Michael and I happened on the Palais de Pal on a warm winter day in 1988, at the dock of a lake that until recently had been a cow pasture in Fulton, Mississippi. Fulton is the seat of Itawamba County, whose claim to fame is that it’s the birthplace of Tammy Wynette, though for us it’s more memorable as the temporary mooring of the Palais and as the location of the Sands Motel, where an impressive stand of old-growth mildew inspired Michael to wear his socks in the shower.
Itawamba County made the national news in 2010 after the school board canceled the high school prom because two female students announced their intention to attend as same-sex dates. After the ACLU filed suit, the school board scheduled what was later characterized as a diversionary prom for seven students, including the lesbians and two students with learning disabilities, while the other kids danced and snapped cell phone pics at a secret location. Good times! So you can imagine that if twenty-two years earlier you had been a disoriented, slightly judgmental and, it must be said, flamboyant houseboat traveler from Chicago, you could have picked a far better place to become stranded.
When we first spotted him, Richard Kinst, owner of the ninety-one-foot Palais, was standing forlornly on the deck with his dog, Sheba, a German shepherd mix with her tail curled between her legs. Michael and I were reporters on assignment for the Jackson newspaper the Clarion-Ledger, investigating the economic impact of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, a series of man-made canals and impounded lakes that passed through Fulton on the way from the Tennessee River to the Gulf of Mexico. As we were interviewing one of the farmers who’d built the cow-pasture marina, he noticed us staring over his shoulder at the odd tableau of Kinst and his boat. The farmer rolled his eyes and informed us that the Palais had been at the marina for two years, since soon after the waterway opened. We sensed interesting trouble. After dutifully taking down the farmer’s statistics regarding the number of boats he’d accommodated in his erstwhile pasture, and wrapping up our interview, we strolled over to talk with Kinst, who turned out to be erudite, witty and starved for conversation.
As he led us on a tour of the Palais, Kinst maintained that he’d been in Fulton for one year, not two, the chronological discrepancy perhaps stemming from the farmer’s weariness or from Kinst’s secret satisfaction with his own misfortune. He rued the day, he said, when he and his captain had selected the two-hundred-mile Tenn-Tom as a more user-friendly route to the Gulf than the notoriously treacherous Mississippi River. Their plan had been to moor the Palais in New Orleans and hire it out for “intimate excursions,” but things had gone awry in Fulton, the result of an undisclosed dispute. The captain had subsequently abandoned him. Kinst, who seemed to have styled his diction and hand gestures after Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, knew nothing about piloting his boat and was not inclined to learn. He was very noticeably going nowhere fast.
In the farmer’s defense, the Palais de Pal was kind of creepy. The interior decor leaned toward the macabre, with heavy burgundy velvet drapes, stained-glass windows, gold-plated candelabra, a fake fireplace and a grand piano. It was very dark. Kinst, despite his protests, clearly reveled in the sublime adversity of being marooned aboard his floating palace, and appeared to be further energized when he noticed us taking notes. The truth was finally going to be told. His story was about to be documented. Possibly, even, his captain would read about it in the newspaper. Paraphrasing a line from the musical A Chorus Line, he loudly proclaimed, with outstretched arms, as if to embrace the whole sorry state of affairs, “Suicide in Fulton would be redundant!” In the minidrama of his life, everyone in Fulton would, at that moment, stop what they were doing and bend their ears to hear the echo of his lament.
The story of Richard Kinst and the Palais de Pal provided us with a perfect opportunity to showcase what the multibillion-dollar Tenn-Tom project really was: a series of flooded farm fields where the most dramatic developments involved costly, quirky asides. At that time, all news accounts about the waterway had been accompanied by standard-issue photos of huge tows of barges. Distributed by the Tenn-Tom promotional board, these photos had actually been taken on the more commercially viable Mississippi River—one of the first examples of dazzle camouflage that Michael and I had come upon. What the promotional board had sought to do, essentially, was make a series of flooded cow pastures look like they were supporting a gargantuan tow of barges headed to an international port. The truth was plainly evident to us during a weeklong boat ride along the length of the route, when we passed only one tow. As an economic development project, it was a $2 billion federal failure. Had you relied on the news releases being disseminated by the promotional board and local congressional offices, you’d never have known. But you would have learned this telltale truth: Six of the multimillion-dollar locks-and-dams were named for U.S. congressmen.
We later heard that Kinst had found a new captain and made his way south to Mobile. After that he disappeared from our screen. I recently Googled “Palais de Pal” and found a boat by that name moored in Green Bay, Wisconsin, but I can’t say for sure if it’s the same vessel—and don’t even get me started on Green Bay.
