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A YEAR AGO, Peter Caserta hired a Long Island public relations firm to get his name into the limelight. The effort failed.
A few weeks ago he hired another representative, but this time the spokesman refuses all requests for interviews with Caserta. Caserta has become so unavailable to the media that, according to a recent USA Today article, he denied to a reporter sent to his Plandome home that he even was Peter Caserta.
Just who is this 54-year-old businessman and why is he attracting the attention of national publications, television broadcasts and some of Wall Street's biggest stock pickers?
If his name isn't instantly familiar to those outside the business world, it soon may be. Caserta is at the beginning of a potential knockdown, drag-out court fight with one of the high priests of American business, John Sculley.
Five months ago, Caserta recruited Sculley to become chairman and chief executive of Spectrum Information Technologies Inc., a Manhasset company that designs software to allow computers to communicate via cellular phones. Caserta, Spectrum's president, hoped the vaunted reputation Sculley had built at Apple Computer Inc. and PepsiCo would boost Spectrum into the forefront of the burgeoning wireless communications industry.
Instead, the whole thing blew up in Caserta's face. On Feb. 7, only three and a half months after joining Spectrum, an angry Sculley quit the company, saying in a $10 million lawsuit that Caserta misled him about Spectrum's financial and legal problems. Spectrum countersued for $300 million, saying Sculley breached his contract and caused the company's stock to fall.
Few people who know Caserta are neutral about him.
"Peter is a very professional man, a good man," said Caserta's son-in-law and former business associate, John Bohrman. "It's just ridiculous that he has been painted as a villain by John Sculley."
Thomas Breslin, president of a Virginia fitness company, takes an opposite view. He claims Caserta took a $2,500 fee, then failed to raise money for Breslin's Ultra Nutrition International Inc.
Caserta always seems to have wanted to make a splash in life.
He grew up in Little Italy, the son of a jeweler who had a shop on the Bowery. He holds a two-year degree from the now-defunct RCA Institute of Technology, yet said in...