Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [34]
Jim McDougal, in the meantime, was still trying to rehabilitate himself. He asked Susan to stop by his new makeshift office on property he had dubbed the Castle Grande project. He said, “Baby, I’ve found a piece of land that’s going to make us more money than Maple Creek.” The new project, to be called Lowrance Heights, would be Susan’s ticket to freedom. As Jim told her, “It’s obvious that our marriage has failed. It’s obvious that you want to be on your own, so why don’t you buy this piece of land and develop it and make your own money instead of being a drag on society?” McDougal said he knew someone who might be able to help. That person was a former municipal judge named David Hale.
Hale operated a business called Capital Management Services, which had been authorized by the federal government to loan money to companies operated by women and minorities. Susan’s tiny advertising agency, Jim explained, would surely qualify for a loan. The money could be used to pay off the last $25,000 debt on Whitewater, getting rid of that headache and the Clintons to boot. As Susan later reconstructed this conversation for the benefit of federal prosecutors, Jim told her, “I have arranged the financing and I will help you with it. I’ve talked to this man [David Hale].” McDougal narrowed his eyes and added, “It will be a way for you to be a good person and not, you know, be begging to me all the time.”
Susan replied sarcastically, “Sure, of course, oh, God, yes. Anything not to be a drag on society. Anything to be a good person.”
Several weeks later, Jim called Susan to tell her everything was set. She recalled, “I was to go by David Hale’s office the next day, sign the loan papers, pick up a check for three hundred thousand dollars, and bring it back to Jim.” In a brief visit that would become the centerpiece of her own criminal prosecution, Susan kept that date with Hale at his shabby one-person office located in the Pulaski Bank. She remembered Hale as a short, pudgy man who was “very obsequious.” He appeared to be a quintessential “good ol’ boy,” who “didn’t look the part [of a banker], but he tried to play the part.” Having just finished a tennis lesson, Susan dropped by Hale’s office wearing a short tennis dress. She engaged in the requisite chitchat, signed several loan papers, and accepted a check made out to “Susan McDougal d/b/a Master Marketing” in the amount of $300,000. Susan recalled, “I made some comments about how easy this was and laughed about how we should do it again sometime. I then left the office and headed downtown to Madison to give Jim the check.”
The whole transaction lasted about ten minutes.
By July 1986, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board examiners announced that the McDougals’ S&L would have to be shut down or put into receivership due to insolvency. Jim McDougal would later rant that the examiners were “storm troopers” and this was “a pure damn political undertaking.” Yet there was now a mountain of evidence that his S&L had engaged in irregularities. The Arkansas Gazette ran a story headlined “Madison Has Shakeup.” Jim and Susan were booted out as officers and directors. The team of examiners for the first time hinted at possible criminal conduct.
Increasingly, Jim McDougal was suffering from dizziness, blurred vision, and blackouts. As Susan described the state of affairs, Jim was “very, very sick and I [was] literally getting him out of bed and washing him and feeding him and taking care of him. He [was] almost incoherent.” During one of Susan’s home-care visits, Jim jumped up and bolted down the second-floor fire escape, climbing down to the blistering hot pavement below, where he went into convulsions and collapsed. Susan telephoned Jim Guy Tucker, Jim’s friend and sometime lawyer, who sped over to assist in the emergency. By the time he arrived, Tucker recalled, “Jim was clearly out of his mind with a seizure and incoherent.” McDougal was taken by stretcher to Baptist Hospital, where a doctor determined that he was afflicted with blocked carotid arteries