THE BOTTOM LINE : How Much To Do Malibu?

The 54-foot AT&T; communications trailer was headed for India on the deck of a ship when, in Hong Kong, one of its $10,000 canvas tarps blew off, exposing it to salt-spray ruin.

So they wrapped the sucker up in cellophane--actually, thousands of square feet of plastic applied by William Leaf III’s Industrial Shrink Film Systems. “AT&T; had invested $20,000 in two tarps and with our film, for $2,500, it got to Sri Lanka in one piece,” says Leaf, who opened the Venice firm two years ago.

Leaf didn’t invent the polyethylene film; he merely found 100 new ways to use it. Back in 1991, on a trip to his native Maryland, he’d seen it used to store boats in the marina for the winter. “They were covered so tightly they looked shrink-wrapped!” says Leaf. “I thought, ‘Boy, that’s a neat way to wrap something. I wonder who’d buy it?’ ”

After training a three-man team and wrangling a supply of the film, Leaf found that lots of people wanted something better than tarps: Vintage car owners. Top Gun Freight Forwarding (for bridge cranes and cement trucks). Southern California Edison (for 20-ton generator rotors). The U.S. military (for secret stuff).

Leaf’s wrappers shroud the car, boat or whatever in blue polyethylene and blast it with what is essentially a giant blow-dryer. The film shrinks to fit, leaving the contents waterproof, dustproof, safe.

“I can shrink almost anything large and odd-shaped: helicopters, airplanes,” Leaf says. “We’ve never really done anything too weird, but my family owns a cemetery and there’s been jokes about wrapping up a body. That’d be the ultimate wrap job.”