Blind switch

called out. Petros scowled. “Go sit down, Jeck, I’ll tell Gus to start up burning your eggs.”

Karen ordered a muffin, Tirabassi just coffee. “Give me the full load, Elaine,” Doyle said to the waitress. When it arrived, that proved to be scrambled eggs, hash browns, sausages, and three slices of buttered toast.

Karen shook her head. “Cholesterol concerns aren’t exactly on your front page, are they?”

Doyle grinned. “Not a factor, my dear. I come from a long line of Micks that thrived on bacon and eggs until they died in ripe old age. My cholesterol count is almost in a dead heat with my weight, one-sixty. When we’d take our annual physicals at Serafin Ltd., my doctor used to turn pale with envy every time he reported this to me. He’d throw the test results down on his desk and spit out the information.”

Tirabassi finished his first cup of coffee. “Do you think we could get back to the matter at hand, Doyle? Or are you going start bragging about your triglyceride count?”

The matter at hand, and particularly the subject of Harvey Rexroth, was not one he was “tremendously familiar with,” Doyle admitted. “I know who Rexroth is, some kind of media mogul. He’s mentioned in the papers every once in awhile, or there’ll be his photo at some fund raiser. Homely-looking sucker, as I recall. But,” Doyle asked as he finished his third piece of toast, “where does he come into this picture of yours that’s got me in it?”

Over the next hour, interrupted only by the periodic appearances of Elaine the waitress with coffee refills, the two agents combined to provide a summarized oral biography of Harvey Theodore Rexroth, age forty-four, owner of palatial homes in Kentucky, Florida, and Montana and a $12 million condo in New York City where his business was headquartered.

Harvey Rexroth descended from a family of wealthy Montana ranchers, their presence in the Treasure State tracing back to the turn of the century. Harvey’s great-grandfather, Horace, maintained two hundred thousand sheep on thousands of cheaply acquired acres. Horace for years was known in the West as the Mogul of Mutton.

His eldest grandson, Harold, was the first to branch out into business beyond the borders of the wide-open ranges. Sent east for schooling, he was graduated from Harvard, then its Business School, and soon began to diversify his family’s holdings, acquiring newspapers all over the West and Southwest. Later, following the Reagan Administration’s deregulation of the communications industry, he began adding radio and television stations to the huge media company that became known as RexCom.

Harold was recognized one of the most belligerent, avaricious, and successful figures in that sector of American commerce, “which is saying something,” as Karen pointed out. He was hated by his rivals and despised by many of his employees, which was no surprise, since Harold was as niggardly and notional as most of his fellow media barons. Rexroth’s workers were for the most part underpaid, yet expected to perform Herculean tasks at an accelerated pace. Harold Rexroth was well known in journalistic circles for his oft-repeated pronouncement that “editors are a dime a dozen, and reporters come cheaper.” He was a very popular speaker at national newspaper publisher conventions.

Harold Rexroth choked to death on a piece of lamb chop nine years earlier. This had happened when he was having dinner in a New York restaurant with four RexCom executives, none of whom, they claimed later, was familiar with the Heimlich Maneuver.

Harold’s son Harvey Rexroth inherited control of RexCom, whose other family-member minority shareholders he treated like steerage passengers on his great ship of commerce. He was as penurious, conceited, and arrogant “as his daddy,” Tirabassi said, “but there is one big difference between Harvey and Harold-Harvey is as twisted as they come. His old man may have been a tyrant and a tightwad, but he was no crookeder than his competitors. You can’t say that about Harvey.”

“Other than being rich and famous, what crime has Harvey committed?” Doyle asked.

“That’s where you come into the picture, Doyle,” Tirabassi replied. “Rexroth is involved in thoroughbred racing and breeding in a number of ways. You’ve had some exposure to the racing part of it. Exposure of a criminal nature,” the agent added accusingly. “But before we get to your role, you need to hear some additional background.” He nodded to Karen.

“RexCom for the most part is a thriving company,” she began. “Harvey, despite his numerous quirks, has been a very able businessman, following in his father’s footsteps-with one very major exception.

“About ten years ago, Harvey entered thoroughbred racing as a partner with some of his RexCom executives in a couple of horses. The partnership did well. One of the horses ran in the Kentucky Derby, to which Rexroth reacted in characteristic fashion. He was so excited about the horse’s future after it ran second in the Derby that he forced his partners to sell out their interests to him. Since these men worked for him, that was pretty easy to accomplish. Then he changed trainers and began buying horses by the carload. He spent millions to acquire a beautiful breeding farm near Lexington, Kentucky. In other words, he jumped into racing with both hands and a wide-open wallet. There were plenty of Kentuckians eager to welcome Harvey and his money.

“Harvey’s racing stable did okay,” Karen continued. “Nothing fantastic, no more Derby starters at least to date, but he had a few stakes winners. He also had a number of trainers. He is a very impatient man, and if the horses didn’t perform to his expectations, no matter how unrealistic they were, he usually fired the trainer. But he always paid these men well, so he never had trouble finding a successor for any of them. He was far more liberal in his payroll practices regarding racing than in any of his other businesses.

“Four years ago, a newspaper called Racing Daily ran a long story detailing what it termed Harvey’s revolving door policy regarding trainers.” Karen paused to smile at Elaine, who reached across the table to freshen their coffee. “To say that Harvey took offense at this story is putting it very, very mildly. He was enraged. He threatened a lawsuit, until his attorneys pointed out the folly of that. He made angry phone calls to a man named Walter Sandler, whose family had owned Racing Daily for over fifty years. Rexroth never received the satisfaction he was seeking.

“It was at that point that Rexroth made what was probably the first serious business error of his career. He was so angry at the Racing Daily for the story that he decided to strike back by going into competition with it. He decided to launch his own national racing paper.

“Rexroth spared no expense. He hired away some of the Racing Daily’s people, brought in big-time talent from other publications. He called his paper Horse Racing Journal. By virtue of spending money faster than his horses were running, he got this project off the ground in less than six months. He made all kinds of public pronouncements about how his new product would dominate.

“The problem was that Rexroth let his desire for revenge cloud his business judgment very badly. He completely misread the situation regarding horse racing and its need for daily publications. The old paper, the Racing Daily, was already tottering. Its circulation was way, way down from previous years. Horse racing itself was staggering. In contrast to years past, when racing was the only legal means of gambling all over the country, things had changed tremendously. States had developed lotteries, they had casinos, and there was a whole younger generation that had very little interest in racing. As a result, the Racing Daily was already on the downward slide.”

Karen paused to thank Elaine for refilling her coffee cup. Tirabassi shifted impatiently before Karen continued.

“When Rexroth came in with Horse Racing Journal, which was pretty widely recognized as a good product,” she said, “he believed he’d blow Walter Sandler’s paper off the map. He undoubtedly knew that the shrinking market couldn’t support two such papers, and he was very confident that his glittering, new, highly promoted publication would take over the market that was left.

“Rexroth was wrong. What he had failed to take into account was the extraordinary loyalty of the Racing Daily’s aging fan base. There were thousands fewer of them than in the earlier glory days of racing, but they had read Racing Daily all of their horse-playing lives, and most of them decided to stick with what they knew.

“Rexroth was stunned by this negative reaction to his pride and joy. He remained in denial for almost a year. He continued to pour money into his new paper, but it didn’t work. He couldn’t pry away enough readership from Sandler’s paper to make even distantly future profits a possibility. Rexroth soon imposed all kinds of editorial changes, ordered huge cutbacks in staffing, slashed expenses and overtime, but without really improving his bottom line. After an early show of interest, maybe because of the novelty of the paper, readership leveled off. And it was