carts traveled on pneumatic tires. Their biggest concern: flat tires were a major problem two miles underground.

When the brothers saw Fishman's forklift tires, they asked him if he could do the same for an underground mining vehicle.

"I said, why not?" Fishman recalls. "It was a totally different industry with the same application - heavy loads hauled at a slow speed, just like a forklift. People said it couldn't be done and I said 'yes you can.'"

The tires worked perfectly deep underground. As the mining industry vehicles got bigger, customers asked Fishman to design and manufacture other size tires. He spent years at the tire manufacturers and mold shops of Akron, Ohio - the home of the tire industry - learning how to make a tire.

BF Goodrich and other major tire manufacturers started making pneumatics for Fishman in sizes never made before by anybody. He would show them his blueprints and designs for tires in sizes they had never made before, and then spend weeks convincing the corporate managers and engineers that making the sizes was not impossible.

Soon, many of the tires with industrial applications were invented and developed by the family company. Louis Fishman and Company grew quickly to 500 employees with operations in the United States, United Kingdom, Singapore, Australia, Japan, South Africa, and across Europe.

As the head design engineer and salesman, Jordan Fishman shuttled constantly between all of the locations and recruited employees along the way. One of those employees was Sam Vance, a man Fishman first met when he was traveling in West Virginia. He hired Vance and as Vance proved himself valuable to the business, Fishman promoted him up through the ranks of the company.

The hard, dangerous and dirty work took its toll on Louis: the man who had dedicated his life to the family business died of a heart attack in 1978. He was only 64 years old.

Jordan Fishman had helped to grow the family business more than tenfold, but in 1980 catastrophe again struck Louis Fishman and Company. A heavy Chicago snow caved in the roof of the Company's factory. For four years, Jordan Fishman battled seven days a week to save the Company. He rebuilt the factory, and once again provided jobs to its workers. But the battle took its toll, and Fishman ultimately made the difficult decision to sell the business that he and his father built for a fraction of what it had been worth.

In 1984, Jordan Fishman started doing business again with his own company, later known as Alpha Tire Systems. He moved his family to Sarasota, Florida to start a new stage in their life together.

Vance had earlier left Alpha for other pursuits, but he re-applied around 1993 and Fishman hired him as U.S. sales manager.

American tire manufacturing capacity had started to disappear a decade before, so Fishman and Alpha had to work with plants in Taiwan, India and ultimately China. The copyrighted designs and specifications for Fishman's newly invented line of mining tires were the core of the new company's value.

Meanwhile, Vance participated in the endless domestic and international sales travel as Fishman managed production and looked toward retirement.

"You get a little smarter when you get older. You start thinking that it's time to enjoy life, spend time with the grandkids and start a different stage of your life," Fishman said. "And my wife had endured so much of my life on the road that she was really looking forward to a full time husband."

"I saw what had happened to my father and I knew it was time to slow down."

He trusted his old friend Vance to nurture Alpha's sales relationships with domestic customers and foreign equipment manufacturers. Instead, as soon as Vance found a willing co-conspirator to exploit the designs, Vance stole them.


THE DECEPTION

From 2000 and 2005, Fishman was unveiling a new line of specialty tires. His manufacturing partner, Guizhou Tyre (GTC), ran the biggest factory in Guiyang City in Western China. Alpha was their biggest partner and Fishman put tire molds in the factory and taught them how to make his unique designs and standard Western-sized tires.

"It was a real marriage," Fishman said. "Then, in May 2005 I caught them cheating on me."

One of Jordan's managers at GTC called to tell him that Vance had arrived at GTC on an unscheduled trip. Vance and factory management were meeting with important customers of the joint venture. Fishman quickly called the head of GTC's Import-Export Department, Mr. Mo - a man he had befriended for almost a decade - and confronted him about the secret meeting.

Mr. Mo eventually confessed to the deception: Vance had convinced Mr. Mo to cut Alpha Mining Systems out of the joint venture so that GTC, with Vance's assistance, could sell directly to Alpha's customers. Vance also brought a list of Fishman's customers to GTC and had begun contacting them to offer Alpha mining tires direct from the factory.

