By MATT MURRAY and JEFFREY A. TANNENBAUM
MILWAUKEE -- To his fans, Phillip W. Katz was a folk hero of the computer culture, a pioneer who set the standard for file compression, or "zipping." Employees at his company, PKWare Inc., found him a beneficent, if often absentee, boss. Friends knew him as a shy jokester who loved partying and picked up tabs with wads of 50- and 100-dollar bills.
But there was a darker Phil Katz, one only half-hidden from those who knew him. For years, he nurtured a serious, steadily worsening drinking problem. As it deepened, Mr. Katz spent more and more time drinking alone, often in strip clubs. He brushed off questions about his problem and fell away from his friends. Even his widowed mother, when she challenged him one too many times, was cut out of his life. At the office, "it was well-known that you didn't mess with him," says Steven Burg, a longtime employee who left the closely held PKWare in 1997. The tacit understanding, he says, was simple: "Phil drinks, and there's nothing you can do about it if you want to stay employed here."
[illustration of Phil Katz]Eventually, Mr. Katz, while still nominally running the company, embarked on a strange underground life. He stopped coming to work and stayed in touch with the office only by fax and e-mail. Fearful of arrest warrants stemming from his drunk driving, he kept away from his condominium in a wealthy northern suburb and stayed in a series of South Side hotels. In one such place, a maintenance man found the 37-year-old Mr. Katz dead on April 14. He had checked in a week earlier, left instructions for housekeepers to bypass his room and hung a "Privacy Please" sign on his door handle. He was sitting on the floor by his bed in his underwear, cradling an empty bottle of peppermint schnapps in his left arm, with two other empty liquor bottles nearby. The official cause of death: acute pancreatic bleeding caused by chronic alcoholism.
Mod note: Excerpted. Read more at:
http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/CONTROVERSY/LAWSUITS/SEA/pkzip.htm
