(page 3 of 8) In a Halloween ritual at the company, employees would gather in a courtyard while Mr. Reyes stood on a chair, made a speech about the need to smash the competition, then took a baseball bat and shattered a pumpkin with "McData" carved on it. Another Reyes specialty: He sometimes startled staffers by chewing tobacco during meetings and spitting into a Styrofoam cup or empty mineral water bottle. Mr. Reyes's lawyer says his client never personally benefited from options practices that have been questioned. "Financial gain is always the motive in securities fraud cases, and here, there was none," said the lawyer, Richard Marmaro. "There is not even an allegation of self-enrichment. Nor is there any evidence of criminal intent." Mr. Reyes received several of his own options grants on highly favorable days, raising a question whether the dates might have been manipulated. One grant was dated Oct. 1, 2001, when Brocade closed at its lowest point of the year, after the Sept. 11 terror attacks had hurt the entire market. Two other awards to Mr. Reyes came at monthly stock lows. Mr. Reyes said the board's compensation committee chose the dates, not him. Two members of the committee in that period, Neal Dempsey and Seth D. Neiman, didn't return calls. Records show Mr. Reyes never exercised any options he received after the company went public in 1999, though he sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shares received before the Brocade initial public offering. Mr. Reyes spent much of his boyhood in Silicon Valley in a family of high-tech entrepreneurs. His father, Gregorio Reyes, had left Cuba in 1958 to study engineering in the U.S. and became a highly successful tech executive. An uncle, George Reyes, is Google Inc.'s chief financial officer. The younger Mr. Reyes arrived at Brocade in mid-1998 as its new 35-year-old CEO. It was a small private company with only about 120 employees at the time. He set out to expand Brocade fast. By 2000, the goal was to recruit 200 new employees every quarter.         PREVIOUS PAGE RETURN TO BIO NEXT PAGE