by Mike Lawson
“Oh,” she said, looking disappointed.
“I’m a guy Mahoney calls from time to time when he’s got a problem or when one of his friends is having one. Like your grandfather. He sent me out here to see if I can help.”
“Does Mahoney listen to you?”
DeMarco shrugged. “As much as he listens to anyone. Mahoney’s a politician, and like most politicians, he acts primarily out of his own self-interest. But he’s loyal to his friends and he told me your granddad saved his life in Vietnam. So he’ll probably help you if he can, and if he doesn’t have to stick his neck out, but that’s the best I can tell you.”
He could see Sarah wasn’t enamored with his answer but said, “Well, since nobody else is willing to do anything, I guess talking to you can’t hurt.”
“Tell me what you’re doing that’s making people want to kill you. All your grandfather said is that you think there’s some kind of big conspiracy going on.”
“I don’t think. I know. I just can’t prove it and I can’t get anybody in law enforcement or the big-time media to listen to me.”
“I’m listening,” DeMarco said.
“You know anything about state government in Montana or the Dakotas?”
“No.”
“Yeah, well, the chances are if you lived in one of those states, you still wouldn’t know anything. People pay attention to national politics because that’s mostly what’s on the news. They know if the president’s thinking about bombing Iran or screwing with Social Security, but they don’t have a clue what’s happening in their own state legislatures. To find out what’s going on in a state legislature you have to really want to know. You have to watch some little local channel that nobody watches and that’s drier than dirt. You have to read bills that are written in some language other than English. So nobody pays a lot of attention to what’s going on in Helena, Pierre, or Bismarck, but that’s where the action really is. If a state can pass a law that’s not covered by federal law, they can make anything happen. Hell, the states can even pass laws that go against federal law and sometimes the federal government can’t do anything to stop them. To use a simple example, it’s like in Washington and Colorado where they passed laws legalizing pot even though the feds say pot’s illegal.”
Sarah Johnson’s intensity was palpable. After two minutes with her, DeMarco could tell that she was completely committed to whatever she was doing. He could sense her seriousness, her resolve. No, maybe resolve wasn’t the right word. Maybe obsession was more accurate. Whatever the case, he could see the passion blazing in her eyes and he thought: Joan of Arc. That’s who this young woman was. She was so zealous about what she believed in that she was willing to be burned at the stake. She wasn’t an activist; she was a crusader and a would-be martyr.
“The other thing you need to understand,” Sarah said, “is that the people elected to state legislatures are paid hardly anything. They barely make minimum wage. In South Dakota, a legislator is paid twelve thousand dollars a year and gets a hundred and ten dollars a day in per diem when the legislature is in session. If you do the math, that’s less than eighteen grand if you don’t take special sessions into account. And it’s about the same in Montana and North Dakota.
“What this means is that these legislators, unless they’re rich or retired with pensions, all have other jobs. They’re ranchers and farmers and salesmen and teachers. Hell, half of them take the job because they need the lousy salary it pays. The other thing is, a lot of times they’ll run unopposed because who else wants a job that pays so little?
“So what I’m trying to tell you is if you want to control what happens in a state, you don’t waste your money bribing Montana’s only congressman in the U.S. House of Representatives. What you do is introduce a bill in the Montana statehouse that does what you want, and if you need the votes, you pay off these part-time politicians who need the money.”
“And that’s what you’re saying is happening? That somebody is bribing state legislators?”
“Yeah, but that’s not all. They’re bribing judges, too. If a law gets passed they don’t like, they’ll file a lawsuit and then if they need to, they’ll bribe judges to overturn the law.”
“Who’s this they you’re talking about?”
“There are a lot of theys,” Sarah said. “I mean there are a lot of individuals and political organizations and corporations who are manipulating state legislators and judges, but the guy I’m after is Leonard Curtis.”
“I’ve never heard of him,” DeMarco said—and Sarah’s expression said: And why am I not surprised by this?
“Curtis is an independent natural gas driller,” she said.
