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

22

"THEY DIDN'T JUST DROP OUT OF THE SKY"

In November 2009, August IV made his first appearance at the Pestalozzi Street plant in nearly a year. He was supposedly there to attend a board of directors' meeting, but he presented himself to a security guard at a different part of the huge complex and asked to be let into his grandfather Gussie's old office.

It was an odd request, but the guard recognized him and wasn't about to question it. Prior to the InBev takeover, Gussie's office on the third floor of the old executive office building had been preserved just as the old man had left it. The Fourth never had a close relationship with his grandfather, primarily because his father's more than ten-year estrangement from Gussie had limited his exposure to the family patriarch. The Fourth didn't see his grandfather more than a handful of times between 1975 and 1989, when Gussie died, and he didn't visit Grant's Farm once in that time. During his last few years at the company, however, he indicated to family members that he'd always been in awe of the old man, and on a number of occasions he sought and received permission from his uncle, Adolphus IV, the trustee for Grant's Farm, to use the big house to host dinners for A-B executives and distributors. His father had never done that.

When the security guard escorted him to Gussie's office, the Fourth was upset to find it unlocked and empty. The new owners had cleared the s.p.a.ce of all Gussie's furnishings and mementos and shipped everything to Grant's Farm, where it now sat in boxes and crates in the ballroom on the third floor of the big house.

The Fourth ordered the guard to leave him there alone. The guard waited outside the door for fifteen minutes, then grew concerned and tried to reenter the office. But the Fourth had propped himself against the door and wouldn't let him in. "Get the h.e.l.l out of here!" he shouted. "I'm fine; I'm on the phone." When the guard finally gained entrance to the office, he found the former CEO lying on the floor in some sort of emotional state (one of the Fourth's confidants later described it as a "panic attack"). The Fourth pulled himself together and headed off in the direction of the boardroom, hollering over his shoulder to the guard, "You don't have to follow me; I know the way." The guard, an ex-cop, said later that the Fourth appeared gaunt and hollow-eyed. "He looked like a heroin addict."

The Fourth was in a dark place. He was no longer married to Kate. He filed for divorce in November 2008, shortly after A-B shareholders approved the InBev deal, stating in court doc.u.ments that there was "no reasonable likelihood that the marriage can be preserved and therefore the marriage is irretrievably broken." The court filings revealed that Kate had signed a prenuptial agreement, which had been supplanted by a property settlement. "We were having difficulties in our relationship and then [the takeover] happened and it was just horrible," Kate said later. "He fought the buyout so hard, and he was so upset by it. He felt like he let everybody down."

In addition to retaining his seat on the board of directors, the Fourth was being paid $120,000 a month in consulting fees supposedly for advising ABI management on new products, marketing programs, beer quality, and the company's relationship with charities. It's not clear if he did any of that, however. He'd only attended the one board meeting. He'd withdrawn from public view and was dividing his time between his Huntleigh mansion and his new $2.8 million waterfront home at the Lake of the Ozarks.

According to friends, he'd fallen into a depression and was being treated by a psychiatrist, who prescribed antidepressant medication. He was also self-medicating with large doses of binge buying. He bought a $1.25 million Bell helicopter and a $2.5 million, fifty-five-foot ocean-worthy cruiser, which he named after his pet mastiff Waymo (short for "way more better than you"). He acquired more than twenty high-end automobiles, including several Lamborghinis, Corvettes, Ferraris, and Porsches, a Rolls-Royce, and a $500,000, 600-horsepower Mercedes SLR McLaren with a lightweight carbon fiber body and a top speed of 230 miles per hour. He spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on guns, mostly high-powered, semi-automatic paramilitary weapons, not hunting rifles, including several .50-caliber machine guns with a range of more than a mile. He even built a small house on the Huntleigh property in which to store and display the a.r.s.enal. According to longtime St. Louis Post-Dispatch gossip columnist Jerry Berger, the gun house featured a full bathroom and a thirty-square-foot safe.

Whether he was at the Huntleigh house or the Lake of the Ozarks, the Fourth presided over constant get-togethers with his "guys," and sometimes their wives and girlfriends. But the revelry and retail therapy apparently did little to fill the hole left by the loss of the company. At some point during the gatherings, the talk inevitably turned to the aborted Modelo deal and how he could have saved the company if only his father hadn't sold them all out for his own personal gain.

Said one regular, sarcastically, "He was feeling sorry for himself, with $100 million in the bank."

When he ventured out in public, he often dressed in pajama bottoms, a T-shirt, dark gla.s.ses, a baseball cap, and orange Crocs. "It was sort of his Hugh Hefner outfit," said a friend. "He thought it kept people from recognizing him." He was spotted in the disguise as he shopped for a new Porsche one afternoon and while he was gambling at a West County casino early one morning.

