THE PRINCE OF BEERS

by Alex Berenson

Sunday, Dec. 19, 2010. Just past noon.

The man with a thousand toys opened his eyes, came to his feet. He padded through the golden wreckage of his bedroom, a mess of flat-screen televisions, boxes of ammunition, pistols and rifles of every imaginable make and caliber, stereo speakers, flashlights, dozens of bottles of Gatorade. Like a survivalist cult had taken over the Playboy Mansion. A few feet away, a loaded shotgun was propped beside his toilet. A Glock pistol hung ready on a hook above it.

Ready for what? The man with a thousand toys lived behind walls and fences, with dogs and cameras watching his mansion inside and out. Once, the security might have been necessary. Once he'd been the heir of a dynasty that had lasted five generations, the rightful ruler of one of the world's most famous companies.

But hardly anyone cared about him now, even in this place that had respected and feared his father, adored his grandfather. And the company wasn't his to run anymore.

His father had made sure of that. His father. The Chief.

The weapons were a tradition too. His family believed in guns and had the accidental shootings to prove their love. He owned more than a thousand, from single-shot pistols to .50-caliber sniper rifles. Beside his mansion he'd built a second house to hold them all.

The man with a thousand toys escaped his bedroom. In the kitchen he mixed drinks, one for him, one for her. Nothing fun. Chocolate protein shakes. He was forty-six now. Staying in shape wasn't as easy as it had been. He was even stuck with a prescription for Crestor now, cholesterol medicine, the balm of middle age. But he tried. Despite his reputation for partying, he'd always worked out, always been careful with his body and his looks. He was handsome, about five-feet-ten, with the blow-dried hair and strong chin and easy smile of a soap opera star. His caterpillar eyebrows and jug-handle ears were his most obvious flaws, but they hardly dented his appeal.

He gathered the shakes, carried them back to the bedroom. Barely four hours of sunlight left. They'd better get up. Mike was around, somewhere.

"Adrienne?"

She lay on the bed, her left arm twisted under her body, unmoving. She still wore her clothes from the night before. She hadn't been sleeping the last few days, been sick. Maybe the insomnia had caught up to her.

"Adrienne?" Louder this time.

Still she didn't move. He put a hand to her cheek, felt her skin cool and clammy. He leaned over, shook her, looked for life, for breath. Found none.

"Adrienne?" Not again. Not another dead girl.

But yes, again, another dead girl.

Where was Mike? He needed Mike. They had to call 911. At least the cops and the paramedics knew the way. They'd become regulars at this haunted house.

* * *

This may sound like a murder mystery. But in truth it's a portrait of power grown soft and louche; it recounts the history of a man given opportunities most of us can hardly imagine, borne of wealth and position to the St. Louis family empire that controlled Anheuser-Busch — a beloved and powerful American institution in an industry that holds unique sway over American life. Yet he was always hobbled, for he was not given, and never had the strength to take, the most important chance of all: the chance to live his life as he saw fit, make his own mistakes, face the consequences of his actions — the way the rest of us, without privilege or position, live our lives every day.

In the end, the fall of August Busch IV shows what tragedies can transpire between the hardest of fathers and the softest of sons — and reveals what mistakes can befall a forty-eight-year-old who has never fully rounded into adulthood; a drinker who over the years bought ten thousand rounds for strangers but can no longer identify his friends; a sloppy good-times hedonist who offers the only link between two untimely deaths, more than a quarter-century apart. It also serves as a reminder that expectations can be curses, that justice comes in many guises, and that loneliness and depression can shrink a mansion until it can feel like a prison cell — though just the sort of spacious, comfortable prison cell that befits a rich, troubled heir to a legendary American fortune.

* * *

Wednesday, Aug. 1, 2012. 7 p.m.

I stepped out of my aged Dodge minivan and found myself in an open-air furnace masquerading as downtown St. Louis. 101 degrees. Another three-digit day in a scorching Midwestern summer. I'd driven here from New York, burning gas at four bucks a gallon, doing my part for global warming. Driven when I could have flown and I couldn't quite explain why, not even to myself. I'd wanted to rumble through Pennsylvania and Ohio in the midst of another sullen American July, the fifth straight summer of our discontent, even the movies taken away by a dull-eyed, orange-haired psychopath.

