You’re on your way down to the pool, where you’ll intermittently read and doze off, listening to the heave and sigh of the nearby waves. Your phone starts its three-note xylophone cha-cha of a ring and you see on the face of your phone that it’s Jen. Jen has a request for anything you have on Lowell Stamms and the Laken Institute, “cross-referenced please, they only want information on the two together.”
The Laken Institute is taking credit for new Right to Work legislation, lauding the bill’s passage on their home page. Fresh off that victory they’re pushing for a prevailing wage bill, ostensibly on behalf of taxpayers, preserving the wealth of their donors the real objective, a fraction more of which will find its way to the Laken Institute in support of these efforts. A fraction in this case being seven figures.
Senator Lowell Stamms did a fifteen-month stretch for felony misconduct, for ghostwriting news releases and fundraising letters (lobbying activities) for the Laken Institute while Majority Leader of the state Senate. When proof leaked to the media Stamms was brought up on ethics charges. It was thought both he and the Laken institute were finished, but here now, years later, the Laken Institute is on a mission to marginalize organized labor. It’s bareknuckle time.
You have a trove on the Laken Institute, including their annual reports and profiles of each member of their Board of Directors and officers. Not that these profiles are damning in what they reveal about these mostly upstanding women and men, they’re more impactful in drawing conclusions from their affiliations, where they work, the things they’re responsible for professionally, what their companies have or haven’t done or supported or didn’t, detailed enough to reveal where they worship on Sundays, if they do.
“Offer them both profiles, the full profiles, Lowell Stamms and the Laken Institute. They can do their own cross-referencing.”
“Okay,” Jen says dutifully. She’s respectful of your vacation, but both of you know you should handle this. Jen is a data management specialist. RDBMS or NoSQL databases, Oracle certification, these are her wheelhouse. You’re the pitchman.
On your way down the other elevator in Sandcastle Tower I, not the glass one but the other with padding hanging over the walls, as if the elevator is for transporting bulky furniture or the violently deranged, and the synthesized ring again. Jen tells you in a remorseful tone that the client doesn’t want both profiles and is insisting you cross-reference Lowell Stamms and the Laken Institute.
“Otherwise it’s too much extraneous information. That’s what they said.”
What they think is extraneous you see as a rich vein, but that’s your projection. They don’t understand the potential of what you’d be providing. Or if they do, they’re looking past it for something easy. Damning and easy. Damning takes work.
“Text me the guy’s name and number, I’ll take care of it.”
You’re sitting on the beach looking out at the Gulf of Mexico with your AirPods in and you make the call. You introduce yourself, and invite him to lunch, Gary with an impossible to pronounce Polish last name. When you ask him spell that he says most people call him Gary W. You’ll be back on the eleventh.
***
You meet at Mo’s Irish Pub. Late morning, plenty of empty tables prior to the lunch rush. You’re on time, curious to see if Gary W. will be there. Being early implies diligence, whereas late implies indifference or disorganization.
Gary W. is sitting in a booth with a woman, sitting on the same side of a booth in an otherwise empty dining area, leaving the other bench for you, the woman on the inside. Gary W. is thick and takes up more than his share of their bench. He’s wearing a polo with slacks, labor management casual, around your age, while the woman looks younger, in her thirties and dressed formally, like she could go from here to a campaign event, interview with an editorial board, $10,000-a-plate fundraiser. They’re a mismatched pair. Their political interests might be aligned, but their agendas are a Venn diagram.
After introductions, a deferential pause, and you ask directly, “So what is it you’re after?”
They blink at you and exchange a look.
“Information,” Gary W. says, and you almost respond with “no shit?”
“Is that something you normally ask of prospective clients?” asks Melissa Beauchamp, deputy campaign manager with Ellie Hendrix for US Senate.
“You know what they say. Don’t ask questions you don’t know the answers to.”
“Meaning?”
“Connecting Lowell Stamms and Laken is hackneyed. Old news, not old enough to be forgotten so too soon to recycle. Whatever you take to the media will be met with indifference. They like being surprised.”
“Our understanding is you traffic in information. No offense, but we’re not looking for a consultation,” says Gary.
“Sure, I can give you what you’ve requested. The way I look at it, I have a vested interest in the outcome. If you pay for this information and it does you no good then I’m a purveyor of not inexpensive, useless information. If I give you what you’ve asked for, for what I charge, ultimately you’ll be dissatisfied.”
Melissa asks, “What do you have in mind?”
“Ellie Hendrix is very likely going to be running against Joe Van Meter. My understanding is Van Meter is comfortably ahead in the polls.”
