Bradley Amundson was at home in Minneapolis two weeks ago when a familiar face appeared on his television screen. It was Jerome Corsi – a blast from a humiliating time in Amundson’s past. “I said: `Hey, there’s Corsi; what’s he doing on TV?”‘ Amundson recalled.

Corsi was on a cable show, promoting his new anti-Barack Obama book, “The Obama Nation,” but Amundson knows him in a very different context. Corsi, Amundson, and James M. “Mel” Rockefeller of Arizona were principals of a group that launched an investment venture in Poland in 1995 that eventually lost about $1.2 million, much of it raised from a group of about 20 Minnesota investors, Amundson said.

In his varied career as best-selling author, conservative journalist, and outspoken polemicist, Corsi has become one of the nation’s most controversial political provocateurs. But the business deal that went sour before he became famous has made him the target of bitter criticism.

Corsi’s role as investor is perhaps the least known of his several careers. And 13 years after the Poland deal, the fingers of blame are still wagging. At least two of those investors won court judgments in separate cases filed in courts in Hennepin and Dodge counties in Minnesota against Corsi and his two partners to recoup a portion of the money lost in the Poland deal, but they never collected from Corsi.

“It was basically a worthless document,” said one of those investors, David Splittstoesser, a cement contractor from Rochester, Minn. When his lawyer tried to collect, he found Corsi’s assets “had been moved into his wife’s name … There was nothing to get out of him,” Splittstoesser told the Globe.

“No comment,” Corsi said repeatedly in a telephone interview Monday in response to a series of questions about his role in the Poland investment.

Until 2004, when he co-wrote “Unfit for Command,” a book that attacked Senator John F. Kerry’s military record and Vietnam War protests, Jerome Robert Corsi was a little-known financial services executive from Denville, N.J., with a penchant for anonymously penning online postings, often virulently anti-Democrat, anti-Catholic, and anti-Muslim in the forums of a conservative Internet site.

Among the commentaries he has since acknowledged writing, Corsi falsely labeled Democratic Senators Kerry and Edward M. Kennedy and former president Bill Clinton as communists, suggested without any evidence that Hillary Clinton was a lesbian, called Pope John Paul II “senile” and Arabs “ragheads,” and asserted that Islam is “a peaceful religion as long as the women are beaten, the boys [sodomized], and the infidels killed.”

“I’ve apologized” for the postings, Corsi said. “I’m sorry I said them because they were inappropriately stated, too harshly stated. … They were written to be provocative … Some were written to be sarcastic or ironic or to be funny … They don’t reflect my beliefs, deep-seated or otherwise.”

He describes himself as a devout Roman Catholic in good standing with the church.

“Unfit for Command,” written with John E. O’Neill, a Houston lawyer who decades earlier had succeeded Kerry as commander of a swift boat in Vietnam, was a best-seller even though Kerry branded it “a pack of lies” and many of the allegations against Kerry proved to be false. Similarly, Democrats and the Obama campaign have denounced “Obama Nation” as loaded with inaccuracies and unsubstantiated innuendo, but the 384-page book debuted Sunday atop the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list.

Corsi, who describes himself as a journalist with an openly ideological slant, makes clear his intent in the book about the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

“I set out to prevent an Obama presidency from happening,” Corsi told the Globe during a break in his busy schedule of promotional interviews. His publicist said Corsi had given about 120 interviews over a two-week period.

Corsi seems an unlikely right-wing polemicist, though he said he has “always been conservative.” Now 62 and in his third career, he moved from academia to 25 years in financial services, then to writing books and for WorldNetDaily, a conservative Internet site.

What is less known is his role in the investment business.

Thirteen years after the Poland deal collapsed, details of how it came together and why it fell apart remain unclear. Rockefeller, one of the other principals, who has a background in marketing and technology companies, said he was introduced to Corsi at a Las Vegas hotel in late 1994 and Corsi suggested creating a mutual fund to invest in Polish companies. Rockefeller said he recruited Amundson, a stockbroker he knew in Minnesota, to help raise funds from investors, and Corsi brought in some high-powered consultants from major US financial services companies to bolster the venture.

