The Prince of Beers (4 page)

But by this point the drugs weren't so much a choice, per se. More of an obligation. He'd been depressed to start with, and jonesing made the blues so much worse. Blues wasn't even the word, everything went black, a river of black. The universe had played a crazy joke on him, given him the job he'd spent his whole life working for and then taken it away. He would have done anything to keep it, anything to prove himself to the Chief. But the Chief had made up his mind.

At least thinking about getting high kept him from thinking about everything else.

The cops came to the gate around 4 p.m., the sun low in the sky, another cruddy winter day. Seemed his mom had called CPS, Child Protective Services. All the drugs and the guns had her worried, what with Blake in the house. Blake, Adrienne's eight-year-old son. Like he would ever hurt Blake. The boy was the only good thing in his life right now, practically all he had to live for. He was always careful with guns and drugs when Blake was around. He wished his mom had known. He might have avoided some embarrassment. 'Cause, come on, he wasn't a hundred percent at the moment, but even he could see that having CPS show up at a mansion in Huntleigh… let's just say it didn't happen every day.

But what happened later that week was much worse. The cops came back, and this time they weren't talking. When he opened his door, they put him against the wall and cuffed him. Just that fast. When he asked if he was under arrest, they told him no, they'd explain on the way. Turned out they had a court order to take him in for 96-hour involuntary detention, figure out if he was a danger to himself or anyone else. If he was mentally competent. Two years before 30,000 people had been working for him. Now the cops were telling him he'd be better off at the psych ward at St. John's Mercy, where he could sober up, get some help.

The worst part was he hardly even had the strength to argue. He knew they were right.

* * *

Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011.

For six weeks, St. Louis had waited to hear whether August Busch IV would face charges in Adrienne Nicole Martin's death. Now County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch had the answer: No.

"It was clearly an accidental overdose," the prosecutor said at a press conference to discuss his decision. The post-mortem tox screen showed Adrienne had lethal levels of oxycodone in her blood. The hole in her nose showed she was a chronic cocaine user. The drugs that killed her "didn't just drop out of the sky," McCulloch said. But Busch had refused to talk about the case with police after that first Sunday afternoon. Without his help, "the investigation as to where the drugs came from is at a dead end," McCulloch said.

The announcement provoked a surprising debate in St. Louis, which showed up on the Post-Dispatch's comment boards whenever the paper wrote about the case. Some posters saw the refusal to bring charges as yet another sign that the Busches, especially The Fourth, were above the law. For the second time, August Busch IV had escaped legal sanction for the death of young woman.

But other writers disagreed. Adrienne was an adult who had chosen to use drugs, they argued. Only she was to blame for her death. And McCulloch had followed his own standard in the case. St. Louis County, unlike some nearby jurisdictions, did not generally prosecute drug suppliers in overdose deaths — whether the supplier was a dealer selling drugs or simply an acquaintance sharing his own stash. Only if police found that another person was present during the overdose and hadn't bothered to get help would prosecutors bring charges.

"I am not a Busch fan but if this woman was found in a crack house we would not be reading about her," a typical comment read. "She took the drugs, and unless they can prove someone held a gun to her head, she was the one that made the wrong choice."

* * *

The threat of criminal prosecution had disappeared. But Busch IV had one more legal bullet to dodge. Under Missouri law, Adrienne's parents and son had the right to sue for damages, alleging that Busch's negligence had caused Adrienne's death. As a child, Blake had a much stronger claim. But since he was too young to file suit himself, Kevin Martin — Adrienne's ex-husband and Blake's father — would need to bring the case. A civil lawsuit could have forced Busch and his employees to give depositions under oath about what had happened on the night of Adrienne's death, or to plead their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

On March 31, 2011, Kevin sued August Busch IV in state court in St. Louis. Then the case took an odd turn. Lawyers for Kevin and Busch jointly agreed to move the case to Cape Girardeau, a town in southeastern Missouri 115 miles away. Kevin lived in Cape Girardeau, but St. Louis County made more sense as a venue for the case. Nearly every potential witness — police officers, Busch's employees, and Busch himself, among others — lived in and around St. Louis.