The point is that we might never have known what a colossal lie the Tenn-Tom represented, nor would we have likely become opposition researchers, had we not taken that investigative boat ride in 1988. Newspaper reporters are notoriously self-centered and rarely work well together, but the Tenn-Tom proved a notable exception for us. We’d devised the trip with photographer Scott Boyd as a kind of field junket, during which we would travel the route, through numerous locks and dams, in Scott’s bass boat, drinking beer and investigating what we suspected from the outset was an economic and environmental boondoggle. Over the course of our journey Michael and I found that entertaining ourselves while working made us more productive and opened us to interesting stories that we’d have missed had we not strayed from the program. It also made the tedium of comparing cost-to-benefit ratios infinitely more palatable, and when it came time to actually write the stories, the division of labor between us developed naturally.
The resulting series encompassed feature stories about characters such as Kinst as well as a charming elderly man who’d been evicted from his ancestral home for a park that was never built, and hard-hitting investigative pieces about the political chicanery that enabled the bogus development project to be built. The Tenn-Tom represented a watershed for us, and not because we ended up winning a hokey in-house award from Gannett, the monolithic corporation that owned the newspaper, but because it showed us how well we worked together—better, in some ways, than either of us worked alone. It also illustrated the utility of peering beneath the public relations veil, and of doing the legwork to bring the story home.
Afterward, Michael and I returned to our respective beats. We remained friends, though a couple of years later I left the newspaper to take a job as an environmental researcher for the state attorney general, and a year after that went to work for the governor as his environmental aide. Michael ended up taking a job as communications director for the mayor of Jackson. After the governor lost his reelection bid and I found myself out of a job, I cobbled together enough freelance writing work to stay afloat. I was chastened by the efficiency of negative politics and had learned a few things about it, and Michael, for his part, was tired of being a political spokesman. So it was that our circuitous career paths led us to go into business together in 1993, to do, among other things, opposition research—essentially, to devote ourselves to delving into otherwise hidden stories against the backdrop of America’s massive political machine. A political operative we knew asked if we’d be interested in doing research for a campaign in Chicago, and we jumped at the chance. I don’t recall how we decided who would go, but it ended up being me.
In early December of 1993, when the Christmas lights were strung across Michigan Avenue and rosy-faced children hurried down snowy sidewalks with mothers bearing colorfully wrapped gifts, I set off in search of political trouble, my first steps into a darker, overlapping universe. Michael’s maiden voyage came soon after and took him to Maryland, where he worked for three weeks on a statewide campaign while making his temporary home in a cinderblock motel.
I no longer remember who the opponent was in the Chicago race, though I breathed, ate and slept with the candidate’s history for two weeks. I could perhaps find the name if I had to, such as if I were subpoenaed to testify, but that’s not what’s relevant here. These politicians come and they go. Michael and I have come to accept the fact that while we fully immerse ourselves in our subject candidates’ lives for a time, we tend to forget their names soon after. After eighteen years, we even get confused about where some stories unfolded, and with so many campaigns under way during a typical season, we even occasionally forget where our plane is headed. Fortunately, the documentation we compile serves as an external hard drive. What’s important here is that during a routine review of newsclips and courthouse records, I passed through the menacing portal of Chicago politics—a system that vies with New Jersey’s and Louisiana’s for sheer institutional corruption. I was surprised by how much dirt there was, and not far beneath the surface, either.
Also surprising, to a new opposition researcher, was how people reacted to what I was doing. I remember that the Lebanese cabdriver who drove me in from the airport, who’d fled Beirut during the war, was very much intrigued when he asked why I was in town and I told him I was investigating a politician. He was amazed that it was possible to openly do such a thing. He loved that about America he said. So did I. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I met an attorney in the gym of the apartment building where I was staying who was all chatty until we had a similar conversation. I was concerned that he might know someone involved in the race, so I said I was doing research, the subject of which was confidential, which put him on the defensive. He made some excuse and hurried off. He was the first of now countless people who have seemed threatened by my reticence to talk about my work.
The true revelation regarding the Chicago race came after I returned to the office. I’d come across what appeared to be a connection between the opponent and several people rumored to be involved with organized crime, which, not surprisingly, was extremely difficult to prove. It was only after Michael and I began receiving phone messages from a Chicago number warning us to back off that it became clear we were on to something, which was both exhilarating and unnerving. In the end, the very act of digging sent ripples through the campaign, as word got around that we were researching the opponent’s possible mob involvement. Though it’s hard to say whether that significantly influenced the election, the opponent lost. I don’t remember what Michael found in Maryland, though he still complains about the cinderblock motel and the one small window in his room that looked out on a dumpster.
