When the news broke in March 2000 that the Fang family was taking over the Examiner from Hearst Corp. – mollifying the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust concerns about Hearst's purchase of the San Francisco Chronicle – many people wondered what, exactly, the Fangs were up to.

It was, to put it mildly, an odd deal. The Fangs paid exactly $100 for the name, Web site, news racks, and archives of the onetime flagship of the Hearst empire, the self-proclaimed "Monarch of the Dailies." And Hearst agreed to reimburse them up to $66.7 million for running the paper through July 2003. The transaction almost certainly wouldn't have happened without the backroom wrangling of key local politicians, including Brown and Sen. Dianne Feinstein.