LOUISVILLE
In his sprawling office, Mason V. Marweg tied the silk laces of his custom-made, three-thousand-dollar elevator shoes. The alligator wingtips, one of sixteen similar pairs of various shades in his closet, raised his height five full inches, up to four-feet eleven and a half. Quite normal.
What wasn’t normal were his three wolverines. He gazed at the beautiful sleeping animals. He’d raised them since birth with the help of his on-staff veterinarian who’d used growth hormone and gene therapy to nearly triple their normal size. The massive carnivores – Shamar, Goba, and Goliath – weighed nearly one hundred sixty pounds each. And although semi-domesticated, they remained vicious flesh-eating predators, trained to obey only his commands. He loved watching them doze in the sun.
He clicked his clicker. Instantly, the three muscular bear-like animals sprang to their feet, snarling and baring their two-inch canines, hoping to sink them into whoever was behind his office door.
Satisfied at their response, Marweg snapped the clicker twice. Immediately, the wolverines sat back in the sun. He opened a small refrigerator and removed three large chunks of raw one-hundred-fifty-dollar-a-pound Kobe beef, and tossed them to the animals. They devoured the meat in seconds.
Shamar, Goba and Goliath were his protectors, 24x7. They even slept with him in his double-king-sized bed, steel-reinforced to support their additional five hundred pounds.
Marweg stood in his penthouse office atop his twenty-story Marweg Industries Building in downtown Louisville. He looked down at the Ohio River and watched the nation’s oldest operating steamboat, the Belle of Louisville, paddle-wheeling its way up river. Passengers were smiling.
Marweg smiled, too. He’d just added two major properties to his mining empire. At the sale closing, the former mine owners refused to speak to him because he’d forced them into bankruptcy. He couldn’t care less. The fools didn’t get it. Business is war! A land war in his case.
And his next land acquisition – Leland T. Radford’s massive twelve thousand acres chock full of coal – would soon be his.
For years, he’d tried to buy Radford’s land, but the tree-hugging fanatic repeatedly refused to sell, babbling on about the ecological balance “of my pristine forests.” Well, my pristine coal haulers will soon roll out of those forests with tons of black gold – coal.
Because Radford was now dead.
Marweg’s phone vibrated in his pocket. He saw Caller ID and answered.
“Yeah …?”
“Something’s come up,” the caller said.
“Explain.”
The more the man explained, the less Marweg liked what he heard. He didn’t need this aggravation now.
“Handle it,” Marweg said, “or I’ll shift my assets elsewhere.”
“I will.”
Marweg hung up. If the man didn’t handle it, Marweg would. Just because he was four feet eleven and a half, certain people thought they could take advantage of him. The corridors of business were now stacked with tall ex-CEO bullies who tried to push him around.
After all, he’d handled every problem since the day his father abandoned him and his cancer-ridden mother, leaving them penniless. Marweg was fifteen. That same day he walked to the nearby Crawford Mine to beg for work. As he neared the office, someone threw a razor-sharp chunk of coal that ripped open his cheek beneath his eye.
The miner who’d thrown the rock, Cletus Buttes, shouted, “We don’t hire no fuckin’ dwarfs!” Cletus and his four pals howled with laughter and threw more coal at him as he ran home, bleeding.
Marweg swore revenge.
Seventeen years later, he got it. After acquiring huge success in the money markets, Marweg bought a network of coalmines, including the Crawford Mine. That same day, he fired Cletus and his four pals. Marweg waved to them as they walked out the gates. Cletus and his boys had lost their appetite for laughing. They’d also lost their pensions. It was one of the happiest days of Marweg’s life.
Today, nearly thirty years later, Mason Marweg sat atop mining empire valued at 5.3 billion dollars.
Most of his wealth came from his coalmines the USA, silver mines in Bolivia and two diamond mines in Botswana. The mines gave him an enormous sense of power.
So would the acquisition of Leland Radford’s 12,000 acres of rich bituminous coal.
And he would soon acquire those acres … one way or another.