How Wild Man Wally Helped Me Figure Out the Mueller Investigation
Don't bother to Google it: "Wild Man Wally" is an alias, one of those name-changed-to-protect-something designations.
More or less three decades ago, before we even met, my Beloved Esposo (BE) got a job working for Wild Man Wally.
The summary the BE most often uses to explain Wally is "Reader's Digest used to have a recurring feature about 'The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Met' or something like that. Wild Man Wally outdid them all."
He was working for Wally when we got married and for a coupla years after, and I spent a fair amount of time in Wally's company. So that description stands up to my fact-checking compulsion: TRUE
Wally shoulda been a Texan, in some ways. He had that you-bought-lunch-so-I'll-buy-the-cadillacs expansiveness when he was in a good mood with his posse.
Good things about Wally first: He cared deeply about helping the suffering alcoholic. He'd been that road himself. Like everything else about him, his drinkin' days mistakes had been vast and in Technicolor, and they'd done him and everyone around him a lot of damage. And he tried hard to make amends for that.
He was a 12-Stepper, what's called in the XA community a "black belt" who could always be relied upon to respond to that 2 am call from a frantic family member or friend of someone who'd just plowed nose-first through the bottom of the barrel. And his response was usually a two-fer: tough-but-compassionate program wisdom, plus a step-up-and-make-it-happen offer of help with treatment.
Wally'd started out as a real estate developer. It's a field that attracts, encourages, and potentiates grifters of all stripes, and Wally's no exception. He was never deliberately malicious about it but he never saw any reason to let trivia like, you know, ethics, laws... stuff like that... get in the way of making a bundle.
At some point in his recovery he decided to put his two passions (making money from real estate deals, and helping suffering alcoholics) together, and back in the late 1980s, early 1990s, he got into the treatment business himself. Since he didn't know much about actually providing treatment services, he pulled in some experts, which was how the BE entered his orbit.
Wally understood the real estate end of the business, though. He was the one who'd buy up the properties, then lease them to the treatment-providing-business entities, or bid on contracts to 'improve', set-up, and run publicly-owned facilities as treatment programs, etc. He had plenty of enterprises, plenty of financial partners overt and shady, and a keen sense of exactly how to get money out of all kinds of banks.
At one point, he told the BE "I like you, you do great work, but I can't ever really trust you, yanno? You're too damned ethical." He said it like a joke, of course, and at the time he sort of meant it that way, but ultimately, that's why the relationship ended. In the mean time, though, being part of Wally's posse was a real education for us.
And one thing he told the BE has stuck with us through the years, and is now helping me make sense of the whole Mueller investigation. Here's how it came about:
Wally never used his own money for a project if he could avoid it. He was into leverage. He'd always get the banks or investors to pony up the cash for a project, sometimes in surprising, even shocking, amounts. Amounts far beyond what the BE, who knows the operating economics of treatment programs intimately, could ever imagine a project would return or support.
But Wally explained that it was always necessary to go for the BIG loan, rather than the small loan.
"See, it's like this: If you owe a guy ten thousand dollars, he owns your ass. But if you owe him ten MILLION dollars, you own HIS ass."
I've been thinking a LOT about that as snippets of information have come out about the people and things being drawn into the Mueller investigation. And the topics and questions apparently being asked of various witnesses.
And I've been adding that up with Mueller's own history of what, who, and how he's investigated large-scale crime and chicanery in the past, and the results of those investigations.
I believe Mueller knows exactly how people like Wild Man Wally think. Writ a bit larger. "When you owe some guy/oligarch/emir/government/mob boss five million dollars, they own your ass. When you owe them five BILLION dollars, you own theirs."
So. What happened to Wild Man Wally?
Well, about what you'd expect, operating on that principle. Eventually the web collapsed. Most of his grand enterprises are gone, the private planes and fancy cars sold, the word on the street has gotten around that he's untouchable as far as legit and even semi-legit financing goes. He still manages to grift a few projects in a small way. He's avoided jail time so far, as far as we know. But he's playing in a much smaller league where the damage is comparatively minimal. And, as noted above, Wally had his own kind of code- he drew the line at bilking widows and orphans, tried to at least do some good with some of the money he grifted. He was genuinely likable, and had a lot of real friends, even when they had to back off and keep their distance from the toxic stuff.
Mueller's investigating something much, much bigger, almost infinitely more complex, and way, WAY darker than Wild Man Wally and his little network of rehab real estate grifts.
But you scale up that kind of freewheeling griftery and I bet you find the same underlying assumptions. Follow those assumptions where they lead, and eventually that web, too, will collapse.
They're gonna be writing books and teaching college classes about this one well into the 22nd Century, assuming the human species survives that long.
prognosticatorially,
Bright
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