Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer Part 22

"So there he was, the chairman of the company in his sungla.s.ses, $500 slacks, and $1,000 boots, digging through the trash," said Brooks, still marveling at the image years later, "when this drunk, tattooed biker walks up, stares at him like he's from the moon, and says, 'Hey, buddy, if you need a beer that bad, I'll buy you one.' August almost fell down laughing."

When it came to the company's award-winning ad campaigns, the Fourth may have been claiming the credit, but no commercial went on the air without August III's approval. "He watched everything, and he could be very intimidating, aggressive and uncompromising," said a veteran of many commercial viewing sessions with him. "But he invited opinion. He genuinely wanted to know what you thought. I remember one marketing meeting when he said, 'I don't get it, but I'm not a contemporary adult. All the people in here under thirty, stand up and you tell me what you thought about that commercial.' He synthesized opinions; he energized you. He was engaged."

The executive recalled one time when August sought his opinion about a commercial at a particularly inopportune moment. "We had just finished a meeting and I was in the executive washroom, in a stall, when he walked in and said, 'Who's in there? Hey, what did you think? Was that the d.a.m.nedest thing you ever saw?' He didn't stand on ceremony. His head was working on something, and he didn't care that I was taking a dump," the former executive said, adding with a laugh, "And I was never comfortable using that restroom after that."

August continued to press his personal war on drugs. Few companies had stricter or more comprehensive drug policies than A-B. All union employees were required to undergo a drug test once a year, and nonunion and management employees were subject to random testing without notice. Other companies required employees to provide blood and urine samples for testing, but A-B required them to surrender a hair sample as well, which could be used to detect drug use up to three months prior. The official company policy stated that workers who tested positive for drugs would be given unpaid leave and could be reinstated after completing an employee a.s.sistance program and testing clean. In practice, few were reinstated. "The company would pay for rehab, but the minute you completed it, they let you go, so it was really one strike and you're out."

Despite a family history rife with substance abuse (his great-grandfather, uncle, mother, and, arguably, his father), August didn't buy the idea that alcoholism and drug addiction were a disease with a hereditary component. "He believed they were the result of personal weakness, not illness," said a colleague. "I heard him say it many times. He thought it was all a matter of willpower."

In the summer of 1995, August ordered a drug "search and seizure" raid at the Los Angeles brewery, conducted by A-B security and human resources personnel with the help of a private investigation agency, Wells Fargo security guards, and drug-sniffing dogs. The task force swept into the plant during a shift change at 4:30 p.m. and locked down the employee parking lot, preventing anyone from leaving for more than two hours while the dogs went from car to car. If the dogs reacted to a car, indicating that drugs might be present, the owner was located and brought to a room in the administration building, where he was told to sign a consent form authorizing a search of his vehicle or face being fired.

One longtime employee was fired on the spot for refusing to sign, and another was fired after he consented to a search and security guards found a marijuana roach clip in the glove compartment of his truck. In the parking lot, a handful of workers were ordered to remove their shoes and socks and sit on the ground while their vehicles were being searched.

The operation turned into a debacle as detained employees began calling their spouses to say they would be late for dinner because the company was holding them "hostage." Family members called reporters, and reporters called Fleishman-Hillard for comment. "I think A-B expected to find a s.h.i.t-load of dope," said a former Fleishman-Hillard executive involved in the damage control. "Instead, they stepped in a load of s.h.i.t."

A group of more than twenty employees sued the company for false imprisonment, false arrest, a.s.sault and battery, invasion of privacy, and defamation, among other things. "The whole operation was reminiscent of some of the horror stories emanating from Germany during World War II," said the workers' attorney, Andrew M. Wyatt, at a press conference announcing the lawsuit, which named August III and A-B security chief Gary Prindiville.

In legal papers, Wyatt cited a sworn statement by the head of the private investigation firm, saying he was told by an A-B executive that "the corporation's legal department had approved [the raid]" and that August III had said "the search better be conducted or (expletive) heads would roll."

But for the embarra.s.sing news stories, August III should have been pleased with the outcome of the raid. No cache of drugs was found, just some traces of marijuana under the seat of one car, which would suggest that there was no significant drug problem at the Los Angeles plant. You could expect to find more than that in any random employee parking lot in America.

