Magazine content is available exclusively for TIME subscribers.THE CHEERFUL GIVER
Happy is the man who rules his market, especially one as lucrative as Vance Opperman's. As president of West Publishing, the quasi-official publisher of court decisions, he has earned a fortune. And so when his empire was threatened in 1994 by potential competition from, of all places, the Justice Department, he called in a little help from his friends in Washington.
Fortunately for him, he had a lot of those. A major Democratic Party fund raiser, who with his father gave $195,000 in 1992-94, Opperman enjoyed a decades-old friendship with Al Gore and served as campaign-finance co-chairman for California Senator Dianne...
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