CITIZEN CHAMBERS

Until very recently, Jim "Fergie" Chambers was an heir to Cox Enterprises and one of the largest family fortunes in America. With hundreds of millions of dollars on hand, a zeal for revolution, and an innate sense for confrontation, he's becoming America's go-to radical communist

- DAN ADLER

THERE'S A STORY among the Saint Ann's School class of 2002, so neat as to seem apocryphal, that Jim "Fergie" Chambers first learned the extent of his family's fortune from a magazine. In his own telling, when he was around 11 or 12, a classmate showed him a copy of a Forbes 400 list. While Chambers had previously marveled at his grandmother's estate in the South of France with its 75-acre vineyard, only now did he realize that Anne Cox Chambers was something like the 10th richest person in America and among the 10 wealthiest women on earth.

His Brooklyn private school possessed an air of bohemianism. The parents were successful artists, not bankers or lawyers like the ones at Manhattan schools with similar tuitions. Chambers's classmates, whom he'd largely known since kindergarten and who have known him almost exclusively as Fergie, were rich too, and they went off to elite colleges. But as they understood it, they were not that kind of rich.

"It wasn't talked about at all until maybe that Forbes thing," one of them recently recalled, "and even that memory is kind of replaced by the tale. I'm not sure if I remember it or if I just know because it's come up in the last 10, 15 years."

Like many Saint Ann's alumni, this classmate has been trying to piece together the arc Chambers has undertaken in the period since their graduation. It is not a straightforward task, given his facility for shaping the dramatic contours of his autobiography-especially lately as the cartoonish contrasts of his life have become a minor fixation in political media.