MagicTrick

In the late '90s, Borislow settled down on a $20 million estate in Palm Beach with his wife, Michelle, and kids, Danny and Kylie. Living large in an early retirement, he threw himself into horse racing. He worked closely with Scanlan, who describes Borislow as "probably the smartest, most loyal man I know." But he also concedes the mogul hated to be corrected, even when he was wrong. "I remember a race years ago where Dan wanted me to put $50,000 down on a horse that I didn't think would make it past the halfway point," says Scanlan, who estimates he's spent $25 million on horses for Borislow over the years. "Well, I wouldn't do it. I ripped up the claim slip. And sure enough, the horse broke his leg at the halfway mark. I called Dan, figuring he'd be happy I'd saved him 50 grand. He screamed at me, 'Next time you do that you're fired. It's not about winning or losing. It's about doing what I want!'"

Borislow is equally fanatical about his 15-year-old daughter's traveling soccer team. He surrounded it with the best trainers and, in a move that raised eyebrows even in lavish Palm Beach, flew in top-rated kids from as far away as California to play in tournaments. In 2008, he took the club to the world's largest youth soccer tournament in Sweden, where it went undefeated.

But the lure of making a second fortune pulled at Borislow, and he eventually returned to the telecom world with his next invention: a small device that plugs into a computer's USB port and allows users to make cheap web calls with their phones. Boosted by a campaign of fast-talking TV commercials, "MagicJack" was another hit after it debuted in 2007.

"Dan is very efficient," says Mike Latimore, a Wall Street analyst who notes that MagicJack has increased in value sevenfold, to $450 million, since it went public in 2010. "All his operations are as scaled back as they can be."

So in the fall of 2010, when Borislow learned that the owners of WPS's Washington Freedom -- John and Maureen Hendricks -- were losing more than they bargained on and were considering selling the team, he was ready to make a deal. Late on a Sunday night, he got a phone call from the team's GM and president, Mark Washo, who recalls finding Borislow "open and charming."

Around 1:30 a.m., Washo hung up the phone and dialed the Hendrickses. "I think I've found the guy to save the Freedom," he said.

WPS OWNERS WERE so thrilled to have an investor who was willing to inject new money into the Freedom franchise (Borislow declines to disclose the purchase price) that they rolled out the red carpet. They let him erase any vestige of the old Freedom by moving the club from Washington, D.C., to South Florida and renaming it after his prize invention, MagicJack.

In return, Borislow changed the scale of the sport almost overnight. The salary cap that was in place for WPS's first two seasons had been rescinded for 2011 to let owners pay their players less. But Borislow turned the tables by going on an almost unhinged spending spree. Over 10 dizzying days, he surrounded Wambach, whom he'd inherited with the Freedom, with free agent pickups like Solo, Rampone, Shannon Boxx, Marian Dalmy, Lindsay Tarpley and Tina Ellertson -- all current or former members of the U.S. national team who were thrilled to be making far more than their colleagues elsewhere. (While Borislow didn't disclose his players' salaries, the average WPS player made $25,000 per season.)

Asked why he overspent at a time when the rest of the league was retrenching, Borislow replies: "It is not okay to treat women like crap and abuse them. For some reason, many people think that is all right. The women to a large degree have accepted this treatment. They don't stick together and tell the USSF and Olympic committee to give them what is fair and equal."

Borislow also moved his 18 players into condos in the heart of the luxury corridor off the Intracoastal Waterway. Suddenly, these women, many of whom had struggled to make a career out of soccer and a few of whom were straight out of college, were living in a building with a giant rooftop pool, a private theater, a sauna and, as one player puts it, "the nicest beds ever." On Easter Sunday, he took the team to a nearby country club, where they shared a lobster-and-caviar brunch with Donald Trump.

But if Borislow was building a world-class franchise in his backyard, he was also curiously uninterested in attracting soccer fans to see it. He signed a deal for the club to play at Florida Atlantic University, which had just a few hundred seats, despite a WPS requirement that teams play in places that could accommodate 5,000 fans. He also neglected the team's website, refused to assemble a front office staff and discouraged players from doing interviews.

"I spent all of last year offering him support from our league," says Dr. Joe Meeroff, a member of the Florida State Soccer Association who was eager to tether the FSSA to WPS. "His response was always, 'I don't need any help.'"

It quickly became clear that Borislow wanted to control every last detail of the insular world he was creating for himself in South Florida. He would show up at practices wearing a MagicJack T-shirt, long shorts and shin guards that he announced were "bulletproof" and would scrimmage with the team, often bringing his daughter and her teammates.