Contrary to PR-generated press reports, August IV had not "toned down his wild ways." He had just become more circ.u.mspect. As his star rose inside the company, he began gathering his own team of executives. They were a little younger than the team he inherited, by about five years, and he seemed to choose them more for their fealty to him than their knowledge of the business. One of them was Jim Sp.r.i.c.k, a former member of the millionaires' boys club. "Sp.r.i.c.k was given a VP position and moved up to the ninth floor, and no one could figure out why, other than he was close to the Fourth," said one of the older executives, who was unaware that Sp.r.i.c.k's testimony had helped sway the jury in the Fourth's 1986 car chase trial.

Sp.r.i.c.k and a handful of the younger executives formed a protective, enabling circle around the Fourth. Whether he was out having dinner, watching football games on TV at home, or traveling on company business, they were ever-present. He called them "my guys." Others in the company called them "the entourage," and several of his friends referred to them as "the jackals." On business trips, they drove the car, carried his money and credit cards, picked up the tabs, and made sure that young women were on the evening's menu. They usually accomplished the latter task by placing an order with the local distributor, telling him what August liked and instructing him to be certain to have several women available. Most of the distributors didn't like it, especially the older married ones. They weren't being asked to provide hookers, just beautiful young women who might want to party with a rich young beer baron, but it felt uncomfortably close to pimping. They felt they couldn't say no to the young man destined to inherit the company in a few years, or complain to his father. If they had been around long enough, they knew that August III and Gussie both had operated in a similar fashion back in the day, though not with the Fourth's singleness of purpose.

In fact, s.e.x seemed to be the one thing that the Fourth and his father bonded over. The two would get into discussions on the subject with such discomfiting specificity that their fellow A-B executives would sometimes excuse themselves from the table, saying they had to go to the restroom, rather than hear more. "It was like listening to Satan talk," said one former colleague. Another remembered having breakfast with them on a business trip in Europe. "August IV had been out to a bar the night before, and he said he'd met a beautiful girl who spoke English beautifully, and he gave her a $100 bill and asked her to go to the room with him, but she tore it in half and gave it back to him. I said, 'Good for her,' and they both looked at me and said, 'What do you mean?'"

The Fourth's relentless womanizing made for great c.o.c.ktail chatter at company social gatherings, where his colleagues and their wives watched to see what manner of pretty young thing he would bring. They were generally "nice girls" caught up in the thrill of dating the Busch brewery heir and naively hoping there might be a place for them in the kingdom. Most often they were wannabe models, actresses, or beauty queens. "He had a weakness for pageant girls," a friend said. The A-B wives learned not to get attached to them because they tended to disappear without notice. One girl arrived in New Orleans with him, expecting to spend the week as his date at the company's Super Bowl festivities. Instead, she found herself packed up and put on the plane back to St. Louis in less than twenty-four hours. The next night another beautiful young woman was sitting by his side at the dinner table.

The Fourth once picked up a girl in a nightclub in Dallas and flew her back to St. Louis with him on the company jet. After a few days, he sent the jet back to Dallas to fetch the woman's two toy poodles. Just as quickly, the woman and her dogs were headed back to Texas. "August IV fell in love with whomever he was with," said a friend of more than fifteen years.

After breaking up with his fiancee Judy Buchmiller, the Fourth dated an aspiring actress named Sage Linville, who moved from southern California to St. Louis to be with him. "There's a girl I'm very much in love with and she may be the one," he told a reporter, adding playfully. "Sage Busch is an interesting name, isn't it? I'm not making predictions about that." He also dated a stunning blonde named Shandi Finnessy, a Miss Missouri who went on to become Miss USA and a runner-up in Donald Trump's Miss Universe compet.i.tion.

One relatively long-term relationship ended on an ugly note when the Fourth's rottweiler horribly bit the young woman on the face. The attack occurred late at night in his home on Lindell Boulevard, across from Forest Park. As the Fourth was rushing the woman to the emergency room, he called one of his guys, frantic, and told him to go to the house and "clean up the mess."

"What do you mean?" the other man asked.

"You'll see; just go," the Fourth replied.

The man later told another executive that he found cocaine at the house and evidence of kinky s.e.x, suggesting that the dog might have attacked the girl because he perceived that she was hurting his master. The Fourth told people that she had gotten up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water, and the dog must have mistaken her for an intruder. The girl vanished from his life, supposedly with a hefty financial settlement. The dog stayed.