By the fall of 2009, friends and family members were alarmed by his appearance and behavior. "Everyone in the family knew what was going on," said one of the Fourth's friends. "When a member of the family is a disgrace, they want to ignore it, deny it, not talk about it. But Steve Bagwell got them together for an intervention."

Bagwell was A-B's vice president of international marketing and a friend of the Fourth's dating back to their high school days. He was loyal to the boss but not part of the hard-partying "entourage," colleagues say. With Bagwell's help, the Fourth's mother, Susie, and his sister, Susan Busch-Transou, attempted an intervention at the Lake of the Ozarks, enlisting Ron Burkle and another of the Fourth's super-rich friends, Florida-based hotelier Jeffrey Soffer, the boyfriend of Elle MacPherson. Both men flew to Missouri on their private jets to partic.i.p.ate in the intervention. When the group confronted the Fourth at his home, he admitted that he'd become dependent on a combination of alcohol, cocaine, oxycodone, and antidepressants. He promised to go into rehab as soon as he returned to St. Louis and got his affairs in order. But he didn't.

By Christmas 2009 the Fourth had taken up with a woman named Adrienne Martin, a twenty-six-year-old divorcee whom he'd met at a notorious downtown dance club called Lure, where she worked as a hostess. An exotic-looking hazel-eyed brunette with a penchant for spandex leggings, Martin maintained an apartment in St. Charles, Missouri, but she lived at the Huntleigh mansion most of the time, along with her eight-year-old son.

According to the Fourth's friends, employees, and regular visitors to the house, Martin soon shared his dependence on drugs, and the couple's behavior began to frighten the household staff. The Fourth's weapons collection seemed to have migrated from the gun house into the main house. "There were guns everywhere, on every table," said one regular visitor to the house. "There were so many guns on one coffee table that you could not see the wood [tabletop]. He had a hundred guns in his bedroom alone."

The a.r.s.enal included a Taser gun, which precipitated a trip to the hospital emergency room when Adrienne was shot with a dart that went all the way through her left index finger. The Fourth told friends that she accidentally shot herself, but they weren't sure who really pulled the trigger, since he had discharged weapons in the house multiple times, according to three people who saw the damage and discussed the incidents with him and members of his household staff. "It was at least five times," said one friend. On one occasion he shot up a bookshelf. On another, he fired three or four rounds into his bedroom wall. "He fired a high-powered hunting rifle in the kitchen and it went right through the wall," said a frequent guest at the house. Another time "he emptied an entire gun because he thought something was after him."

There were similar incidents at the lake house, where he installed a dozen "game" cameras in the surrounding woods, like those around the Huntleigh property, so he could see on indoor monitors if anyone approached the house. Friends say he became increasingly paranoid and was beset by what they characterized as wild hallucinations. "He would sit and stare at the security monitors and swear there were people out in the woods watching him," said one. "He said he saw little blue heads floating around in the air," said another. He had a sawed-off shotgun mounted under a countertop in the kitchen where he liked to sit. The gun was aimed at the kitchen door, which was the main delivery entrance to the house.

One day, he supposedly became so enraged by the sound of a leaf blower somewhere in the neighborhood that he donned a bulletproof vest and helmet, strapped on several weapons, and roared off on his motorcycle to find who was responsible. Fortunately, the culprit apparently got away.

Amid all the crazy behavior and guns, it was the regular presence of Martin's young son, Blake, that concerned people the most. "I called A-B security and told them they should do something because there was a little kid walking around with hundreds of loaded guns lying all over the place," said one friend. "They said they were aware of what was going on in general and would look into it."

The Fourth's housekeeper finally took matters into her own hands when she arrived for work one morning in early February 2010 and found the little boy wandering unattended in the midst of all the weaponry while her boss and Adrienne slept in his barricaded bedroom. She called the Fourth's sister, Susan Busch-Transou, in Florida and told her what had been going on in the house. Susan and her mother reacted quickly, contacting the children's division of the Missouri Department of Social Services, which promptly dispatched a social worker to the Huntleigh house, accompanied by a local police officer. But after the social worker interviewed the Fourth and he promised to secure the weapons, the department of social services took no action regarding the child.

