Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [64]
Fiske selected space in Two Financial Center in a nondescript, wooded area of West Little Rock, the same brick and darkened-glass building that housed the FBI. Days later, O’Sullivan was driving to a Staples office supply and then stopping at a local hardware store to pick out doorknobs with cheap locks. She later said with a chuckle, “It seemed we would probably need some security.”
In that unobtrusive fashion, Robert Fiske left his family behind in Darien, Connecticut, moving to Arkansas to work long days and nights, seven days a week, in a drab building surrounded by magnolias and towering pines. How long he would stay on this remote assignment was uncertain. Fiske’s principal goal was to complete the investigation swiftly, because this case created “a question mark about the president.” Any such cloud over the White House, he believed, was not good for the country. For Fiske, moving to Little Rock was one way to make sure he was not distracted from the task at hand. “It made it very easy to work long hours,” he explained, “because there wasn’t anything else to do.”
There was no shortage of lawyers signing up to work alongside the highly respected New York lawyer. Rusty Hardin, a Houston trial lawyer who had won over a hundred felony convictions as a district attorney in Harris County, Texas, was impressed with the nonpartisan nature of Fiske’s operation. “It really wasn’t a liberal/moderate/conservative dichotomy,” he said.
Fiske and his prosecutors were soon organizing their work into several distinct criminal matters: First, they were investigating David Hale’s recent allegations in the press, in which he claimed that President Bill Clinton was directly linked to Jim McDougal’s shady business deals. They also examined a fresh batch of criminal referrals that potentially implicated Jim McDougal, Susan McDougal, and Governor Jim Guy Tucker in an S&L fraud. They also commenced a formal reinvestigation of the death of Vince Foster, to address rampant rumors that still swirled around that tragedy.
Robert Fiske accomplished a great deal as he toiled a round the clock on these matters during the winter and spring of 1994. Yet historians would never have the chance to assign a final grade to his work. This was due to forces that swept in so quickly they surprised even Fiske himself.
Whitewater quickly morphed into a melodrama featuring powerful political figures, big money, con artists, murder, allegations of sexual indiscretions, and charges of scandal leveled directly against the president and First Lady of the United States. Combined with an exotic Southern backdrop, set in the environs of Arkansas hitherto unknown to the now-enthralled American public, this national drama played itself out in ways that Robert Fiske never could have imagined—even if he had remained on the job long enough to witness it.
CHAPTER
9
DAVID HALE VISITS JUSTICE JIM
David Hale, a pudgy, smooth-talking former municipal judge and businessman from Little Rock, was known for skating along the edge of the law and propriety. Max Brantley, the Arkansas Times editor who covered the Whitewater story, would later put it even less charitably, describing Hale as “a paranoid liar and embezzler.” Larry Jagley, the prosecuting attorney for the Sixth Judicial District of Arkansas, who once prosecuted Hale for bilking money from a burial insurance company that served poor and elderly African American families in the delta of southeast Arkansas, sized up Hale: “He is a grifter. He couldn’t crawl straight as a child. Continued his crooked way.” The Arkansas prosecutor paused, then said, “He’s just a crook. Plain and simple, that’s all he is.”
One major aspect of Fiske’s investigation related to Hale’s activities running Capital Management Services, a company ostensibly built to lend money to minority-owned businesses. The FBI had raided Hale’s office on the same day, in a haunting coincidence, that