Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer Part 16

August IV's Corvette was equipped with a high-performance Z51 suspension that gave it the road-hugging capability of a Ferrari or Lamborghini, according to Road & Track magazine. Benson, who held a degree in automotive engineering, figured the car had to be going at least 55 miles per hour when it entered the S bend-more than twice the posted speed limit-for it to flip over the way it did. Investigators found hair and blood on the visor above the driver's seat. If they could match those to August IV, it would go a long way toward establis.h.i.+ng that he was driving. Benson pet.i.tioned the Pima County Superior Court for an order requiring August IV to furnish blood, hair, and saliva samples, as well as fingerprints and palm prints. Despite their previous pledge to make August IV available, the Busch legal team fought the order all the way up to the Arizona Supreme Court, which in February confirmed the lower court ruling. The Busch attorneys then claimed their client's three-month-old head injury prevented him from traveling to Tucson. Pima County authorities accused them of "stonewalling," but agreed to send Ron Benson to St. Louis to gather the samples, provided that August III paid for all the costs.

Benson found himself in the first-cla.s.s section on the flight to St. Louis. It was his first time. He was met at the airport by an ex-cop security officer from the brewery and was driven directly to St. John Mercy Hospital, where a conspicuous contingent of more than a dozen security men equipped with earphones and radio communications waved them through intersections and traffic barricades to a cordoned-off building with still more security men standing sentinel. With timing that could not have been accidental, August III arrived moments later, emerging from a limousine and striding into the building, where the waiting staff received him as if he were a visiting dignitary, which in a way he was-he sat on St. John's board of directors, and the Busch family and Anheuser-Busch were among the hospital's most generous benefactors.

"The bearing, the manner, the walk-it all conveyed a raging confidence," Benson recalled. "I think he was trying to show me that he was the man in charge."

On the plane, Benson had prepared himself mentally for just such an encounter. "I was determined to show that I was not there because he had allowed me to be there but rather because we had allowed him to do it this way. I wanted them to know that I was calling the shots. I would show tolerance, not deference. I was representing the victim. No one was going to speak for her but me."

"You will not be taking any statement from our client; we don't want you asking any questions," London said right off the bat. Benson bristled. "I'm going to ask whatever I need to ask," he replied, "and your client can answer or not, but I'm not taking orders from someone's defense attorney."

Despite the initial tension, the blood, hair, and saliva samples were taken without incident. Benson had not spoken to August IV before. He seemed nothing like his father-low-key, una.s.suming, and deferential to the hospital employees.

From the hospital, they drove in procession to the St. Louis County police headquarters for the fingerprinting. Once again, August III appeared to be in command, as uniformed cops and plainclothes detectives alike greeted him respectfully-"Good to see you, Mr. Busch." Benson didn't get the same reception: "The only person they stopped and asked for identification was me, a fellow officer looking into a possible manslaughter."

In the car on the way back to the airport, Benson wondered if the tiny Pima County prosecutor's office was overmatched. Evidence aside, did they even have the resources to go up against August Busch III in a trial? He suspected they didn't, and the thought left him feeling unsettled and vulnerable. It was a cold, gray day with remnants of snow on the ground as the Busch security man pulled the car into the dimly lit airport parking structure. "It was like a scene from a movie," Benson recalled. "And suddenly it struck me that I was all by myself, far from home and without backup. From what I had seen of their operation, it didn't seem all that far-fetched to think that they could easily do away with some lowly deputy sheriff from Arizona." The driver handed him his return ticket; it was coach.

Back in Tucson, Benson threw himself into the investigation with renewed zeal. For four consecutive weekends, he sat in his car near the crash site on River Road, writing down the license plate numbers of vehicles that pa.s.sed by between 1:00 a.m. and 2:00 a.m. Then he traced the plates to the more than one hundred registered owners and called each one to see if they had driven by and seen anything the morning of November 12. He kept thinking about Mary Jo Kopechne, the young woman who was killed late one night in 1969 when Senator Ted Kennedy drove his car off a bridge on Chappaquidd.i.c.k Island in Ma.s.sachusetts and then left the scene without reporting the accident. Police found Kopechne's body in the senator's submerged vehicle the next morning. Kennedy received a two-month suspended jail sentence for leaving the scene after an inquiry found there was no evidence that he had been driving negligently.