"Dan would try to play with us as our sweeper, behind the defenders, and sometimes he would bring his daughter or his employees," says a member of the squad. "We had to play 13- and 14-year-old girls."

Borislow also brought his Philly tough-guy gambler act. According to several firsthand accounts of the scrimmages, he routinely berated his players. "You're f--king idiots!" he screamed at them. One player remembers him shouting, "You're retarded!" In an email, Borislow vehemently denies these accusations.

"Until I got to preseason camp, it was all rainbows and butterflies in West Palm Beach," one of the targeted players recalls. "But the worst times were being with him on the field as he degraded you. I wanted to hit him. All the time."

In his emails to The Magazine, Borislow likened his success at anticipating customer demand in the tech world to knowing what's best for his players. "I am not running for public office. I am trying to do what I think is right," he wrote. "Steve Jobs didn't ask people, 'What do you want?' He figured out what they need. I believe in this philosophy."

That confidence carried into MagicJack's inaugural season. When the Boston Breakers came to town for the team's opening game in April at the FAU Soccer Stadium, the Breakers' coaching staff walked the field and realized it was three yards narrower than the standard 66 yards. They discovered why when the game started and Borislow fielded an unorthodox 3-4-3 formation that placed three strikers up front, presumably to give Wambach more opportunities to score.

"FAU has a beautiful wide field, but Dan told them to make it narrower to help him play that crazy offense," says Breakers GM Andy Crossley.

Three days later, Melanie Fitzgerald, the league's operations manager, wrote Borislow to explain he needed to play on a standard field for the league to remain in compliance with the USSF and fined him $1,000. "I don't ask for a worthless speech from you," he replied after several more run-ins with the league. "Have somebody else respond to my requests and inquiries." He signed the missive, "Your Boss Dan."

On May 12, 2011, he fired off another email to Fitzgerald: "You will be lucky," he wrote, "if the league is still in business by the playoffs."

AS BORISLOW'S RESPONSES grew sharper and the media began picking up on the story, a running focus of coverage came to be whether the WPS could survive its new explosive owner. But behind the scenes, a more complex subplot was playing out. As one rival GM puts it: "The real scandal on that team was that the national team players never stood up for the lesser players."

One of the midlevel players, who asked that her name not be used, recalls, "There was a group of our teammates who got $50,000 for doing four minutes of work advertising Dan's company. And they bragged about it." Meanwhile, he harangued those not on the national team, monitoring their Twitter feeds and taking them on private walks around the field where he told them how "Daddy" wanted them to act. (Borislow denies ever telling players to call him Daddy.) "You are playing with living legends with Christie, Hope, Shannon and Abby," he wrote to the team on May 23. "You have no clue how they got to the top, so I will tell you. They give everything they have."

"It was all just a way of trying to manipulate me for reasons I didn't even know," says a player who got one of the lectures. Adds another: "It always feels good to get praise, especially from a man that powerful. But he changes so fast."

Cat Whitehill, a former Freedom and national team player, says the complaints magnify the often subtler reality of women's soccer: There are so few superstars that the majority of players can be easily intimidated. "A lot of people put the conflicts within that team on Abby," Whitehill says. "I won't deny that people think that. But I have a hard time believing it. I think the national team members never deliberately meant for the other players on the roster to get treated badly. But it does appear that they didn't consider what standing up to Borislow would mean for the rest of the team."

Wambach was unavailable for comment through her agent, Dan Levy. But in her interview with ESPN in London, she said, "When it comes to Dan, sometimes you are going to take some of his punches. I was one of those players. But Dan has always supported me, always loved me."

Indeed, during a 2-0 win over Atlanta in May 2011, Wambach felt emboldened enough to openly argue with her head coach in front of her teammates. "Abby wanted to play one position, and [coach] Mike Lyons told her to play another," says a person who was on the field that day. "She complained to Dan, and 10 minutes later [Lyons] was fired."

When Wambach and her national team colleagues left for a four-week stretch for the 2011 Women's World Cup in Germany, Borislow began to ride those left behind even harder. "That's when Dan really came out of the woodwork," says one player.

After a 2-1 loss to Boston, he lashed out at his players in an email, writing, "I didn't play this sh--y game, you did." But the bluster was tinged with a deep sense of personal failure and frustration. "I [want to] help teach you how to be successful at whatever you want to do in life." In closing Borislow wrote, "I did the opposite and helped create some even bigger losers."

He also threatened to institute five-minute-mile runs that the women dubbed "suicide miles" and required them to take hot Jacuzzi baths before practice. "We would be in there for 15 or 20 minutes because he thought it would be good for us," one player remembers. "It made us so uncomfortable that he thought he knew what was right for our bodies."