Roberts shares a brief history of his time at the company, as he sees it. When he took over, he says, “it was clear where the business was going. There was going to be four big holding companies and six niche agencies, and anything in the middle was going to be dead. We were in the middle.” Under Roberts, Cordiant spun off Saatchi & Saatchi back into its own entity, and new financing was generated by selling stock to staffers at a discount. Roberts moved the agency’s headquarters from London to New York. He implemented the strategy of winning more business from the agency’s core clients and announced he had two secret weapons for revitalizing Saatchi & Saatchi creatively: Lovemarks and Peak Performance.

When the subject turns to Burns, Roberts speaks for more than an hour. During that time, he professes bewilderment and hurt over Burns’s departure, insists he tried to make things work with him, and, yet, maintains he did the right thing by suing him. “I always liked Mike,” he says. “I wanted to make this a family, but I was sitting outside of it. I was not the father or even the godfather or uncle or grandfather, and it didn’t work.”

In 2001, Roberts says, he offered to make Burns CEO of Saatchi Australia, a move, he says, that would have given Burns more seasoning. “I thought he could build on his skills in Australia, and it would take him away from his self-imposed baronial fiefdom.” After Burns lost his CEO position, Roberts offered him the position of co-chairman, a largely ceremonial title.

When I ask Roberts why he chose to sue Burns, he grimaces. “I was taught you have to do what is right when no one is looking,” he says. “I believe there has been a breach of fiduciary duty by Mike.” As I say my good-byes, Roberts mutters, “Mike Burns—it must be that Irish blood.”

Roberts’s journey from Lancashire, England, to CEO of one of the world’s largest and most prestigious ad firms borrows from both Horatio Alger and Alfie. Roberts’s father was an orderly at a psychiatric hospital, and his mother worked in a greeting-card shop. In school, he excelled in rugby and cricket, but he “was too much of a rebel” to earn honors like being named a prefect. When he announced at 14 that he would be a millionaire before he turned 30, his classmates laughed him out of the room.

At 17, Roberts fathered a girl with a high-school sweetheart. The couple later married, and the family moved to London, where Roberts blustered his way into Mary Quant cosmetics just as the hip boutique was branching into Europe. Roberts persuaded management to hire him as a brand rep, despite having no experience, by offering to work for six months at half-pay. Quant prospered, and so did Roberts (he and his first wife eventually divorced, and he married a Quant model. They’re still together and have their own children; he sees his first daughter regularly). “It was the first time I had money in my pocket,” he says. “I felt I could accomplish things.”

The Saatchi 17 deny they intended to take General Mills. Their argument is simple: We are not stupid enough to think seventeen people could steal a half-billion dollars in business.

Roberts next spent three years with Gillette, marketing women’s toiletries, before going to work for Procter & Gamble as chief of Middle East marketing. “I learned how products can change the world,” says Roberts, who lived in Casablanca. “Before we got there, they had never seen detergent and shampoo. Lives were changed.” By 29, Roberts had made the million he had boasted he’d make with a year to spare.

In 1982, Roberts went to work for Pepsi, first in the Middle East, and later was named president and CEO of Pepsi Canada. Taking what he learned from P&G, he demanded his colleagues not just sell Pepsi but love it. If you hated Coke, that helped, too (witness the machine-gun stunt).

Roberts spent the next seven years as head of Lion Nathan, a New Zealand brewery, moving the company into international markets including China, with unremarkable results. Profits stagnated, and between 1995 and 1996, Lion Nathan lost nine executives in one eighteen-month period. Roberts resigned.

At about the same time, Saatchi was looking for a new CEO. Kevin Roberts knew Saatchi’s operation from his days with Procter & Gamble, a longtime Saatchi client, and had since become friends with then-CEO Ed Wax. Wax was impressed with Roberts’s energy and brand-love theories. In May 1997, he offered Roberts the job.

Shortly after I met Mike Burns, he invited me to his Greenwich Village apartment, ten blocks from Saatchi headquarters. The apartment is a large, pleasant one-bedroom in a five-story building; he also owns a home in Sagaponack (when Burns left Saatchi, he was earning $1 million a year). As we were getting acquainted, his phone rang. It was the Minneapolis Club, the posh hotel he called home on his trips to Minnesota. “No, I probably won’t be coming anytime soon,” he said. “Yes, you can let my membership lapse. Talk to Saatchi & Saatchi about any outstanding bills.”