Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [111]
Hardin and his FBI agents used time-tested techniques to determine if Hale was telling the truth: They would take events out of sequence, jumping back and forth from one period to another, so that Hale could not weave a false story without tripping himself up. Explained Hardin: “It’s really not very different than the CIA getting somebody and taking them off into the woods in western Virginia for a while to try to find out whether they actually are a mole or whether they really are telling the truth.”
There was no illusion that Hale, by himself, would enable OIC to land a big conviction. He was an admitted felon—a former public servant who had embezzled federal funds as part of a shameless “pyramid scheme.” Prosecutors in the Sixth Judicial District of Arkansas were already investigating Hale for his burial-insurance fraud scheme. Evidence had also surfaced recently that Hale had engaged in a protracted extramarital affair with his secretary, and in the process swindled her grandparents out of $486,000. David Hale came with an enormous pile of baggage. If his testimony was to stick, there would have to be other witnesses corroborating it.
One prime candidate was James B. McDougal. The first failed prosecution of McDougal had left him penniless, without a wife, suffering from manic depression, and living in a trailer-cottage in Arkadelphia. Hale was now singing like a songbird, trilling away to OIC that he, Jim and Susan McDougal, then-Governor Jim Guy Tucker, and others had plotted to illegally divert $825,000 worth of Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan funds into various shady enterprises.
Emerging briefly from his nook in Arkadelphia, McDougal had spoken to USA Today and scoffed at Hale’s agreement to “cooperate” with OIC. “They’re going to let that filthy scumbag sit there and tell his story against the president of the United States?” McDougal asked. “That is one thing in life that I will do for Bill. I will flush [Hale] out.”
Susan McDougal was living in Nashville with her now fiancé, Pat Harris, flying back and forth to California, where she had been charged with embezzling $150,000 from Nancy Mehta, the eccentric wife of renowned symphony conductor Zubin Mehta. Susan had been working for the couple during a two-year period in which she was attempting to pull her life back together. She was now accused of setting up a secret credit card account in the woman’s name and using it for personal extravagances. Layered atop this mess was the bizarre relationship that had developed between Susan and her employer, by which (according to Susan’s therapist) “Nancy had made me her husband in every sense except sexual.” The embezzlement charges and the “unhealthy” nature of her personal association with Nancy Mehta had turned her life topsy-turvy again. In the midst of this chaos in her personal life, Susan was contacted by Ken Starr’s office in March 1995 and was asked to pay a visit to the OIC offices in Little Rock.
According to Susan McDougal’s account of that meeting, she arrived at Two Financial Center without any worries. Her ex-husband, Jim, had already been cleared of similar S&L charges—that was yesterday’s news. A group of OIC prosecutors and FBI agents sat down at the table and told Susan that they would grant her “global immunity” if she gave them a complete, candid admission of everything she knew. According to Susan’s account, one of the prosecutors said, “We want to know about the Clintons’ role in Whitewater.”
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