City of Grudges

by Rick Outzen

  Bowman Hines grew up in Pensacola. His grandparents, Dr. Louis Bowman and his wife, Sarah, raised him. Bo’s parents had died in a car accident on Interstate 10 when they were driving home from a Florida State University football game, back when head coach Bill Peterson finally had the team winning games. The Florida Highway Patrol found nine-year-old Bo strapped in the back by his seat belt, unharmed. “A miracle”—that’s how Dr. Lou described it on the front page of the Pensacola Herald.

  Pensacolans watched young Bo grow up and were filled with admiration as he became an Eagle Scout, won the Optimist Speech contest, and was the star quarterback the year that Pensacola’s Booker T. Washington High Wildcats were state champions. Scholarship offers poured in. Of course, Bo chose Florida State. He was redshirted his freshman year and sat on the bench during the 1974 and 1975 seasons. In 1976, Coach Bobby Bowden was hired and switched Bo to linebacker. His senior year, FSU won ten games, lost two, and beat Texas Tech University in the Tangerine Bowl. Bo made second team All-American. The Pensacola Sports Association honored him as its college athlete of the year.

  After graduating, Bo passed on the NFL draft and got an MBA while working as a graduate assistant for Coach Bowden. He came home to Pensacola and married Sue Eaton, another Pensacola native. Bishop Roberto Garcia presided over the wedding that rivaled Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s ceremony. Both weddings took place in July 1981. The wedding dress—designed and dreamed up by the French fashion designers who made spare money in New Orleans and Mobile during Mardi Gras—created a sensation.

  When the couple returned from their Bali honeymoon, Bo bought a dump truck with a loan from his grandfather and began his road construction company, hauling gravel at first. He eventually built his own asphalt plant, which led to his dominance of much of the state, county, and city road work in Northwest Florida and South Alabama. Pensacola’s golden boy could do no wrong.

  For years Bo chaired the Florida Panhandle Arts Council, a nonprofit organization that supported many of the cultural groups in the area, including the Pensacola Opera, Pensacola Little Theatre, Pensacola Symphony, and dozens of art galleries.

  He and his wife Sue put on huge galas and auctions at the Saenger Theatre that raised thousands for the arts. These affairs always had elaborate silent auctions and lasted until two in the morning. Everyone came, and everyone enjoyed themselves—even old Phyllis Longfellow, the Pensacola Herald’s society columnist, who liked to tell people that Sue was tacky and Bo was nothing more than an overgrown fraternity boy.

  The governor of Florida put Bo on the state arts commission. He honored Bo with the coveted Patron of Florida Culture Award, which got his handsome, smiling face on Florida Trend magazine.

  In March 2010, I had decided to write a personal profile of my friend Bo for the Insider and maybe tease him a little, but also show how much his efforts meant to the arts and culture in Pensacola. However, I found I had a problem. Some of the executive directors of the cultural groups gave me less than glowing reviews of my friend. They replied to my questions with stilted answers, and a few board members didn’t even return my phone calls.

  I finally tracked down a former art gallery director who had moved to St. Louis. He told me the reason few wanted to talk about Bo Hines and the Florida Panhandle Arts Council. He said Bo’s Arts Council was a sham.

  Apparently little of the money ever made it to the art galleries, opera, symphony, or community theater. When the arts groups received their grant checks from the Arts Council, they were dated months earlier, as if they had sat in a desk drawer somewhere before being mailed. The amounts were often much less than promised. But since this was Bo Hines, the millionaire road contractor, they assumed there was some mistake.

  When the executive directors and board chairs of the cultural groups called him, Bo always had an excuse about the delay. And for the first year or so, the checks kept coming, even if they were late and less than expected. Then the payments stopped altogether. Payroll checks bounced. Rent and utility bills fell behind. My source still had paychecks that he couldn’t cash.

  When I asked about it, Bo tried to bluff his way through my questions. When I told him that this wasn’t a smart move, my normally affable friend suddenly became guarded and evasive. Then he quit taking my calls. I felt like he was daring me to write the article.

