FOCUS/midwest SUMMER 2010

FOCUS/midwest Founded in 1962 by Charles L. Klotzer

Dougan Round Barn, near Beloit, Wisconsin

SAMPLE ISSUE / SUMMER 2010

FOCUS/midwest Founded in 1962 by Charles L. Klotzer

TABLE OF CONTENTS

SUMMER 2010

3

The Illinois town that outlived the predictions of its founder / C.D. Stelzer

4

Occupation: Poet / Doug Bybee

6

Why charity can’t be the answer / Hans S. Falck

7

Kazooziphone: How Howard the Milkman made $10 / Jacqueline Jackson

9

Why there were no Christmas trees in Gondar / Barb Olson

11

Paul Simon on southern Illinois in 1962 / Paul Simon

12

Being Lincoln: Fritz Klein talks about life as an impersonator / Roland Klose

15

Games people play / J. Mitch Hopper

19

Life in Lincoln’s town / Tara McClellan McAndrew

21

Fears and lobbying in Collinsville: Illinois kingpin Gary Fears works in mysterious ways / C.D. Stelzer

29

Under the radar: East Side player Gary Fears and his diverse business associates are betting that his military aviation business finally takes off. Whether it will fly is still up in the air / C.D. Stelzer

35

Chicago politics and the limits of reform / Walt Harrington

36

For a more equitable society / Richard H. de Lone

37

An industrial policy for America’s new Appalachia / Ted Evanoff

  

Find FOCUS/midwest online at focusmidwest.com E-mail FOCUS/midwest at focusmidwest@yahoo.com Follow FOCUS/midwest on Facebook and Twitter

2

The Illinois town that outlived the predictions of its founder It has been nearly 10 years since the Battle of Armageddon was supposed to have occurred, according to the predictions of the late Richard Kieninger. Life in Stelle, Illinois, goes on.

Kieninger founded Stelle, the German word for “place,” in 1973. The original residents of the planned community believed in the prophecies set forth in Kieninger’s 1963 book The Ultimate Frontier, which forecast that Armageddon would commence in November 1999. Writing under the pen name Eklal Kueshana, Kieninger further warned that survivors of the final war would be put out of their misery soon thereafter by a series of catastrophic events.

Among other things, Kieninger claimed he was the reincarnation of King David and Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten. In The Ultimate Frontier, a mysterious character named Dr. White contacts a boy named Richard, who is then recruited into a multitiered secret society of perfect human beings, called the Brotherhoods, which allegedly originated 25,000 years ago.

“On May 5 of the year 2000 A.D.,” wrote Kieninger, “the planets of the solar system will be arrayed in practically a straight line across space, and our planet will be subjected to enough gravitational distortion to tip the delicate balance. Although one cannot normally expect mere planetary configurations to have such a spectacular effect on us, many factors within our earth are conjoining to produce great surface instability around the turn of the century.”

Kieninger described in detail the earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and hurricanes that would occur after the conjunction, citing the biblical book of

Revelation as a corroborative reference. He further forecast that the tumult would cause existing landmasses to sink into the ocean.

He and his followers, however, planned to escape the havoc in high-tech dirigibles of their own design. Kieninger envisioned that the residents of Stelle would ultimately colonize the Kingdom of God on the lost continent of Mu, which would resurface from the Pacific Ocean near Easter Island.

Originally, Stelle residents, who hailed mainly from the Chicago area, were required to donate their assets to the cause. But by the late 1970s, some believers had begun to waver and filed lawsuits to regain their lost savings. In 1980, the remaining Stelle residents ousted the autocratic Kieninger, who moved to Texas and founded the community of Adelphi, Texas, which was also based on his apocalyptic visions.

In 1998, a federal jury convicted Kieninger, by then 70 years old, for his role in a secessionist movement that passed millions of dollars in fake checks backed by the nonexistent Republic of Texas. The failed scheme was apparently part of Kieninger's vision as well. In The Ultimate Frontier, Dr. White tells young Richard that he will create a city and, later, a nation.

3

Today, 44 households comprise Stelle, according to the town’s website. The Stelle Group, the community’s original governing body, was disbanded in 2006, replaced by a more traditional community association.

Nowadays, the curved drive and suburbanstyle homes give no hint of the town's unusual history. But there are signs that residents continue to believe in self-reliance and sustainable energy. For instance, the village still provides its own telephone and Internet service, which is solar-powered.

Although many Stellites accept reincarnation as a precept, it seems that most of the people there loathe reliving the past.

There is a stigma attached to the early days of the community from which they would prefer to disassociate themselves. But the work of another failed prognosticator has helped keep Kieninger's ideas alive.

Kieninger wrote the preface to Richard W. Noone’s bestseller 5/5/2000 Ice: The Ultimate Disaster, first published in 1982 and reissued by Random House in 1997. In the book, Noone theorizes that the 2000 planetary alignment would trigger a solar flare, which could induce a polar shift, causing the reversal of the earth’s magnetic field. If this would have happened, it could have dislodged trillions of tons of ice from the South Pole, according to Noone, and consequently unleashed geologic disasters across the face of the earth. Neither Kieninger or Noone foresaw the melting of the polar caps due to global warming.

Kieninger, who served approximately 18 months in federal prison for his involvement in the Republic of Texas secessionist movement, lived beyond his prophesied end of the world. He died in Adelphi, Texas, in 2002. -- C.D. Stelzer (cdstelzer@yahoo.com) F/m

Occupation: Poet It’s appropriate that the invitation to the 50year high school class reunion came a year early, for the class of 1959 was always “appropriate,” the last “sit up straight” class.

They were “follow the suggested outline” students who were learning to take the road most traveled. Solid folk and fine people, but so unremarkable they have no generation name of their own, only a label identifying them as “between” more illustrious generations. They were the “InBetween Generation” that filled the unused space after the Greatest Generation and before the Baby Boomers. Too late for Korea and too early for Vietnam, they had

no war to call their own. Too late for Swing and too early for real rock & roll, they had no music to call their own.

They were expected to stay inside the lines -- to become dentists inside the lines, accountants inside the lines, and teamsters inside the lines. 1959 had no authors of imagination, it had no poets.

Forty-nine years later the class of ’59 followed the appropriate agenda and sent the appropriate invitation a year in advance; more than sufficient time for invitees to “follow the suggested outline” and provide:

4

A1) A 1959 photo B2) A current photo C3) A 300-word synopsis of one’s life: Spouse, children, grandchildren, awards won, special interests, career highlights.

Forty-nine years later John Mibbles is attempting to “follow the outline -- to the letter.”

There’s list of “Classmates We Can’t Find” in the reunion invitation, 26 people -he doesn’t recall a name. He has, in fact, disremembered so much that he can’t recall the size of the school. Was it 400 students?

900? 1,500? He remembers only that he was a daydreaming “look out the window” student, and try as he might he could not remember his dreams -- not a single one.

spent away the hour trying to write his life to paper and . . . nothing.

John Mibbles’ high school time was not his only time lost; all his memories flickered on and off nowadays. Some came back, some did not, and some returned much different from when they left.

His mottled memory was the reason for today’s doctor appointment and MRI; perhaps it wasn’t the first of Alzheimer’s -perhaps it was a benign tumor that could be removed or a clogged artery that might be unplugged.

He thought the conversation with the doctor was inconclusive; maybe -- he couldn’t remember.

He doubts his 1959 classmates would remember him. He’d made no mark in school and he’d left town immediately after graduation. His life played out -- and after high school he never looked out the window again.

And then inside the hum of the MRI, the "Memory Recovery Instrument," he remembered it all; a full and good life, almost too wondrous to be believed. And inside the chamber, John Mibbles spoke his life aloud, in chronological order.

But, for some odd reason, he found the “synopsis of one’s life” request strangely appealing. He tried to write it to paper . . . and . . . nothing.

I have tasted my mother’s homemade chocolate chip cookies -- hot from the oven.

He’d won no awards, his interests were mundane, he’d worked “jobs to pay bills” -no “career” to it.

He’d discuss his writer’s block tonight, at the end of day, when he walked with Rebecca. It’s what they did: at day’s end, they walked and said, “How was your day?”

In the meantime, there was a doctor appointment and an MRI to suffer this day.

He waited an hour, alone, two times, in small windowless rooms, and two times he

After my first communion, as I walked away from the altar, I felt sunlight in my chest and I knew God, intimately -- for awhile.

In a weed-filled field pretending to be a ball diamond I “felt” the sweet sound of a wooden bat connect with a tape-covered fastball.

In the long afternoon: I watched my children grow from toddler to adult and be better than I ever thought to be. And then I heard my grandchildren laugh.

5

At twilight: An old friend stopped by and we sat in the shade of the magnolia tree, and drank iced tea, and talked of things that were and things that ought to be.

And tonight, when day is done, I will walk with Rebecca and we will say “How was your day?”

After the MRI he knew to write it down immediately, lest he forget it -- and he did both: he wrote it and forgot it.

Rebecca found it six months later, in the envelope with the reunion invitation, in a pile of recyclables forgotten to be recycled.

She knew they’d not be attending the reunion at year’s end; knew they’d not be attending anything at year’s end. She spent times the next week in private places, reading his words again and crying again and smiling again. And then, she wrote just “Poet” in the space provided to sum up his life and mailed the invitation back to the class of ’59. -- Doug Bybee Bybee is a retired state-government employee in Springfield, Ill., and columnist.

When he isn’t writing essays, he is working on the great American novel. He can be reached at dougbybee@sbcglobal.net F/m

Why charity can’t be the answer “Do people have a right to social services that will solve their difficulties? Since it is our argument that charities and philanthropies are out of place in a mature society, social services should not be a matter of privilege but should be guaranteed by law.

“Because men and women are entitled to life, they are entitled to an adequate diet, decent housing, sufficient clothes, total medical care, adequate treatment for mental health problems, and the freedom and opportunity to search for values.

“In a developed society, responses to human needs are channeled through organizational forms. Such services should be met by public agencies financed primarily by tax funds, and not by voluntary, private agencies financed primarily by non-tax funds.

“The ‘right’ to welfare services should be integrated into our legal system because, pragmatically, it offers the only workable alternative to the continuing and intensifying deterioration of social conditions; and philosophically, human needs precede in fact and in importance the service rendered. . . .

6

“What private agency can address itself to the fact that half the hospital beds in the United States are in psychiatric institutions? What constellation of agencies can hope to measure up to the societal demands for food, clothing, health, and shelter? We have tried for many years and have abysmally failed.

‘Topping’ the United Way goal, for example, is the height of irony. We haven’t begun to provide services that would uphold the humaneness of our neighbor. The United Way, and most other fundraising agencies, are classic examples where the service defines the need, rather than the opposite.

