Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer by William Knoedelseder

Author:William Knoedelseder
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Azizex666
ISBN: 9780062009265
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-11-06T05:00:00+00:00

15

“DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?”

After bailing his son out of trouble in Tucson, August III made sure the “Busch heir” had a soft landing back home in St. Louis.

He arranged for August IV to enroll at St. Louis University, where decades of Busch patronage guaranteed special privileges, including an electronic key that gave August IV access to the teachers’ parking lot, which was a major perquisite on the parking-challenged urban campus. He replaced August IV’s wrecked Corvette with a new Porsche and secured a town-house apartment for him on Lindell Boulevard, across the street from the place he’d rented when he split from August IV’s mother.

If August IV had learned any life lessons from the Tucson tragedy, they weren’t apparent as he jumped into the social scene in St. Louis’s fashionably hip Central West End. His running mates usually included half a dozen other sons of prominent businessmen. The “millionaires’ boys club,” as some called them, might start the evening at Culpepper’s Bar in Maryland Plaza, then move to Harry’s Restaurant & Bar on Market Street and later caravan to Metropole downtown at Laclede’s Landing. They all had fast cars, loads of money, and last names that rang a bell, but nothing could compete with the Busch aura, so August IV became the Big Dog and they functioned as his entourage, his protectors, even his advance men. Typically, one of them would be sent ahead to alert the proprietor of the next establishment: “August Busch IV is on his way here, and we will need a table for eight with iced buckets of Budweiser set up; he doesn’t want to be bothered by the other customers, and he will not interact with you.”

August IV thus let everyone know he was there and at the same time kept almost everyone away from him. If any strangers approached the table, one of his crew would block their way unless August gave the nod to let them pass. His boys ordered his drinks for him, paid the tab with his credit card, and fetched hot-looking girls he spotted in the crowd, either bringing them over to meet him or writing down their phone numbers for him.

From the bustling bar scene at Laclede’s Landing, they would head across the Poplar Street Bridge to sample the after-hours pleasures of Sauget, Illinois.

Named for the French-descended family that had run it since the 1920s, Sauget (pronounced So-zhjay) was a kind of modern-day Deadwood, a four-square-mile industrial “village” that operated in the sweet spot between moral laxity and lawlessness. In Sauget, drugs were sold and consumed openly in numerous nightclubs and strip joints, and it was a lot easier to hire a hooker than buy a loaf of bread. In Sauget clubs, August IV and his friends would snort lines of coke right off the table, according to a compatriot who sometimes partied with them. “Those guys were out of control. They didn’t do little lines of coke. They did foot-long lines.... I once saw August IV snort a line of coke as long as that table over there.

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