Pima County faced a similar problem with August IV. Even though the blood and hair samples Benson collected in St. Louis turned out to match what was found on the visor above the driver's seat in the Corvette, it only proved that August IV was behind the wheel when the car rolled over, not that he was in any way impaired. There were no witnesses to testify that he was under the influence. No usable fingerprints were lifted from the empty Bud Light cans found by the car. All that could be proved beyond a reasonable doubt was that August IV was driving too fast to navigate a curve that local law enforcement had known for years was unduly dangerous.

The prosecutor's office concluded it was highly unlikely that a jury would return a felony conviction for negligent manslaughter. They felt they stood a better chance of a guilty verdict for leaving the scene, but at what cost to the county coffers? The Busch family was prepared to spend a fortune defending any charges, and it was only a misdemeanor.

So on July 3, 1984, Pima County authorities announced they were ending the investigation into the crash that took Michele Frederick's life and that no charges would be filed against August IV.

"I didn't feel good about it," Benson said recently. "My gut told me this guy was drunk and killed this girl, and I couldn't do my best for her because the evidence just disappeared. It didn't seem like we got justice done on this one, even though I'm confident that we did all we could."

In the course of the eight-month investigation, St. Louis press coverage was notable for what it did not contain. No details of Michele Frederick's life were reported beyond her age and occupation at the time of her death. To St. Louis readers, she was merely a "waitress" or a "pa.s.senger," and a faceless one at that. While the newspapers repeatedly published a yearbook photo of August IV looking choirboy innocent in a sports coat, white s.h.i.+rt, and tie, they never printed a picture of Michele, even though her high school yearbook photo was easily obtainable-a particularly surprising omission, given the media's long-standing love affair with stories involving pretty blonde victims. There were no published statements from grieving friends or family members either, not even a "no comment" indicating that a reporter had at least tried to get them on the record.

The family's low profile appeared to be due to a secret settlement agreement negotiated early on by Busch attorneys. A former neighbor noted that the family subsequently bought a Porsche and put in a pool, "in a neighborhood that previously had neither." Twenty-five years after the accident that claimed her daughter's life, Michele's mother, Greta Machado, declined to talk about it "because it is still so painful."

August IV didn't return to the University of Arizona, which was probably a wise decision, since the case had sparked bad feelings among his on- and off-campus peers, many of whom believed-incorrectly-that he had left Michele to die and that his family had bought off the authorities. As one high school friend of Michele's said recently, "I haven't had a Budweiser since."

The Busch family made no public statements about the Tucson case at the time, but years later August IV's mother, Susie Busch, offered a lofty perspective on the sad episode. "I was devastated, absolutely devastated for young August to have to go through something like that," she said during a conversation with a Post-Dispatch gossip columnist. Asked if she thought her son had been treated "justly," she reportedly replied, "No ... because I feel there is no just treatment for families with a name and money."

15

"DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?"

After bailing his son out of trouble in Tucson, August III made sure the "Busch heir" had a soft landing back home in St. Louis.

He arranged for August IV to enroll at St. Louis University, where decades of Busch patronage guaranteed special privileges, including an electronic key that gave August IV access to the teachers' parking lot, which was a major perquisite on the parking-challenged urban campus. He replaced August IV's wrecked Corvette with a new Porsche and secured a town-house apartment for him on Lindell Boulevard, across the street from the place he'd rented when he split from August IV's mother.

