(FORTUNE Magazine) – As business startup tales go, they don't get much more improbable: A young American basketball player from Chicago's South Side strikes up a conversation with an older gentleman, a Swiss financier, in the lobby of an Italian hotel. They get to chatting about the elder man's work--financing commodities sales in countries most banks deem too small or too dangerous to be worth the bother. The young man is intrigued. A few months later he gives up basketball--and with it his dream of playing in the NBA with his boyhood friend and college teammate Isaiah Thomas--to go into the commodities business for himself, with backing from the Swiss financier.

Today, Demetrius "Tony" Brown, 36, is back home in Chicago as the co-owner (along with his wife, Winifried), president, and CEO of Fuci Metals, which generated $100 million in sales last year by, yes, scrounging up business in nooks most big metals dealers deem too small or too dangerous--places like Siberia, Turkey, and Africa. "The higher the risk, the higher the reward," Brown says. "I work in those markets because that is where the best margins are." General Motors and Toyota are now big buyers of the aluminum and other metals Fuci (pronounced Fyu-see) supplies. Ford now buys 15% to 20% of the company's wares and recently called Fuci its "preferred" aluminum provider. But to obtain raw materials at prices that allow his company to compete with industry giants like Reynolds and Glencore Ltd., Brown has gone to some pretty bizarre lengths--like jumping into Siberia's icy Angara River in an attempt to bond with the Russian producers who are now Fuci's main suppliers of aluminum and silicon.

It adds up to an all-American success story, made possible by a young man who treated sports as a means to an end and by a bunch of foreigners willing to give an African American a few breaks he might have had trouble getting at home. "The stigma of being an African American," he says, "becomes positive on foreign soil." The first benefactor was that older gentleman in the hotel lobby: the late Jacob Neff, a partner with the Anglo-German investment bank S.G. Warburg & Co. Neff helped Brown start Euro Capital Management, which financed commodity sales, mostly in Turkey and Africa. A few years later Brown got his second big break from Italian metals manufacturer Nuova Fucinati, which set him up in 1988 as CEO and majority owner of its new U.S. trading arm, Fuci Metals USA, then the following year agreed to let him buy out its 49% share for $250,000.

Brown, the youngest of 12 children and only the second to graduate from college, has built Fuci into an example of genuine alchemy. So his dream of playing in the NBA didn't pan out--he'll have to settle for the life of a big international dealmaker. And hey, he's dodged a bullet. He says, "I didn't want to end up playing European basketball when I was 35."