One evening in December, I dined downtown and subsequently attended a play with a group. Greensboro's streets were alive with our citizens.

The sidewalks were thronged with outdoor diners and window-shoppers. The stores were packed and the cash registers jingled.

Only the northwest corner of "The Square" was quiescent. Here at Greensboro's Ground Zero, darkness poured from the windows of a 17-story tombstone. What served as headquarters of the South's most successful financial colossus for 100 years has become a granite ghost.

This is due to the manipulations of corporate cowbirds and their adherents who "relieved" the Jefferson Pilot treasury of about $250 million, deeply discounted and transferred remaining assets to a weaker corporation (Lincoln National), and thus executed our beloved company.

How like the law of the jungle where the strangler fig, having matured through the support of its host tree, strangles its host to death knowing that even in death the host will support it.

Stay tuned for revelations of how a brilliant, ruthless, self-serving executive sold the assets of the South's most successful financial corporation to a less successful company, executed the company he had been CEO of for a decade, and emerged the largest private shareholder in the newly endowed, surviving corporation.

Walker F. Rucker
Greensboro
Walker Rucker is the grandson of a founder of Jefferson-Pilot and son of a longtime board member who fought the sale of the company to Lincoln Financial.