They say it was an obvious ploy to get Omaha-based Northern Natural Gas to agree to be bought by Lay's then-smaller company. Rohde says that while Lay may have even bought a home in Omaha to carry out the ruse, Lay was only around long enough to buy "10 gallons of jet fuel" before he pirated what was to become Enron to Houston months after the deal closed.

In hindsight, having the now-disgraced energy giant leave town turned out to be yet another Omaha windfall. Omaha has had its share of them as it blossomed from a town of meatpackers into a major hub of business, due to a long stretch of either good fortune or home-bred competence.

Omaha is probably not high on the list of cities people would name as being centers of commercial influence. It is 167 miles from the geographic middle of the continental USA, so it's about as far away from both Wall Street and Silicon Valley as you can get. It has an air of detachment, with minor league baseball, minimal traffic even at 5 o'clock and a median home price of $132,400 that is rising barely at the rate of inflation. You could buy Buffett's home for less than four shares of Berkshire Hathaway's $83,500-a-share class A stock.

Yet, Omaha has tremendous wealth, industry and influence for being in the middle of nowhere. It ranks eighth among the nation's 50 largest cities in both per-capita billionaires and Fortune 500 companies. No coastal city can claim a ranking as high as Omaha on both lists. Not San Francisco. Not Los Angeles nor New York — nor Houston. Philadelphia and Baltimore haven't a single billionaire between them, nor do 15 other cities in the top 50 by population. Honolulu has no Fortune 500 companies, nor do a dozen other cities among the largest 50.

Size matters

Omaha has:

•Big money. Omaha's billionaires are Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts ($1.5 billion), Walter Scott ($1.2 billion) of Peter Kiewit Sons, and Berkshire Hathaway founder and CEO Buffett, the second-richest man, valued by Forbes magazine at $44 billion. That's more super-rich per capita than even Seattle, home of Paul Allen, Jeff Bezos and Craig McCaw. And Omaha is quietly wooing Bill Gates, a longtime golfing buddy of Buffett's, as an honorary citizen now that he is on Berkshire's board of directors.

•Big companies. The Omaha-headquartered Fortune 500 are No. 12 Berkshire, No. 121 ConAgra Foods, No. 174 Union Pacific and No. 463 Mutual of Omaha. Peter Kiewit, which constructs dams and highways, has in the past been a Fortune 500 company and just missed the most recent list.

Buffett says that when he travels he runs into an inordinate number of people who claim to be from Omaha. "I get very suspicious," he says. "I always suspect they are saying this merely for status reasons."

He jests, of course. Omaha is never mentioned in the same breath as Boston or Chicago and likely would lose a status derby to Wal-Mart headquarters Bentonville, Ark. Omaha, as a business center, surely requires its share of business supplies. Yet Magnus Nicolin, who is on the road 60% of the time as CEO of business supplies manufacturer Esslete, has never set foot in Omaha. Office Depot has four stores in Omaha, yet CEO Steve Odland remembers being there only for leisure — perhaps two decades ago, he's not exactly sure.

Omaha and Atlanta are almost equal in population. Yet, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport boarded 83.6 million passengers in 2004 vs. 3.9 million at Eppley Airfield. Screens in the men's room urinals claim that Eppley is the world's cleanest airport, a small comfort to people like Ameritrade CEO Joe Moglia, a native New Yorker who waits until after 4 p.m. to catch the only non-stop flight to New York, which goes to Newark, N.J.

You can walk 45 minutes in Omaha and see all four Fortune 500 headquarters. You can walk longer than that before you see four men wearing suits and ties. Although Kiewit Plaza plays host to two billionaires — Buffett and Scott — it is generously described as humdrum and sits in a neighborhood of abandoned commercial property and businesses such as Sheri's Show Club, where the sign boasts of topless dancers starting at noon. Omaha did not make Money magazine's Top 100 best places to live in 2005. Schools are above average, but so is crime.

Omaha offers quality of life

Why, then, is Omaha a thriving business center? Best to ask Moglia. It makes sense that Union Pacific and ConAgra, a food company with agricultural roots, have grown up here. But online brokerage Ameritrade is a fish out of water.