The media has long characterized August IV's s.e.xual escapades as a "playboy" lifestyle, often employing that old-school adjective as a kind of editorial wink, telegraphing an unmistakable admiration for his accomplishment, as if to say we should all be so lucky. Several of his colleagues even coined a secret nickname for him that was intended as a humorous reference to his seemingly constant priapic state. "How's Woody doing?" they'd say. Or, "Has Woody weighed in on this yet?" But to some who knew him over a number of years, the Fourth's incessant coupling seemed more a sad compulsion born of a deep psychological wound. A female friend suggested that his need to win over beautiful women constantly stemmed from a severe case of acne that had marred his looks and played havoc with his self-confidence when he was a teenager. A male friend opined that it was because "he could never get a hug from his dad."

Whatever the cause, one result was that between the ever-changing women and the ubiquitous entourage, August IV was rarely if ever by himself, almost as if he were terrified of being alone.

Fortunately for him, he could afford not to be. In the late 1990s, he began hosting weekend parties at the company's luxury compound on the Lake of the Ozarks, a 55,000-acre man-made lake in the Ozark Mountains about a forty-five-minute helicopter flight from St. Louis. Started by August III in 1982, the woodsy compound featured four separate residential units, a tennis court, a helicopter landing pad, an elaborate boat dock with a full-service kitchen, and a fleet of half a dozen watercraft, including a large cabin cruiser, a high speed powerboat, and two houseboats. With a staff of twenty-one in the summer months, the complex could accommodate up to a hundred guests.

The lake property was not a place that A-B's rank-and-file workers or middle managers ever visited. August III used it primarily as a conference center for his highest-ranking executives, members of the strategy committee, who would be flown to the lake on corporate aircraft, sometimes with their wives, for several days of meetings and relaxation. He also hosted Busch family gatherings, birthdays, and holiday celebrations at the compound, all sumptuously provisioned but low-key affairs. There were no wild parties when August III was in residence at No. 4, the largest residential unit on the property. Key executives, important distributors, close Busch friends, and even some Cardinals players also were allowed to reserve units for getaways with their families.

The atmosphere at the compound started to change, however, after the Fourth became vice president of marketing and began showing up at the lake with "his guys" nearly every weekend. According to a former supervisor of the household staff, "the work hours got a lot longer because he would stay up late partying, and the staff had to stay on the job until he was done and dismissed them."

Unlike his father, who preferred barbecuing his own steaks to going out to eat, the Fourth hit all the hot spots in the area, from the Blue Heron restaurant, where you could find a $1,200 cabernet on the wine list, to the h.o.r.n.y Toad, a raucous roadhouse hookup joint where cocaine and oxycodone (known as "hillbilly heroin") could be purchased in the crowd almost as easily as a Bud could be bought at the bar. According to local legend, the Fourth once paid a c.o.c.ktail waitress at the h.o.r.n.y Toad $1,000 to deliver a round of drinks topless.

When the clubs closed, the Fourth and the entourage usually brought some patrons back to the compound, where they liked to fire guns across the water from the boat dock and set off fireworks. "They set the place on fire once," said the former staffer. During the day on weekends, they hopped into one or more of the company boats and headed for "Party Cove," which the New York Times called "the oldest established permanent floating baccha.n.a.l in the country." The party took place in Anderson Hollow Cove, where more than a thousand boats would be anch.o.r.ed so closely together that you could step from one to another amid much mooning, "t.i.tty flashing," and public fornication to the cheers of spectators.

In his posh fifty-foot cruiser or conspicuously branded Budweiser powerboat, the Fourth was always the biggest fish in the cove, and he reveled in his celebrity. The bikinied females who flocked aboard his boat were not the same as the girls he picked up in Central West End bars or brought to company parties. "They were a different cla.s.s of women altogether," said a friend. "These were more the 'rode hard and put up wet' gals, coa.r.s.er and more worn. And they reacted to him as if he were a G.o.d."

In an interview with a local magazine, the Fourth described a typical lake weekend from an entirely different perspective. "Here we can work in a non-traditional, natural setting," he said. "The great thing about the Lake is that we can walk into any bar or restaurant and just talk to people, engaging consumers while they're enjoying our beverages. It's a tremendous opportunity to get people's honest feedback about a particular product."

The lake became the Fourth's refuge, a place where he was always surrounded by people who catered to him and protected him, including local sheriff's deputies, whom he paid to moonlight as his personal bodyguards and weekend security detail at the compound. "His father had no security," said a former compound employee. "The Fourth was kind of obsessed with it, especially after 9-11." That sort of patronage bought a lot of indulgence from law enforcement in the small rural community of Lake Ozark, Mo. "The Fourth liked the lake because he felt he could control the environment there, and no one in authority was watching or judging him," said a friend.