If August IV had learned any life lessons from the Tucson tragedy, they weren't apparent as he jumped into the social scene in St. Louis's fas.h.i.+onably hip Central West End. His running mates usually included half a dozen other sons of prominent businessmen. The "millionaires' boys club," as some called them, might start the evening at Culpepper's Bar in Maryland Plaza, then move to Harry's Restaurant & Bar on Market Street and later caravan to Metropole downtown at Laclede's Landing. They all had fast cars, loads of money, and last names that rang a bell, but nothing could compete with the Busch aura, so August IV became the Big Dog and they functioned as his entourage, his protectors, even his advance men. Typically, one of them would be sent ahead to alert the proprietor of the next establishment: "August Busch IV is on his way here, and we will need a table for eight with iced buckets of Budweiser set up; he doesn't want to be bothered by the other customers, and he will not interact with you."

August IV thus let everyone know he was there and at the same time kept almost everyone away from him. If any strangers approached the table, one of his crew would block their way unless August gave the nod to let them pa.s.s. His boys ordered his drinks for him, paid the tab with his credit card, and fetched hot-looking girls he spotted in the crowd, either bringing them over to meet him or writing down their phone numbers for him.

From the bustling bar scene at Laclede's Landing, they would head across the Poplar Street Bridge to sample the after-hours pleasures of Sauget, Illinois.

Named for the French-descended family that had run it since the 1920s, Sauget (p.r.o.nounced So-zhjay) was a kind of modern-day Deadwood, a four-square-mile industrial "village" that operated in the sweet spot between moral laxity and lawlessness. In Sauget, drugs were sold and consumed openly in numerous nightclubs and strip joints, and it was a lot easier to hire a hooker than buy a loaf of bread. In Sauget clubs, August IV and his friends would snort lines of c.o.ke right off the table, according to a compatriot who sometimes partied with them. "Those guys were out of control. They didn't do little lines of c.o.ke. They did foot-long lines.... I once saw August IV snort a line of c.o.ke as long as that table over there. I couldn't understand how a heart could take it."

On May 31, 1985, August IV was driving home from Sauget at 1:30 a.m. Barreling west on Highway 40 out of downtown at 75 to 80 miles per hour, he blew past the giant Anheuser-Busch "A & Eagle" animated neon sign at Chouteau Avenue and nearly sideswiped a car that was merging into the traffic lane from the Boyle Avenue entrance ramp. The car contained two undercover narcotics cops. "Motherf.u.c.ker!" detective Nick Fredericksen yelled instinctively as his partner Bob Thomure swerved to avoid contact with the speeding silver Mercedes.

Fredericksen and Thomure were just coming off their s.h.i.+ft after executing a search warrant with another undercover team, detectives Mike Wilhite and Junius Ranciville. It had been a long day, and the last thing they wanted was to chase after a speeder, which wasn't their job. But the Mercedes, with its dark tinted windows, looked an awful lot like a car that belonged to one Vernon Whitlock Jr., a former cop, federal marshal, and bail bondsman turned high-end drug dealer. The narcotics division had been trying to make a case against Whitlock for months.* Now, it seemed as if Providence had placed probable cause directly in their path. Armed with legal justification for stopping Whitlock and looking into his car, the two tired narcotics cops took off in pursuit.

Just east of the Kings.h.i.+ghway Boulevard exit, August IV slowed down, eased over onto the shoulder, and stopped. Thomure pulled the beat-up 1976 Buick Special sedan-a "covert vehicle," in police parlance-behind the Mercedes. Unshaven and dressed scruffily in jeans and T-s.h.i.+rts, the two detectives walked toward the Mercedes, but as Thomure approached the driver's window, August suddenly gunned the engine and roared up the exit ramp. Thomure had to jump back from the car to avoid being hit. The detectives took up the chase again, but the Buick's six-cylinder engine was no match for the Mercedes, and they quickly lost sight of the vehicle. After a few more minutes of cruising the area, they gave up and headed for home, but not before broadcasting a description of the car and its last known location. Nine minutes later, a voice came over the radio. "Hey, he's here; we got him." It was Wilhite and Ranciville, who'd heard the radio transmission on their way home and turned back to help out. They'd happened upon the Mercedes at almost the exact spot where Fredericksen and Thomure had lost it. After another short chase, August IV pulled over again. Then, just as before, he took off when Wilhite approached the window. Again, the Mercedes narrowly missed hitting the detective.