Over the next few days, reports from staffers inside the house indicated that the Fourth's paranoia and hallucinations were getting worse, and that he was walking around sweating profusely, with multiple weapons strapped to his body and making threatening comments about finding out who had made the call to social services. His family promptly pet.i.tioned the circuit court of St. Louis County to issue an order committing him to involuntary confinement for treatment. Based on written allegations about his "24-hour-a-day" consumption of prescription and illegal drugs, his hallucinations, paranoia, and firing of weapons in the house, the court determined that he presented a likelihood of serious harm to himself or others, and issued a warrant directing the police to take him into custody and transport him to a medical treatment facility for involuntary treatment.

The task of executing the warrant fell to the police department of Frontenac, which provides protection under contract to Huntleigh's 135 homes and 334 well-heeled residents. The officers were told that the Fourth would likely be on drugs, heavily armed, and acutely paranoid, and he would be able to see on his interior monitors whoever buzzed the intercom for admittance through the gates. Somehow they had to gain entrance without alarming him. They were shown the floor plan of the house and warned that if he ran into his heavily fortified bedroom, then they could be in a siege situation.

So they came up with a ruse to fool him into letting them in. They would send the social worker and the police officer who had interviewed him a few days earlier to the front gate on Lindberg Boulevard to say they were just stopping by on a follow-up visit. A contingent of about of about a dozen officers and an emergency medical team would be stationed out of sight. When the Fourth buzzed the social worker and cop through, the others would follow and rush the house to subdue him.

Around noon on Thursday February 11, 2010, a caravan of black SUVs sat idling on Lindberg Boulevard as the social worker pressed the b.u.t.ton on the front gate intercom. A tactical team and a hostage negotiator from the St. Louis County Police Department were standing by a mile up the road at the Frontenac Plaza mall, just in case the commando mission went badly.

The plan worked perfectly. Wearing a bathrobe and armed with five weapons, the Fourth put up no resistance. He was handcuffed and taken to St. John's Hospital, where he was admitted under the name of Sam Stone, the t.i.tle character of an old John Prine song about a soldier who comes home from Vietnam as an addict and eventually dies of an overdose.

With the Fourth safely locked down in detox, his family moved to clean up the mess he'd left behind. Adrienne Martin was sent packing. "They put her out of the house that day," said one of the Fourth's friends. The family hired a team to go through the house to collect and catalog all the weapons. According to a partic.i.p.ant, they found approximately nine hundred weapons and a large cache of ammunition-drawers and buckets full of it. The Fourth had between thirty and forty loaded a.s.sault rifles stashed under his bed and a number of semi-automatic pistols fastened by magnets to the headboard. They found a tear gas gun and orange residue indicating that it had been fired inside the house.

After nine days at St. John's Hospital, friends say, the Fourth was flown by private plane to a rehabilitation facility in Phoenix. The only public mention of the entire episode was an item that appeared in Jerry Berger's online gossip column on March 8. Headlined "Busch in Rehab," it reported simply: "August Busch IV is currently in an out-of-state treatment center, confirmed a family source."

Friends say the Fourth made it through twenty-one days in rehab. Then, with his sister and mother in town to visit him, he p.r.o.nounced himself "cured" and left. Back in St. Louis, he cut off communication with the people who had tried to help him-his mother and sister, Steve Bagwell, Ron Burkle and Jeff Soffer-and picked up his life right where he'd left off. Adrienne Martin and her son moved back into the Huntleigh mansion, and the partying resumed. He even got his guns back because it turned out that they were all legal. It was as if nothing had happened.

Eight months later, on the night of November 18, 2010, the Fourth's longtime friend and A-B underling Jim Sp.r.i.c.k got into a domestic dispute with his wife, Mich.e.l.le, which led to the police being called to their home. While there, the responding officers found a quant.i.ty of drugs, including marijuana, methamphetamine, and two large tablets of cocaine molded and professionally packaged to look exactly like Alka-Seltzer, complete with the brand name stamped into it. According to police doc.u.ments, Mich.e.l.le admitted that the drugs were hers, and she was taken to the police station, where she said that she and her husband were part of a group of former and current Anheuser-Busch executives and their wives that regularly attended parties at the home of August Busch IV; in fact, they had been at his house that night. Asked where she got the Alka-Seltzer cocaine, she replied that August had given it to her. She said a friend of his, a well-known St. Louis businessman, had it manufactured for his friends so if they got stopped, the police wouldn't know it was drugs. Mrs. Sp.r.i.c.k was booked for possession, and the DEA was notified about August's friend with the Alka-Seltzer cocaine.

Thirty days later, at 1:12 p.m. on December 19, a St. Louis County 911 operator took a call from the Huntleigh mansion.

"We need an ambulance to 2832 South Lindberg," the caller said.

"OK, is that a business or a residence?"

"A residence."

"OK. What's the problem?"

"This girl is not waking up; we can't get her to."

"Is she breathing?"

