Viktor Kožený

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Viktor Kožený was born on June 28 in 1963 in Prague

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He was a young handball player on a trip to France when his mother and stepfather sold their country cottage for a beat-up Fiat and defected from communist Czechoslovakia. Kozeny joined his parents in Germany.

As an 18-year-old living in Germany, Viktor attended a lecture in Munich given by an eminent American physics professor named Marlan Scully, a protege of Naval Research's Dr. Herschel S. Pilloff.

Explaining that he was a physics prodigy who had fled communism, Kozeny waved around a notebook that contained his scribbled "theories."

The professor was so moved by Viktor's story that he invited Kozeny to study with him at the University of New Mexico. Days after Scully returned to Albuquerque, Kozeny appeared on his doorstep, asking for a place to stay and a $100 loan.

Two subjects engrossed the freckle-faced redhead -- women and money, said Wolfgang Schleich, who briefly roomed with Kozeny in Albuquerque and who is now a professor at the University of Ulm in Germany.

"He always boasted about girls," Schleich said. Kozeny also appeared to want a piece of one of the university's grants to study missile defense systems.

He proposed a far-fetched effort to use space-based mirrors to shoot incoming rockets, said Schleich, who concluded that Kozeny knew little about physics.

"The guy was a fake," Schleich said. "He had big dreams and was a big talker."

It didn't take long for Scully to realize that Kozeny "didn't know zilch" about physics. Yet the professor tried to help him anyway, eventually persuading a colleague, Graham Flint, then the director of the U.S. Air Force Developmental Optics Facility in New Mexico, to take Kozeny into his home.

Within months, however, the Czech teenager had run off with the man's wife, Diane Dyer, a 37-year-old mother of three.

"He had a disproportionate amount of self-confidence," said Flint, 68, whose family housed exchange students like Kozeny. "He was a good-looking man, very tall, very powerful and athletic."

Kozeny and Dyer moved to Massachusetts and were married in June 1983, according to state records. She briefly paid Kozeny's way as he enrolled in Harvard University's summer school and later won admission to Harvard College to study economics. They divorced in 1986. She describes Kozeny's expenses as extravagant.

He would graduate Harvard after six years with a degree in economics and a handful of glowing recommendations, including one from Harvard law professor Stephen Breyer.

In the mean time Kozeny married and divorced again, months after fathering a daughter, according to Massachusetts birth and divorce records.