“The services required can only be guaranteed by the resources and participation -- in part or in full -- of government: local, state, or, preferably, federal. Human needs have outgrown the resources of private charity. Services as a matter of privilege, which can be arbitrarily withdrawn, are as antiquated as

voluntary control of air pollution, sewage disposal, and other community problems.

“The mere involvement of government does not mean that private agencies should go out of business. Their place will be to work for social welfare on the public front, to speak out and lobby for better social services, to conduct research and experiment with new techniques, to watch the administration of services, and insure democratic and not arbitrary practices. The future of the private agency would be assured.” -- Hans S. Falck Excerpted from “All charities should be abolished,” FOCUS/Midwest, May-June 1966. At the time his essay was published in the magazine, Falck was a professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis. He later taught at Virginia Commonwealth University. He was a past chapter president of the National Association of Social Workers and a founder of the Virginia Organization of Health Care Social Workers. F/m

__________________________________________________ Kazooziphone: How Howard the Milkman made $10 Howard Milner glances at his watch; it’s almost 8 o’clock. He turns his truck from his milk route and drives downtown. He parks before the Beloit Daily News building, pours coffee from his thermos and plucks a newspaper from behind his seat. It’s last night’s paper. He studies the classified page.

There is an item hidden on the page, put there once a week to encourage people to read the advertisements. It’s always different, and it offers $10 to the first person the next day who arrives at the Daily News office, fulfilling a certain requirement. “First

person to arrive in a pink bathing suit.”

“First person to arrive with a home-baked pumpkin pie.” “First person to arrive with half a beard.” Howard has never competed in these contests, but the box this time reads, “$10 prize to the first person who arrives at the Daily News office and plays a musical instrument.

Howard finishes his coffee. He then opens his glove compartment and takes out a battered kazoo, left there by one of his children. He takes the piece of hose and the

7

all the offices and he plays “Turkey in the Straw” again, and “The Arkansas Traveler,” and “Suwannee River.” When he comes back to the information desk there’s a man with a saxophone, a woman with a clarinet, and a boy with a mouth organ. But Howard was the first. They give him $10 and a photographer takes his picture. He goes back to delivering his route.

That night Howard’s picture is on the front page. He’s playing his instrument and standing before the milk truck, with “Dougan Guernsey Farm Dairy, The Babies’ Milkman” plain to see. The headline reads, “Musical Milkman Konkocts Kazooziphone.” -- Jacqueline Jackson (jjack1@uis.edu)

funnel he keeps in his truck for any gas emergency. He jams the funnel into one end of the hose and the kazoo into the other. He loops the hose so that the contraption resembles a French horn with the funnel as the bell. He practices a few minutes, then hops out of his truck and enters the building.

He stands by the information desk and plays “Yankee Doodle.” By the time he’s finished, he’s the center of a small crowd.

“Kazooziphone” is among dozens of stories included in The Round Barn, a forthcoming book about life on a dairy farm near Beloit, Wis. Jacqueline Dougan Jackson is the author of more than a dozen books, including Stories from the Round Barn (1997) and More Stories from the Round Barn (2002). Howard Milner, a longtime Dougan Dairy employee, died in 2006. He was 94. F/m

“There,” Howard says. “I’ve played a musical instrument in your office and it’s only 8:03. Am I the first?”

“I’m not sure that’s a musical instrument,” says the girl at the information desk. “What is it?”

“A kazooziphone,” Howard says promptly.

“An instrument that plays music.” He puts the kazooziphone to his mouth again and plays “Turkey in the Straw.”

The group agrees the kazooziphone is a musical instrument. They take him around to

8

__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ Why there were no Christmas trees in Gondar This is a Christmas story, but it is an Ethiopian Christmas story.

A few days ago, in mid-December, Wossenseged failed to show up for class. He never misses school so this was notable, disturbing even in these notable and disturbing times. For nearly two years, Grazamatch Hailu and Weisero Zawaditu had sent this their youngest among several sons for schooling at the Gondar International Elementary School; every school day he would arrived in a Land Rover accompanied by a guard with a rifle held so it was visible to everyone they passed.

Wossenseged has grown tall now. He is a big boy for seven, with a serious disposition, an expressionless face, protruding eyes and rather pale skin and a real flair for math. He is the youngest child of his father’s old age, and comes to school in scrupulously clean clothing, worn with washing, carefully patched and mended. I have wondered at Wossenseged’s demeanor and dress.

Because he is the youngest in a large family of a traditional aristocrat -- a Grazmatch -and his mother has the prestigious position of President of the Gondar branch of the Haile Selassie I Women’s Welfare Association, he is probably being raised by loving servant women, and cash may be a lot scarcer for such traditional Ethiopian families, no matter how respected they are, especially if you are the youngest of many.

On the other hand, I sometimes wonder whether there is an effort to send Wossenseged out into the world very plainly clothed so as not to attract attention, gossip or jealousy from his father’s enemies.

Whatever the case, Wossenseged contradicts the adage that the dress makes the man, for all the other boys in the class -- there is only one girl in the group of 10 -- look to Wossenseged for leadership.

The next day, our principal, Sara Rajan, tells us teachers that Wossenseged’s mother and father have been arrested and jailed in Gondar. At the International School someone recalls how, after nationalization last year, the revolutionary government in Addis Ababa assigned officials to every municipality in the country and started checking into management of the royal lands. Grazmatch Hailu is in charge of the Princess Tenagnework Vegetable Farm here in Gondar, and maybe there are some irregularities. But would Wossenseged’s

9

mother be jailed for farm management problems?

A few days before Christmas, Ruth and I both come down with infectious hepatitis and are too weak even to stand so we climb into the big waterbed together. We have been unable to get a live Christmas tree as yet this year so Yemeseretch, Ruth’s schoolmate who is living with us for a few months, surprises us by making a four-foottall tree from green crepe paper on the divider in the living room. But even if we had not gotten sick, we probably would not have managed a live tree this year because the Provisional Military Council, known as the Derg, ordered that no trees may be cut or sold for Christmas without permission. In Addis Ababa farmers have always made extra money by bringing a couple of fir trees to town to sell to foreigners, but now households will be held responsible if we buy trees from unauthorized dealers.

Clark tried to learn if the local Princess Tenagnework Vegetable Farm was designated as an authorized Christmas tree dealer, but then he decided to keep quiet about the whole thing when it was announced that the unfortunate Princess Tenegnework, along with the other 13 princesses, her sisters, were now under house arrest in Addis Ababa.

Making an already sensitive situation worse, it’s being said that people at the Princess Tenegnework Vegetable Farm enabled our Provincial Governor, just recently appointed to the post by the Emperor, to escape arrest by troops of the revolutionary army, and that it is Wossenseged’s father, Grazmatch Hailu who executed the escape.

The tangled tale began earlier in December, while the country was still in

shock over Bloody Saturday, the night radical elements in the Derg marched into Central Prison and shot 54 prisoners imprisoned because of their allegiance to the Emperor. News arrived that 200 troops were passing through Gondar, on their way to the battlefront in Eritrea. Suspecting they carried orders for his arrest, the Provincial Governor, Gen. Nega Tegegne, managed to get out of town on the night before the troops arrived. When the soldiers reached his palace, they were told the General was very sick, too sick to welcome them, and for the next 36 hours the General’s escape was covered by a loyal servant who carried meals into the Governor’s chambers, ate a part of the food himself emerging with partially empty trays, each time announcing that his Excellency was still too sick to receive visitors.

We hear the rest of the story about Wossenseged’s parents and General Nega’s escape from Colonel Assis who once served in the army with the General, then returned to a bit of land in Gondar received for faithful service at retirement. General Nega was born, a very poor boy, on the high plateau in the village of Debre Tabor not far from Lake Tana. He is well liked by the army, is a highly trained commando experienced in guerrilla techniques, and a veteran soldier from the United Nations forces that fought in the Congo.

It is Grazamatch Hailu, Wossenseged’s father, who helped Nega escape from the governor’s palace in the vegetable farm truck with the General buried under piles of Swiss chard. After this escape, Nega headed straight back to his home region in the Dembia Plains around Lake Tana. There, renegade groups, which had never been loyal to any national government, took him deep into the countryside where the Derg’s army could not go.

10

One sly, clever servant holding off 200 of the revolutionary government’s finest; one proud general, bouncing long distances beneath a pile of vegetables. Gondarie love a good story, especially one that makes fools of the powerful and the rich, and eventually this story is told all over town.

This is why there are no Christmas trees in Gondar, December 1974. We have been unable to learn what happened to Wossenseged or his parents, but we teachers at his school hope that somehow they escaped, perhaps slipping back to their home village to hide there safe from prosecution

and from the many battles that overtook the whole Gondar region. -- Barbara Olson (bolson1000@sbcglobal.net)

Barbara Olson is a writer in Springfield, Ill. This story is one of five Christmas tales from a book she’s completing about her experiences in Ethiopia, in the early 1970s, just as that nation was rocked by revolution.

Since the publication of another of her Christmas tales, in 2007, she has reconnected with former students who have shared their memories of that turbulent time.

F/m

_______________________________ Paul Simon on southern Illinois in ’62 “In my home town of Troy, when I first came here in 1948, there were many people who really believed that there was a regulation that no Negroes could be in the city after dark. There are still no Negroes living this community of 1,800 people, but they have been in the city to sing in a church, or present a high school program, or simply attend a Sunday morning service. We are not so startled when we walk down the street and see a dark face. When my wife and I have had overnight guests who were Negroes, no one has said a thing. They simply assume that whom we want to have for guests at our house is our own business. The ‘issue’ is gradually dying.

“There still are struggles, but the direction is clear. Even the defeats indicate this.

“At Mound City there were two ‘attendance centers’ for one high school district. One, by coincidence (as far as the law is concerned), was all white. One was all Negro. Both were very small and there was no economic excuse for the two high schools existing. In the fall of 1961

they integrated -- and fired all of the Negro teachers. The latter action is now being questioned in federal court. I believe the action of firing teachers clearly violated state law, as well as the federal law on which the court action is based. But state officials were reluctant to handle this ‘hot potato.’

“Yet even this reverse -- if it stands up in court -- cannot offset the fact that the student population has been integrated and some day the faculty will be also. [...]

“The day will come when ‘the south will rise again’ in Illinois -- in the good sense. We want to grow economically. We want to grow culturally. And we want all our citizens to share in that growth.” -- Paul Simon, “How Southern is Southern Illinois?” FOCUS/Midwest magazine, July 1962 F/m

11

Being Lincoln Fritz Klein talks about life as an impersonator Abraham Lincoln strolls into the McDonald’s on South Grand Avenue, buys a cup of coffee, and takes a seat. He’s dressed casually; his beard is gray.

was young, so it took him up to four hours to make the transformation, he says. These days, it doesn’t take as long.