I didn't see much, though. I rolled down the awful Pennsylvania Turnpike after dark and then chased a hotel room on I-70 until I hit Columbus at 4 a.m. Show Us The Real Birth Certificate, a billboard in PA urged, but aside from that cri de droite, I didn't see many Obama or Romney bumper stickers, didn't detect much interest in what either side was selling.

Maybe folks were just too hot to care. The next afternoon, as Ohio turned into Indiana into Illinois, the air dried out and the corn stalks shrank. I started to understand why I'd been reading about a modern Dust Bowl. In southern Illinois the streams were mudholes. I pulled off the highway at a barbeque joint a hundred miles east of St. Louis and heard from the high schoolers behind the counter that they hadn't seen rain since early March. March, I said, stupidly. Five months without rain seemed impossible. Yep, March. I shut up and ate my barbeque and got back on the road.

The Mississippi was still flowing, though, still a mile wide. The Mississippi's a magnificent river, the second-longest in the world, the freshwater link between the Midwest and the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi is home to Huck and Tom, the birthplace of the blues. In theory, anyway. In reality the Mississippi looks like a pot of refried beans that should come with a side of hepatitis vaccine. Ocean liners cruise the Hudson. The Mississippi's ship traffic runs more to grain barges. Its bridges are equally dull, jumbles of steel, Erector sets thrown together by a particularly lazy kid. On the plus side, they probably don't encourage jumpers the way that the George Washington or the Golden Gate do. Who wants to spend eternity being nibbled by Asian carp?

I cruised off the Martin Luther King Jr. Bridge, parked, trudged toward my hotel. Have I mentioned the heat? I found myself surrounded by cheery-looking white people dressed in red: red shorts, T-shirts, caps, pants, socks. Red underwear for all I knew. They walked south, moving about as fast as the river. Aha! The Cardinals must be in town. After I check in, I'll head over to Busch stadium — the name of yet another reflection of family's impact on St. Louis. I hadn't been a New York Times reporter all those years for nothing.

I'd come to St. Louis to investigate the death of Adrienne Nicole Martin, a 27-year-old ex-waitress, wannabe model, and all-around good-time girl. In December 2010, Adrienne was found dead at the mansion of her boyfriend, August Busch IV, the former chief executive of Anheuser-Busch — called The Fourth, to distinguish him from his dad, The Third. Adrienne had left an eight-year-old son behind.

In truth, I knew I wouldn't be solving a crime. Toxicology reports showed that Adrienne had died of an overdose of oxycodone, a powerful prescription opiate that kills thousands of Americans every year. After a short investigation, local police and the St. Louis County prosecutor's office had concluded that Adrienne's overdose was accidental. The prosecutor declined to charge Busch IV, or anyone else, in the death. Despite mutters locally about Busches buying justice, no one had offered evidence to contradict the theory of accidental death.

Still, the story of the fallen heir and the dead waitress fascinated me. Of all the giant companies begun in the 19th century — Standard Oil, Coca-Cola, Carnegie Steel — I could think of only one other whose family had held control so long (The Times, which was still run by the Sulzberger family). The first generation builds the business, the second enjoys it, the third wrecks it, the saying went. Or, as Andrew Carnegie himself had said, Three generations in America from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves.

But the Busches never went back to shirtsleeves. Control of Anheuser-Busch passed from Adolphus Busch to August Sr. to Adolphus III to August Jr. — known as Gussie — to The Third to The Fourth. Six Busches and five generations. They made Budweiser one of the world's best-known brands, earned tens of billions of dollars for themselves and their shareholders. When August Busch IV took over as chief executive in 2006, the company controlled nearly half the United States beer market. That year, A-B had sales of $18 billion, profits of $2 billion, and 30,000 employees.