The reason for the move became clear soon enough. Kevin Martin didn't intend to put August Busch IV through a protracted legal fight. On April 15, Busch agreed to pay $1.5 million for Adrienne's death, with the money to be split among Blake and Adrienne's parents, who were divorced and estranged. The payment was sizeable, considering Adrienne was jobless and had died of an overdose. Even if a jury had found Busch liable, it might have awarded less. A quick settlement also meant lower legal expenses, so Blake would keep more of the money.

On the other hand, the two sides agreed to a deal before Kevin's lawyer deposed a single witness or saw a single document or email that wasn't publicly available. Most plaintiffs' lawyers want some idea of the strength of their case before they agree to a settlement, even one that seems favorable. Blake didn't need the money right away, so why rush? The quick settlement smacked of collusion between The Fourth and Kevin, who had become friends before Adrienne died and remained so afterwards. It would prevent Adrienne's mother or father from being actively involved in the case, though they could ask for a portion of the $1.5 million.

Adrienne's parents separately tried to assert their rights to intervene in the lawsuit. But in a bizarre ruling in May 2011, the Cape Girardeau judge, William Syler, denied their request. In December, a Missouri appellate court reversed Syler's ruling. Adrienne's mother and father then asked to return the case to St. Louis — and in July 2012 Syler again ruled against them, setting up more appeals. Lawyers for Busch could not have found a better delay strategy. After more than a year, the suit was stuck at its earliest stages.

Finally, on Sep. 25, 2012, the Missouri Supreme Court rejected the parents' request to move the case back to St. Louis. Busch IV and Kevin Martin had won. In a hearing on Oct. 9, Judge Syler was openly dismissive of Christine Trampler, Adrienne's mother. On Oct. 30, the judge approved a $1.75 million settlement that included a $200,000 payment to Christine Trampler, ending the lawsuit."

And so the Fourth's lawyers washed away the last legal fallout from Adrienne Nicole Martin's death.

* * *

Thursday, August 2, 2012. 8 p.m.

I'd spent the day talking to St. Louis notables and checking out the records from the Martin lawsuit at the Court of Appeals downtown. The city's emptiness was jarring. Lots of American city centers are deserted after dark. But the St. Louis core seemed hollowed out even on a weekday afternoon, like a neutron bomb had wiped away the people and left the buildings standing. Note to Hollywood: if you're looking to film a post-apocalyptic epic, STL will do just fine.

The folks I'd interviewed had been nice enough, but not too exciting. I was about to meet a more colorful character, a seventy-something professional sharpie named Norton Balber, a/k/a The Hat. He'd been a small-time bookmaker and backroom card player decades before, back when St. Louis still had a mob presence, before the Feds cracked down. Now organized crime was gone, but the state had more gambling than ever. Like the rest of the Midwest, Missouri had decided casinos were fine as long as the state got a cut. The Hat was still a good enough card player to take down the frat boys who came to the Lumiere casino downtown on Friday nights. But his main occupation was telling stories about the glory days.

I'd met Balber playing poker at the Lumiere in 2009, on a tour to promote my novels. Most folks you meet at the table stop thinking about you the minute you get up, but The Hat had turned into a fan of my books. We emailed every so often, and when I told him I was coming to St. Louis, he said we should have dinner.

So I made my way to an Italian place not far from the train station. The restaurant was mediocre, but Balber presented me with a most pleasant surprise. He knew "a gorgeous girl" — a woman almost forty, but forever a girl to the Hat — who knew August Busch IV. Knew him well, in fact. Her name, almost too good to be true, was April Twist.

April Nickles Twist and her ex-husband Tony are a story all their own. Tony's a retired professional hockey player, a forward on the St. Louis Blues for six years. His real job, though, was fighting. "It takes a special talent to stand on skates and beat someone senseless, and no one does it better," Sports Illustrated once wrote about him. April's an ex-waitress turned bar and cigar shop owner. She's small and busty, with curly hair brown at the roots and a wide, inviting smile. April has known August almost twenty years; they met cute on his boat on the Lake of the Ozarks. "He said what's your name, 'I said, I'm April.' And he said, 'Oh, I'm August.'"