Corsi, Rockefeller, and Amundson personally guaranteed the total of $250,000 that was invested up front by a group in Minnesota and that was the basis of the civil judgments won by the investors, Splittstoesser and other investors said. There were no guarantees backing another $1 million put up by investors.

The partnership began to unravel during a trip to Poland in March 1995 when Corsi abruptly split off and began meeting separately with Polish business representatives, according to an account of the trip written by Rockefeller’s lawyer, Ronald Burd, and provided to the Globe. With Corsi and the mutual fund plan out of the picture, Rockefeller and Amundson continued to pursue investments in a Polish insurance company, but in separate interviews, blamed each other for the collapse of the venture later that year. With Corsi no longer involved, they realized that almost $1 million wired in installments to a Polish partner had disappeared.

The FBI’s Minneapolis office conducted an investigation, but it did not result in any criminal charges, according to several investors and others who said they were interviewed by the FBI.

“It ruined my career in the brokerage business, and it was a sad story for a lot of people,” said Amundson, who said he settled the claims against him for less than full value. He said he now sells real estate and is a general contractor.

“I lost my stellar reputation by being associated with the deal,” said Randall Schwake, former president of a bank in Claremont in southeastern Minnesota. Schwake said he was not an investor but recruited many of his bank’s best customers, who invested sums ranging from $25,000 to $100,000 or more.

Corsi, a graduate of Case Western Reserve University in his native Cleveland who also holds a doctorate in political science from Harvard, said he began his career in financial services after about a decade of teaching and conducting research at colleges and universities in New Hampshire, Colorado, and New Mexico.

The transition to politics and writing came in 2004, Corsi said, when he suggested collaborating on a book to John O’Neill, who had started an anti-Kerry organization, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Corsi said he was acquainted with O’Neill from their days as debating opponents in college and he had done research about Kerry’s antiwar activities.

“That opened up the possibility of a new career,” Corsi said.

The publisher of “Unfit for Command” was the conservative Regnery Publishing. Last year, Corsi and four other authors sued Regnery’s parent company, Eagle Publishing, claiming it improperly reduced their royalties by more than $1 million by giving away books to new subscribers to Eagle periodicals or selling them at reduced rates to members of the Conservative Book Club, which Eagle operates. The suit, which Corsi declined to discuss, was dismissed in January in US District Court in Washington, D.C., according to Eagle spokeswoman Patricia Jackson.

Corsi said he had never enrolled in a political party until this year, when he changed his voter registration to the anti-tax Constitution Party, which supports radical reductions in the role of the federal government, while considering running as its presidential nominee. In 2005, Corsi announced that he was considering moving to Massachusetts to challenge Kerry for reelection in 2008 but never did. He said he gave his wife, who owns a house cleaning and janitorial service in New Jersey, veto power over the decision.

“She didn’t want to move to Massachusetts,” Corsi said.

Credit: Brian C. Mooney Globe Staff. Fox News Channel

Until 2004, when he co-wrote “Unfit for Command,” a book that attacked Senator John F. Kerry’s military record and Vietnam War protests, Jerome Robert Corsi was a little-known financial services executive from Denville, N.J., with a penchant for anonymously penning online postings, often virulently anti-Democrat, anti-Catholic, and anti-Muslim in the forums of a conservative Internet site. Among the commentaries he has since acknowledged writing, Corsi falsely labeled Democratic Senators Kerry and Edward M. Kennedy and former president Bill Clinton as communists, suggested without any evidence that Hillary Clinton was a lesbian, called Pope John Paul II senile and Arabs ragheads, and asserted that Islam is a peaceful religion as long as the women are beaten, the boys [sodomized], and the infidels killed.