But The Fourth's reign didn't last. In June 2008, a group of Brazilian businessmen running a Belgian-based brewer called InBev offered to buy Anheuser. Remarkably, the Brazilians won in a matter of weeks. On July 13, 2008, A-B announced it would sell itself to InBev for $52 billion in cash. Under normal circumstances, the deal might have attracted attention, maybe some handwringing, an American icon sold to a little-known foreign company. But in the summer of 2008, business reporters — and everyone else — had other concerns. As Lehman and Fannie Mae and AIG melted down, Anheuser's sale went practically unnoticed outside St. Louis.

InBev allowed The Fourth to remain on the board of the new company, gave him a $120,000 per month consulting contract. He also cashed out almost $100 million in stock. Not a bad payday, considering he'd been chief executive for barely eighteen months. Still, the deal was a humiliation for Busch, who had vowed never to sell A-B to InBev. For the next two years, he more or less disappeared.

Then came that Sunday afternoon 911 call.

* * *

Sunday, Dec. 19, 2010. 1:20 p.m.

Huntleigh, Missouri calls itself a city. It's really a tiny, wealthy village fifteen miles west of downtown St. Louis. About 330 people live there, 99 percent of them white. August Busch IV is one. His estate occupies four-and-a-half acres on a hill at 2832 South Lindbergh Avenue, and includes a 16-room, 6,300-square foot mansion once owned by the hockey legend Brett Hull, as well as a smaller second house. South Lindbergh is a busy road, but fences and a thicket of trees screen Busch's property from traffic. Motorists who turn onto the driveway that leads up to the mansion are confronted by an imposing gate and an automated voice that screeches, "You are trespassing! You ARE trespassing!"

Too small to have its own police force, Huntleigh pays for police coverage from the city of Frontenac, whose department is headquartered a couple miles away. The Frontenac force isn't huge either. Several of the officers who responded to the 911 call from Busch's estate had been there before. Some had worked security at the mansion when they were off-duty, before Frontenac police chief Tom Becker made them stop.

Officer Robert Scronce was the first to arrive. "She was in the bedroom and she was not breathing," Busch said. Scronce found Adrienne Martin lying on Busch's bed. She was tall and thin, with wide hazel eyes, long brown hair, an oversized nose, and breasts too big and round to be anything but implants. The kind of woman who looked good across the bar, not so much close up. She wore grey spandex leggings and a black sweatshirt. The sweatshirt's pocket held a straw covered with white powder, though Scronce didn't find it. Her skin was cool and her lips blue. Scronce knew right away she was gone. Paramedics officially pronounced her dead at 1:26.

What happened? Scronce asked Busch. Busch didn't know. Nor did he know anything about her medical history. He couldn't remember whether she took prescription medicines or used illegal drugs. Apparently he hadn't been paying attention. The Frontenac officers found three prescription bottles for Adrienne in a closet in Busch's bathroom.

Two bottles were empty of pills, but coated with powder residues that the St. Louis County police laboratory later found to be cocaine and oxycodone. The third bottle held Trazodone, an anti-depressant often prescribed for insomnia. Under the mattress of Busch's bed, the police found a straw that held still more cocaine. Six bloody spots, recently wiped away, soiled the sheet under Adrienne's body. The officers bagged up the pill bottles and sheet.

By now, Wendell Payne, an investigator from the St. Louis County medical examiner's office, had arrived at the mansion. He had questions for Busch, but he didn't have a chance to ask them. The beer heir had Arthur S. Margulis, a top St. Louis criminal lawyer, at his side. A former FBI agent, Margulis had piercing blue eyes and had defended Missourians accused of murder and other major crimes for a generation. His Sunday afternoon presence at an apparent accidental death was unusual — or would have been if August Busch IV hadn't been involved. Margulis kept Payne from Busch until Payne bagged Adrienne's body and took it to the morgue.

After Payne left, Frontenac detective James Ford approached Busch and Margulis for an interview. Margulis said that Busch would give a statement and answer "limited" questions. Ford read Busch his rights, and at 3:07 p.m., Busch scrawled an unrecognizable signature over the waiver form that Ford offered him.

