Allen Andersson made a fortune. Three times. Richer each time, and ever less interested in being rich. It's almost all evaporated now, more than $300 million, but Andersson still sits smiling in the Washington manse he can no longer afford. He blew his dough on things that make him happy and that he thought would make the world a better place, not on ephemeral luxuries -- look no further than the weary, 15-year-old black Honda Accord with the coat hanger for an antenna that he drives, when it's cooperating. Instead, this 'serial entrepreneur,' inventor, investor, math whiz and philanthropist plopped hundreds of millions -- don't ask him exactly how many because 'I don't like numbers,' he confesses -- into intriguing but commercially dubious scientific research that thrilled his mind. He poured tens of millions more into building libraries for the poor in Central America, a vast charitable enterprise that he now hopes other foundations will help prop up because his business empire has been crippled by poorly performing investments and the credit crisis. And then, there's one of his all-time favorite multimillion-dollar gambits, the time he played presidential kingmaker in Honduras ... and won. Barely noticed outside Tegucigalpa, Andersson assumed a key -- many say decisive -- offstage role in the 2005 election of Manuel 'Mel' Zelaya, the recently deposed president of Honduras. As Honduras convulsed this month over Zelaya's ouster in a military coup, Andersson spoke for the first time about what he proudly describes as the 'shenanigans' he orchestrated in the final days of the 2005 upset. It is a saga sprinkled with heaps of cash, private detectives, sting operations, attack ads, internecine squabbles and Andersson's epic grudge against Zelaya's wealthy, dashing opponent, Porfirio 'Pepe' Lobo, whose last name means 'wolf' in Spanish. In short, Andersson had a blast. 'I just had a taste of blood in my mouth,' he says, suddenly bringing his right fist onto a glass coffee table. 'My mission was not to avoid poverty or bankruptcy or disgrace; my mission was to beat Pepe Lobo.' -- -- -- Allen Andersson, 6-feet-2 , walks with a shambling, loose-limbed gait, speaks softly and laughs at himself constantly. At 64, the native of Cape Cod, Mass., calls himself 'an imperfectly socialized person.' He has globe-trotted with celebrities, but is so oblivious to pop culture -- he went several decades without owning a television -- that he has no idea why they are famous. For much of the decade, Andersson has been gleefully distributing his winnings in Central America from his early-2000s investment in Amylin Pharmaceuticals, a tiny company with innovative diabetes research that caught his eye when he was evaluating drug treatments for his diabetic daughter, Rachel, now 24.) The 65 libraries he built in Guatemala and Honduras thrived as mini-community centers. But he had even grander plans. 'I thought I had discovered a way of really multiplying value in science,' says Andersson. 'I decided that if I could make a couple billion dollars, I could do truly revolutionary things in Central America.' Honduras was a logical starting point. Andersson had served for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tegucigalpa in the 1960s when, he says, he was 'a very, very serious draft dodger.' After leaving Honduras and finishing up at MIT, Andersson tried working as an engineer but had a habit of getting himself canned. He struck it rich in the 1980s, inventing an early word-processing system. From there, he tinkered with various projects until he finally made about $50 million in the early 1990s from the stock he got for selling his software company, which had developed a system for connecting phone networks to the Internet, to Cisco. Yearning to do philanthropy on a massive scale, he called Robert White, head of the Washington-based Center for International Policy, himself a maverick whom President Ronald Reagan had booted as U.S. ambassador to El Salvador after White tried to negotiate a peace in the civil war there. 'He said, `I'm immensely rich, and I want to spend money bringing democracy to Central America,' ' White recalled. 'He kept saying, `Think big. Spend, spend, spend.' ' Big, they would eventually decide, meant the presidency of Honduras. -- -- -- The 2005 Honduran election pitted Mel Zelaya, the leftist son of a well-heeled businessman, against front-runner Pepe Lobo, president of the Honduran congress. Lobo was the former head of the national forestry agency in a country plagued by illegal logging of precious hardwoods. Andersson suspected Lobo had surreptitiously condoned illegal logging that had decimated indigenous communities. Bladimir Baca, a top Lobo aide, vigorously disputed those claims in a telephone interview from Honduras, saying Lobo's business interests have been primarily centered on food crops and not timber. In the months before the election, White says, he met with Zelaya and extracted promises from the candidate to crack down