Fortune

A patent for a simple medical device has made its inventors, its marketers, and a university rich—which is why everyone wants a piece of it:

“For Wake Forest University, which licensed the VAC patents to KCI, the device has meant about $500 million in royalties. Based almost entirely on the VAC deal, the university was ranked fifth by the Association of University Technology Managers in its most recent survey of licensing income, trailing only Columbia, New York University, Northwestern, and the University of California system. In recent years the KCI payments have propped up the bottom line of the university’s medical center, and the VAC money has paid for research, recruiting, and construction that probably wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

“As you might imagine, all that success gave KCI and Wake Forest a powerful incentive to build a fence, to protect the patents at all cost. And it gave everybody else an equally powerful incentive to find a way through the fence.

“This is the story of what happens when there are billions of dollars wrapped up in a prosaic piece of technology that at its core is closer to your kid’s science-fair entry than the Human Genome Project, one that despite all the commercial success and some 4 million or so patients still has its share of doubters in the medical community. It’s a story about luck and timing and the squeezing of the health care dollar. It is about betrayal and wrangling over patents. And mostly it is about invention, the tenuous and uncertain act of breathing life into an idea that may or may not have been yours all along.”

An investigation into how the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) became accused of intentionally allowing American firearms to get into the hands of Mexican drug cartels:

“Voth grew deeply frustrated. In August 2010, after the ATF in Texas confiscated 80 guns—63 of them purchased in Arizona by the Fast and Furious suspects— Voth got an e-mail from a colleague there: ‘Are you all planning to stop some of these guys any time soon? That’s a lot of guns…Are you just letting these guns walk?’

“Voth responded with barely suppressed rage: ‘Have I offended you in some way? Because I am very offended by your e-mail. Define walk? Without Probable Cause and concurrence from the USAO [U.S. Attorney’s Office] it is highway robbery if we take someone’s property.’ He then recounted the situation with the unemployed suspect who had bought the sniper rifle. ‘We conducted a field interview and after calling the AUSA [assistant U.S. Attorney] he said we did not have sufficient PC [probable cause] to take the firearm so our suspect drove home with said firearm in his car…any ideas on how we could not let that firearm “walk”‘?”

Nearly one year after taking over for Steve Jobs, a report card for the new CEO. The company has never been more efficient, or fun, but some are wondering about the future of the products:

“The ultimate ‘tell’ of tectonic changes at Apple will be the quality of its products. Those looking for deficiencies have found them in Siri, a less-than-perfect product that Apple released with the rare beta label in late 2011, a signal that the service shouldn’t be viewed as fully baked. Siri’s response time has been slow, meaning the servers and software powering it are inadequate. ‘People are embarrassed by Siri,’ says one former insider. ‘Steve would have lost his mind over Siri.’

“Obviously, no one can say for sure how Steve Jobs would have reacted to anything that’s going on at Apple, and Cook seems increasingly comfortable leading the company where he thinks it should be going. Jobs was opposed to dividends and stock buybacks, for example. Yet Cook repeatedly prepared investors for a coming dividend by stating publicly that he had no ‘religious’ opinion about them. Apple announced on March 19 that it would begin paying a quarterly dividend of $2.65 a share and buy back $10 billion worth of stock.”

Inside the boardroom battles that led to the hiring (and firing) of CEO Léo Apotheker, formerly of SAP. Meg Whitman is now in charge of finding ways to fix the legendary tech company:

“A few months after she took over as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard last September, Meg Whitman held one in a series of get-to-know-you meetings with employees. To say the audience, a group of software engineers and managers, was sullen would be an understatement. As Whitman spoke, many of them glared at her. Others weren’t making eye contact with their new boss. Their heads were down, and they were tapping furiously on handheld devices.

“‘Your comments are being live-blogged,’ one employee told her defiantly. Whitman challenged the man. ‘You all have taken leaking to a new art form,’ she said. ‘It’s a sign of an unhappy company. You wish HP ill.’ The tapping suddenly stopped, and as the room fell silent, the mobile devices were lowered.”

