The Prince of Beers (2 page)

After Payne left, Frontenac detective James Ford approached Busch and Margulis for an interview. Margulis said that Busch would give a statement and answer "limited" questions. Ford read Busch his rights, and at 3:07 p.m., Busch scrawled an unrecognizable signature over the waiver form that Ford offered him.

In the interview, Busch stuck to the story he'd already told Officer Scronce. He and Adrienne had dated for more than a year. She regularly stayed at his house. Unfortunately, they'd both been feeling under the weather. In fact, Busch had been taken to a local hospital on Thursday, Dec. 16, having a panic attack. He checked out the next day, despite the advice of his doctors, and came back to his mansion. Aside from a helicopter ride Saturday afternoon, he and Adrienne hadn't left since. The night before, Busch went to bed early, but Adrienne didn't join him until early Sunday morning. He woke up around 12:30 p.m., left his bedroom, came back a few minutes later and tried to wake Adrienne.

Did Busch know whether Adrienne used illegal drugs? Again, Busch insisted he had no idea. The answer was a lie. He'd used cocaine with her many times before. He agreed to let Ford examine the surveillance tapes from his mansion. Without fanfare, the interview ended.

Busch never again spoke to the authorities about Adrienne's death.

Night fell. Officer Scronce, Detective Ford, and the other Frontenac police officers piled into their cars and left the mansion to rejoin the world. Only Busch and his paid companions were left in the mansion. The man with a thousand toys could contemplate the wreckage of his life in peace.

* * *

May 1975.

August Busch III was about to fire his father.

Gussie had run Anheuser-Busch for thirty years, raising production from 3 million barrels of beer to 37 million. A-B was the largest brewer in the United States, with almost one-quarter of the market. But by the mid-1970s, Gussie was slipping. So was Budweiser. Miller Brewing, A-B's top competitor, had just introduced Miller Lite. Fueled by the legendary "Tastes Great, Less Filling" ad campaign, Lite became a cultural sensation and stole market share and profits from Bud. Gussie refused to introduce a light beer, worried it would hurt the Budweiser brand.

Instead, as profits fell, Gussie focused on cutting costs. He laid off 120 workers at A-B's headquarters and pared its marketing budget — a slow form of suicide for a company that had always spent heavily to promote Budweiser as a premium product. As the crisis deepened in 1975, Busch III laid the groundwork for his coup. He met one-on-one with A-B's directors to explain the threat from Miller. He convinced the company's top executives to promise to resign if the board didn't force Gussie out. By May, The Third was ready. He moved against the man who shared his name, asking A-B's directors to replace Gussie and make him chief executive. Gussie appealed to their loyalty, but the directors had made up their minds.

At age thirty-seven, August Busch III was master of A-B. Under his reign, the company reached its greatest success. Busch faced down the Teamsters and introduced new low-calorie beers to compete with Miller Lite. He poured billions of dollars into advertising, marketing, and sports sponsorships. Meanwhile, he continued Anheuser's tradition of spending lavishly on the wholesalers and distributors crucial to the beer business. He hired Harvard MBAs to dissect the retail beer market with thousands of different promotional campaigns. And in 1982, he introduced Bud Light, which ultimately surpassed Miller Lite to become the largest-selling low-calorie beer in America — and then overtook Budweiser to become the best-selling beer of all. Year after year, Anheuser-Busch's profits and market share grew. In 1980, the company had 28 percent of the American beer market. A decade later, it had 43 percent. Over the same period, its earnings per share increased fivefold.
Stack it high and watch it fly
became A-B's unofficial motto.

By all accounts, the Third ran the tightest of ships. "August worked very, very hard," Bill Finnie, a longtime A-B executive, told me. "He hated bullshit. He worked his tail off. It was twenty-four-seven Anheuser-Busch. You joked that Fridays were great because there were only two more workdays in the week."