Moglia says companies take root in Omaha and elsewhere by pure happenstance. For example, Ameritrade founder Ricketts was one of the first to recognize what the deregulation of brokerage commissions could mean to the small trader. Anybody anyplace could have had that vision. It just happened to be Ricketts, who happened to live in Omaha.

But Moglia says it is not coincidence that as companies grow large and visionaries grow rich, they remain in Omaha.

For example, when Ameritrade became a proven player, it could have bolted for New York's financial district. But a move to New York would have more than doubled its real estate costs. Ameritrade can also pay smaller salaries than if it were in New York, yet give employees a better quality of life, Moglia says. Median household income in Omaha is $49,000 vs. $45,700 nationwide, yet Omaha home prices are about $50,000 less than the national median.

That means a better quality of life for CEOs, too. Commutes are often too short to finish a cup of coffee, says Rohde, who received a $1.2 million salary and a $3.6 million bonus last year. Moglia, who became an Omahan in 2001, has a five-minute commute, leaves the office for his son's baseball games 10 minutes before the first pitch, and says he is seriously considering the city for retirement.

Recent rumors had E-Trade offering more than $6 billion to acquire Ameritrade, which would have meant an end to the Omaha corporate headquarters. But Moglia spurned offers by New York-based E-Trade and rather steered Ameritrade to an acquisition of the U.S. operations of TD Waterhouse. That will create a larger company that will stay in Omaha with $1.8 billion in annual revenue and doing more online trades from middle America than any New York firm.

Moglia says a secret and valuable bonus to Omaha is the Strategic Command at nearby Offutt Air Force Base that oversees U.S. nuclear forces. Moglia is convinced that this is where Air Force One diverted on Sept. 11, 2001, to protect President Bush because it is perhaps the safest, most closely guarded place in the USA. Companies worried about their own continuity in a disaster are by association under an umbrella of protection in Omaha, says Moglia, who is on the STRATCOM Consultation Committee.

'Woodstock Weekend'

There are few downsides to staying in Omaha — Moglia can think of nothing but air service. Union Pacific Chief Operating Officer James Young says Omaha's low unemployment rate makes filling jobs problematic, and recruiting outsiders can be a challenge.

As the airport shows, Omaha is no tourist destination, although the Berkshire annual shareholders meeting here, called "Woodstock Weekend for Capitalists," had 21,000 attendees in 2005, vs. 450 in 1985. Buffett's letter to shareholders, popular among investors worldwide, has plugged Omaha 105 times since 1983.

Berkshire headquarters employs just 17 on just one floor, but its 190,000-employee empire worldwide includes four Omaha firms: jeweler Borsheim's, Central States Indemnity, National Indemnity Cos. and Nebraska Furniture Mart, which covers 75 acres and employs 2,200. Borsheim's competes with New York jewelers. But like Ameritrade, the cost of doing business in Omaha gives Borsheim's an edge, says CEO Susan Jacques.

Other major companies with Omaha headquarters include trucker Werner Enterprises, heavy-equipment company Valmont Industries and Omaha Steaks. Major companies with a significant Omaha presence include Qwest Communications, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen Hamilton and Kellogg, which turns acres of corn into cornflakes.

It's also hometown to banks of customer-service reps answering 1-800 calls, about 40 insurance companies and the College World Series. But say Omaha to anyone over 40 and the first thing that comes to mind will be Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom TV show, which aired Sundays from 1963 to 1971. Mutual of Omaha enjoys 99% brand recognition due to the program, and taxi drivers have told CEO Dan Neary that tourists ask cabs to divert and drive by headquarters.

Ethics is a major draw to new business, Neary says. "I've never dealt with a single company in Omaha that had a hidden agenda," he says. Rohde goes so far as to say Omaha would have a fifth Fortune 500 company if Enron had not gone to Houston. The ethics of the Omaha workforce would have headed off the scandal, he says. If so, Omaha would rank behind only Atlanta, St. Louis and Minneapolis in per-capita Fortune 500 companies.

Buffett, an Omaha native whose father and grandson attended Central High School, says he never thought of moving Berkshire's headquarters. "It was a big deal when we moved from the eighth floor to the 14th," he says.