Michael C. Darcy has a grand and complicated plan for restoring the glory to Baltimore's doddering old shipyard in Sparrows Point.

He has persuaded the former yard of Bethlehem Steel to retool its entire business and dedicate six full years to building cruise ships.

He has some of the best engines, thrusters and naval architects in the world lined up and a powerful maritime union lobbying for him in Washington.

What Darcy doesn't have is the $1.64 billion he needs, or the congressional blessing he wants, or any history of closing deals this immensely complex. His fledgling company, Voyager Holdings, doesn't have its own office - or a phone, a staff or any money-making business.

And throughout the shipbuilding and ship-operating industries, people wonder whether Darcy has the credibility to pull off so ambitious an enterprise.

"If you figure that out, would you let me know?" said John Avis, president of Kvaerner Masa Marine, an Annapolis naval architecture firm that has agreed to design Voyager's new vessels. "We've been talking with him for three years or so, and we're still waiting to see."

Darcy unveiled a plan two weeks ago to construct three 1,000-foot cruise vessels at Baltimore Marine Industries in Sparrows Point. Two of the ships, using an untested tri-hull design, would be capable of reaching 45 knots using water-jet propulsion.

He also announced agreements with such industry stalwarts as Kvaerner, General Electric and Rolls-Royce, and claimed private commitments for the first $230 million in expenses.

For the balance of the project's costs - $1.64 billion - he applied for a government-backed loan. The whole deal hinges on the U.S. Maritime Administration's decision whether to guarantee that loan.

It was a bold proposal even for Darcy, who has a long history of proposing spectacular plans and expensive ideas. But it was a major step in a plan that he has pursued at least since 1985, when Darcy - then in his early 20s - is known to have first floated his vision for a new American passenger line called Voyager Cruises.

His goal is to operate the ships in the Hawaiian islands and Alaska, and perhaps to offer high-speed cruises from the Northeast to the Caribbean. As a selling point to Congress, the ships would be equipped with strengthened decks and removable cabins for conversion into military transport vessels in wartime.

"He's really pulled all the pieces together," said Mike Horner, project manager for the marine engine unit at General Electric Aircraft Engines, which is to build gas-turbine engines for the ships. "Programs of this nature are difficult to bring to fruition, but he's stuck with it and really put together something worthwhile. We're enthusiastic."

Darcy left college in 1979, after only a year, to work for his family business of stripping and salvaging old passenger ships. Since leaving the business in the late 1980s, he has been one of the maritime industry's most ubiquitous deal-seekers.

Fueled by his childhood passion for ships, he has toured the industry for more than 10 years in search of any opportunity that would give him a stake in the shipping trades.

His odyssey is being financed by money from the now-defunct family business and backed by the lawyers and lobbyists for the International Organization of Masters, Mates and Pilots.

In the mid-1990s, Darcy formed a company called D'Arcinoff Group - his old family name - and continued his quest to "exploit innovative business opportunities" in the maritime industry.

Rare is the shipping executive who does not know of him. Darcy's name is well-known in the backrooms where maritime policy is made and in the boardrooms where shipping deals are negotiated.

"I grew up with passenger ships - it's what I know and what I love," said Darcy, now 40 and living in Northern Virginia. "And while I haven't run a cruise line, my strength is the ability to put together complicated transactions."

But Darcy has built a reputation based largely on what he has not accomplished, rather than what he has.

Over the last decade or more, he has proposed or been associated with numerous buyouts or financial transactions that didn't materialize when it came time for money and ships to change hands.

A former official with Norwegian Cruise Lines said Darcy negotiated a deal in the early 1990s to become a "major investor" in the company, even traveling to the headquarters in Oslo to nail down the details. The arrangement fell apart because he couldn't produce the money.

The biography on his company Web site says Darcy was "active in various financings and acquisitions, including ... the leveraged buyout of Dolphin Cruise Lines, which closed in late 1990."

But Paris Katsoufis, president of Dolphin Cruise Lines at the time, remembers Darcy's role differently.

"Mr. Darcy was trying to buy Dolphin Cruise Lines, but at the end of the day he did not have any money," said Katsoufis, now president of Topaz International Cruises. "He appears every so often, somewhere else in the cruise industry with some other plan, but as far as I know he has never gotten far."

Darcy has also been associated with discussions to purchase distressed shipyards and cargo lines around the country, but the cruise industry is clearly his greatest fancy.

Among a dozen cruise-ship executives contacted by The Sun, all but one said they recalled at least casual contact with Darcy concerning his desire to buy or invest in the industry. None could remember a deal that took place.

"Was he trying to broker a deal with us? That depends what you mean," said Philip C. Calian, the chief executive officer of American Classic Voyages, a U.S.-flagged cruise line that went bankrupt last year. "There's sending a random letter, and then there's actually showing up with some money."

Darcy dismisses the failed deals as simply missed opportunities in his enduring process of creating a new American cruise line.

"I pursue a lot of things, and they don't always come together," Darcy said. "How many deals has Morgan Stanley gone into and looked into and then not been able to close? It happens all the time. But I'm persistent."

Darcy's critics - and he has many in the shipbuilding industry because of his long quest for congressional permission to bring foreign-built ships into American trade - say that his more conspicuous failures aren't just the result of failed negotiations, however. Sometimes there is little negotiation at all, merely Darcy's unfounded boast that a deal is afoot.

The Kvaerner Philadelphia Shipyard, a unit of the same company that is designing Darcy's new vessels, sent him a letter late last year threatening legal action if he didn't stop claiming to have struck some kind of deal with the yard.

