Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer (27 page)

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 pass. 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 (pronounced
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 coke 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 coke. They did foot-long lines.... I once saw August IV snort a line of coke 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. “Motherfucker!” 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 shift 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 Kingshighway 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-shirts, 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 hell was going to break loose, a perfect shit 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 circumstances. 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 fucking give you that train.”

August IV was fingerprinted and booked on three misdemeanor counts of third-degree assault (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 circumstances of the arrest, which involved undercover officers who were apparently impersonating criminal types driving an unmarked car, we are assessing the matter.”

The headline in the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
that morning must have seemed like déjà 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 document, 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 flashing 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 assault,” 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 brass 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.”

For all his tough talk, Peach ended up pulling his punches. He dropped the felony weapons charge, saying it “did not meet the legal requirement” because the gun was not “on his person or within reach.” He chose not to subpoena the mobile phone records after learning that August III sat on the board of the phone company, AT&T, feeling it wasn't worth the fight it would take to get them. And he assigned his least experienced attorney to the case—“a misdemeanor attorney who had never tried a misdemeanor case,” according to Nick Fredericksen.

The detectives would have preferred that Peach drop the case altogether, but they knew he couldn't. Coming on the heels of Peter Busch getting probation in the shooting of David Leeker and August IV walking away scot-free in the death of Michele Frederick, it would be perceived by the public as whitewash, evidence that the Busch family routinely bought off the authorities. So the prosecution was going to trial because it was politically impossible not to. And the detectives were resigned to the fact that they were going to have to get up on the witness stand and take one in the teeth for the team.