Back when he was a lowly but cocky bank loan officer in the early 1960s, Hugh McColl would gab away the late nights with his friend Reitzel Snider, sipping whiskey in the kitchen and sharing their career dreams.

Like most young men on the make, Snider would talk about money and how he wanted lots of it. McColl, though he worked for a bank, seemed strangely indifferent to the almighty dollar. He was after something else.

"In those days, the word 'power' was the word that was always in Hugh's vocabulary," recalls Snider, a Charlotte real-estate investor. "I thought it was curious for him to use the word 'power' as a way to describe his aspirations.

"But now I understand."

Today, Hugh Leon McColl Jr. may be the most powerful person in North Carolina. As chief executive of NationsBank Corp., the third-biggest bank in the country, he has accumulated the muscle to build cities, to move markets, indeed, to transform the American financial landscape.

McColl and NationsBank are leading the way in an era of wrenching change in the banking industry. The dismantling of federal and state banking laws has encouraged the rapid growth of a handful of megabanks, which have gobbled up hundreds of competitors.

Each new deal seems bigger than the last.

In two fell swoops in the past 16 months, McColl and NationsBank bought the biggest bank in Florida and the biggest bank in the Midwest.

Amazingly, in less than a decade, NationsBank and rival First Union Corp. have concentrated more financial power in Charlotte - Charlotte! - than any other place in the country, save New York City.

McColl's is a kind of power not seen in the state in generations, if ever. Historians are starting to compare McColl to such North Carolina business legends as James Buchanan Duke, the robber baron who built tobacco and electric power monopolies, and the Reynolds family, whose tobacco company built Winston-Salem and is now a global conglomerate.

McColl's power is visible in many ways, from his company's 60-story granite tower in downtown Charlotte to its 100,000 employees and $285 billion in assets.

Such financial strength has sent ripples across the state by making unprecedented resources available to businesses from Asheville to Wilmington. The bank's success has also made many Tar Heels rich. More than 24,000 North Carolinians own a chunk of the company's soaring stock.

McColl's personal power manifests itself in other forms as well. In 1993, for example, he jawboned the National Football League into giving Charlotte a team, and he persuaded Alan Greenspan, the reclusive chairman of the Federal Reserve, to visit Chapel Hill last fall for the dedication of the new McColl Building at the business school at McColl's alma mater.

As a young man, when he was not musing about power with Snider, McColl was often in the kitchen of another friend and colleague, Luther H. Hodges Jr. They talked about the day they would buy a New York bank and how they would create the first truly national bank, one with branches from coast to coast. Pretty audacious for two upstarts whose company, then called North Carolina National Bank, or NCNB, wasn't even the biggest in the state.

"He and I talked about those things regularly," says Hodges, who left the bank in 1977 to run for the U.S. Senate and now lives in New Mexico. "His philosophy has worked. Part of it is his own doing. Part of it is North Carolina. Part of it is luck. Part of it is timing."

Since becoming chief executive in 1983, McColl has transformed his company from a third-tier state bank into a national behemoth that competes with giants created by the Rockefellers, the Mellons and the Morgans.

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