  Bo would understand my predicament. I had friends and, more critically, advertisers, who wouldn’t appreciate this story, even if I proved every allegation. The easiest course of action would have been to walk away and hope the Pensacola Herald picked up the story.

  My closest friend in Pensacola, Dare Evans, begged me to put off publishing the article. She and I had known each other since our freshman year at Ole Miss. I had a few high school pals that I occasionally called to catch up with, mostly on birthdays and during the Christmas holidays, but Dare was a constant in my life. Dare was my sounding board, my fiercest defender, and one of the few people who really knew me.

  Dare felt I needed to find the Arts Council executive director and interview her. She had two valid reasons. The first was that no matter how well I wrote it, Dare knew the article was going to cost me advertisers, something I really couldn’t afford.

  “Walker, why are you so hell bent on self-destruction?” Dare said over glasses of wine at Blazzues after she had read my first draft. “I don’t understand your death wish mentality. Do you want the town to hate you? Take the time to get it right.”

  “Dammit, I do have it right,” I said. “Bo stole that money and the executive director bolted because she is afraid to testify.”

  “You don’t know that for sure,” she said.

  “I’m convinced I have this right. You’re letting your friendship with Sue color your analysis.”

  And that was her second reason. Sue and Dare had been nearly inseparable since Dare’s husband died. They played tennis regularly, dined at Jackson’s or Pensacola Yacht Club at least twice a week, and took vacations together. Because of Dare, Sue had become my friend before I ever met Bo.

  “That’s not fair, Walker,” Dare said. “You’re too stubborn to admit I’m right. You want the glory of breaking this story.”

  I shook my head, “No . . .”

  “It’s always the story. Well, this one will have no glory. You will be vilified, and I can’t, I won’t rescue you.”

  Dare stood, grabbed a twenty-dollar bill out of her purse, and threw it on the table. “I won’t. You will hurt people that I care about.”

  Even though Dare might have been right, I couldn’t back down. I had already gone through all the stages of grief—denial, anger, and finally acceptance. The man I thought I knew, the man that Pensacola loved, was a phony. Even worse, he was a crook.

  I had no choice but to expose him.

  So, I did. I reported the financial woes of the Arts Council. The next week the City of Pensacola and Escambia Board of County Commissioners, which each gave the nonprofit organization half a million dollars annually, called for an audit. They found nearly $200,000 was missing. The money had been stolen through a variety of schemes. Several checks had no supporting documentation. Some vendors appeared to have charged substantial markups for their goods and services. They claimed to have rebated part of the surcharge to the Arts Council, but the funds were deposited in a bank account that didn’t show on the nonprofit’s financial reports. Bank records showed a series of ATM withdrawals that gradually drained the mystery account.

  Hines had signed the checks, the vendors’ contracts, and the bank documents setting up the off-the-books account. Adding to the confusion, the paid executive director of the Arts Council had vanished.

  The state attorney’s office reviewed the audit and my article and indicted Bo Hines. He pled not guilty and refused to waive his right to a speedy trial, which placed the case on the June docket.

  The public reacted as Dare predicted, not to defrock its favorite son but to attack me. The Pensacola Herald jumped immediately and fero
ciously to his defense and gave me, the accuser, a severe beating. They cast doubts over my reporting and alluded that the real culprit was the sloppy bookkeeping of the missing executive director. Hines was merely the victim of his soft heart that had kept him from firing the director. He wasn’t aware of how bad the money and bookkeeping issues were.

  Readers began to distrust my facts. They wanted to believe anything that maintained Hines’ hero status. They reasoned that a guilty man wouldn’t want to go to trial so quickly. Bo knew he was innocent, they thought, and he didn’t want to waste any time in clearing his name. At the downtown restaurants and bars I frequented, longtime acquaintances turned their backs on me. But love, support, and comfort poured out for Hines.

