Nicholas unloads in email

Former Broadcom CEO and co-founder Henry Nicholas admitted that he did really bad stuff, felt like a liar and was not fully functioning. Nicholas wrote all this in a 1,800-word email to his estranged wife, reports the OC Register. The year was 2002 and his business and professional life were falling apart. "I deserve everything that is happening to me. I just wish I didn't have other people who depend upon me and look to me to be their leader," Nicholas wrote. The email, which has been turned over to the feds but never published, could become a big deal because Nicholas faces charges of drug distribution and securities fraud. The email was obtained by the Register from a former Broadcom employee.

"The worst part is seeing the company falling apart because I am not fully functioning," he writes. “However, I don't care about Broadcom anymore, I just feel like a liar to the people I am recruiting into new positions." In a letter to the Register, Nicholas' attorneys said the e-mail was Nicholas' private property and objected to its publication by the Register. "This e-mail is a communication between husband and wife. …The contents of the email are private to Dr. Nicholas," said the letter, signed by defense attorney Brendan V. Sullivan Jr. The Register is publishing an article about the e-mail because it sheds new light on this influential business leader during a period in which the government charges that, as CEO of a large public company, he was breaking laws pertaining to securities, accounting and illegal drug use.

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In the e-mail, Nicholas writes that he is "potentially (messing) some things up that will be irreparably damaging. Fortunately, those results take at least a year to show up on our financial performance. However, I am willing to lie … to get the key people in place so that I can extract myself from Broadcom as soon as possible."

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In the e-mail, Nicholas cites an "event from hell" at the "warehouse," after which his wife left him. According to the four-count drug indictment against Nicholas, the warehouse was a lavishly decorated retreat in an industrial park on El Camino Real, near his Laguna Hills mansion, which Nicholas created "to distribute and use controlled substances." A lawsuit drafted but never filed by disgruntled construction contractors – attached as an exhibit to a civil suit against Nicholas by another former employee – describes Stacey Nicholas finding her husband at the warehouse in the spring of 2002 "having sex with a prostitute while high on drugs."