He’s been back in his hometown for only a few days, and must depart soon for an extended tour of the East Coast.

Being Honest Abe is hard but rewarding work, says Richard F. “Fritz” Klein, who has been portraying the 16th president for more than 30 years and is considered one of the nation’s top Lincoln interpreters.

With the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birthday only months away, and a full line-up of events scheduled to honor the Great Emancipator, impersonators across the country are seeing a jump in bookings.

Not Klein, who says he’s been “maxed out” for years.

“I haven’t gotten more business,” he says, “but the people who call tend to call for bicentennial reasons.”

Klein fell into playing Lincoln by chance.

He was working as a landscaper in Hawaii, doing community theater on the side. In a local pageant about Hawaiian history, he portrayed preacher Lyman Beecher.

Somebody spotted the lanky 28-year-old actor in a mourning coat and top hat, and decided he was a dead ringer for Lincoln. It was 1976, and there were plenty of U.S. Bicentennial events that could use a Lincoln impersonator. “I thought it’s really a stretch; I was supposed to be playing the president, so I had to age 30 years,” Klein says. He

By 1980, Klein and his wife, Linda, gambled on the possibility that being Lincoln could become a full-time occupation, but they wanted to move closer to where the work would most likely be. He considered a number of possibilities with historic ties -- Gettysburg, Pa.; Washington, D.C.; the birthplace near Hodgenville, Ky.; and the boyhood home in Spencer County, Ind. -- but the couple decided on Springfield, where Lincoln spent his adulthood.

When they moved here, in 1982, Klein had ambitious plans for a bookstore, a gift shop, and a venue to perform nightly for tourists.

“I didn’t realize at the time that pretty much all of downtown shut down at night,” he says. “Springfield is not Gettysburg.”

The occasional gigs he secured in his new hometown weren’t enough to support a growing family (the Kleins came to Springfield with two children; two more were born after they arrived). He’d have to hit the road, and the early days weren’t easy.

12

“Sometimes, I would lie awake in bed, just fretting how I would pay the next bill,” he says. “But things would always come along.

And after a while, I just began developing a reputation.”

Early clients included conventions, service clubs, churches, and schools.

It was the kids who forced Klein to really learn Lincoln, warts and all.

“Initially, I stuck with Lincoln’s words, and that doesn’t fly with children. The language has changed too much. I couldn’t just go with scripts -- these kids wanted to know what Lincoln was thinking,” he says. “ ‘Did he have a dog?’ ‘What were his kids’ names?’ ‘Where did he grow up?’ ‘Did he have any friends when he was a boy?’

“I’d write this stuff down, and I’d go back and study and say, ‘I’ll let you know.’ It just started opening up worlds of research.”

In a similar vein, he was often asked by professional groups to address a specific topic, and he’d have to crack the books, learning about Lincoln’s views on economics, constitutional issues, faith, and other weighty stuff. It’s not a stretch to channel Lincoln on contemporary matters -“he was involved in a lot of things,” Klein says. There are limits: “I can’t talk about rocket science.”

But Lincoln’s own life story, one marked by failure and loss, touches on universal themes -- of determination, courage, and facing inestimable challenges -- that Klein incorporates in many of his presentations and resonates with many audiences.

“Perseverance is one of the main things: Don’t be afraid to meet obstacles head on.

Don’t be afraid of the opposition because, in many ways, they’re your friends -- you’ll

find out things from them that you’ll never find out from others.”

“Lincoln was notoriously adept at bringing in people who opposed him -- his forgiving nature was one of his strongest cards because he could work with people that he knew were working against him and turn them into friends. That’s vital: trying to find ways we can work together.”

Klein says the message was especially meaningful after 9/11, when national unity became paramount. “Lincoln was able to allow minor differences to just go by the board and to look at what is our common cause.”

Lincoln took office as the nation was ripping apart, and had to act boldly to face the challenge of the Rebellion. But the steps he took permanently cemented the power of the federal government, and for that, he remains controversial even today.

“Now I’m not one to ascribe motives to people. Sometimes it may look like a duck, walk like a duck, smell like a duck -- but you can’t accuse him of wanting to be a duck necessarily,” Klein says.

Lincoln acted because he had to, Klein says. “He took the bull by the horns, and did what needed to be done.”

Being Lincoln hasn’t meant just becoming invested in his biography, it also has meant shelling out serious money to make the experience authentic for audiences. Klein relies on tailors who specialize in period attire to produce his three-piece suits; his beaver stovepipe hats are ordered from a supplier in Canada; his boots also are specially fitted. The hat and cane each cost about $400; each suit about $1,200. Klein says his overcoat, made from a pattern he

13

drew based on Lincoln’s actual garment, was a steal at $700.

hope it wouldn’t degenerate into Elvises jumping out of airplanes over Las Vegas.”

Klein also hunts for early 19th-century items to better tell Lincoln’s story. For some school programs, he’ll show children how to write with quills -- he invested in a $300 antique quill-cutter to make sure the feathers would actually write. His collection includes period toys, tools, and money. Among his treasured possessions are pre-Civil War marbles that were discovered in their original packaging during a construction project in Atlanta, as well as antebellum gold coins and other currency.

Not surprisingly, Klein skipped the association’s April 2008 gathering in Alton, Ill., where about 80 Lincolns showed up to mark the sesquicentenniel of the LincolnDouglas debates.

The more he’s portrayed Lincoln, the more the president has invaded Klein’s life, affecting the way he walks and talks. When sitting for family portraits, for example, photographers would chide him for not smiling. “It just became a habit [not to smile in photographs],” Klein says, “because in Lincoln’s time that was tantamount to bunny ears. Smiling was just foolish.”

Klein definitely doesn’t want to appear foolish. For example, he’s steered clear of the Association of Lincoln Presenters, an 18-year-old organization of nearly 300 impersonators. “I have a board of advisors that is composed of people from the business community, the religious community, the school community -- people who represents the various elements that I try to market to -- and they have just felt like it’s important for me to keep my work on a fairly professional level.”

“They’ve advised me don’t appear in public or on camera with other Lincolns,” he says. “So when this association came along, I thought more power to them, but I’m not a member and I’ve not gone to any of their meetings. It’s fine to do that, but I would

Klein refuses to endorse other Lincoln impersonators for bookings he can’t take. “I don’t want to be responsible for anybody else, if they do a good job or not.” Although he turned 60 this summer -- “I’m older than Lincoln was when he was dead,” he quips -he’s not grooming an understudy.

He’s also careful about the type of appearances he’ll accept. One long-time client, Lincoln Financial Group, taps him for ribbon-cuttings and other corporate appearances, but Klein won’t do anything that makes Lincoln look ridiculous.

“Roller-skate through the aisles -- I won’t do that.”

Klein did, however, don an apron last year to catch a salmon at Seattle’s famed Pike Place Market.

“I’m not above humor and having a good time,” he says, smiling. -- Roland Klose (rwklose@gmail.net) Klein’s appearances have included the History Channel, NPR, and summer-long stints at Mt. Rushmore. He’s featured in a two-hour documentary, which is scheduled to air next spring in Europe, produced by Vidicom Media Productions of Hamburg, Germany. He’s also booked for several appearances in Springfield, during the week of Lincoln’s birthday. For more information, go to www.LincolnInstitute.com. F/m

14

Travel

Games people play I’m not a particularly brave man. While it’s true, I do undertake some activities with uncertain outcomes, I always make sure there is a large margin for error and always have a parachute, spare air, or a secret safety door within arm’s reach. I’ll never scale the Eiger, penetrate the Lusitania or wear blackface for a Klan rally. I left all those risky behaviors behind at 25. My body is older now. My knees are weak, my blood is more sugar than red cells, and my heart is in serious need of a cholesterol purge. Still, I savor the unexpected, the nearly dangerous, the almost foolhardy. Along comes geocaching.

At first blush, geocaching sounds like the silliest sport yet devised by an increasingly technocratic society. Part Internet search, part satellite tracking, and part woods tromping, geocaching is sometimes known as high-tech hide and seek. The game is simple. First I log onto a Web site where a simple background check makes fairly sure that I am an actual person with a trackable email account. No money changes hands.

Once a recognized member I choose an avatar -- a secret name -- by which I am now known to other geocachers. The secret name lets me remain anonymous. I can log in any time I wish and play the game. Now, about the game; here is where it gets a little weird.

You may not realize it, but each time you drive to work or travel around the city, county or state, you are passing secret hidden stashes. These stashes are anything from small 16mm film canisters to large green surplus ammunition cases. In them are

a logbook and perhaps a few trinkets to trade. In fact, right now there are 160,000 hidden caches in 214 countries. The largest number are, of course, here in the U.S. Here’s how it works.

I place a secret cache in a waterproof box in a hole in a tree stump a few hundred feet off a hiking trail in some state park or conservation area. I register the cache with an identifying name like “I’m Stumped” and log the latitude and longitude using any of the popular and highly accurate hand-held Global Position Satellite locators, or GPSs. In addition, I may mention something interesting about the area. That’s it. The geocache is placed.

Now, you, searcher, log onto the Web site and see that a new cache has been placed at such and such coordinates and off you go. A short hike with your GPS locator and there it is. You open it, write your name in the logbook and maybe trade a trinket or two.

Later, when you get home, you log onto the Web site and add an entry that indicates that you found it and lets you make a comment or two. That’s all there is to it. Sounds absolutely boring, eh? Well, this is where it gets interesting.

There are several different sorts of caches.

One is for the kids. It is always easily found and never far from a parking lot. It lets this sport stay family oriented. The kids get to find something in the outdoors and come back with a whistle or a key-fob from Key West.

15

Another type is for the puzzle masters. The cache is cleverly hidden and must be found by applying a bit of brainpower. A cache named “Rock Me Baby” will have the same accurate GPS coordinates as any other cache but you have to figure out that one of the rocks on the ground is actually made of fiberglass and hinged to hide the contents.

These can get very devious. A recent cache I found was hidden 10 feet up and disguised to look like a bird’s nest.

Some caches are virtual. That means there is no physical thing to find, just a place. It requires some feedback with the cache owner via the secure e-mail connection the geocaching Web site provides. The cache may be a museum, a statue, or a place in a state or federal park where hiding items is prohibited. You may need to take a picture or report some detail to prove you were there. These sorts of caches are not common and are not particularly favored by the geocaching crowd.