“But what makes you think—”
“The biggest thing happening in this country, energy-wise, is natural gas and North Dakota has been called Kuwait on the Prairie. South Dakota and Montana also have gas and oil reserves, and huge corporations like Exxon and Conoco, and big independents like Devon and Anadarko, are all going after the gas. It’s like the California gold rush out here. Workers are living in shantytowns in trailers and RVs, and so many people are coming here that housing prices have skyrocketed and it’s hard to get a motel room. They just can’t develop the infrastructure fast enough to support all the drilling. At the same time, there are all kinds of issues—environmental issues, property issues, tax issues—related to natural gas. I mean, you’ve heard of fracking, haven’t you?”
“Sure,” DeMarco said. “That’s when they pump in water to get the gas out.”
“Not just water but chemicals, and fracking can contaminate ground water and cause earthquakes.”
“Earthquakes? Is there any scientific evidence that fracking—”
“My point,” Sarah said impatiently, “is that there are all sorts of legal issues related to natural gas, which means laws are getting passed to regulate the industry, and sometimes the laws are good for the gas companies and sometimes they’re not. And what Leonard Curtis is doing, in every way he can, is making sure the laws are favorable to him.”
“Aren’t other companies doing the same thing?”
“Yeah, probably. Almost certainly. But I know Curtis is doing things that are illegal and I can’t take on an entire industry. I figured if I focused on one guy I’d have a better chance of making a case. And Curtis is into everything: drilling, land leases, pipelines, drilling equipment. Anything to do with natural gas.”
“And you think he’s bribing people?”
“Quit saying that! Quit saying I think! I know he is.”
“How many people are in these state legislatures?” DeMarco asked.
“In Montana there are a hundred in the House and fifty in the Senate. North Dakota is about the same as Montana. In South Dakota there are seventy in the House and thirty-five in the Senate.”
“And Curtis is bribing all of them?”
“Of course not. Don’t be stupid. First of all, the statehouses in all three states are currently controlled by the Republicans, and a lot of Republicans support drilling because they want the United States to be energy independent and because the industry creates jobs. Right now, North Dakota has the lowest unemployment rate in the nation thanks to natural gas. So the statehouses are tilted in Curtis’s favor and he doesn’t have to do much to get a lot of these folks to vote the way he wants. He contributes to their campaigns, and these are little local campaigns where a few thousand bucks goes a long way.
“But these Republicans aren’t a bunch of sheep, and a lot of them are farmers and ranchers and they care about the environment and anything that affects their property and mineral rights. And Curtis doesn’t always need to get a law passed. Sometimes all he needs to do is slow things down, so legislation gets delayed. Or if there’s a politician who’s ranting against something Curtis wants, he just needs to quiet the politician down.”
“Sarah, have you actua
lly got any evidence that Curtis has bribed anyone? I mean, have you witnessed him bribing somebody or has anyone been willing to go on record that Curtis bought them off?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know . . .”
“Let me give you an example. You know what a blowout preventer is? The device that failed in the Deepwater Horizon and dumped five million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico?”
“Yeah, I know what you’re talking about,” DeMarco said.
“There was bill going through the North Dakota statehouse to increase inspection requirements for blowout preventers, and naturally Curtis was against the bill because more inspections would delay production and increase his costs. This one Republican named Stevens sided with the Democrats on the bill and he was pushing his party to approve it. Stevens is actually a pretty good guy when it comes to balancing energy production against environmental concerns.
“Well, Stevens is a farmer and to get to his farm he uses a road that passes through another farm. Stevens has an easement from the other farmer allowing him to use the road, and his dad had it before him. But one day, the other farmer says he’s not going to allow Stevens to use the road anymore, and this meant that Stevens would have to drive an extra twenty miles to get to his place. To make matters worse, the road he’d be required to use has a bridge that goes over a little creek, and it’s not rated for heavy loads. Stevens filed a lawsuit, of course, but the lawsuit was going to drag on for a year and in the meantime, Stevens would go broke. The next thing that happens, don’t you know, Stevens stops supporting the bill, it fails in the Senate, and he gets the easement back. You see?”