But Busch III was a hard man to like. He was cold, distant, obsessed with personal safety and firearms. Years after he retired, Anheuser-Busch spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on his security detail. He helicoptered to work every day from his estate in St. Charles County, west of St. Louis, landing on the roof of the A-B executive offices — a convenient way to avoid human contact. Busch III could be charming when the mood struck him, Bill McClellan, a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, told me. But mainly, The Third relied on his temper and his power. Like his son, he was medium-height and square-jawed, with brown eyes, a thick head of hair, and a penchant for cowboy boots. That physical resemblance masked enormous differences in personality. The Third, unlike The Fourth, was prone to fits of anger that turned him red-faced and squinty-eyed. Tightly wound, he demanded loyalty and obedience from employees. His management philosophy, he told Fortune magazine in 1997, was "Make sure your standards are high, and if someone doesn't meet those standards, take them out." (When I asked him to comment for this piece, his response was "Goodbye, Alex. Have a nice day. Have a drink." He didn't mention a brand.)

In 1969, Susan Busch, the Third's first wife and the mother of August IV and his sister Susie, filed for divorce. Susan alleged that August III "nagged and criticized her conduct and found fault with her without cause… and used profane and humiliating language toward her," according to Under The Influence: The Unauthorized Story of the Anheuser-Busch Dynasty. (Written by two Post-Dispatch reporters and published in 1991, Under The Influence is the definitive history of the first 130 years of the Busch empire.)

Five years later, Busch III remarried. His second wife, Virginia Lee Wiley, was a tall, beautiful blonde, like Susan. Busch III and Virginia had two children of their own, while The Fourth and Susie lived with their mother. The Third took his son to board meetings and distributorships, making sure that the Fourth knew he was the heir apparent. Otherwise, III treated IV as distantly as anyone else. Busch IV told Fortune in the 1997 piece that the relationship between father and son was "almost all business." But The Fourth got plenty of pleasure elsewhere.

* * *

Monday, Dec. 20, 2010. 2:30 p.m.

Autopsies are grisly affairs, the reduction of the human body into its component parts, heart and lungs and liver extracted and weighed like so many specialty meats. All modesty disappears. In his examination of Adrienne Nicole Martin's corpse, deputy St. Louis County medical examiner Michael Graham noted dispassionately that "the breasts are prominent due to the presence of implants. The genitalia is unremarkable. The pubic hair, for the most part, has been shaved."

Yet Adrienne's corpse gave up its biggest secret even before Graham cut her open. She had a quarter-inch hole in her septum, the skinny piece of cartilage and bone that separates the nostrils. You'll want pictures of this, Graham told Ford, the Frontenac detective, who was watching the autopsy. Graham ran a pick in one of Adrienne's nostrils and out the other to show that the hole extended through Adrienne's septum. Ford made sure to get a photo. What's going to cause a hole like that? Ford asked Graham, a highly regarded coroner who has written several pathology textbooks.

The answer: Snorting cocaine. Not for days, or weeks. For months on end.

* * *

Sunday, Nov. 13, 1983. Just past midnight.

The boy with a thousand toys loved everything speedy: cigarette boats, Harleys, planes. Now he had a new go-fast, a slick black Corvette fresh off the dealer's lot. Girls dug it. He'd brought it with him from St. Louis to Tucson, where he was studying at the University of Arizona's engineering school.

Studying. Yeah, right.

He spent nights at Dirtbag's, this bar near school where the manager let him jump the line. The place was pretty cool. Cheap drinks and plenty of girls, including a sweet-looking bartender named Michelle. She was tall, pretty, blonde, with a tight body. She liked to smoke weed, wasn't afraid of a little blow. Okay by him. He loved to party. And he could drink like a machine. Five, six, seven cocktails and a bunch of beers, sack out, do it again the next night. Iron livers ran in the family.

So: just another Saturday night. He hit a disco called Viola's. Michele was there, taking the night off from Dirtbag's. He was drinking vodka collinses, basically spiked lemonade, a little girly but they did the trick. The drinking age in Arizona was 19, which was nice, meant he didn't have to use his fake ID. Of course he'd pregamed with some Bud Lights, didn't want to start the night cold. By the time Viola's shut at 1 a.m. he was feeling no pain. He and Michele and their friends weren't done partying. Not even close. They decided to convoy up, head home. Michele would ride with him in the 'vette.

Things got blurry after that...

* * *

When Pima County Sheriff's Department deputy Ronald Benson arrived at August Busch IV's Tucson apartment the next morning, he found a scene eerily similar to the one that Frontenac officer Scronce would see in Huntleigh 27 years later. A semiautomatic rifle lay at the foot of Busch's bed. A loaded sawed-off shotgun sat on a nearby table. Busch himself appeared dazed, his head and chest spattered with blood, according to Under the Influence, whose authors extensively interviewed Benson.

