John Caples came up to me at the end of the evening. He was a quiet and weathered man about ten years older than myself. “Carl, I had no idea you were in the service.”
“Same here. Viet Nam?” I asked him.
He nodded. “Da Nang, ’68 to ’69.” He picked up the plaque from where it was laying. “That’s a pretty vague citation.”
Another man with us laughed. “That’s the kind of citation you get for when you’re somewhere you’re not supposed to be and doing something you’re not supposed to be doing, and nobody is allowed to know about it.”
I smiled. That was about as perfect a description for that Nicaraguan hike as I could imagine. “Close enough!”
Afterwards, Brewster excitedly told me we needed to push the Bronze Star and heroism as campaign hot buttons. I shut him down in no uncertain terms! “Brew, this is not a winner for us,” I told him.
“The Republican Party always looks good on defense and national security. This plays to that,” he replied.
We were outside in the parking lot at that point, so I just leaned up against the car. I shook my head. “Listen, I don’t know why Andy decided to pick the fight, but he screwed up. He should have gone after me on the Bronze Star itself.”
“What do you mean?”
“Brew, I’m not saying I didn’t earn the damn thing, but it’s not like on television. Things got very messy on that mission. I’m actually kind of surprised he didn’t have that already.”
McRiley shrugged. “He’s tied in tight to the various banking regulators, but as far as I know, he doesn’t know shit about the military. Maybe he simply saw the medal and decided not to push on a hero, but then why push the flag pin routine? Maybe he just doesn’t know what any of it means.”
“I don’t know either, buddy, but in my opinion, let sleeping dogs lie.”
Andy Stewart shut down the flag pin campaign quick enough, but immediately began pushing elsewhere. The obvious one was that I was trying to buy an election. No matter what I did, I was too rich. If I gave money to a local charity, I was trying to buy their support. Then, no matter what I gave, it wasn’t enough, and with my massive funds, I was being cheap. He loudly called on both the IRS and the SEC to investigate how I had come about by my ill gotten gains (he actually used that phrase) and when both agencies ignored him, he called on the Attorney General and the Justice Department to investigate how I had bribed the investigating agencies.
There was a small grain of truth to some of what Stewart was claiming. For years I had been donating to any number of local civic and service groups. Five or ten thousand dollars was a lot of money for a volunteer fire department or health clinic, and I routinely gave a few hundred thousand every year to groups all over the area. Most were in the district, simply because I lived relatively close to the center of the Ninth. Brewster simply made my routine donations into photo opportunities. We never gave any campaign speeches at these events, but if asked, I was always able to say some kind words for the people involved and the fine and necessary work they were doing.
To be fair about it, Stewart was doing many wonderful things by giving away money, also. At least once a week he would have a press conference or a photo opportunity and be shown talking about a new government grant, or tax benefit, or road improvement. Of course, the money he was giving away didn’t cost him anything, whereas mine did.
We pushed back on two fronts. One was the Horatio Alger story about how I had built my business from nothing, even to making a drive-by movie of my parent’s house. They no longer lived there, having sold it as part of the divorce. Still it showed I hadn’t grown up in a mansion. The other front was the negative one. I had made my money in the stock market. How did Andy Stewart, who had been working in the public sector non-stop since he got out of law school, build a net worth of over $20 million? When reporters started questioning our information, we released some very carefully sanitized versions of the info our investigators had uncovered. No account numbers were given, but banks were named. The result was a predictable level of chaos, with Stewart fulminating about the release of the information and dancing around whether it was true or not.
A big part of Andy Stewart’s money was due to his position as the fourth highest ranking member of the House Committee on Financial Services, also known as the House Banking Committee. As such, he had taken over a half million dollars in the last ten years from various banks and Wall Street finance companies as campaign donations. Even better, leaving aside whether Andy had ever dipped his fingers in the till inappropriately, was the way members of Congress got to legally benefit from insider trading.
Very specifically, if a Congressman learned something as a result of his routine Congressional duties there was no prohibition against playing the stock market to profit from this knowledge. As a private citizen, I could go to jail for buying or selling stocks based on information I learned in a board meeting. Like in any number of other matters, the federal laws on insider trading did not apply to members of Congress or the Senate. If Stewart learned something from a banker or lobbyist, it was perfectly legal for him to call up his broker and act on it. Stewart was heavily invested in the banking business.
It might have been legal, but it was definitely tacky, and I enjoyed watching him squirm under repeated questioning from the Baltimore Sun and the local television stations. I didn’t enjoy the second half of the ‘Billionaire Murderer’ label I predicted would be tossed around. There was no way in the world I could label Andy Stewart a killer. He was proudly declaring his push for strong gun control laws, and tying this to me as well. Not only was I a murderer of my baby brother, my ownership and use of a gun validated the need for control of guns.
For starters he dug up all the mud that had been tossed back in 1983, especially the various allegations originally tossed around by the State Police in their pissing match with the Baltimore County Police. Some of those allegations, reported by that jackass WJZ reporter, were that I had used my wealth to buy my way out of jail. (If only! If I could have done that, I would have used it to bury the whole damn mess!) Then he started going after the rest of my family. My father, quite predictably, punched out a reporter outside of the condo in Perry Hall he had bought with his half of the house proceeds. Equally predictably, my mom was waylaid by a camera crew at the door to her apartment, made an incoherent statement, and then ended up hospitalized at Sheppard Pratt for ‘exhaustion.’
I heard from John Rottingen early on that reporters from Baltimore were calling. They hadn’t shown up on his doorstep yet, but at least one managed to find his unlisted phone number and bug them at home. They were taking it pretty well so far. So far I couldn’t see any of the local television stations or the Sun coughing up the cash to send somebody out to Rochester to bug them in person. I asked him to keep me informed, and then let Marilyn know the latest.
Brewster had the media people working overtime on this, because it was pretty much as awful as we had thought it would get. We ended up with a television ad that seemed to go over well.
(Extreme close-up of a giant Bowie knife, slowly pulling back until you saw a hand holding it angrily. Over laid was a slow, deep voice.)
“Carl Buckman’s family was being terrorized by a psychotic madman. A stalker came after his wife. Her car was vandalized and firebombed. Their house was firebombed. On September 3rd, 1983, he broke into their home with a fourteen inch long knife and announced his intention to butcher his wife and infant son, and then attacked Carl Buckman. Carl Buckman killed his attacker. His attacker was a known paranoid schizophrenic with a history of violence.”