Entrepreneurs

Over the years, Larry "Big Al" Jordan has experimented with a number of moneymaking schemes. He has peddled everything from cocaine to chocolate chip cookies, human hair to hiking boots. But none of his ventures -- or misadventures -- has generated the kind of cash flow and acclaim he now enjoys from the simple sale of T-shirts featuring the name of the neighborhood where he grew up: Watts.

ARMORED dinosaurs once ruled this Gobi Desert area near the Mongolian border. Millions of years later, it became the domain of Genghis Khan and his clan. Now the land belongs to Jin Xiancong and the people from Wenzhou. Jin ships 10,000 VCRs each month into neighboring Mongolia, runs his own logistics firm and builds office properties. He will soon be mining iron and other minerals in the region, where winter temperatures can drop to 40 degrees below zero.

After revolutionizing our appreciation of artisan bread at her La Brea Bakery and earning awards for her pastry at Campanile restaurant, Nancy Silverton has turned her skills to America's favorite food: pizza. She opened Pizzeria Mozza in the fall with celebrity chef Mario Batali and other partners to rave reviews. Diners pack the tables at the Highland Avenue eatery seven days a week, savoring the rustic, rich flavors of her pizzas.

Dennis Block seemed glued to his black leather chair, his coffee untouched, apparently impervious to physical needs such as the bathroom or food, taking one landlord's phone call after another. Almost all the callers wanted the same thing: to evict their tenants. In a DVD he gives to landlords, Block describes himself this way: "A man who has evicted more tenants than any other human being on the planet Earth." He has never been busier.

Hundreds of miles north of here on the edge of the Mongolian steppes, Li Enhui is producing a "magic bag" to help China fight the fierce sandstorms that plague this city every spring. Li's water-saving pouch, which he says enables trees to thrive in desert conditions, was selected as a special technology project by the organizers of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Hoping to host sandstorm-free games, the government is planting a "green wall" of trees around the capital to keep the desert at bay.

Joseph Michalek makes liquor the old-fashioned way, slowly heating corn mash in a large copper still. As for the rest of his moonshine operation, he steers clear of Southern mountain traditions. A relative newcomer to the Appalachian foothills, Michalek, 38, does not haul sacks of grain or sugar to a creek, hunch down in mud to stoke wood, or cast a wary eye about for federal tax agents. Instead, the Northern entrepreneur with gelled hair, crisp blue jeans and polished Dr.

What would you do if you became a multimillionaire? In Silicon Valley, the answer is often surprising: Get back to work. Gautam Godhwani faced that decision at the age of 24. Only a few years out of UC Berkeley, he helped start an Internet company called AtWeb from his parents' basement, and Netscape snapped it up in 1998 for $93 million. He celebrated by buying a Porsche 911 and a San Francisco apartment with three bedrooms and a view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

After more than a quarter-century of struggle to nurture small businesses in the challenging environment of South Los Angeles, Marva Smith Battle-Bey received national recognition for her efforts Monday when the Small Business Administration honored her as its 2007 National Minority Small Business Champion. Battle-Bey, president and chief executive of the Vermont Slauson Economic Development Corp., a nonprofit she has headed since 1981, credited her organization's track record for the award.

You could smell the onions from the driveway. Audrey Bernstein, standing in the kitchen of her cozy 1920s house in Silver Lake, was preparing for a French-themed soiree, and the menu included onion tarts, French onion soup and brioche pockets stuffed with asparagus, goat cheese and more onions. There was a lot of chopping to be done, and no time to cry.

In any other chain restaurant, a walk-in cooler is a walk-in cooler. To Sam King, it's 40 degrees of heaven. Standing in the frosty, metallic cubicle he calls the Shrine, the chief executive of King's Seafood Co. shows off the contents like a dad displaying photos of his kids. On one shelf are boxes of wahoo -- white, delicate and flown in fresh (dated that day) from the Pacific Islands. On another are boxes of salmon just harvested from farms in Chile.