DeMarco shook his head. “And that’s it? A guy won’t let him use a road and then the guy changes his mind and Stevens changes his vote?”
“Yes. Nobody gave Stevens a bag full of cash. Curtis just created a situation where Stevens would go bankrupt if he didn’t play ball.”
“How did you find all this stuff out, about Stevens and the easement and the other farmer?”
“When Stevens changed his position I wanted to know why, and I started digging. I talked to people, like the Democrats he’d been working with, and his lawsuit, of course, was a matter of public record.”
“But you don’t know for sure that Curtis made the other farmer cancel the easement, or why he did it, or if that’s the reason Stevens changed his vote.”
“I do know! I just can’t prove it. Stevens denies it, of course, and when I asked the other farmer—who his neighbors all said is a shitty farmer and up to his neck in debt—he refused to talk to me. But I know!”
Before DeMarco could object again, she held up a hand to silence him. “There was another case. A Democrat, who lives in Williston, which is right about in the middle of the Bakken oil field. She was making a big stink about flaring and saying that Curtis was one of the biggest polluters.”
“Flaring?” DeMarco said.
“Jesus,” Sarah muttered, appalled by DeMarco’s ignorance. “Flaring is where they vent off and burn waste gases that supposedly can’t be efficiently captured and processed. If you were to go up in space it would look like there are ten thousand bonfires burning on the Great Plains. They actually have satellite pictures showing this. Flaring is bad in that it not only contributes to greenhouse gases but it actually wastes a lot of gas. They’re burning off millions of cubic feet of gas a day.”
DeMarco wondered if she was exaggerating—but he doubted she was. “So why do the gas companies do it?” he said.
“Because it’s cheaper to flare the gas than it is to install the equipment to capture it. Or they’ll say it’s for safety reasons. Anyway, this legislator from Williston runs a bakery and she was pushing for legislation to reduce flaring. Then out of the blue comes an old lady, who looks like everybody’s grandma, and she files a lawsuit saying she was poisoned by a cupcake.”
“A cupcake?”
“Yeah. She said she found rat feces in the cupcake and it made her sick, and she got a lawyer to file a suit. This baker couldn’t afford to fight a lawsuit, and if a rumor got out that she had rat shit in her flour, it would kill her business. Then the same thing happened, just like with Stevens. The lawsuit was dropped and the baker quit being a squeaky wheel. When I asked her about it, she started crying and wouldn’t talk to me. Shouldn’t you be taking notes or something?”
“No,” DeMarco said. “I don’t need to take notes, not at this point. I get the gist of what you’re saying but the thing is, I’m not sure what to do next. I have to give it some thought.”
“Well, I know what you need to do,” Sarah said, her eyes blazing like they might set DeMarco’s martini on fire. “First you need to go read my blog and then get Mr. Mahoney to read it.”
DeMarco almost laughed out loud. Mahoney never read anything. The people who worked for him read the documents that Mahoney was supposed to read, then told him what the documents said.
“Then what Mahoney needs to do is convince the attorney general to investigate Curtis. What Curtis is doing isn’t happening in a single state, so it would be appropriate to get the FBI and the Justice Department involved. They need to form up a federal task force.”
“A federal task force?” DeMarco said. “Based on a cupcake lawsuit?”
“Shit, I’m just wasting my time with you,” Sarah said. She started to get up but DeMarco placed a hand on her forearm. “Hold on, Sarah. I just need to think about all this, then maybe I’ll talk to Mahoney.” He had no intention of talking to Mahoney.
“Okay,” Sarah said, then tears welled up in her eyes. “I just can’t get anybody to take me seriously and this is serious stuff. Curtis is making a mockery out of democracy and nobody cares.”