“Correct.”
“Van Meter is supported by the Laken Institute. Your idea is to tie him to nefarious money. Link him to some impropriety. Let’s start there. See if there’s a better way.”
“The Laken Institute has a stable of candidates,” explains Gary.
“Unless they’re secretly financing a eugenics project, what they are and who they support is baked in. They’ve been around a long time. Weaken them by picking off their candidates.”
“We were kind of hoping to do both. Kill two birds with one stone. Cut off the head, kill the body,” from Gary. “Okay, I’m out of clichés.”
You smile, they smile.
“The press won’t care. When you bring them old news, they’ll tune you out. The next time you bring them something they’re less likely to listen, or if they do run it you won’t get the wattage.”
A server in a green Kiss Me I’m Irish t-shirt walking slowly by stops at the pause in conversation.
“Give us a few more minutes please,” Gary says.
“Are we going to eat?” Melissa wonders.
“A few more minutes,” Gary tells the server so he’ll go away.
“What’s the alternative,” Melissa asks.
“I’m not sure yet. Give me until the end of the week, Monday at the latest. I’ll give you what you asked for if I can’t come up with anything better. However you want it.”
“Cross-referenced?”
“Sure.”
They look at each other.
“Make it worth our while,” Gary the union boss tells you. You shake hands.
No one stays for lunch. You hang back, watching them in the parking lot, walking to their cars, slowly pulling away from one another. She says something, he gesticulates, she says something else, he gesticulates again and she nods. You can guess what they’re saying by watching them. Subtitles aren’t necessary:
“So what do you think? Will he give us something we can use?”
“It’s what he does. I guess at some point you have to give that a chance.”
“And if not, we’ll just get what we wanted in the first place.”
“Exactly. I hear his information is good.”
***
You’re a human algorithm, your ability to decipher patterns. You can put your music playlist with over seven hundred songs on shuffle, and after listening to five songs you can figure out the shuffle pattern and correctly predict every song played after that. It’s a game you play sometimes when you’re out. Someone won’t believe you can really do that and bet you, and you always win. Once they bet you a hundred dollars, you couldn’t correctly predict the next song after listening to only three, on someone else’s phone. You had to count the number of songs in the queue, and after the third song you counted some more. It was an educated guess, but you were right. So your wife Jo leaving you for another woman, something you didn’t see coming, is one of life’s great paradoxes. Relationships have been patternless for you, you’ve always had your work and your gift, when all else fails.
***
You caught on early that information is the new currency and developed your contextual niche. You tracked who gave money to who, at first through the Federal Election Commission (FEC), then through the many sites that track this, looking for patterns. Like, for example, politicians who might be friendlier toward insurance companies than toward the ranks of their insured. You were startled at how apolitically and abundantly insurance companies contributed, particularly after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v FEC decision. With health insurance at the forefront of policy debate, with policymakers peddling their influence, unholy alliances were inevitable. Rampant’s a strong word; pervasive?
The National Association of Insurance Commissioners website provides tracking of complaints to every state’s insurance commissioner going back three years. Every six months you or Jen review the number of complaints made, by state, for every insurance carrier, crosschecking those with their complaint index. Where one is the baseline, if an insurance company hits four or higher on the index, even three or higher, it’s red flag time.
You have press credentials and so you file a request for public records under the Freedom of Information Act, requesting all individual complaints to a particular state insurance commissioner when you notice a high complaint index number, or a high number of complaints with a particular state insurance commissioner about a particular insurance company. When you get the individual complaints, Jen archives them.
You peruse the Joe Van Meter for US Senate website and discover he was state insurance commissioner, for a longer than normal tenure, going back several years. Right before he went into politics.
In sifting through the archives you discover twenty-seven complaints about XYZ Health Insurance billing its customers for treatment of hypertension, at three hundred dollars a crack, for routine blood-pressure screenings, where hypertension was neither diagnosed nor treated. Insurance Commissioner Joe Van Meter denied all twenty-seven complaints. It isn’t a surprise when you research Van Meter’s past campaign donations and find that XYZ has been a consistent and generous contributor. In some years his leading contributor.
You’re friends with reporters at two of the state’s largest daily newspapers and know several TV news producers well. They’ve quoted you as an anonymous source. Were you to provide this information directly to the media, that would imply bias, and you’re an apolitical mercenary. You sell it to the Hendrix campaign and they leak it to the media. You charge a lot. They can afford you. Since Citizens United v FEC they’re all well-funded campaigns. Your friends in the media will know where the information came from.