The final common type -- my personal favorite -- is a cache placed in a location you would never normally go to and generally will involve some degree of difficulty in getting there. A favorite trick is to place such a cache near an unmapped road near the convolutions of a river or stream. You follow the published roads on your map while watching your GPS locator. After fording the stream two or three times you finally get to the cache only to find the unmapped road nearby. But rather than being mad for missing an easy drive-in, I revel in the chase that has left me muddy, thorn-scratched, frostbitten, and tired -- but the sights I was shown along the way make the outing a delight. It is just as likely that a long hike in the outback will deliver me safely to the cache where I am greeted by an unusually beautiful view -- one I would not

have seen any other way. Now and then, however, the search for difficult caches can turn . . . well, unsettling.

Recently, my wife and I were in Las Vegas for a yearly convention. This time, I paid little attention to the work of life and concentrated on the fun of life. We geocached all over southwestern Nevada and southeastern California. Most of the caches were in the high desert or Death Valley and taxed the small rental car more suited to mall parking lots than remote desert roads. We found many of the geocaches and also witnessed a million desert cactus blooms, several desert tortoises, abandoned nuclear testing grounds and a town called Rhyolite, abandoned in 1911 but still standing there in the desert sun. For the most part, these were not hard finds but made us drive back-trails in the desert without the aid of an SUV. On our last day, I decided to drive up into the Spring Mountain range west of Las Vegas and look for some Alpine caches.

Those not familiar with the area would be surprised how quickly the hot desert becomes Colorado-like ski mountains. One foot in fire, the other in ice. I had three specific caches in mind. The first two were not particularly hard to find, but the spectacular, breathtaking views from the snowy ridges up to the ski slopes of Mt. Charleston were more than enough compensation for three-dollar gas and a week of living out of a smelly suitcase.

The third and final cache, however, nearly screwed the pooch! We should have quit while we were ahead.

“Griffith Peak Trailhead Cache” is located at 36 degrees 13.215 minutes north by 115 degrees 35.974 minutes west at approximately 8,000 feet on Griffith Peak,

16

less than five miles from the summit of Mt. Charleston; a popular Nevada ski area. The published information about the cache indicated that it was a standard ammunition case with all the standard cache contents.

The owner indicated that it wasn’t a particularly hard cache to find but a highclearance vehicle might be preferable. Well, to me a high-clearance vehicle translates roughly into economy rental car, so off we went. Leaving the Nevada highway at 5,000 feet, I knew we were in for a 3,000 foot climb. I had printed out a basic map from my home software so I was pretty sure of where I was and the GPS locator knew right down to 12 feet where it was.

In Nevada, any road that isn’t a paved highway is merely a graded flatness in the rocks but this road leading into the Toiyabe National Forest started off pretty well maintained. We traveled a few miles on a relatively good surface only occasionally swerving to miss a rock whose only mission in life was to puncture my oil-pan. The GPS indicated that we were going nearly straight up like a rocket. By 20 minutes into the ascent, the good road soon changed its mind and had gotten ugly. Now off the approach and moving up to the Griffith Peak summit, the road was barely a car-width wide and the blocking boulders had gotten bigger. My wife had to get out and move several out of the way so we could pass. Our speed had dropped to a crawl. We had to position the car every few yards to get across deep ruts carved into the road by the winter snowmelt run off. The ruts got deeper and closer together and the incline increased substantially. Since there simply was no room to turn around with the mountain on one side and a 100-foot drop on the other, and since neither of us had a lick of sense, we decided to keep going. The GPS was indicating that we were now five miles away; now four; now three; now two. We

had given up screwing up our faces each time the undercarriage dragged across mountain rock. I was intent on staying as close to the mountain wall as possible while my wife kept her eye glued to the everdecreasing width of the road and the everincreasing depth of the drop.

At one mile from the cache, we were getting euphoric at the sights of the high Alpine view and the smell of the fir trees.

We hadn’t noticed that the snow on the mountainside was getting thicker and older and was beginning to have the consistency of cement. The road continued to get narrower. However, I was not so euphoric that I missed the unmistakable smell of something seriously wrong with our rental car -- the car we had only recently named “Surefoot.”

So, there we were. Seventy-five hundred feet up the Toiyabe forest road on Griffith Peak with all the grandeur of the snowcapped Charleston Mountain in front of us and a steaming, boiling, beeping mess of a car with its hood up behind. What to do, what to do?

First, I did what everyone in my position should do. I released a primal scream and a torrent of obscenities at the car rental company for not configuring our economy rental with snow treads and a diesel engine.

The primal scream did the most good. Next, I shifted into Boy Scout mode. Since we had long since left any cell phone coverage behind in the valley, I wasted no time in thinking about how I could use the phone’s battery to start a fire. We had plenty of water and enough snacks in the car to last a week, so survival was not the issue. Our plane was scheduled to depart for home in about eight hours, so I figured we’d be missed within the week and a simple search of the entire state of Nevada would have us home in a

17

year or so. I had neglected to tell anyone exactly where we were going. I never know until I’m on my way anyway.

Without a plan and with a seriously unhappy car, we did the only thing good geocachers in this position could do. We started out to find the cache on foot. Now irony stepped in with both boots.

Less than 50 feet from where our dead car lay, the trail, passing as a road, made a sharp left behind a stand of fir trees to continue up the mountainside. From that point on, the road was covered with four feet of snowpack. It was completely impassable. We found the remnants of a campfire at the edge of the road that appeared to be a couple of months old and we both realized that it had been some time since we had seen any tire tracks so it was apparent that help was not about to simply wander by.

Can’t walk up and can’t drive down.

Hmmm. How to pass the time? What to do to get our minds off the idiotic situation we were in? Use your imagination.

About an hour later we were figuring out how many bottles of water we could each carry and how many Corn Curdlies and Potato Poopies it takes to keep two people alive as we prepared to walk back down the road to civilization. However, the car had quit bubbling and fuming so I decided to try to get it running just enough to get turned around. Perhaps then we could coast downhill. Lady luck followed irony and stepped in herself. The radiator was not punctured after all. The car was not deceased, it was simply exhausted. With my wife out in front to help me get the front tires as close to the road edge as possible

and using the rear bumper to subtly tell me when I had backed into the mountain, I backed and filled a dozen times until the car was facing downhill. Keeping it in neutral most of the time and riding the brakes hard, we limped and bucked and dragged and bottomed and lurched and scraped all the way back down Griffith Peak. By the time we got to the highway, the engine had quit smelling but the brakes had taken on that warm cherry glow. We had to wait again for the new heat to dissipate.

But, don’t misunderstand me. Our near death, lost in the wilderness experience, an experience that would have pushed our rental care insurance to its limits, was anything but a disappointment. It was absolutely, positively the best failed cache find ever!

After arriving home, I logged onto the geocaching Web site and looked again at the entry for the Griffith Peak Trailhead Cache.

The first warning I should have noticed was that no one had found it since September of last year -- eight months previous. The other revelation came from my mapping software.

A different and easier road would have taken us closer to the cache -- but from the other side of the mountain! We had used the route they implied only idiots with a Jeep should try.

One last note: When I returned the rental car at the Las Vegas airport, I was asked how it performed. I told them the shocks felt a little soft. --© 2009 J. Mitch Hopper Mitch Hopper is a writer and audiovisual professional who lives in Rochester, Illinois.

E-mail him at id@brainmist.com F/m

________________________________________________

18

Nonfiction

Life in Lincoln’s town Abraham Lincoln must have been tired.

It was October, 1860, one month before his first presidential election. Between that, his busy Springfield law practice, and his trio of rascally boys, he probably needed a boost.

Some respected historical sources say he used cocaine to get it.

Lincoln’s alleged cocaine purchase was originally published in the frequently cited book, “The Personal Finances of Abraham Lincoln” by Harry E. Pratt (The Abraham Lincoln Association, 1943). It analyzes Lincoln’s finances and lists credit purchases his family made at Springfield’s popular downtown drugstore, Corneau and Diller’s.

According to the ledger, on October 12, 1860, the Lincoln family purchased fifty cents worth of “cocaine,” among other items.

Today an allegation like that could destroy you. But cocaine was originally legal and found in common medicines and wines that could be purchased over the counter at your local store.

Drugstores then offered a cornucopia of now illegal or controlled substances. Corneau & Diller’s sold other Springfieldians morphine, laudanum, chloroform, quinine, opium pills, mercury, and belladonna (from the deadly nightshade plant), according to their ledger. And that was just over three months.

It says Lincoln tried self-medicating his depression with a variety of medicines, including “fifty cents’ worth of cocaine” from the “Corneau and Diller drugstore.” Shenk repeated that assertion in a September 2005 Atlantic Monthly magazine feature about Lincoln’s depression.

He isn’t the first to publicize Lincoln’s selfmedicating practices. In 2001, physician Norbert Hirschhorn and professors Robert G. Feldman and Ian A. Greaves described in the summer issue of “Perspective in Biology and Medicine” their theory that Lincoln was poisoned from taking too many “blue mass pills” (which contained the toxin mercury). These were often prescribed for melancholy and other maladies.

Since Lincoln took mercury pills to ease his blues, it’s not a far stretch to think he used cocaine to help, too. After all, Lincoln’s depression was quite severe at times, according to several of his friends and colleagues, and even Lincoln himself.

Other respected media cite Lincoln’s alleged cocaine purchase, giving it further credence.

These include the Web site of the National Park Service, which oversees the Lincoln Home. All references cite Pratt’s “The Personal Finances of Abraham Lincoln” as their source.

The problem is Pratt was wrong.

Clearly, Civil War-era central Illinoisans were well-medicated.

The drugstore’s original ledgers, which are brittle, old tomes carefully wrapped and kept at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, hint at the root of the problem.

In 2005, author Joshua Wolf Shenk theorized that Lincoln took cocaine for his depression. His book, “Lincoln’s Melancholy” (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005), argues that Lincoln’s depression gave him the tools to be an effective president during a turbulent time.

In flowery handwriting, the ledger lists several credit purchases for the Lincoln family on Oct. 12, 1860, including “cocoaine.” Two other Springfieldians also bought “cocoaine” that year, according to the record. Their entries list, “Bot. (abbreviation for ‘bottle’) Cocoaine.”

19

Of course, some words were spelled differently back then, which has caused problems with historical interpretation. For instance, the ledgers misspelled “cigars” as “segars.” Pratt’s book assumed the ledger’s “cocoaine” meant cocaine.

grow, ” said a customer testimonial in a Nov. 21, 1863 Harper’s Weekly ad.

Not likely, says drug historian Dr. David Musto. He has written four books about drug regulation and history, is a Yale Medical School faculty member, and has been a White House advisor on drug policy.

The answer is in a front-page ad in the Springfield paper, the Illinois State Register, on the day before Lincoln’s purchase -- Oct. 11, 1860. It says:

“It’s virtually impossible that Lincoln purchased cocaine in 1860,” he says. “Cocaine wasn’t even isolated from coca leaves until 1860 by a scientist named Albert Niemann in Germany.”