Within a few minutes, a third narcotics team was converging on the area as Ranciville and Wilhite chased the Mercedes through the Central West End at speeds of up to 85 miles an hour. Thinking they were pursuing a known drug dealer who must have something very incriminating in his car, Ranciville pulled close enough to the Mercedes for Wilhite to lean out the right-side window and fire a bullet into the tread of the Mercedes' left rear tire. By the time the tire deflated, bringing the car to a stop, all three narcotics teams were on the scene, surrounding the car, blocking any possible avenue of escape. Detective Ron Kleier was the first to reach the Mercedes. Gun drawn, he flung open the door and ordered the driver out. When August IV emerged, they all knew right away that something was wrong. Instead of the flashy forty-something drug dealer they were expecting, the "suspect" was a nicely dressed, clean-cut college kid. "Why are you doing this to me?" August asked as they were cuffing him. "Do you know who I am?"

They found out quickly enough when they looked in his wallet. A check of the glove compartment revealed that the Mercedes was registered to August Busch III. The six detectives exchanged looks as it dawned on them they had just stepped in a steaming pile of trouble.

The chase, complete with the shot fired, had been broadcast over the police radio, where it no doubt had been picked up on scanners used by the news media. It was on tape. So that bell could not be unrung. August IV would have to be taken to police headquarters and booked for something. A report would have to be filed. All h.e.l.l was going to break loose, a perfect s.h.i.+t storm of politics and publicity, with them caught in the middle.

As they transported August IV to the station, Fredericksen and Thomure were kicking themselves for not running the Mercedes' license plates prior to pulling the car over the first time. Had they known whom it belonged to, they might have backed off and gone home to bed, thereby giving August IV a break that the average Joe would likely never have gotten. In the car, they explained to a somewhat teary and shaken August IV what the process would be at the police station. "Just don't treat me like some little rich kid," he said from the backseat.

Word of the incident preceded them to headquarters, where the narcotics teams were greeted on arrival with sympathetic looks from their fellow officers, one of whom summed up the group sentiment by saying, "Boy, you guys are done." The uncomfortable truth was that a sizable percentage of the department earned extra income from Anheuser-Busch and the Busch family, which together comprised the city's second largest employer of police officers, behind the department itself. Off-duty cops provided security for Busch family members and corporate officers, Busch homes and company facilities. Mike Wilhite was among the many who worked security details at Cardinals games. The Anheuser-Busch in-house security staff was rife with retired officers, as were numerous private investigation firms that derived significant income from myriad A-B and Busch family litigation.

If all that weren't enough to complicate matters, the narcotics cops who walked August IV into police headquarters that morning were acutely aware that the chief of detectives, their boss, had a son who worked at Anheuser-Busch in the advertising department. As Post-Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan drolly noted at the time, "Arresting a member of the Busch family is not the best way to get ahead in the St. Louis Police Department."

Indeed, the arrest of August IV prompted a huddle of nervous high-ranking officers, several of whom, the chief of detectives included, were awakened and called into headquarters that morning. They, too, were caught in the middle-between the media, which would be all over the story and looking for any signs of favoritism, and the power and temperament of August III, who could be expected to ruthlessly protect his errant son from any level of prosecution. They decided to proceed cautiously in releasing information about the arrest until the police report was fully vetted up the department chain of command.