Over the period of a few years, the Fourth literally took over the lake facility. His father used the compound less frequently, and other A-B executives were uncomfortable with the increasingly rowdy atmosphere. Eventually, management of the property came under the purview of A-B's vice president of hospitality, Jim Sp.r.i.c.k. From then on, the Fourth "operated it like a little party palace," said a former company employee.

The Fourth changed the atmosphere at the St. Louis office, too, as he moved to solidify his position in the hierarchy of the company. Buoyed by his accolades for A-B's ad campaigns, he morphed into a "hard-charging, aggressive, a.s.sumptive guy, ent.i.tled and arrogant," according to one executive who worked with him at the time. "He'd have dinner with his father on Sunday night and then come in on Monday and say, 'My dad and I talked and this is what we are doing.' His father inadvertently empowered him. People knew he was probably going to be chairman one day, so they got out of his way; they deferred to him even though his actual position didn't dictate that deference."

Inevitably, resentments sprang up between the older members of the management team and the younger men the Fourth was bringing in to the mix.

"You had the big brothers and the little brothers," said one observer of the dynamic. The big brothers were, for the most part, loyal to August III, and felt that helping the Fourth succeed was part of their duty to the Chief. The little brothers felt they owed allegiance solely to the Fourth, and they saw his father as a tyrant intent on holding on to power for as long as he could. It was a repeat of the pattern established thirty years earlier, when a young August III and his corporate planners b.u.t.ted heads with Gussie and his buddies up on the third floor of the old administration building.

The big brothers thought the Fourth was too caught up in the glamour aspects of the business-the cool TV commercials, sports sponsorships, and lavish Super Bowl parties-and didn't pay enough attention to the sales functions of the brewery and its distributors, the gritty work that moved the product out of the plants and into the beer coolers of America. They looked askance at the Fourth's growing relationship with Ron Burkle, a onetime California supermarket magnate turned billionaire investor whose reputation for womanizing matched or exceeded his own and whose parties at his Beverly Hills mansion, "Green Acres," featured the sort of guests the Fourth would never have b.u.mped into at the h.o.r.n.y Toad, including former president and Mrs. Clinton and the Reverend Jesse Jackson and his sons Yusef and Jonathan. The Fourth hosted Burkle on at least one occasion at the lake compound, where the staff had no idea who he was but took to calling him "the rich guy."

The big brothers grumbled that while the Fourth was hobn.o.bbing with Burkle, he avoided mixing with people far more important to the company. "He did not respect our distributors," said one. "He viewed them as hired help rather than the wealthy independent businessmen that they were."

"He had the attention span of a flea," said another. "He could not finish a dinner or a round of golf with important clients or wholesalers. He was always saying, 'I gotta go.'"

At a meeting with executives of 7-Eleven at the company's offices in Dallas, for example, the Fourth "got up and walked out when the discussion went longer than he'd planned," said an executive who was present. "Everyone was shocked because they wanted to share their strategy with us. The meeting went on for another hour without him, and when we got back to the airport he was waiting on the plane. We asked, 'How could you walk out on one of our largest customers?' He said, 'I'm sorry, but I just couldn't sit there anymore.'"

(In contrast, August III once waited several hours for the CEO of 7-Eleven, whom he was supposed to meet for dinner at the Ritz-Carlton. But the other man was flying in on his own plane, and there was some delay. "So after about an hour, August asked, 'How much business do we do with 7-Eleven?'" said a former executive who was present. "I told him twenty-four million cases a year, and he said, 'Holy s.h.i.t! I'll wait all night for someone who buys that much beer from us.'")

Sometimes the Fourth wouldn't show up for meetings at all. When his father and all the other senior executives gathered in Palm Springs for a long-scheduled golf weekend with one of A-B's biggest customers, the vice president of marketing had his a.s.sistant phone in his regrets at the last minute. "Where's August?" his father asked a subordinate at the kickoff c.o.c.ktail party. "He was supposed be here." The Fourth was forty-five minutes away by corporate jet, hanging out with his new best friend Ron Burkle in Los Angeles, where he remained for the entire weekend. To the big brothers, it was another example of his lack of work ethic.