  Grudges fueled the public attacks on me. Hines’ arrest and pending trial put blood in the water—not Bo’s, but mine. And the sharks were swarming. They believed this could be the time to settle old scores with me, like the former assistant city manager who lost his job after we reported his golf junkets were financed by city vendors, the contractor who saw his string of no-bid contracts broken when we revealed the numerous cost overruns, and the county commissioner whose reelection and congressional aspirations evaporated after we disclosed how his hunting buddy’s son wound up with a county job and six-figure salary. And those were only a few of my enemies that had waited years for the right opportunity to pounce.

  I became the target of Pensacola’s scorn. This would pass after the trial concluded, I hoped. Until then, I had little choice but to endure the disdain directed my way.

  2

  Dressed in my work clothes—starched white button-down, khaki slacks, and Chuck Taylors—I descended to the Pensacola Insider offices on the second floor. My work area was nestled between two windows in the southwest corner overlooking Palafox Street, Pensacola’s main downtown street.

  The neighborhood of Palafox had a New Orleans French Quarter feel to it. City leaders with the help of the banks created a grant program during the seventies to encourage owners to build balconies with wrought iron railing above the retail shops, restaurants, bars, and offices on the avenue. Red brick sidewalks lined the street, and history permeated the area.

  From my southern window I looked down on Blazzues, a jazz club located on the site that had been Andrew Jackson’s house when he was the first governor of the Florida Territory in 1821. One block further south Plaza Ferdinand marked where the Tennessee general was sworn in as the military governor. Winos toasted his bust daily.

  A fire destroyed the Jackson residence in 1839 and robbed the city of a possible tourist attraction. Only a bronze plaque erected in 1935 by the Pensacola Historical Society near Blazzues’s outdoor seating marked the town’s one connection to the White House.

  Jackson, the patron saint of grudges, fought thirteen duels, many over his wife Rachel’s honor. Biographers claimed he was wounded so frequently in the gunfights that he “rattled like a bag of marbles.” One bullet from an 1806 duel was lodged so close to his heart that it could never be removed, causing him pain for the rest of his life. It probably fed his ill temper, but he won the duel and killed the man who shot him. Roger told me that was very apropos of Pensacola to win the duel but carry the victim’s bullet for the rest of his life.

  The bartenders at Blazzues often talked about the bar being haunted. Doors locked when they took out the garbage. Beer taps suddenly started flowing. Glasses fell off the bar with no one near them. No one went into the big cooler without a fellow worker standing guard. Probably the ghosts had been court-martialed or shot by Jackson. They had grudges for good reasons.

  Big Boy and I would have the office to ourselves for a couple of hours before the staff arrived. It was our quiet time. The dog jumped up on the couch next to my desk. His gray snout gave away his age, although he was so boisterous many mistook him for a puppy. He never barked but moved among the work areas and watched over the office. Whenever a visitor arrived, Big Boy perked up and joined the guest on the couch, hoping for some petting. If the guest ignored him, he would reach out a paw and tap him on the leg or arm and flash his adorable brown eyes. Big Boy was the star of the office, and he knew it.

  Up until last Thanksgiving, Big Boy had been Roger Fairley’s dog. Fairley was an outstanding citizen who built a nice fortune opening temporary employment and day labor agencies along the Gulf Coast. He once owned the Pensacola Conquistadors of the defunct Continental Basketball Association. The voters had elected Roger to several terms on the Pensacola City Council and Escambia Board of County Commissioners. He taught me how Pensacola politics worked and where the bodies were buried.

  We enjoyed each other’s company. He explained to me the mysteries and intricacies of Pensacola politics. When he died, he bequeathed Big Boy to me. He also had owned the three-story building that housed our offices and me. His widow told me that Roger left instructions that she could sell the building only to me—that is if I ever pulled together enough money to buy it. Until then, we didn’t pay rent as long as we ran ads for the Pensacola Symphony and Pensacola Opera.

  When I sat down at my desk, constructed from an old door on top of two sawhorses, I cranked up Cowboy Mouth’s Voodoo Shoppe on the computer, took a sip of my coffee, and began surfing the web. I perused the top Florida papers: Miami Herald, Tampa Bay Times, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Florida Times Union, Orlando Sentinel, and Tallahassee Democrat. Like some evil troll under the bridge of my life, my blog had to be fed.