Given the slow transportation, communication, and production back then, Dr. Musto doesn’t think companies could have produced commercial quantities of cocaine the same year it was isolated.

Nobody paid much attention to Niemann’s cocaine discovery anyhow. “Ten years went by before anyone even bothered to confirm his observation that cocaine crystals made the tongue numb…,” according to Steven Karch’s “A Brief History of Cocaine” (CRC Press, 1997).

So, if Lincoln didn’t buy cocaine, what did he buy?

Hair tonic -- a boost for his follicles, not his neurons.

Perhaps ol’ Abe was more vain than we thought. “Cocoaine” was a remedy for dandruff and baldness in the later 1800s and went by the brand name, Burnett’s Cocoaine. It was made by Joseph Burnett in Boston from the oil of cocoanuts (an alternative spelling of coconuts), hence its drug-like name.

Burnett’s hair tonic was popular nationwide. “I have used the contents of one bottle, and my bald pate is covered all over with young hair, about three-eighths of an inch long, which appears strong and healthy, and determined to

Did Corneau and Diller’s sell it at the time of Lincoln’s purchase?

“Cocoaine -- Burnett’s, for the hair At Corneau & Diller” (The hair tonic must have been in demand, because another Springfield store also advertised it.)

Lincoln didn’t buy cocaine, he bought hair tonic for his unruly mane. Our soon-to-be Sixteenth President wasn’t looking to feel good, he wanted to look good. Who can blame a presidential candidate for that? -- Tara McClellan McAndrew

From Stories of Springfield: Life in Lincoln’s Town (2010), published with the author’s permission.

Tara McClellan McAndrew’s work has appeared in more than 35 local, national, and international publications. She has also been involved in the production of documentaries and other broadcasts for Illinois Public Radio, National Public Radio, Christian Science Monitor Radio, and the BBC. Her plays about history have been performed throughout Illinois, including a fulllength production about Ellis Island staged at Lincoln’s New Salem State Historic Site. Her roots in the Springfield area go back five generations and include ties to Lincoln. F/m

20

SPECIAL REPORT

Fears and lobbying in Collinsville Illinois kingpin Gary Fears works in mysterious ways

By C.D. STELZER / cdstelzer@gmail.com First part of a two-part series. First published at focusmidwest.com in May 2010.

Nine Gateway Drive is far from K Street, the center of Washington’s influencepeddling industry. The address belongs to a now-vacant space in a strip mall located in Collinsville, Illinois, just east of St. Louis.

This small town, which bills itself as the horseradish capital of the world, seems an odd place for the Kingdom of Morocco to be doing business, but, according to a 2006 congressional lobbying report, the North African nation hired Collinsvillebased Avatar Enterprises Inc. to help represent its interests in the United States.

Gary R. Fears, the 63-year-old owner of Avatar, now lives in Boca Raton, Florida, but his career is deeply rooted in Madison County politics, where he made his bones decades ago as a Downstate operative for then-Gov. Dan Walker. Since leaving public life, Fears has traded on his insider status and political connections to parlay a series of controversial deals into a byzantine financial empire.

The foundation of that empire began in the early 1980s, when Fears received millions from the state to build a hotel in Collinsville but eventually defaulted on

the loan, leaving Illinois taxpayers in the lurch. A decade later, he circumvented regulators and made a fortune selling his family’s hidden ownership interest in Illinois’ first riverboat casino.

Since then, Fears has invested in Indian casinos and taken on exotic clients, among them an Internet gambling venture based in Gibraltar and Morocco’s governmentowned phosphate industry. His hired guns include Republican and Democratic operatives with access to the highest levels of the federal government.

If that’s not enough to give one pause, Fears’ latest acquisition is a Soviet

21

military aircraft that has been grounded for nearly a year because of litigation. As often is the case for Fears, the lawsuit is another high-stakes craps game in a world filled with risk.

helper, Booster Club member, cast member of the junior class play and supporter of the Red Cross. Schoolmates remember him as slightly overweight and having few friends.

Federal law enforcement agencies have investigated Fears’ activities in the past, and he has been a person of interest in criminal investigations in at least two states. Two of Fears’ business partners have met untimely deaths. Fears also has been the plaintiff or defendant in a raft of civil cases, and his international financial transactions spurred the IRS to go after him for back taxes.

Fears’ first marriage ended in divorce in October 1969; his ex-wife was awarded custody of their infant son.

But despite intense scrutiny by local, state and federal authorities, he has never been cited for a single criminal violation.

“I’ve got to be the most investigated guy in Southern Illinois,” Fears once told a reporter, “and I’ve never even been charged with illegal parking.”

In 1968, he campaigned for liberal U.S. Sen. Eugene McCarthy, a Minnesota Democrat whose anti-war candidacy prompted President Lyndon B. Johnson not to seek a second term.

Three years later, Fears stumped on behalf of another maverick Democrat, Dan Walker, who won the Illinois governorship despite fierce competition from Downstate rival Paul Simon and the powerful political machine of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley.

The Venetian Fears grew up in Venice, Illinois, one of six children of car salesman Floyd Fears and his wife, Edna.

Sandwiched between the slaughterhouses of East St. Louis and the steel mills of Granite City, the town gained it name not for its grandeur but because the streets sometimes turned into canals after a heavy rain.

His 1964 senior class picture in The Venetian shows a pensive young man with a dark, wavy pompadour. The high school yearbook lists him as class treasurer, office

Under Walker, Fears acted as a fixer for the Illinois Department of Transportation, settling disputes that were delaying the completion of Downstate portions of the interstate highway system.

22

“It was a quagmire,” recalls retired St. Louis Post-Dispatch Illinois political correspondent Taylor Pensoneau. “The sticking points included minority hiring quotas and other hot-button issues. What was at stake was continued federal funding.” In his biography of Walker, Pensoneau describes Fears as “an imaginative hustler from Granite City who was adept at finding shortcuts through red tape.”

After Walker’s 1976 defeat, Fears quit his state job, but his political career wasn’t over. Within months he had vaulted onto the national stage, joining the Democratic Party’s national finance committee.

With the advent of the Reagan era, the “imaginative hustler” switched his streetsavvy panache for the acumen of an investment broker, and pragmatism took precedence over partisan politics. In the future, Fears the entrepreneur would cross party lines whenever necessary. Politics and business were both means to an end, the two sides of the same coin of the realm.

“I personally don’t think it all that fascinating,” says Fears of his rise from obscurity. “I meet people all the time who came from tough economic backgrounds who improve themselves by hard work. It is what this country is based on.”

Hotel-motel time Fears’ dodgy deals date back to 1982, when he and partner B.C. Gitcho of Granite City received a $13.4 million state loan from Republican Gov. Jim Thompson’s administration to build what

is now the Holiday Inn in Collinsville.

When the hotel fell behind in its payments, then-Illinois Treasurer Pat Quinn (the state’s current governor and a Democrat) sought to hold the borrowers in default, but his efforts were blocked in court.

In 1995, newly elected Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka, a Republican, renegotiated the terms of the loan, but the state still ended up with the short end of the stick.

Under the restructuring, the hotel was allowed to skip quarterly mortgage payments if it could show that it was operating at a loss. The loan and its accrued interest of more than $31 million were never repaid.

A final 2007 audit conducted for the state by an independent hotel management company concluded that Fears’ Collinsville Holiday Inn reported losses in 2005 and 2006 that “under normal, usual and customary reporting … would have resulted in a gain and thereby funds should have been due and payable to the state.…”

Alleging serious misconduct, current Illinois Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias turned over 100,000 pages of documents to federal prosecutors in Chicago, but U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has so far declined to take action.

“The entire project became a political football,” says Fears of the hotel deal. “It is long forgotten that I became a limited partner in the late ’80s. [I] had no operational role after that [and] no ongoing liability beyond what was supposed to be guarantees for a set amount.”

23

Republican powerbroker William Cellini, owner of a Springfield hotel (the Renaissance hotel, now the Abraham Lincoln Hotel & Conference Center), defaulted on his loan, too. The state of Illinois finally placed both hotels in receivership in 2007 and sold them at a loss. Cellini is now facing federal charges in Chicago for influence peddling in an unrelated case that resulted in the indictment and subsequent ouster of Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

Fears reserves judgment on Blagojevich but lauds Cellini as an honorable man. “I am proud to say he is a friend,” says Fears.

“I will be stunned if he is found guilty.”

Frank cashes out Fears is qualified to vouch for Cellini’s integrity because they have worked together before.

In 1990, Fears transferred his interest in Illinois’ first riverboat casino, the Alton Belle, to his son, Victor Fears, who then sold his shares to Cellini with an option to buy them back later. When Argosy Gaming Co., the owner of the boat, went public in 1994, Victor Fears bought back his option and then resold his interest for an estimated $4 million. The deal effectively allowed the Fearses to obscure their stake in the gambling company and later profit from it without having to undergo the routine background checks required by the state gaming board.

Belleville developer Frank E. O’Donnell Sr. was not as fortunate. O’Donnell, a heavily indebted partner of Fears’, was found dead in a room at the Quality Inn in Collinsville on Nov. 17, 1990. The coroner’s report states that Fears told investigators at the scene that O’Donnell

had previously been hospitalized for chest pains and was in failing health. Forgoing an autopsy, the coroner ruled O’Donnell died of a heart attack. A month later Victor Fears collected on a $100,000 life insurance policy that his father had taken out on O’Donnell five years earlier.

An O’Donnell family feud over a separate life insurance policy, however, prompted an inquest and exhumation.

Toxicology tests showed that O’Donnell had died of a drug overdose, not a heart attack. At the coroner’s inquest, a state police detective testified about clandestinely recorded conversations in which an informant was offered $10,000 to help someone kill himself. The Collinsville nightclub owner who allegedly made the offer on behalf of another party later pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiring to distribute 13 pounds of cocaine. He contended that law enforcement authorities had pressured him to wrongly finger Fears.

“Frank [O’Donnell] and I were friends,” says Fears. “We developed a couple of strip shopping centers and fast food locations together, along with some condos in Hilton Head and Sarasota. Frank committed suicide after a long period of depression and tough economic events.

There was a spate of publicity as a result of an anonymous call to the state police claiming knowledge of Frank being poisoned with curare, a Brazilian poison that simulates a heart attack. After much publicity, he was determined [to have] died of an overdose of sleeping pills.”

Around this time, Fears decided to pull up stakes and move to Florida.

“I always loved Florida,” says Fears.

“It’s not that I hate Illinois. The best part

24

of this country is the Midwest, the great wealth of the people and the values of the Midwest. I was 40 years old and I just thought it was silly to spend your whole life in one spot.”

