The Vicodin Thieves. Chip Jacobs
Читать онлайн книгу.
embarrassment best forgotten. If not for his toothy photograph on the wall or yellowing newspaper stories about him, an outsider never would have known that Alhambra’s onetime favorite son had ever banged the council gavel.
“I don’t mean that to sound cavalier, but there are probably thousands of unsolved murders in L.A. County over fifteen years,” said Alhambra mayor Paul Talbot. “Stephen Ballreich’s murder, though more sensational, is just as tragic as thousand of others. I’m more interested in the more current types of crimes.” The Sheriff’s Department has about 1,200 cold cases it is working, including Ballreich’s, officials estimated.
Councilman Daniel Arguello, who split with Talbot in a juicy power struggle in the last few years, disagrees that his colleague should be so passive about the taking down of one their own. “This isn’t Los Angeles, where you have four million people living there—it’s Alhambra!” said Arguello. “It was a very serious crime and nobody knows who did it, even the Alhambra spin doctors who say Ballreich was an evil guy.”
PROJECT PRIDE AND THE KID
Ballreich’s mother, Jean, said she has lost track of the probe. For the three years after it happened, she stayed in touch with authorities from her home in Prescott, Arizona. A highly devout Christian, now twice widowed, she moved to the Southwest in 1980 to ease her asthma. “At first, I really, really wanted to know,” she said. “I would keep calling the Sheriff’s Department, and the detective said, ‘As long as I’m here,’ they would pursue it. There are many things about it that are hard to understand. “But it won’t bring [Steve] back. God knows all things, and he knows what happened. If I could talk to whoever did this, I would just say. ‘I forgive you,’ not because I didn’t love my son, but because God will.”
She and Stephen’s father, Barney, had once foreseen exquisite things for him. From an early age, he schmoozed neighbors on his paper route, had terrific writing and speaking abilities, and possessed an allure everybody recognized. Shackling those talents, his mother said, was a manic-depressive streak and pigheadedness from an early age that he was destined for life in politics and only politics.
The family’s Beverly Hills-based jewelry business disinterested him as an occupation. Ballreich’s father then died suddenly when he was in his early-twenties. “From the time he was born, a lot of [Stephen’s] problem was being too high or too low,” in a possible sign of bipolar syndrome. “I couldn’t convince a lot of people about that,” Jean Ballreich said. “Emotionally, he was unstable. If he hadn’t been that way, he might’ve been the governor of California. I would’ve loved it if he’d gone into TV.”
One matronly Republican Party volunteer recalled meeting Ballreich when he was a gung-ho teenager with a cast on his leg stuffing mailers for a conservative candidate. Ronald Reagan and former Senator Barry Goldwater were his icons. He quoted Thomas Jefferson the way some teenagers quote rock lyrics, though Stephen was a Beatles fan entranced with The White Album. He collected vintage political pins, assembling an impressive collection.
Despite obvious brains, his grades were average, his mother said. After graduating from Alhambra High School, he attended various colleges without earning a degree. To earn money—and he always seemed to scrambling for it—he acquired a Burbank restaurant named The Pizza Pantry. He did seasonal campaign work for local Republicans, as well, and may have taken odd jobs under the alias Richard Aldridge, sources said.
He married young, but the union was tumultuous and he and his first wife, Cindy, subsequently divorced. She did not respond to requests for comment. “He wasn’t a follow-througher unless it was something he wanted to do,” Jean Ballreich said. “Politics ruined his marriage. He gave Cindy a bad time. He did so many contradictory things.”
But he achieved some landmark ones, too. In 1974, in the midst of Watergate and Vietnam, Ballreich blindsided the Alhambra status quo by unseating incumbent Councilman T. D’Arcy Quinn. Though it made for a magical storyline, he had used hustle and chutzpah to win, staying up until 4:00 a.m. election-day dropping campaign fliers on doorsteps while his opponent slept. When he rotated in as mayor three years later, after winning re-election in 1978 with a record seventy-five percent of the vote, laurels were thrown at his feet.
Parker Williams said that he introduced Ballreich about this time to renowned political consultant Stuart Spencer, who would later counsel Reagan as President. Spencer, Williams said, believed that Ballreich had a sparkling career ahead if he pushed aside the distractions and focused. Certainly, someone with his zippy charisma was bound for bigger things than a city whose most provocative issue was getting the Long Beach Freeway extension completed so local streets were less bottlenecked. The local Jaycee’s named Ballreich, who seemed to have a little John McCain in him, one of California’s “five most successful young men.”
His signature initiative was Project Pride, a community cleanup regimen. Local television stations did segments showing the Baby Boomer mayor painting over graffiti with ex-gang members. He also pushed for the opening of a boxing club.
Yet only three months after his re-election victory party, a citizen’s group called All We Can Afford accused him of misusing and failing to report $2,650 in travel expenses following a March 1978 trip to Washington, D.C. for the National League of Cities. Questions swirled around whether he had receipts for his time at the Mayflower Hotel or whether he had even stayed there.
A District Attorney probe netted no formal charges. Prosecutors never turned up any proof that Ballreich had intentionally broken Alhambra’s then-vague travel rules. Ballreich reacted defensively, all the same, bitterly resigning from the council where he had been its telegenic star—a decision he said he later regretted. “I will not subject the city or any member of this City Council to the continual meaningless harassment, such as it has had to endure during the last fifty-five days,” he said publicly at the time. His adversaries, he added, had contorted an innocent incident into something criminal.
From there, the city’s chastened prince did the unexpected. He boxed up his things and hotfooted it 1,700 miles to Arkansas.
DREAMING GRANDLY
He was there during most of the 1980s, doing what, nobody is quite certain. Everybody he spoke to from Arkansas heard different stories, the truth grafted, nuanced, or fabricated whole cloth. Maybe he was just airbrushing over his shame about tripping himself up just as new doors were about to open for him. What is known is that he stayed in a house that his mother purchased in a lakeside resort town called Heber Springs in Arkansas’ north-central Ozark Mountains. He also spent time in Little Rock, apparently doing campaign work for state Democrats. Interspersing his political work was a stint as a radio talk show host for a station whose call letters or format nobody can pinpoint all these years later.
Longtime friend Born visited him in Heber Springs in 1988. As usual, Ballreich did not show up to their agreed meeting place. Perplexed, Born asked a local where he could find the town’s big radio personality. “The guy laughed,” Born recalled. “He said, ‘Steve fries fish for a living.’ I thought typical Steve.”
Wherever his paycheck was signed, Ballreich spoke constantly about associating with then-Governor Clinton and his wife, Hillary. Depending on who you ask, he worked for Clinton, advised him, socialized with him, or some combination thereof. There were conspicuous similarities between the two. Both were political junkies and bubbly ambitious during the workweek, good time Charlies hooked to pathological libidos after hours, and magnetic one-on-ones around the clock.
“If you were in a crowded room with Bill Clinton, he’d talk to you like you were the only one there, and Steve was the same way,” quipped Glenn Thornhill, who knew Ballreich from his Young Republicans days. “Steve said he knew Bill and Hillary, and hung around in the same circles. Who knows? It could’ve been bull. But I can see why Steve liked him: Clinton was a successful Steve Ballreich.”
While in Arkansas, Ballreich fathered a daughter, Noelle. One source said he wed the mother in a shotgun marriage that did not last long. Before he died, he admitted he had been an absentee father and that at least Noelle would not be influenced by his poor decision-making.
Unfortunately, there was not always so