In the interview, Busch stuck to the story he'd already told Officer Scronce. He and Adrienne had dated for more than a year. She regularly stayed at his house. Unfortunately, they'd both been feeling under the weather. In fact, Busch had been taken to a local hospital on Thursday, Dec. 16, having a panic attack. He checked out the next day, despite the advice of his doctors, and came back to his mansion. Aside from a helicopter ride Saturday afternoon, he and Adrienne hadn't left since. The night before, Busch went to bed early, but Adrienne didn't join him until early Sunday morning. He woke up around 12:30 p.m., left his bedroom, came back a few minutes later and tried to wake Adrienne.

Did Busch know whether Adrienne used illegal drugs? Again, Busch insisted he had no idea. The answer was a lie. He'd used cocaine with her many times before. He agreed to let Ford examine the surveillance tapes from his mansion. Without fanfare, the interview ended.

Busch never again spoke to the authorities about Adrienne's death.

Night fell. Officer Scronce, Detective Ford, and the other Frontenac police officers piled into their cars and left the mansion to rejoin the world. Only Busch and his paid companions were left in the mansion. The man with a thousand toys could contemplate the wreckage of his life in peace.

* * *

May 1975.

August Busch III was about to fire his father.

Gussie had run Anheuser-Busch for thirty years, raising production from 3 million barrels of beer to 37 million. A-B was the largest brewer in the United States, with almost one-quarter of the market. But by the mid-1970s, Gussie was slipping. So was Budweiser. Miller Brewing, A-B's top competitor, had just introduced Miller Lite. Fueled by the legendary "Tastes Great, Less Filling" ad campaign, Lite became a cultural sensation and stole market share and profits from Bud. Gussie refused to introduce a light beer, worried it would hurt the Budweiser brand.

Instead, as profits fell, Gussie focused on cutting costs. He laid off 120 workers at A-B's headquarters and pared its marketing budget — a slow form of suicide for a company that had always spent heavily to promote Budweiser as a premium product. As the crisis deepened in 1975, Busch III laid the groundwork for his coup. He met one-on-one with A-B's directors to explain the threat from Miller. He convinced the company's top executives to promise to resign if the board didn't force Gussie out. By May, The Third was ready. He moved against the man who shared his name, asking A-B's directors to replace Gussie and make him chief executive. Gussie appealed to their loyalty, but the directors had made up their minds.

At age thirty-seven, August Busch III was master of A-B. Under his reign, the company reached its greatest success. Busch faced down the Teamsters and introduced new low-calorie beers to compete with Miller Lite. He poured billions of dollars into advertising, marketing, and sports sponsorships. Meanwhile, he continued Anheuser's tradition of spending lavishly on the wholesalers and distributors crucial to the beer business. He hired Harvard MBAs to dissect the retail beer market with thousands of different promotional campaigns. And in 1982, he introduced Bud Light, which ultimately surpassed Miller Lite to become the largest-selling low-calorie beer in America — and then overtook Budweiser to become the best-selling beer of all. Year after year, Anheuser-Busch's profits and market share grew. In 1980, the company had 28 percent of the American beer market. A decade later, it had 43 percent. Over the same period, its earnings per share increased fivefold. Stack it high and watch it fly became A-B's unofficial motto.

By all accounts, the Third ran the tightest of ships. "August worked very, very hard," Bill Finnie, a longtime A-B executive, told me. "He hated bullshit. He worked his tail off. It was twenty-four-seven Anheuser-Busch. You joked that Fridays were great because there were only two more workdays in the week."

But Busch III was a hard man to like. He was cold, distant, obsessed with personal safety and firearms. Years after he retired, Anheuser-Busch spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on his security detail. He helicoptered to work every day from his estate in St. Charles County, west of St. Louis, landing on the roof of the A-B executive offices — a convenient way to avoid human contact. Busch III could be charming when the mood struck him, Bill McClellan, a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, told me. But mainly, The Third relied on his temper and his power. Like his son, he was medium-height and square-jawed, with brown eyes, a thick head of hair, and a penchant for cowboy boots. That physical resemblance masked enormous differences in personality. The Third, unlike The Fourth, was prone to fits of anger that turned him red-faced and squinty-eyed. Tightly wound, he demanded loyalty and obedience from employees. His management philosophy, he told Fortune magazine in 1997, was "Make sure your standards are high, and if someone doesn't meet those standards, take them out." (When I asked him to comment for this piece, his response was "Goodbye, Alex. Have a nice day. Have a drink." He didn't mention a brand.)