April, sick of jokes about her name, thought The Fourth was mocking her. "I was like, 'Oh, that's really funny, dude.' I definitely wasn't reading the paper to know what August Busch looked like. I think he was really intrigued by the fact that I was on his boat, and I had no idea who he was."

Of course, The Fourth had other reasons to be intrigued. "I'm wild and fun, so he liked that about me," she said. "It was always fun when you were with August, you got the best dinners, you got the best treatment. He always wanted to go have fun, and he always wanted to bring his friends."

April and August slept together occasionally, but the relationship was never serious. April watched with amusement as his women came and went. "There was always a couple girls like me who he had hidden away," she said. Even after April married Twist in 2001, she stayed friends with The Fourth. She said she believed he appreciated the fact that she never asked him for money or tried to take advantage of his wealth. Over the years, she grew to see him as deeply lonely, despite — or because of — his drinking and late nights.

"He's a normal guy who happened to fall into a lot of money, and he doesn't have very many friends," she said. "He doesn't have a lot of people who care about him who he's not paying to care about him."

The day after Adrienne died, The Fourth called April. "He was so upset," she said. "Told me that his girlfriend had died, that she'd died in her sleep. He was crying, really upset, not upset like, 'Oh my God, I got another dead girl, he was genuinely, genuinely upset.'" He denied using drugs on the night Adrienne had died. "He said, 'I didn't do coke, April. I just went to bed and I went to sleep, and she's dead.'"

Busch stuck to that story in an interview Jan. 4, 2011 with the Post-Dispatch. "I went to serve her breakfast in bed, and I couldn't wake her up," he said. "It's the saddest thing I've ever dealt with." He acknowledged that he'd been depressed since the A-B sale and had been hospitalized in 2010, but didn't mention his alcohol or drug problems. He seemed intent on convincing the world, or maybe himself, that Adrienne had not died of drug abuse.

But the toxicology reports proved otherwise — and raised the question of why Busch had ruled out the possibility so vehemently. He too had been a chronic cocaine user. Either he had kept using after his stint in rehab, or he had quit and somehow missed the fact that Adrienne hadn't. He appeared to be a fool at best, a liar at worse. His professions of devotion for Adrienne made matters worse.

"She was the only girl I've ever been with that I didn't want to have someone on the side," he said. "You know, I'm this notorious bachelor who always wanted someone on the side, but I didn't with Adrienne."

A sweet sentiment. It would have been, anyway, if Busch hadn't been married less than three years before. The comment reinforced the popular perception that he'd married Kate Thatcher only because he wanted to become Anheuser's chief executive.

Not surprisingly, The Fourth gave no more on-the-record interviews about Adrienne's death.

* * *

The deaths of Michele Fredrick and Adrienne Martin have created an indelible image of Busch as a feckless playboy, a drug addict who couldn't care less about the women he beds. In a Post-Dispatch column in February 2011, Bill McClellan went to The Great Gatsby to explain Busch:

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

The analogy is seductive. But it misses a crucial point. The Buchanans had each other. August Busch IV has no one. His family is tired of his messes and keeps a wary distance. On that cold December morning when Adrienne died, The Third and the rest of the Busch clan were in Hawaii. The Fourth has no children. He destroyed his marriage. After the A-B sale, he had $100 million, but the only woman who would stay with him was a drug-addled single mom. Despite his protestations of love for Adrienne, he liked her more than anything because she put up with his depression. "I've been through some pretty bad times the last two years, and she was always by my side," he told the Post-Dispatch.

August Busch's relationship with his father has defined his life. In interviews with business magazines — interviews intended to demonstrate his fitness to run a publicly traded company — he spoke over and over of his desire to prove himself to The Third. In 1997 he told Fortune that he kept letters from his father in his briefcase. "Five notes of compliment from the Chief over ten years of full-time employment here… I cherish them." In 2002 he was even more effusive, telling Businessweek: "Take a walk through my house, and it looks like a father museum. Every picture on the wall is of my father, or me and my father… But he has been extremely tough on me. Maybe you can call it tough love." Even in 2007, after becoming CEO, he told Forbes that a better relationship with the Third would be a "dream."