COLORADO New leadership in a new state aims to revive bankrupt Adelphia

The company's goal is to become a broadband leader.
GREENWOOD VILLAGE, Colo. (AP) -- Halfway across the country from a New York courthouse where the founders of Adelphia Communications Corp. will be tried on fraud charges, the company is in the middle of a swift turnaround.
Chief executive Bill Schleyer and chief operating officer Ron Cooper, who arrived a year ago, say they expect Adelphia to be ready to emerge from Chapter 11 this summer, two years after the company was plunged into scandal and forced to undergo bankruptcy reorganization.
Founder John Rigas, two of his sons and a fourth former executive have pleaded innocent to conspiracy and fraud charges stemming from an alleged scheme from 1999 to 2002 to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from the company. Prosecutors say the scam cost investors more than $60 billion.
Fast changes
While prosecutors prepared their case, Schleyer and Cooper wasted no time in moving Adelphia's headquarters from Coudersport, Pa., to this Denver suburb to take advantage of the high-tech and telecommunications-trained work force in the area.
They decentralized a tightly controlled, family-run behemoth into regions and recruited their own management team. The executives also put the company's missions on paper, drafted an ethics policy and set up a whistleblower hotline.
The former board of directors is gone, and Adelphia probably will change its name in an effort to shed its past. "I would say we're strongly leaning toward it," Schleyer said.
Bankruptcy expert David Skeela, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, said all this is critical in distancing the new managers from Adelphia's tainted past.
"It's not going to be a family fiefdom coming out of bankruptcy," Skeela said.
After arriving, Schleyer and his team dove into upgrading the company's cable network, restating three years of financial results and reorganizing Adelphia's debt so it could emerge from bankruptcy able to compete in the crowded cable, satellite and telecom industries.
They say their goal is to turn the nation's fifth-largest cable company, with 5.3 million cable subscribers in more than 30 states, into a broadband leader.
"A lot of people thought Adelphia would be swallowed up piecemeal," said Bill Brandt, a corporate restructuring expert and head of Development Specialists Inc. in Chicago. "The fact that they're not speaks volumes about the two people they brought in."
Schleyer and Cooper, both cable-industry veterans, have worked together three times before, most recently at AT & amp;T Broadband. With Adelphia, they faced their biggest task.
In 2002, the company revealed it had guaranteed $2.3 billion in debts incurred by the Rigas family (the number has since been pegged at $2.8 billion). Schleyer, Cooper and new chief financial officer Vanessa Wittman, fresh from helping lead telecom company 360networks out of bankruptcy, found not only questionable accounting but years of poor management.
"What we found was far worse than what we anticipated," Schleyer said.
Profit margins, average revenue per subscriber and technology were far behind peers such as Comcast Corp. and Time Warner Cable. Wittman quickly helped land $1.5 billion in financing for upgrades to help Adelphia catch up.
Winning workers over
The new managers also had to gain the trust of workers.
"They came into the worst of possible worlds," Brandt said. "Not only was there a bankruptcy, where management was being turned out under a cloud, it was a family-run business where you have all this loyalty to the family."
Even today, many in Coudersport still think highly of the Rigases. Some have derided pay packages for Cooper and Schleyer that could give them nearly $41 million over three years if the company performs well.
Still, Tom Lamb, the company's vice president of information technology, said he was impressed when Cooper spent a Sunday taking questions and shaking hands at an annual Coudersport picnic. Cooper also made 40 visits to the field to spread Adelphia's mission to be a broadband leader.
Rob Robb, a marketing vice president, remembers thinking, "Wow, these guys really know their stuff."
"They know every aspect of the business, from human resources to marketing to engineering," said Robb, who worked under the Rigases and now works in Colorado. "I could see from the get-go that the company was moving in the right direction."
About 1,200 of the 1,400 employees who worked in Adelphia buildings dotting Coudersport remain there, providing shared services such as accounting and payroll.
The move to Greenwood Village, near the cable hub of Denver, was to help attract executives who might have balked at moving to remote Coudersport. In all, the company employs about 14,000 people.