  A web journal that I created about the same time as the maritime park initiative, the blog was my mistress, demanding constant attention. I fed it news, viewpoints, and political buzz constantly. And the public loved it, making it one of the most popular political blogs in the state.

  On the blog, I honed my writing skills, pushed ideas, battled the naysayers, and made my paper relevant daily. It required—no, it demanded—perpetual attention. Readers wanted more and more. And I gave it to them.

  After scanning the state newspapers, I looked online at the Pensacola Herald, our town’s Barnett Press-owned daily newspaper. Barnett USA ran the largest newspaper chain in North America with more than two hundred newspapers in the United States and Canada. It specialized in medium-sized markets like Pensacola that could only support one daily paper. Without competition, the paper set the ad rates and drained the community dry. Very little real news was reported, especially if the article would impact ad sales.

  A cash cow for Barnett Press, the Herald gobbled up all the ad dollars and continually developed new websites and faux publications to saturate the market and satisfy their corporation’s insatiable hunger for more profits.

  I hated them. In our paper’s early years, I read the daily newspapers obsessively to see if they reported one of our stories before our weekly issue came out, but they seemed to have adopted a policy of ignoring anything we published or else going in the complete opposite direction. They loved defending Bo Hines and not too subtly attacking my journalism. Their ad reps used it to poach our customer list, and we were seeing our ad revenue slip.

  An alt-weekly in a small market had no chance to beat a Barnett daily. They had all the money, resources, and staff. If they made the decision to go after the Pensacola Insider, Barnett would crush us. Until then, we danced on the razor’s edge. Taunting and weaving through the decades-old grudges as we pushed the ancient, self-important city ahead.

  Ultimately, we would fail. I had no exit strategy with a big payoff. The only uncertainty was when the executioner’s ax would fall. Would it be today? Next Week? Or in five years?

  I woke up every day knowing this. No amount of jogging, drinking, or writing could change that fact or erase it from my thoughts when I sat at my desk drinking coffee and watching downtown Pensacola wake up.

  Morbid? No, realistic.

  Pensacola’s current narrative had me as the bastard who tried to ruin their hero, Bowman Hines. An unprofessional tabloid journalist, or worse a blogger, set on building his reputation by destroying the man
who had selflessly helped Pensacola all his life. Bo Hines was one of their own; I was not.

  At eight o’clock, I donned my blue blazer and walked two blocks to the M. C. Blanchard Judicial Building and sat outside Courtroom B waiting for the prosecutors to arrive. Television crews were already there. The Herald had a photographer and two reporters ready to cover every nuance of the trial.

  As we waited, all their phones suddenly began to vibrate at the same time. A sheriff’s deputy approached us. Mrs. Bowman Hines had been found dead at her residence. The judge had postponed the start of the trial.

  A few of the reporters looked to me for a comment. I brushed them off and found a corner of the judicial center to call Bo. Though dreading the conversation, I had to call. He didn’t answer. Thank God.

  “Bo, I am so sorry to hear about Sue,” was all I thought to say in the message I left on his voice mail. Brilliant. But I meant it. That was all I could summon. And like everything else, it was the truth, alone and naked and standing there.

  Maybe I should disappear for a few days. I hadn’t taken a vacation in years. However, I didn’t have the cash to leave town and my credit cards had maxed out.

  I had friends in Cajun country, deep in the swamps near Thibodaux in south Louisana. Those weird places in the bayou where nobody knew or gave a crap about your name. I could go there and eat gumbo and jambalaya and wash it down with a six-pack of Dixie beer.

  My phone vibrated. It was a text message from Bo: “Leave me alone.”

  I was so screwed.

  I texted Jim Harden to call me. A private investigator and a somewhat reliable source that had helped me in the past, Harden spent most of his life on the fringes, having lunch meetings at convenience stores and roadside food trucks with people who contacted him via notes shoved under the mat of his office, which was sandwiched between a tattoo parlor and Domino’s Pizza in a bad part of town. He might know what had happened to Sue.