on illegal logging and to improve human rights. By then, Andersson was already deep into his 'shenanigans.' Believing the Honduran media to be almost completely controlled by various oligarchs, he took over the small newspaper El Libertador and encouraged tough stories about Lobo. He hired a U.S. polling firm, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, and funded private-eye forays in Honduras by the Environmental Investigation Agency, a nongovernmental organization that had ferreted out illegal loggers in Asia. One EIA agent posing as a lumber buyer secretly videotaped a meeting in Miami with a Honduran congressional candidate, Gilma Noriega, and her father, lumber dealer Guillermo Noriega. On the tape, Gilma Noriega says payoffs to government officials can be made to ensure a steady flow of lumber, and brags that their business will be protected if her father's best friend, Lobo, is elected. 'Pepe Lobo will be our savior,' Guillermo Noriega says on the tape. Andersson thought this was his smoking gun. But EIA didn't want to give him the tape. EIA Executive Director Alexander von Bismarck says in a recent interview that he hadn't initially been aware that their work would be used in a political context related to the 2005 election. He also feared for the lives of staffers involved in the sting, as well as activists in Honduras, if the tape was made public. Andersson fumed, accusing the agency's officials of being 'cowardly' -- 'Sam Spade wouldn't run away,' he recalls telling them. Ultimately, the agency refused to turn over a high-quality version, which Andersson says amounted to theft. El Libertador did get and use a low-quality copy and pounded the illegal logging story on its front pages, but other media refused to pick up the story. In the final weeks before the election, Andersson booked at least $200,000 of advertising time on Honduran television networks and saturated the airwaves with the EIA tape. Ultimately, Andersson estimates, he spent $2 million trying to influence the election's outcome. Zelaya, once a long-shot, squeaked into office. More importantly for Andersson, Lobo lost. -- -- -- But Zelaya struggled as president, alienating his base by cultivating leftist allies, such as Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia. With Honduras mired in poverty and crime, Zelaya tried to circumvent the supreme court and pushed for a referendum on whether the constitution should be changed to allow him to serve a second term. He was ousted on June 28. His American sponsor offered no sympathy, saying Zelaya 'has been such a lazy, ineffective and clownish jerk that I almost regret it sometimes.' Andersson 'would call and say, `Is it too much to ask to have prosperity and democracy by the time I'm 72?' ' recalled Matthew Colburn, who headed the investor's foundation in Honduras until the money ran out last year. Andersson had had a Midas touch with Amylin, making more than $200 million on a $6.2 million investment. But his investment firm -- Paperboy Ventures, so named because he delivered newspapers while growing up poor on Hyannis Port -- foundered. He lost bundles on lupus drugs and electric-bicycle motors. He points out that he goes for 'the big scores,' investing in companies in search of future capital gains, rather than current profits. 'He is in a league by himself for being tolerant of uncertainty,' says his friend Joseph Cook, Amylin's former chief executive officer. 'He does not exist for the money. He's truly interested in serving others rather than himself.' Which made the call Andersson made last year all the tougher. After donating $5 million over half a decade to fund Central American initiatives, Andersson says, he had to tell White 'the party's over.' There would be no meddling in this November's Honduran presidential election, even though Lobo has returned as a leading candidate. 'Allen's a riverboat gambler. It's amazing how people who are supposed to be intelligent can do the stupidest things,' White says. 'He deserves great credit for having the imagination and the generosity to use his wealth for the benefit of this poor country. It's really a tragedy that he lost all that money.' But Andersson's wife, Susan Riecken, says she won't miss the big house and bank accounts, as the couple and their teenage daughter, Nell, make plans to repair to a New Hampshire cabin. Maybe this is, as Andersson's associates suggest, just a pause until he makes his next fortune. Paperboy, though staggering, owns a stake in numerous companies -- one turns sewage into fuel, another converts fish heads and scales into amino acids -- and any one of them could suddenly soar in value. Or not. 'I absolutely don't know what the future holds,' says Andersson. 'I don't know what our properties are worth. I don't know what our true balance sheet looks like. We could come out of this wealthy; we could come out of it broke.' If he conjures another fortune, however, he knows one place he'll spend it: the Republic of Honduras. 