Banking on Coconut Creek Casino It didn’t take Fears long to hitch his wagon to the Sunshine State’s nascent Native American gambling industry. By early 1994, Gaming Management International, a Fears-backed company, was paying $30,000 a month in consulting fees to a frontman who had connections in the Seminole tribe.

In 1995, Fears briefly hired Stephen G. Weil, a convicted stock swindler, to work for GMI. Three years later, the feds busted Weil for laundering drug money, but by then Fears had long since dispensed with Weil’s services. Taking the personal approach, Fears befriended Seminole tribal chairman James E. Billie — also known as Chief Billie — a former alligator wrestler and country singer. As a gesture of goodwill, he loaned Billie a $670,000 Turbo Commander aircraft and also gave the tribe a parcel of land worth $1.7 million near the proposed Coconut Creek Casino site.

His generosity may have ingratiated him with the tribe, but Fears failed to receive the thumbs-up from the city of Coconut Creek after questions about his background surfaced. This temporary setback did not deter him, however.

Working behind the scenes, Fears became the secret majority shareholder in a realigned partnership — Coconut Creek Gaming — that included son Victor and Florida developer Alan Ginsburg.

Under the arrangement, the partnership put up $19.6 million to build the casino in return for a 35 percent stake in its profits for the first 10 years of operation, which could have cost the Seminoles hundreds of millions of dollars. In 2003 the tribe ousted Chief Billie and quit paying Fears and the other developers. The partnership sued and the tribe countered by asking for a federal review, but not before a Fearsowned company, Coconut Chips, scored an $8 million promissory note through the contested contract.

The National Indian Gaming Commission voided the development agreement, ruling that it illegally placed ownership of the casino in the hands of the outside partnership. Under the law, only tribes themselves may own their casinos.

In a letter to the Seminoles, Penny J. Coleman, acting general counsel of the NIGC, opined that the development contract allowed Coconut Creek Gaming “to collect a large amount of money, over a lengthy period of time, for doing nothing.”

Fears disagrees. “She’s taken a view that if you have a development agreement that exceeds certain parameters — and nobody knows what those parameters are — you are getting too big a share of the profits, which creates a proprietary interest in the casino,” he says. “It’s an aggressive stance by her. I personally think she’s overreaching. Maybe I’m wrong. The courts have never ruled on it.”

Fears’ development deals involving Indian casinos in California in the last decade were fraught with similar complexities and conflict and in at least one instance ended up in court, even though Fears at one point hired a former director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to

25

work for him. Despite the insider help, neither West Coast deal panned out.

“The biggest trouble with tribes is internal tribal politics,” Fears says.

Politics also stymied Fears’ proposed casino deal in China in the 1990s. When Gary Triano, his partner in that venture, died in a car bombing in Tucson in 1996, the crime had all the hallmarks of a mob hit. The FBI and detectives from the Pima County Sheriff’s Department questioned Fears and cleared him of any involvement.

Last year Pima County prosecutors finally charged Triano’s ex-wife and her lover with the murder.

Fears has not been as fortunate in clearing up his tax problems. The IRS claims that he owes more than $300,000 in federal income tax, dating back to 2001.

The case stems from a series of multimillion-dollar international currency transactions in late 2000 involving Deutsche Bank and companies owned by Fears. Negotiations on a settlement agreement have dragged on in U.S. tax court for years.

Offshore payments A 2009 court opinion on Fears’ tax case says that he “resided” in Illinois when the petition was filed. The discrepancy in his residency is duly footnoted in the court ruling. Fears says that he hasn’t visited Collinsville more than 10 times in the last decade. Nonetheless, after moving to Florida Fears continued to run his operations out of 9 Gateway Drive in Collinsville until 2008 while incorporating dozens of shell companies across the river in Missouri through his longtime attorney in suburban St. Louis.

Over the years his holdings have ranged from steakhouse franchises to an auto body repair shop, a sprawling empire that Fears now confesses may have become too diverse.

In the beginning, his corporate structure was less tangled. Fears originally set up Avatar Enterprises Inc., a Delaware corporation, as a management consulting company to represent the Southern Illinois Contractors Association, he says. Today, more than three decades later, Avatar has morphed into an international lobbying firm, acting as the registered foreign agent for the Moroccan government and PartyGaming, a Gibraltar-based online gambling company founded by expatriate Ruth Parasol, San Francisco-born heiress to a sex-industry fortune.

In 2007, Robert Kjellander, a former GOP national treasurer, was hired by Avatar to work on both the Moroccan and PartyGaming accounts, according to federal records. Fears made a discriminating choice in Kjellander.

During the Bush administration, the Springfield-based lobbyist had access to the highest corridors of power through his close friend Karl Rove, then-White House deputy chief of staff.

A year earlier, the Bush administration had banned online gaming in the U.S., which cut significantly into the profits of PartyGaming and made it a target of prosecution. Congressional lobbying records indicate that PartyGaming paid Avatar more than $1.3 million in 2007 alone. Last year PartyGaming agreed to pay a $105 million penalty to the U.S.

26

while continuing to lobby for a change in the law in Congress.

Kjellander and Fears’ efforts on behalf of the Moroccan government’s phosphate industry were far less lucrative but were more heavily shrouded in secrecy.

Morocco is the world’s largest producer of phosphate, a key ingredient in fertilizer and an essential commodity to American agribusiness.

In 2006 and 2007, the Moroccan Office Chérifien des Phosphates, or OCP, paid Avatar a total of $80,000. But the payments were inexplicably routed through a front company, Flager Holdings Ltd., with a post office box in Providenciales, the capital city of the Turks and Caicos Islands, a British protectorate with lax financial regulations.

Reached by phone at his office in Springfield, Kjellander declined to comment. Fears says that Avatar’s involvement with the Moroccan agency was short in duration and limited in scope.

“Morocco owns OCP, which is a huge mining company,” Fears says. “They were looking to go public. They wanted a government-political analysis and some feelings on how the contracts they had in the States would be regarded. They also wanted some advice [on] who to talk to about going public. I don’t remember who they ended up hiring.”

Human rights, online poker and wildfire prevention Avatar’s work for Morocco, however, went beyond lobbying on behalf

of its government-owned phosphate industry. Avatar also hired attorney Steven C. Schwadron, a well-connected Democratic lobbyist in Washington, D.C. Schwadron’s job appears to have been linked to Moroccan efforts to counter an indigenous political movement advocating autonomy for the Western Sahara.

Control of the Western Sahara has been in dispute since Spain withdrew from the region in 1976. Since then, Morocco has occupied the territory. The Moroccan takeover spurred an uprising by the Polisario Front, an armed resistance group representing the native Sahrawi people.

The United Nations has consistently favored autonomy for the Western Sahara, but the United States has backed Morocco’s occupation, in part because the kingdom is an ally in the so-called war on terror. A ceasefire has been in effect since 1991, but international efforts to resolve the conflict have failed. In the intervening time, an estimated 90,000 to 160,000 Sahrawis have fled across the border and are now living in Algerian refugee camps.

In 2008 and 2009, the autocratic Moroccan government funneled more than $250,000 to Avatar through Strategic Communications Group, according to the Department of Justice foreign agents registry. Avatar’s lobbying was part of a larger Moroccan public relations campaign unleashed to expose alleged human rights abuses and suspected misappropriation of foreign aid in Polisario-controlled refugee camps in Algeria.

The law firm where Schwadron works, Sher & Blackwell, received bundled payments from Morocco, by way of Avatar, totaling $35,000. The money opened the door to at least one congressman’s office. As recently as 2006,

27

Schwadron had been the chief of staff for Democratic Rep. Bill Delahunt, chairman of the Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight. After Schwadron contacted his former boss, Delahunt wrote a letter to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, asking her to “undertake a thorough review of apparent human rights violations suffered by refugees in the Polisario camps in southern Algeria.”

However, critics of the Moroccan blitz, including Human Rights Watch, claim that Morocco orchestrated the PR campaign to divert attention from its own human rights violations and to derail the Polisario Front’s continuing push for Western Saharan sovereignty.

While working for Avatar, Schwadron also lobbied for its other foreign client, Gibraltar-based PartyGaming. In return, Avatar paid Schwadron’s law firm $20,000, according to a congressional lobbying report. The report indicates that the work was related to “congressional oversight and legislation regarding Internet gaming, including possible amendments to the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006.” But the same filing lists another purpose for the lobbying: “Congressional oversight and legislation relating to wildfire prevention and suppression.”

Interestingly, more than $100,000 in Sher & Blackwell lobbying in 2008 and 2009 involved the same odd pairing of issues: online gambling and forest fire prevention. In all instances Schwadron is named as the contact, but the client is listed as “Alpha Neo (on behalf of Avatar Enterprises).” Alpha Neo is a Fearscontrolled company.

Schwadron declined to comment, but his lobbying work on these widely disparate issues appears to be connected to a 94-ton Soviet Ilyushin IL-78 refueling tanker plane that Fears owns.

In October, Air Support Services — another Delaware-incorporated company owned by Fears — filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in federal court in St. Louis. Air Support’s only asset is the IL-78, which can be used as a midair refueling tanker or as a firefighting aircraft. The move temporarily kept a Texas creditor from seizing the plane for an unpaid debt. In mid-December, Fears reversed his legal strategy and had his bankruptcy attorney dismiss the case. But the bankruptcy filing offers additional information on Air Support’s creditors.

Headlands Limited of Gibraltar has a stake of more than $1 million in the aircraft. Moreover, the bankruptcy records list Headlands as being located in the same building in Gibraltar that Avatar lobbying client Russell De Leon uses as a mail drop.

De Leon is the husband of Ruth Parasol, the founder of PartyGaming. In 2008, De Leon paid Avatar Enterprises more than $680,000 to promote a congressional overhaul of federal online gaming law.

In March, a ruling by a Michigan state court reaffirmed an earlier decision that awarded the plane to the Texas creditor who sued Fears for more than $70,000 in unpaid maintenance costs while the plane was mothballed for more than two years.

Fears has not announced whether he will appeal the judgment, but one thing is sure: The giant aircraft, which Fears describes as “the world’s best firefighting airplane,” has so far been more of an albatross for him than a golden goose. F/m

28

SPECIAL REPORT

Under the radar East Side player Gary Fears and his diverse business associates are betting that his military aviation business finally takes off. Whether it will fly is still up in the air.

By C.D. STELZER / cdstelzer@gmail.com Second of a two-part series. First published at focusmidwest.com in May 2010.

“It’s interesting that the guys who came here to help move the plane actually were Russian nationals,” says Cheryl Hill, a prosecutor in Marquette, Michigan.