Busch told the deputies that he couldn't remember what had happened the night before. He thought he might have pulled over and slept beside his car. The truth was very different. Busch's Corvette had wrecked on a sharp curve on River Road in rural northeast Tucson. The accident had thrown Michele Frederick through the sunroof and into a tree. She broke her neck and died at the scene. Busch walked away from the accident and flagged a ride to his apartment. He didn't mention what had happened to the Good Samaritan who took him home.

The deputies arranged an ambulance to take Busch to Tucson General Hospital. Along the way, he admitted drinking "quite a bit" the night before. He said he'd had one or two vodka collinses, as well as several beers. A waitress at Viola's, and people who'd been with him, said that in reality Busch had drunk as many as seven vodkas in his four hours at the disco. The Corvette was littered with empty cans of Bud Light. But Busch insisted he'd been safe to drive, and some people with him said he hadn't appeared drunk.

At Tucson General, doctors treated Busch for a fractured skull, and took blood and urine samples for a potential criminal case. Five days later, Deputy Benson asked an Arizona court to measure the samples for alcohol and other drugs. Benson said the sheriff's department had found probable cause to believe that "the crime of manslaughter had been committed," according to Under the Influence. The judge agreed. But Tucson General couldn't find Busch's urine sample, and it had damaged his blood sample. Suddenly investigators couldn't prove exactly how drunk Busch had been on the night of the accident. A week after the accident, Busch was released from the hospital. He flew home to Missouri and refused to speak further with investigators.

The sheriff's office pursued the case, even sending Benson to St. Louis after getting a court order to take more blood samples from The Fourth. A friend of Michele's said Busch had been driving unsafely. But the Busches fought back, bringing in highway engineers to examine the curve where the accident had happened, hiring lawyers to fight requests for evidence. On July 6, 1984, after an eight-month investigation, prosecutors in Tucson announced they would not bring criminal charges. The circumstantial evidence showed that Busch was driving, they said. But Busch's claim of amnesia was credible because of his skull fracture, and even if they proved he was speeding, they could not prove that he had been driving drunk or had used other drugs, they said.

So The Fourth escaped prosecution in Michele Frederick's death. He stayed in Missouri and eventually graduated from St. Louis University, a private Jesuit institution. As years passed, Busch always denied knowing what had happened that night, or even whether he'd been driving. "I had a bad head injury. I don't remember that part of my life," he told Fortune in 1997. But he did remember that prosecutors hadn't charged him. "They couldn't prove blame." Later, Busch IV told BusinessWeek that the accident might even make him a smarter executive. "As painful as that memory is, the experience will make me a better keeper of responsibility for our products."

But Michelle's death — and a 1985 incident in which St. Louis police shot out a tire of Busch's Mercedes following a high-speed chase — left a taint on Busch that never disappeared. Even minor legal indiscretions will derail an executive's career at most big publicly traded companies. The Fourth's problems were far more serious, and the higher he climbed at A-B, the louder the whispers of nepotism became.

And at his most vulnerable moment Busch, too, would admit that the death in Tucson still haunted him.

* * *

When it comes to troubled American cities, Detroit gets the press, but St. Louis is hardly better off. In 1950, the city had 850,000 people. In 2010, it had 320,000. Like other Midwestern industrial cities, it suffered from middle-class flight, failing schools, and lurid crime. In 2010, only New Orleans had a higher murder rate among the 100 largest American cities.

Along the way St. Louis's biggest companies fled or were taken over. McDonnell Douglas sold itself to Boeing, May Department Stores to Federated. Southwestern Bell moved to San Antonio and eventually became AT&T. A century before St. Louis had been the fourth-largest city in the United States, a worthy rival to Chicago, 250 miles north. These days it scrapped for business with towns like Nashville. Its confidence had plunged along with its population. A few days before I arrived in St. Louis, McClellan wrote a column in the Post-Dispatch headlined, "What's wrong with us? Too hot to say." He speculated that the city had always been doomed because it had been settled by pioneers too lazy to go further west. He was joking, but the fact that the Post-Dispatch mocked its hometown so openly was telling.