Fishman severed his relationship with Vance and threatened litigation against GTC. He or his company owned the copyrights, molds and trade names, after all. His Chinese partners relented, cut off Vance and settled with Fishman.

Undeterred, Vance took illicit copies of Fishman's designs for the new line of specialty mining tires to the Al Dobowi Group, a Dubai tire distributor run by Surender Kandhari and his sons Jasjeev and Harjeev. Vance had several discussions with them and produced a business plan showing how together they could steal Alpha's business; the Kandharis immediately jumped at this opportunity and offered Vance the position of Business Development Director for mining Tires. The Kandharis then brought in Linglong Tyre and Rubber, a tire factory in northern China, to join the conspiracy.

According to InventorsDigest.com, Vance began working for Al Dobowi in the summer of 2005 from his office in Tazewell, Virginia. At the Kandhari's direct request and with Vance's help, Linglong copied Fishman's blueprints to make molds and produce Alpha's unique tires.


This new Al Dobowi/Linglong venture refused to relent and Alpha's business - which had grown into another successful Fishman company with dozens of employees in the United States - lost millions in sales to the new enterprise. Fishman's plans to slow down his life and retire were over.

"It was 1974 all over again. I was back in survival mode, just like 30 years ago - all the endless workdays, travel and aggravation," Fishman said. "They knew our prices and profit margins. Vance gave them my blueprints, my customers, everything on a silver platter. They didn't have to do anything."

Fishman turned to the courts and sued Vance to recover his losses. Three years into the fight, Fishman's wife of almost half a century left him. With the long-awaited retirement no longer a reality, she had had enough.

A Sarasota court found Vance liable for stealing the copyrighted blueprints and other Alpha intellectual property and acting maliciously in doing so. A warrant for Vance's arrest was issued after he ignored court orders to appear and have his deposition taken. He fled overseas, shuttling between his co-conspirators in China and Dubai, to avoid a warrant out for his arrest in the United States. In 2008, the court awarded Alpha $19.6 million compensatory damages and $39.3 million in exemplary damages.

The award was later overturned on a jurisdictional technicality, but the court gave Alpha permission to amend the original complaint. Not wanting Vance to escape liability, a new complaint was filed.

On Oct. 28, 2009, based on evidence found during the Florida litigation against Vance, Fishman filed a copyright infringement and unfair trade and competition lawsuit against Al Dobowi and Linglong in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to recover losses resulting from the conspiracy.

The complaint later added a Chinese and Dubai company that are the wholly owned subsidiaries of Al Dobowi and the Kandharis. On July 21, 2010, a jury in federal court found in favor of Fishman and awarded him $26 million.

Instead of conceding their liability, the defendants have filed an appeal of the jury verdict. Texas attorney R. Ted Cruz of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius is representing the Chinese defendants in the case. In an odd twist of fate, Cruz is running for the United States Senate from Texas backed by the Tea Party movement - a patriotic group not known for its support of Chinese corporations that steal from American companies.

According to a trial deposition of industry veteran John Canning taken in the case, the group plans to continue this conspiracy and litigation until Jordan Fishman dies.


THE WIND IS SHIFTING

The Chinese conglomerate and Dubai distributor are unwise to bet against Jordan Fishman. The slim and well-put together entrepreneur is a genuine sportsman, even in his seventies. Fishman played football and baseball as a boy and until he turned 50. Now he plays handball and golf, but he finds little time for sports due to the protracted litigation. Still, he's healthy as a horse and he says he plans to live a long, long time.

Fishman isn't bitter; he's a remarkably happy man given everything that he has been through. After all this, he's still an industrial designer at heart. "I walk around tapping on doors and walls and touching things all the time, trying to figure out how things are made," he said. "My kids have made fun of me for that for almost 50 years, and I don't think that will ever change."

According to Fishman, the second fire to almost destroy his company is not yet extinguished but the wind is shifting in his favor. He's certain the billion dollar bullies in China and Dubai - and the old friend who sold him out - will get their comeuppance long before he leaves this life.

And maybe, just maybe, Jordan Fishman will finally get to relax, after all these years.