Hill is referring to a gargantuan Soviet military aircraft worth millions of dollars that has been stranded for the better part of the last year at a former U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command base in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

The spring thaw has melted the snow that accumulated around the aircraft over the winter, but mysteries surrounding its presence at Sawyer International Airport remain.

A fuel-leaking Cold War relic, the 94-ton behemoth has been the subject of both curiosity and consternation in Marquette since it touched down in July. Almost immediately, five members of the Ilyushin IL-78’s nineman Ukrainian crew were deported for visa violations.

Hill, the local official charged with interim custody of the plane, recalls that one of the foreign-born aviators dispatched by the U.S. Customs Service to move the plane off the runway told her that he had flown the same aircraft during the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. She mentions the coincidence as an aside, her prosecutorial inquisitiveness piqued more by the plane’s flight plan from last summer.

“I think that the more interesting question is, what were they going to do with it in Pakistan?” Hill says. “Were they running guns? Were they running drugs? Were they running people? You could drive tanks in there.”

The prosecutor’s suspicions raise a litany of other issues regarding accountability and transparency in the increasingly privatized war on terror, including the extent of U.S. military

29

intelligence involvement, the veil of secrecy enveloping de facto covert operations, the purposes of such clandestine actions and who ultimately is profiting from the expansion of the wars now being waged in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The covert nature of the aircraft’s mission and those involved in carrying it out would never have come to light if not for a dispute over a maintenance bill.

Victor Miller, owner of Air 1 Flight Services of Sherman, Texas, filed suit against Air Support Systems LLC in June 2009, alleging that the company owed more than $70,000 in maintenance fees accrued during the two-anda-half years the plane was mothballed at the North Texas Regional Airport. After the Ukrainian crew took off with the plane the next month, it was grounded in Michigan, as a result of a restraining order, before it could leave U.S. airspace.

The registered owner of the plane is Gary R. Fears, a former Downstate Illinois powerbroker who now resides in South Florida. Fears dismisses the imbroglio over the plane as much ado about nothing.

“The whole thing was a huge misunderstanding,” says the 63-year-old Fears, who maintains his corporate address at his lawyer’s office in St. Louis County, Missouri.

The leaseholder of the plane is North American Tactical Aviation Inc. (NATA), a corporation with the same Wilmington, Delaware, address as Air Support Systems LLC, a Fears-owned company with one asset: the grounded plane. That the corporations share the same Delaware incorporation address could easily be attributed to coincidence, but bankruptcy records filed on behalf of Air Support Systems in St. Louis last fall provide more details as to who invested money in the aircraft or lent money for its purchase.

The outstanding creditors listed in the filing include a private mercenary group, a shadowy front company in Gibraltar and an Illinois gambling executive with alleged ties to the Chicago mob. On October 23, a judge in Marquette County, Michigan, ruled in Miller’s favor and awarded him the plane as payment for the unpaid debt. To prevent the tanker from being taken, Fears countered by filing for Chapter 11 protection for Air Support Systems on October 28 in federal bankruptcy court in St. Louis.

“That stayed all of the action,” says Hill, the Marquette County prosecutor. On Dec. 17, Fears reversed his legal strategy and had his St. Louis bankruptcy attorney dismiss the case he had filed less than two months earlier. In March, the Michigan court’s ruling was upheld.

The decision is the latest twist in the bizarre legal dispute. The latest Michigan court ruling follows a decision by the Department of Homeland Security to release the plane. Miller could not be reached for comment, but Fears maintains that he is still the legitimate owner.

Buying a foreign military aircraft is not like other business transactions. Before Fears could get his hands on the IL-78, the federal government had to allow its importation.

North American Tactical Aviation, the shadowy corporation that leased the plane from Fears after he purchased it, initially obtained permission to bring the plane to the United States. It is also the company involved in the failed effort to fly the plane to Pakistan last summer.

“I’m told that NATA [North American Tactical Aviation] had a contract to take the plane to Pakistan in support of the allied efforts there,” Fears says. He emphasizes that the mission had been officially sanctioned.

“We bought the plane from the Ukrainian government. The Air Force wrote a letter in support of the importation of it, saying they thought the plane had potential use in support of U.S. training requirements. The refueling

30

system on that airplane is common to many, many other countries.

“I view it as a logical and good thing to support the [war] effort,” says Fears. “It’s not to say that I agree politically with all efforts. I thought the Iraq war had a noble purpose and was grossly mishandled by the Bush administration, billions of dollars and thousands of American lives wasted. It was as bad as Vietnam in terms of misuse of assets. I view Afghanistan as far more complicated a question than Iraq, and I don’t know what the right answers are there. I’m glad I’m not the guy making the decisions.”

Strange bedfellows Nevertheless, while the wars rage on, Fears views the purchase of the Ukrainian military aircraft as a pragmatic business choice and sound investment. Though he says that the plane was a one-time deal and that he is not a broker of military hardware, records related to his abortive bankruptcy filing on behalf of Air Support Systems show that his acquisition of the plane was not carried out alone. Fears received venture capital from an international security firm operated by former high-ranking military officials. The records show that Trident Response Group of Dallas sank more than $2.5 million into Air Support Systems for the purchase of “future aircraft” on December 5, 2005. The Federal Aviation Administration issued Air Support Systems a certificate of registration for the IL-78 nine months later.

Former Navy SEAL Clint Bruce, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, and businessman C. Dewey Elliott III founded TRG. Bruce is lauded on the Trident website as a past commander of SEAL platoons “engaged in direct support of the Global War on Terror.”

Elliott, a fellow Annapolis alum, is listed as having been a “senior consultant with Washington and Boston-based firms where he supported intelligence, systems acquisitions and financial management for DoD [Department of Defense], Fortune 500 and multi-national clients.” The website shows Lt.

Col. John B. Skinner III, an active Marine Corps Reserve officer, as TRG’s vice president of operations. The board of directors includes retired Marine Corps Gen. Jack Davis, a former federal agent and state law enforcement officer; and John W. Wroten, a Naval Academy grad, former Marine captain and retired vice president of Electronic Data Systems.

The involvement of former Navy personnel in backing the purchase of a military aircraft seems normal enough, but the other creditors come from widely divergent backgrounds.

For instance, Headlands Ltd., a front company in Gibraltar, has more than $1.1 million tied up in the IL-78, according to the bankruptcy filing, By no small coincidence, Headlands’ address is in the same location as a mail drop for Russell De Leon. He is the husband of Ruth Parasol, the founder of PartyGaming, an online gambling company that has employed Fears’ lobbying services.

Together De Leon and Parasol own 40 percent of PartyGaming. They reside in Gibraltar.

31

Parasol, who grew up in affluent Marin County, Calif., founded PartyGaming with profits from her family’s pornography business. Her father, Richard Parasol, a Holocaust survivor and former Israeli Army officer, opened a string of massage parlors in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district in the early 1970s. After graduating from law school, Ruth Parasol joined the family business, which by then was operating phone sex chat lines. The father and daughter then diversified, investing in Internet Entertainment Group Ltd., an online pornography company. In 1997 Ruth Parasol shifted her interests exclusively to online gambling, which proved even more profitable than the sex trade.

But after President George W. Bush signed a law banning online gambling in 2006, Internet gaming profits took a nosedive. In response, PartyGaming hired Avatar Enterprises Inc., Fears’ lobbying firm. Lobbying records show that Avatar used influential Republican and Democratic lobbyists to work on PartyGaming’s efforts to lift the ban. The Republican, Robert Kjellander, an Illinois lobbyist and former GOP national treasurer, is a close confidante of former White House adviser Karl Rove. The Democrat, Steven Schwadron, is a former chief of staff for Rep. Bill Delahunt of Massachusetts.

Congressional lobbying records show Schwadron represented Avatar on two legislative issues: Internet gaming and “legislation relating to wildfire prevention and suppression.”

Aside from being a midair refueling tanker, the IL-78 is touted by both Fears and NATA as a superb firefighting aircraft.

Fears says there is nothing mysterious about his business relationship with either Kjellander or Schwadron. “I knew Bob (Kjellander) from Springfield years ago, [and] Steve works for a law firm I use in D.C.,” says Fears. “Neither one of them are partners in Avatar. If someone is giving you advice … on the project, then

better to be safe than sorry — you register them as having worked on that as well.”

The other major creditor of Air Support Systems is Chicago businessman Kevin Flynn, a casino executive and former gaming partner of Fears. The bankruptcy filing shows that in April 2008 Flynn secured a $1.3 million interest in the IL-78. Fears and Flynn crossed paths years earlier, when Flynn operated the Blue Chip Casino in Indiana. The two were later involved in a failed Indian casino development in California.

In 2001, the Illinois Gaming Board yanked Flynn’s long-dormant state license because two of his investors allegedly had ties to the Chicago mob.

At the time of the revocation, Flynn and his father, Donald Flynn, a former executive of Waste Management Inc., were seeking to transfer their existing gaming license from the shuttered Silver Eagle casino in East Dubuque, Illinois, so they could operate the proposed Emerald Casino in Rosemont, a Chicago suburb. Investors in the casino deal included a lineup of heavy hitters, including associates of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley.

But the state gaming board pulled the Flynns’ license because investors Nick Boscarino and Joseph Salamone were alleged to have ties to organized crime. Salamone, an Oak Park grocer, is the brother of Vito Salamone, a mob soldier who had originally been listed as a casino shareholder. Boscarino is a former Teamster official with close ties to Rosemont Mayor Donald E. Stephens.

Boscarino and Stephens once owned a forklift rental company along with organized crime figure William Daddano Jr. The gaming board also cited Emerald for hiring a construction company owned by the wife of Peter M. DiFronzo, the brother of Chicago mob boss John “No Nose” DiFronzo.

The gaming board concluded that Flynn had displayed a “contentious pattern … of

32

providing misleading information to the board and its staff.”

“Other than his disagreement with the Illinois Gaming Board,” says Fears, “I don’t know any infraction of any kind that Kevin [Flynn] has ever been involved in.”

Grounded The story of how Fears and his odd cast of creditors ended up with a grounded Ukrainian behemoth leaking fuel on the tarmac of an isolated airstrip in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan began four years ago.

The IL-78, which was formerly owned by the Ukrainian Air Force, departed Kiev on May 23, 2006, according to flight records. It refueled in Reykjavik, Iceland, before landing the next day at the North Texas Regional Airport, formerly Perrin Air Force Base, in Sherman, Texas. Tactical Air Defense Services, a private military-related start-up company formed by Fears, ran the operational arm of its enterprise at the airport, says retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Charles Searock.