"Yeah, we don't know. It's dark. I'm going to try and get a light to see."

"OK, all right, I'll get them going right away."

"All right, thanks. Bye."

The caller was Mike Jung, one of the Fourth's household employees. The girl was Adrienne Martin, and she was dead.

An emergency medical team made the official p.r.o.nouncement fourteen minutes later. They found Adrienne lying on her back fully clothed (including a jacket) on top of the covers on the Fourth's bed. In a short time, five Frontenac police officers and an investigator from the county medical examiner's office were on the scene, bagging evidence, asking questions, and taking notes. Also on hand was one of St. Louis's most prominent criminal attorneys, Arthur Margulis, who was representing the Fourth. Fortunately, Adrienne's son, Blake, was in Springfield, Missouri, visiting relatives.

From the outset, the investigators believed they were looking at a fatal drug overdose. Twenty-seven-year-old women don't often die in their sleep from natural causes. Their suspicion seemed borne out after Adrienne's body was moved to the morgue and the medical investigator found a plastic straw "covered by a white residue" in the right front pocket of her jacket. Police detectives found a similar straw, also encrusted with "a white powdery substance," between the mattress and box springs of the Fourth's bed. They found no cocaine in the room, however, just two empty prescription bottles on a dresser, which were covered inside with a white powder residue.

Detectives saw no signs of trauma on Adrienne's body and no evidence of a struggle, although they noted in their reports that "the entire room appeared to be in disarray. Items were lying throughout the room in no identifiable pattern ... electronic devices, power cords, television, remote controls, Gatorade bottles, two cups of brown liquid, weapons, ammunition, radios, speakers, shoes, a watch, tools, flashlight batteries." The master bathroom was strewn with similar items, and inside the "toilet room" they found "a loaded shotgun behind the door and a Glock pistol loaded with an extended magazine hanging on a hook next to the toilet paper roll."

Detective James Ford asked to speak to August IV and was told by attorney Margulis that he would allow his client to make a statement and answer limited questions. According to Ford's report, the Fourth offered a brief chronology of the previous eighteen hours: After eating dinner at the house with Adrienne, he went to bed around 6:00 p.m. Sat.u.r.day, but she did not. He awoke around 2:00 a.m., and she was still awake. He asked her to come to bed and went back to sleep. When he awoke at 12:30 p.m. on Sunday, she was in bed and appeared to be sleeping. He went into the kitchen, made them both a protein shake, and returned to the bedroom around 1:00 p.m. and was unable to wake her. He called Mike Jung into the room, and they both tried to revive her, shaking her, slapping her face. Then they called 911. Detective Ford asked if he knew whether Adrienne abused drugs. He answered no.

Despite all the indications that this was a drug-related death, the Frontenac Police Department did not obtain a warrant to search the rest of the house or obtain blood and urine samples from August IV to see if he had consumed any drugs the night before. Based on the warrant they had executed in February, they had reason to suspect he had.

The next day, December 20, Detective Ford and Detective Matt Brune witnessed the autopsy performed by Dr. Michael Graham, St. Louis County's a.s.sistant medical examiner. Graham quickly identified a hole in the septum of Adrienne's nose, which he demonstrated by inserting a surgical tool in one nostril, through the hole in the septum, and out the other nostril. "Snorting a large amount of narcotics over a long period of time" could have caused the condition, he said. It was the only notable finding during the exam, which yielded no apparent cause of death. It would be up to the toxicology reports to tell the tale, and they wouldn't be completed for four to six weeks.

It wasn't until December 23, four days after Martin's death, that the Frontenac Police Department got around to telling the public about it, and even then the disclosure was only in response to a call from a Post-Dispatch reporter acting on a tip. Asked why the department had waited so long, Police Chief Tom Becker responded matter-of-factly that the department had released information as soon as it received media inquiries and after approval by the city attorney. The implication was that had it not been for an enterprising reporter, the mysterious death of a young woman in the bed of the town's most notorious "playboy" might have remained a secret indefinitely.

Making matters worse, the department's initial press release stated incorrectly that Martin's body had been discovered on Sat.u.r.day, making the gap between her death and its disclosure seem even longer. The department quickly corrected the error, but the impression had been created that the authorities were somehow covering for the Busch family. Who else would benefit from keeping the story out of the press? Indeed, the department initially refused to say whether August IV had been in the house when Martin died. On Christmas Eve, the Post-Dispatch raised more suspicion when it reported that forty-two minutes had elapsed between the time Adrianne was found unresponsive and paramedics were called. The Post's claim was based on a statement from the medical examiner's office that conflicted with Detective Ford's written report, which put the time at 1:00 p.m. but was not made public.