Soon after that we found ourselves being paid to roam the country, scrutinizing all kinds of politicians. It was like researching and writing an extended series of investigative and human-interest pieces, without the bylines. We were generally aware of the stereotype of opposition researchers—smarmy guys who plumb the depths of society for damaging tidbits about politicians that are then used to sully the political process. To some extent, this is true. But not all of us are smarmy and our work is not necessarily subversive.
We started our business, Huffman & Rejebian, in a tiny office in an art deco high-rise in downtown Jackson that by the time we moved in had become “affordable.” We shared a single laptop and took turns sitting behind a desk bought from a used office furniture store—an old metal husk from the forties, scarred and dinged, for which we purchased used aluminum office chairs to tastefully match the period. When we finally got a second computer, we set up our office like a miniature newsroom, facing each other yet shielded by our monitors so we didn’t have to stare directly at each other all day. The shielding worked so well that in a subsequent office a friend came in toward the end of the day and remarked to Michael, “Wow, nice shiner!” at which point I realized that I, a professional investigator, had failed to notice that the person sitting across from me for the last six hours sported a black eye. It was like a marriage, in its way; unavoidable familiarity at times made us oblivious of each other.
The rest of our floor was vacant and the hall lights were always off, seeming to emphasize that we were outside the mainstream, which we liked. When we occasionally had visitors we’d hear the echo of their footfalls in the dark, empty hallway before their silhouettes appeared at the frosted glass window of our door, which gave our office a decidedly noir atmosphere. It was clear that we inhabited a fringe realm. Similarly, our being located in Mississippi seemed to confer a mysterious, offbeat air on us in the minds of campaign workers in places such as New York and California. We were, in a sense, inscrutable, yet with a reputation for delivering. We had no website, no promotional materials, no cold-call list. Clients came to us through word of mouth only.
There weren’t many people doing what we did, and there still aren’t, for many reasons, including the corrosive effects of looking for the bad side of everyone and the volatility of the people you encounter, who range from noble public servants to destructive parasites. There is also the seasonal nature of the income. But the main reason is that most people are not that good at getting to the bottom of things. Few people have clear ideas about the origins of . . . well, much of anything. FedEx delivers a fruit basket during the holidays; a link is forwarded by a Facebook friend; someone on TV hurls a rotten tomato or a pipe bomb from an angry crowd. Where, really, do these things come from? Most people don’t have a clue. Who has time to try to get to the bottom of things, what with Sandra Bullock’s husband having an extramarital affair? The answer is: We do. We care very much about the origins of the information that fuels negative politics. Once you start gathering that kind of information it’s hard to stop, with the result that entire towns occasionally fall under our critical eye, and now and then we turn our wrath on each other.
Starting out eighteen years ago, we worked in total secrecy. Any investigation requires discretion, after all. But the volatility of today’s political and media environment has lifted some of the traditional taboos about our line of work. A candidate who can’t afford his own researcher may hold a news conference to decry his opponent’s having hired a “private detective” to discredit him, but this is a quaint throwback. Most people are now aware that political research is routinely done, and social networking sites have blurred the lines between what’s public and private, anyway. On one hand, it can be distressing when someone forwards you an inflammatory, baseless e-mail, but it’s also liberating for us as researchers in that people are becoming less easily shocked by our digging.
During a recent research project in Georgia, as I was requesting copies of property tax records for a candidate who’d been late paying numerous times, the clerk came upon one request and said, “This isn’t the candidate. You must have written the number down wrong.” She knew the candidate, knew what I was doing and was not at all put off or surprised. This is most decidedly not always the case, but the fact that it happened at all represents a minor sea change. In the past, few clerks complied with our requests unquestioningly unless they loathed the candidate we were researching.
When we are confronted by obstructionist clerks and others who attempt to throw obstacles in our path, we gird ourselves with the knowledge that in this, the golden age of lies, we are on the side of truth. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear from opposition research. Finding out what’s going on is about far more than sitting down to Google someone (which, unfortunately, is how many campaigns are coming to view opposition research), or citing an undocumented claim in someone’s blog. In the end, the cold, hard, documented facts are our best hope of knowing what’s really going on, and the best way to find them is as close to the source as possible. That’s something that’s understood even in the underworld of recalcitrant clerks. The process of discovering salient facts is crucial to the world’s greatest evolving democracy and, at times, is also extremely entertaining—as we learned long ago, while hoisting beers in a bass boat on the Tenn-Tom.