“It was, at the time, the location of a training school wherein we were going to train foreign pilots,” says Searock, a seasoned combat pilot who flew more than 150 B-52 missions during the Vietnam War. The principal officers of TADS, Victor Miller and Mark Daniels, had signed up Searock to oversee the International Tactical Training Center, an ambitious program aimed at providing flight training for NATO pilots and others. Miller also owned and operated Air 1 Flight Services, an aviation maintenance service, at the same airport.

Neither Miller or Daniels could be reached for comment, but a lawsuit filed by the two men last year in Palm Beach County (Florida) Circuit Court provides a glimpse of what apparently transpired.

In March 2005, according to the suit, Fears and a group of Florida investors approached Miller and Daniels to offer financing for their

company AeroGroup Inc., a Utah-incorporated military flight training contractor. At that time, AeroGroup had a pending contract to buy the IL-78 and other foreign military aircraft from NATA. Fears and the other investors claimed that they had obtained control of a publicly traded Nevada mining company, Natalma Industries Inc., and intended to change its name to Tactical Air Defense Services Inc. The intended purpose of the newly formed entity was to raise tens of millions of dollars to bankroll the purchase of assets on behalf of AeroGroup, specifically to buy the IL-78, according to the lawsuit. Toward these ends, Fears solicited start-up capital from Jeff Horan of JT Hanco, according to the lawsuit.

However, the suit claims, instead of backing AeroGroup Fears diverted funds to set up Air Support Systems, which then bought the IL-78 for itself. In Air Support’s 2009 bankruptcy filing, Horan’s name is listed with Trident Response Group, the Dallas-based security firm, as having invested more than $2.5 million in the IL-78.

Miller and Daniels further alleged that when TADS purchased AeroGroup’s assets in 2006 the Florida investors were still contending that tens of millions of dollars would soon be available.

A TADS prospectus states that the company was angling to team up with an unnamed competitor [NATA] to provide combat and midair refueling training with the IL-78 and other foreign aircraft. “We have a good chance of being awarded the contract,” the TADS document says.

But the deal never materialized.

“This whole thing was predicated on Air Force contracts that were being negotiated by Mr. Mark Daniels,” says Searock. The contracts, however, were never finalized. As a result, “when they went public with TADS it

33

did not generate the income or the investors as they anticipated,” Searock says.

From Searock’s perspective, everything seemed to be on the level. “We would meet quarterly, sometimes more often, with Mr. Fears and the guys from Florida,” he recalls.

“We met in Florida. We met a couple times in Dallas, as he was passing through, and a couple times he came to Sherman. I had no problem with him. We were involved in a lot of different things, including the tanker. There was no reason for me to suspect that these guys weren’t on the up-and-up, if they poured $5 or $6 million into getting this airplane [the IL-78] and having it totally refurbished and delivered. That was an expensive scheme, if it was a scheme.”

But Searock became disenchanted with his employers after he says he shelled out his own cash to cover operating expenses and wasn’t reimbursed. He resigned from his position at the end of 2006 and sued TADS and all of the principal players, including Fears, for back pay.

Miller and Daniels dropped their Florida lawsuit in April 2009 after reaching a settlement agreement with Fears and other investors. As owner of Air 1 Flight Services, however, Miller placed a lien for unpaid service costs on the IL-78 in Texas in June 2009.

lawsuit has any more validity than the earlier case filed in Florida that Miller and his partner chose not to pursue.

“Air Support Systems owns the plane. It's registered with the FAA,” says Fears. “The whole thing was a huge misunderstanding and blown out of proportion by the press. Victor Miller and those guys checked with the FAA, found where the plane was at and called the local authorities and said, ‘They have left in violation of a court order.’” But Fears says there’s one problem with that allegation: “ NATA was never served with that court order.”

Fears says Miller’s aviation firm, Air 1 Flight Services, has been out of business for two years. “I can show you the agreement that Victor Miller signed and the release on the lien that shows those bills’ being paid,” says Fears. “It was a phony claim by a company that didn’t exist.

“This is a military aircraft — and it is going over to support the U.S. Air Force allied efforts over there [Afghanistan-Pakistan].”

In 1968, as a young man, Fears stumped for Democratic presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Wisconsin, who campaigned against the Vietnam War. Today, more than four decades later, he appears comfortable with the concept of profiting from warfare. When asked about his role as a modern day privateer, he paraphrases President George W. Bush’s first secretary of defense: “I think maybe it was [Donald] Rumsfeld who said, ‘If it’s not firing a gun, we should look at privatizing it.’”

Shortly before noon on July 17, 2009, a nine-member Ukrainian crew hired by NATA boarded the IL-78 and took off from North Texas Regional Airport. The flight plan called for the craft to refuel at Wittman Regional Airport, in Oshkosh, Wis., before leaving U.S. airspace and heading to Pakistan. Alerted to the plane’s departure, Miller filed a restraining order, and the plane was diverted to Sawyer International Airport, in Gwinn, Mich., where it has been stranded ever since as a result of litigation.

Asked whether his activities are somehow involved with covert CIA operations, Fears laughs. “Not that I’m aware of,” he says. “I wish there was something that exciting to all this stuff that I was a CIA guy, but that’s not the case.” F/m

Despite the Michigan court ruling that favors Miller’s cause, Fears doesn’t believe that the

This special report was funded by a grant from the Press Club of Metropolitan St. Louis.

34

Chicago politics and the limits of reform “Because of the Machine’s enormous power, the main reform goal has not always been to overthrow the Democratic organization but to ‘open it up’ to push for nominating ‘good men’ to party posts. To some, however, ‘opening up’ government, efficiency and civil service have clogged rather than opened government. Says Washington University political scientist Dennis Judd: ‘Reform politics absolutely closes the system. True, the intention of reformers was not to make the system less open. But reformers want a centralized, professionalized politics with civil service.

What kind of people can work within a centralized, bureaucratic politics based on efficiency defined as the centralization of authority? People who can talk, read, know their rights, browbeat and intimidate.’ The modern corporation and the Pentagon, he says, are the ultimate in bureaucratic government. Both are incredibly corrupt. ‘Take your pick,’ Judd says, ‘but don’t be so damned righteous about it.’

“As columnist Mike Royko once quoted [Mayor Richard] Daley: ‘the party permits ordinary people to get ahead. Without the party, I couldn’t be mayor. The rich guys can get elected on their money. . . .

Without the party, only the rich would be elected to office.’ [ . . . ] “Reformers’ frequent calls for an issueoriented politics also seems hypocritical to some. Asks lifelong labor organizer, writer and sometime political candidate Sydney Lens, ‘[ . . . ] How can we expect people to keep up with thousands of political issues? The average guy is so bewildered, he votes either because he likes a guy’s smile or because he can get favors.’ [ . . . ] Lens says reform politics has contributed to the New Politics of personality, charisma and media stylism. ‘The big

issue for a politician,’ Lens says, ‘is how many people have heard his name.’

“Simple name identification. In short, the emergence and aggrandizement of the ‘independent’ voter and candidate has speeded the breakdown of political parties and generated a rootless topical politics.

An independent candidate is supposed to be his own man. No party bootlicker.

That’s fine, but multiply the number of candidates a person votes for by the number of issues candidates take a stand on: That’s how informed a fellow must be to make an intelligent voter choice.

Without simple party tags that label a politician’s general approach to issues, Lens says, the average guy is lost. What remains? Smiles and favors.” -- Walt Harrington Excerpted from Harrington's news analysis “Chicago politics and reform – when?” in the May-June 1975 edition of FOCUS/Midwest. F/m

35

For a more equitable society “Public policies to create greater social and economic equality have had limited success. The source of inequality is a basic tension between the democratic and capitalist strands of our heritage.

Efforts to resolve that tension have failed.

“Over the long haul, it is theoretically possible to change the economic contours of our society primarily through a redistribution of employment opportunities. A series of incremental steps can be taken towards the following objectives that would achieve the goal of a more equitable society: “1) Full employment, including a gradual build-up of the capacity of local and state governments to provide meaningful, if low-paying, public service jobs so that anyone willing and able to work is guaranteed the opportunity to participate in the productive processes of society.

“2) Economic development of distressed areas, to create private, sustaining jobs for individuals, especially those who live in some rural areas, where depression never ends.

“3) Firm and carefully planned enforcement of affirmative-action programs to overcome the legacy of race and sex discrimination.

“4) Replacement of welfare with a credit income tax, or similar redistributive tax, to ensure a decent

minimum income for the ‘working poor’ or those unable to work.

“The ultimate goal is to create a world in which each child and parent has the opportunity not only to make decent lives but, in making their lives, to help make history. This would be a world in which the power to influence and shape our collective destiny, a power now concentrated in the hands of relatively few, was diffused among the many who currently have little more than the power to muddle through.” -- Richard H. de Lone Excerpted from de Lone’s essay “The Limits of Reform and a Just Society,” from the October 1979 edition of FOCUS/Midwest. F/m

36

An industrial policy for America's new Appalachia Brain drain.

Manufacturing. Made in the U.S.A.

Low income.

It’s what we're real good at around here. Or, at least, it’s what we once were good at.

Vanishing factory jobs.

Welcome to the Rust Belt.

Hard to believe this was the Greatest Generation’s arsenal of democracy.

Today, the industrial Midwest looks more like the arsenal of despair.

We’re the New Appalachia.

Just run that idea around the brain.

Almost half the states of the old Confederacy report higher income-per-job than a place like Indiana.

Nothing can alter that fact soon.

It could get worse.

People who study this stuff, the economists, they think factory jobs won't come back in great numbers like after the ’82 recession.

So how do we get the train back on the track?

Listen to this guy: “The good news is that, at least for the United States, we’re going to have a manufacturing renaissance.”

Clyde Prestowitz Jr. is talking.

Remember him? He was a trade negotiator in President Ronald Reagan’s White House. He correctly predicted Japan would export its way to prosperity. He correctly predicted China would export its way to prosperity.

Now he says the United States can export its way to prosperity.

Here’s the problem now.

Here’s why there will be no sudden renaissance. It is not the brain drain, low pay or the worn factories. Those are not the problems. Those are symptoms.

The problem, Prestowitz says, is in Washington, D.C. We have no industrial policy favoring exports.

We have no industrial policy.

Japan and China shut out our goods. We willingly take theirs.

Why? “We think we’re playing a free-market, freetrade game,'” Prestowitz said. “When I was in the government, we assumed Japan was playing the same game. They weren’t. Japan was playing a game called catch up -- or export-led growth.'”

Catch up.

Nice game.

It’s time to tell New Appalachia’s leaders it is time they learn the game. -- Ted Evanoff Originally published May 2009. Evanoff, a veteran journalist, is the co-author of At the Crossroads: Middle America and the Battle to Save the Car Industry (2010). F/m

That’s right.

Indeed, the sure way out of this economic mess we’re in, he says, is to export our way out.

How do you do that?

37