A look back at the wine industry in the United States shortly after the end of Prohibition. Wine consumption was growing, but it was unclear whether American companies could compete:

“Since repeal became imminent the U.S. has been flooded with wine propaganda. In every metropolitan newspaper, experts have conducted daily columns on the art of wine drinking. Makers of the variously shaped glasses from which one drinks hock and Sauternes and Burgundy have done a boom-time business. The Marquise de Polignac, whose husband makes French champagne, has been repeatedly interviewed. The propaganda has been paid for by the French wine interests and by California’s. (The French are now feeling pretty glum about their quota.) But however it started, it has made the drinking and serving of wine, for the moment, as much a fad as was the cross-word puzzle or mah jong. So U.S. wines have a market worth competing for, an opportunity which may not come again for many, many years.”

An investigation of the many scams of Minkow—who goes from prison, to church, and then back to prison:

“Minkow was the boy-wonder business phenom of the 1980s. In 1982, at age 16, he started ZZZZ Best, a carpet-cleaning company, from his parents’ garage in Reseda, Calif., in the San Fernando Valley. The business expanded rapidly and went public in 1986, making Minkow, at age 20, worth more than $100 million on paper. But it was a giant Ponzi scheme and collapsed in May 1987. Minkow was convicted of 57 federal felonies, sentenced to 25 years, and ordered to pay $26 million in restitution. …

“The story of Minkow’s life is comic, tragic, and psychologically perplexing. Minkow is blessed with intelligence, courage, indomitable drive, rhetorical gifts, an apparent desire to do good, and a record of documented beneficent deeds. Yet he also keeps doing ghastly things. His story is hard to read without pondering the question, Is character destiny? More narrowly, can a con man ever be redeemed?”

Tim Cook arrived at Apple in 1998 from Compaq Computer. He was a 16-year computer-industry veteran – he’d worked for IBM (IBM, Fortune 500) for 12 of those years – with a mandate to clean up the atrocious state of Apple’s manufacturing, distribution, and supply apparatus. One day back then, he convened a meeting with his team, and the discussion turned to a particular problem in Asia. “This is really bad,” Cook told the group. “Someone should be in China driving this.” Thirty minutes into that meeting Cook looked at Sabih Khan, a key operations executive, and abruptly asked, without a trace of emotion, “Why are you still here?”

On this Memorial Day weekend, travel back to August 1938 to New York City’s Coney Island on a hot summer Sunday. The article profiles the narrow strip of land where Brooklyn meets the Atlantic and thousands of New Yorkers still pour out of the subway to eat hot dogs, ride roller coasters, visit bathhouses and watch freak shows. This was during the Depression, when Coney Island was struggling to survive as the “empire of the nickel.”

To Hannam, chairman of J.P. Morgan Capital Markets, Afghanistan represents a gigantic, untapped opportunity — one of the last great natural-resource frontiers. Landlocked and pinioned by imperial invaders, Afghanistan has been cursed by its geography for thousands of years. Now, for the first time, Hannam believes, that geography could be an asset. The two most resource-starved nations on the planet, China and India, sit next door to Afghanistan, where, according to Pentagon estimates, minerals worth nearly $1 trillion lie buried.

There’s no shortage of drama at Twitter these days: Besides the CEO shuffles, there are secret board meetings, executive power struggles, a plethora of coaches and consultants, and disgruntled founders. (Like Evan Williams. The day after Jack Dorsey announced his return to the company — via tweet, naturally — Williams quit his day-to-day duties at the company, although he remains a board member and Twitter’s largest shareholder, with an estimated 30% to 35% stake.) These theatrics, which go well beyond the usual angst at a new venture, have contributed to a growing perception that innovation has stalled and management is in turmoil at one of Silicon Valley’s most promising startups.