The little brothers had an entirely different view of their boss. They saw him-and by extension themselves-as the hip breath of fresh air the company needed to blow away the smell of the Clydesdale stables that seemed to cling to everything. They pointed to the success of the Bud Light "I Love You, Man" and "Real Men of Genius" campaigns as evidence that the Fourth was himself a marketing genius, capable of leading the company to new heights of success if his father would just support him and not keep undermining him all the time. The Fourth fostered the latter sentiment by posting some personal notes his father had sent him on the wall in his home, where others could see them. "They were painful to read, stern and businesslike," said a frequent visitor to his house.

The most loyal of the little brothers sometimes characterized the Fourth as a "visionary" or even a "great man," but at the same time they ignored or covered up behavior that belied such descriptions. They knew, for example, that his partying was beginning to interfere with his job performance. "Did it ever make sense to you why he would never attend a meeting before noon? It was because he'd gotten wrecked the night before and he couldn't make one before that," one of the little brothers confided to a big brother years later, after the takeover deal went down. "And how many meetings did he cancel out on?"

The older, married executives missed the signs because they didn't stay up with Fourth into the wee hours, when his demeanor changed and he got a little loopy and poignant, and stood with his face a little too close, as if something more than alcohol was at work. The big brothers attributed his unavailability to laziness. The little brothers didn't tell them what was really going on for fear they would tell Dad.

The Fourth's mother, Susie, apparently knew enough to call several of the older executives and ask them to help her arrange an intervention for her son. They thought she was being overly dramatic. Besides, they'd never seen the Fourth any more impaired than a lot of them got on occasion. It sort of went with the territory. They respectfully declined Susie's request, figuring that if they tried to rope the Fourth into an intervention and he didn't go for it, then they'd be looking for another job pretty quickly.

In 2001 the Fourth took half a dozen or so members of his executive team on a working vacation to Key West, Florida, where they found a new safe haven for misbehaving. They rented a secure floor on one wing of the Hilton and, with the 172-foot Big Eagle yacht and Little Eagle speedboat docked nearby for their use, commenced two weeks of epic partying that seared them into the memories of the locals. They quickly made themselves known at Rick's, the town's largest nightclub complex, which boasted half a dozen separately operated bars, including a topless one called the Red Garter.

"The Budweiser guys," as they became known around town, usually ate dinner in private rooms at the Fourth's two favorite restaurants, Shula's on the Beach and Benihana, running up bills of $5,000 to $6,000 a night. They threw parties on the Big Eagle that cost "a couple hundred grand," according to a local business owner who helped provision the boat. "They would send people out to get them cases of Cristal champagne and Opus One wine. Big-ticket items. Sometimes they'd have people drive to Miami and buy it all out, magnums of Cristal. There'd be none left anywhere, all the way up the coast to Ft. Lauderdale."

They once sent someone on an emergency helicopter flight to Joe's Stone Crab Restaurant in Miami after the Fourth complained that the crab claws that were about to be served at a large dinner party were too small. When the bigger ones arrived in time, he instructed that they were to be served "only to my guys," not the other guests. "He took care of his boys; he showed them a good time."

The Fourth's first sojourn to Key West resembled one of his grandfather Gussie's booze-and-broads cruises-on steroids. But when the Budweiser guys came back to town a few months later-and on subsequent biannual trips-the nightly entertainment program would have shocked the old man. The A-B men no longer had to pick up women in the bars because unbeknownst to company higher-ups, women were provided for them through several local escort agencies. According to a Key West business owner who was involved in the supply chain, a midlevel manager in A-B's St. Louis office made the initial contact with the escort agencies and then arranged for a local distributor to write checks to "cash" in the amount of $20,000 upon request. The distributor gave the checks to an intermediary, who cashed them and paid the women directly. The distributor then billed A-B $20,000 for "models."

How much the women were paid depended on whether they were "good girls" or "bad girls." As one partic.i.p.ant explained, "Good girls were arm candy, pretty and intelligent." They worked the early shift. They attended dinner parties, mixed with guests and business clients, were generally charming, and then went home with $400 or $500 for their night's work. The "bad girls" worked the late shift. The A-B executives jokingly referred to them as "the finishers." They were expected to provide s.e.xual services, for which they received $1,500 to $2,000 per night. "All the girls were very high cla.s.s. That's what they liked, even for bad girls." They would request six to eight women a night. "Some nights they'd go through the entire $20,000."