A year ago, the Journal of Commerce reported that a memorandum was circulating purporting to be an agreement for D'Arcinoff Group to purchase CSX Lines, the domestic remains of the once-mighty American shipping line Sea-Land Service Inc. The memo was bogus.

CSX Lines' President Charles G. Raymond declined to discuss the memo, and when asked to talk about Darcy would offer only: "He has very little credibility."

"It seems like every couple of months I get a call from some member of Congress or some staffer telling me that Mike Darcy has this big deal put together," said Ande Abbott, legislative director for the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, whose members work in shipyards around the country.

"But it never pans out. He's supposedly had a deal with almost every shipyard in the country. And the worst part is, he's got a lot of good people who are going along with him."

Again, Darcy is unmoved by the criticism. He has never made a public statement or issued a press release about any deal except his current pursuit of Project Voyager, he said. "And we would not have gone public if we didn't have it all nailed down."

Still, his history has left a trail of skeptics, who say Project Voyager is another in a long list of flimsy dreams from Darcy - and perhaps his most absurd to date.

The last cruise ship construction underwritten by the federal government, for American Classic Voyages, took place at the Ingalls Shipbuilding yard in Pascagoula, Miss., one of the top commercial yards in North America.

The financing came from renowned investor Samuel Zell, who spent $300 million of his own money. A partially completed hull and the material for a second are now sitting dormant in the shipyard, the company bankrupt and largely dissolved.

"If Sam Zell couldn't do it at Ingalls, what makes anyone think that Michael Darcy can pull it off in Baltimore?" asked Morten Arntzen, chief executive officer of American Marine Advisors Inc., a consulting firm in New York. "He doesn't have the financial backing or access to capital, he has no experience, no viable operations, and he's proposing a deal that's quite a bit larger. Does that seem reasonable?"

Yet big ideas are not unusual in the cruise industry, where plans for floating convention centers and round-the-world condominiums have gotten serious consideration. Nor are aborted deals uncommon. A list of failed shipping ventures could mark a course from Miami to St. Maarten.

And so Darcy has his supporters. Building a ship or buying a cruise line is often a matter of bringing together the right people and selling them on a plan, some industry watchers say. In that sense, the only thing keeping Mike Darcy from becoming Commodore Darcy might well be a handshake.

When he went to Oslo in the early 1990s to negotiate with Norwegian Cruise Lines, for instance, he took along a representative of Donaldson, Lufkin & Genrette, a financial services firm that was interested in backing him.

"If DLJ had signed off on the deal, it would have gotten done," said Blandin J. Wright, a Miami-based broker who worked with Darcy on the proposal. "They decided not to participate so it didn't happen, but it was close."

Darcy has been lobbying Congress for legislation that would allow him to operate foreign-built ships in Hawaii, giving him a foothold in the industry while he builds new ships.

And he has signed a deal with Alaska's Glacier Bay Cruiseline, which would allow him to gradually take over part of the business.

Joseph M. Beedle, the former chief executive of Glacier Bay's parent company, first saw the plans for Project Voyager in 1999, during a visit to Darcy's makeshift headquarters at a union office in Washington.

"It wasn't that crazy," said Beedle, now the vice president for finance at the University of Alaska. "I wasn't overly impressed with him personally, but when you listened to him and when you combined it all, he had a vision that was at least worth listening to."

Beedle's successor, Gary Droubay, has continued the negotiations and signed a firm agreement with D'Arcinoff Group.

"We think their business plan is viable, we think it's a great idea, and obviously we're comfortable being part of it," Droubay said.

Droubay said he investigated Darcy's finances before signing an agreement and determined that Darcy has several million dollars of his own money, ostensibly from his family's business.

Droubay also saw commitment letters from potential investors in Project Voyager, spoke with Darcy's financing consultant at Morgan Stanley and determined that the cruise ship project has "at least half a billion dollars in committed equity" available if the federal government agrees to back the plan.

"They've proven to us that they have the financing," Droubay said. "It appears to us that there is no doubt they have the backing to do this."

Darcy's partners in Project Voyager also are convinced his plan is legitimate and realistic. All of them said they knew of D'Arcinoff's history in the industry, but determined that his latest proposal was a good one.

"That's always one of our concerns," said Horner of General Electric, which along with building engines has agreed to provide some financing for Project Voyager.

"Does it pass the ethics test? Or the newspaper test? If all the facts were spelled out in the newspaper, would it be something we'd be proud of and something we'd like to be associated with? In this case, the answer is yes."

Said David Cassidy, president of Baltimore Marine Industries: "You look at the players that he has around him - GE, Rolls-Royce, Kvaener, Morgan Stanley - they're not going to associate with something that isn't credible. They've done their homework."

The final judge will be the federal government. All of Darcy's Project Voyager deals are contingent on a U.S. Maritime Administration pledge to guarantee his loans.

And so the biggest hurdle might still be before him. The Bush administration is trying to eliminate shipyard construction guarantees, and the Maritime Administration is still stinging from the collapse of American Classic Voyages.

Other would-be cruise operators have withdrawn their requests for construction loan guarantees, saying the political and economic climate makes them unrealistic.

David Turner, head of a budding cruise ship project called SeaAmerica who admits he "didn't like Darcy personally" when he met him recently, thinks he is foolish for pursuing the project now. And yet he is rooting for him.

"He really has been a visionary, and he absolutely has the drive, the foresight and the stamina to develop an American cruise ship line," Turner said. "But cruise ships in Baltimore? It'll never happen."

"In this business, we're all entrepreneurs, we're all dreamers reaching for the stars. But if he's dreaming about those big ships, it's a wasted effort. I hope he doesn't waste his whole life dreaming about them, but I wish him well."