“I care, Sarah.” Actually the only thing DeMarco really cared about was this girl not getting hurt. Although he admired her courage and her commitment, he thought she was being naïve if she believed she could change a political system that had become blatantly corrupt. She also didn’t seem to understand that without solid evidence—which she didn’t appear to have—she would never be able to prove to the satisfaction of any court in the land that Curtis was doing anything illegal. But his job wasn’t to help her advance her cause; his job, as far as he was concerned, was to keep her from getting killed.
“Now tell me,” DeMarco said, “about these death threats and the other things people have done to try to get you to stop.”
6
“Do you hear me?” Curtis said. “I want that bitch to quit writing about me.”
Marjorie and Bill were still sitting in the Pirogue Grille with Leonard Curtis, less than two miles from where DeMarco was meeting with Sarah Johnson. By now their coffee was cold and the waitress didn’t bring them fresh cups because Curtis had rudely instructed the waitress to leave them alone.
Sarah Johnson’s blog was the bane of Curtis’s existence. It was a disorganized, unstructured mess that if printed out would run two thousand pages, and it served three purposes. First, Johnson used it as a journal or a diary in which she recounted what she’d done that day in her relentless pursuit of Leonard Curtis. It discussed, in mind-numbing detail, legislation or legal cases she’d researched. She also named people she’d talked to, usually castigating those people for incompetence or stupidity. Marjorie and Bill, therefore, pretty much always knew what Johnson was doing because she told the whole world.
The second part of the blog was an ongoing rant against the American political system, and Johnson raved about how Curtis manipulated politicians with campaign contributions, took them on junkets, and paid for misleading television ads. She admitted that what Curtis was doing was arguably legal, but she wanted everyone to know how he was using his vast wealth solely to benefit Leonard Curtis as opposed to the common people.
It was the third part of the blog that was the real problem, however, and the reason for Curtis’s angst. What Johnson
would do was look for any legal or legislative issue in the tristate area that affected Curtis. Next, she would identify people who appeared to be pivotal to the legislation passing or failing, or to a lawsuit being decided in Curtis’s favor. Marjorie couldn’t even imagine the hundreds of hours Johnson spent researching and investigating. Johnson’s final step would then be to find some evidence, no matter how circumstantial or far-fetched, that a key person had been bribed, coerced, or otherwise unduly influenced. However, the evidence—if you could even call it evidence—could never be tied directly to anything Curtis had done personally. Nor had Johnson been able to find a single person willing to admit that he’d been bribed or coerced.
But the problem was that Johnson was right! In the past two years, she had uncovered eleven instances where Curtis had in fact bribed or coerced politicians.
Marjorie had tried dozens of times to convince Curtis that Sarah Johnson wasn’t worth going after and that he should simply ignore her. She told Curtis that less than fifty people a week read Johnson’s rambling blog. For that matter, they weren’t sure that anybody actually read it; they could just see that less than fifty people a week visited her website—and eight of those people were Bill, Marjorie, Leonard Curtis, and five lawyers.
One reason so few people read her blog was that Johnson didn’t have the ability to make the complex legal issues she wrote about simpler and more understandable, and the way she wrote wasn’t engaging and put people to sleep. Furthermore, in person, Johnson was rude and antagonistic, and she alienated the people whose help she needed. The bottom line was that no law enforcement organization had been persuaded by her and her incomprehensible blog.
But Curtis didn’t care. Curtis wanted her stopped.
So Bill and Marjorie had tried to stop her. They started off with a low-key approach. They had a lawyer send a cease-and-desist letter to Johnson warning that she would be sued for libel if she continued to make blatantly false accusations against certain people named in her blog. Letters from lawyers terrify most normal people. Normal people can envision spending massive amounts of money and time battling a lawsuit, and then, ultimately, losing the lawsuit and everything they own to pay off the lawyers and penalties imposed by the court. But Sarah Johnson wasn’t normal, and the letter from the lawyer didn’t deter her one tiny bit. She posted the letter verbatim in her blog, citing it as an example of the kind of thing Curtis would do to stop any investigation into his criminal activities.