Up in the fourth-floor office of the narcotics division, the arresting detectives went about the business of booking the suspect, writing up the arrest report, and processing evidence gathered at the scene. The latter included a .38-caliber revolver found on the floorboard of the car behind the driver's seat. There was one bullet in the chamber and five lying loose on the floor in the front, suggesting that August IV may have tried to unload the weapon during the chase. The detectives also brought in the tire that Mike Wilhite shot out. The media would report that they had "changed" the tire as a kind of mea culpa when they realized who August IV was, but in fact they were instructed by their sergeant to secure it as evidence because it contained the bullet that Wilhite fired.

August IV was not administered any form of sobriety test, a break that probably would not have been given to an August Smith under the same circ.u.mstances. He was allowed to make his one phone call, presumably to his father, and afterward sat dejectedly in the squad room. In an attempt to lighten the mood, detective Ron Kleier began teasing him. "Hey, kid, don't worry. When this is over you can go out to Grant's Farm, have a few beers and ride that little train.... I always loved that train." August replied that he had not been to Grant's Farm since he was twelve years old (about the time his father ousted Gussie) and added, morosely, "If you get me out of this, I'll f.u.c.king give you that train."

August IV was fingerprinted and booked on three misdemeanor counts of third-degree a.s.sault (with the car), one felony count of carrying a concealed weapon, and six traffic violations (running three stop signs and one traffic light, and speeding). Released on $8,000 bail within two hours, he was picked up at the station by A-B's head of security, Gary Prindiville, a former St. Louis cop. They were barely out of the building before the Busch family released a statement through Fleishman-Hillard: "Due to the unusual circ.u.mstances of the arrest, which involved undercover officers who were apparently impersonating criminal types driving an unmarked car, we are a.s.sessing the matter."

The headline in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat that morning must have seemed like deja vu to August III: "Busch Heir Is Arrested after High Speed Chase." He reacted swiftly and decisively. While the police department was angering reporters by refusing to release the arrest report, which was supposed to be a public doc.u.ment, Fleishman-Hillard issued a statement depicting August IV as a victim of reckless cops:

"Mr. Busch was approached late at night by two persons who gave no indication of being police officers while his car was on the shoulder of the highway waiting for a friend traveling in a separate vehicle. The unkempt and unsavory appearance of these undercover narcotics officers, plus their life-threatening behavior, made it no more than prudent for a young man in Mr. Busch's position to escape."

The officers did not show badges, according to the statement, nor did they use flas.h.i.+ng lights or sirens during the pursuit, thereby creating "a situation in which a terror-stricken young man had every reason to fear for his life and took evasive action against what he believed to be criminal elements."

The statement was clearly the handiwork of Norm London, who was fast becoming August III's on-call criminal defense attorney. The allegations immediately put the authorities on the defensive with reporters.

"I don't care how they were dressed or what kind of car they were driving," said one police department spokesman, "if he didn't think they were police officers then he should have driven to the police station and reported them."

"When somebody's got something the size of an automobile and you have to jump out of the way to avoid getting hit, that's considered a.s.sault," said the deputy commander of the narcotics division.

"No one is naive enough to believe there aren't undercover police officers around," said St. Louis circuit attorney George Peach.

Peach, whose office would prosecute the case, pointed out that even though there was a mobile phone in the Mercedes, August IV did not call the police to report that scary-looking men were chasing him. The prosecutor said he intended to subpoena the phone records to see if August had called anyone else during the chase. He defended the officers, calling Fredericksen and Thomure "two of the best," but he tore into the department bra.s.s for conferring the morning of the arrest and not providing his office with a copy of the official six-page arrest report until three days later. "If [August IV] was some normal everyday dope, we would have had that report by 2 a.m.... if the police do their job and they arrest Mr. Big, then why does the lieutenant colonel have to be called at home and told about it? I can't think of anything that justifies it."

The arrest report said the detectives showed their badges, sounded their sirens, and flashed their red lights during the pursuit. "We believe what the policemen have said happened," Peach said. "These are honorable men. The probable cause was the high rate of speed at which he was operating his car. If [the Busches] disagree, that's what we have courtrooms for."