In 1969, Susan Busch, the Third's first wife and the mother of August IV and his sister Susie, filed for divorce. Susan alleged that August III "nagged and criticized her conduct and found fault with her without cause… and used profane and humiliating language toward her," according to Under The Influence: The Unauthorized Story of the Anheuser-Busch Dynasty. (Written by two Post-Dispatch reporters and published in 1991, Under The Influence is the definitive history of the first 130 years of the Busch empire.)

Five years later, Busch III remarried. His second wife, Virginia Lee Wiley, was a tall, beautiful blonde, like Susan. Busch III and Virginia had two children of their own, while The Fourth and Susie lived with their mother. The Third took his son to board meetings and distributorships, making sure that the Fourth knew he was the heir apparent. Otherwise, III treated IV as distantly as anyone else. Busch IV told Fortune in the 1997 piece that the relationship between father and son was "almost all business." But The Fourth got plenty of pleasure elsewhere.

* * *

Monday, Dec. 20, 2010. 2:30 p.m.

Autopsies are grisly affairs, the reduction of the human body into its component parts, heart and lungs and liver extracted and weighed like so many specialty meats. All modesty disappears. In his examination of Adrienne Nicole Martin's corpse, deputy St. Louis County medical examiner Michael Graham noted dispassionately that "the breasts are prominent due to the presence of implants. The genitalia is unremarkable. The pubic hair, for the most part, has been shaved."

Yet Adrienne's corpse gave up its biggest secret even before Graham cut her open. She had a quarter-inch hole in her septum, the skinny piece of cartilage and bone that separates the nostrils. You'll want pictures of this, Graham told Ford, the Frontenac detective, who was watching the autopsy. Graham ran a pick in one of Adrienne's nostrils and out the other to show that the hole extended through Adrienne's septum. Ford made sure to get a photo. What's going to cause a hole like that? Ford asked Graham, a highly regarded coroner who has written several pathology textbooks.

The answer: Snorting cocaine. Not for days, or weeks. For months on end.

* * *

Sunday, Nov. 13, 1983. Just past midnight.

The boy with a thousand toys loved everything speedy: cigarette boats, Harleys, planes. Now he had a new go-fast, a slick black Corvette fresh off the dealer's lot. Girls dug it. He'd brought it with him from St. Louis to Tucson, where he was studying at the University of Arizona's engineering school.

Studying. Yeah, right.

He spent nights at Dirtbag's, this bar near school where the manager let him jump the line. The place was pretty cool. Cheap drinks and plenty of girls, including a sweet-looking bartender named Michelle. She was tall, pretty, blonde, with a tight body. She liked to smoke weed, wasn't afraid of a little blow. Okay by him. He loved to party. And he could drink like a machine. Five, six, seven cocktails and a bunch of beers, sack out, do it again the next night. Iron livers ran in the family.

So: just another Saturday night. He hit a disco called Viola's. Michele was there, taking the night off from Dirtbag's. He was drinking vodka collinses, basically spiked lemonade, a little girly but they did the trick. The drinking age in Arizona was 19, which was nice, meant he didn't have to use his fake ID. Of course he'd pregamed with some Bud Lights, didn't want to start the night cold. By the time Viola's shut at 1 a.m. he was feeling no pain. He and Michele and their friends weren't done partying. Not even close. They decided to convoy up, head home. Michele would ride with him in the 'vette.

Things got blurry after that...

* * *

When Pima County Sheriff's Department deputy Ronald Benson arrived at August Busch IV's Tucson apartment the next morning, he found a scene eerily similar to the one that Frontenac officer Scronce would see in Huntleigh 27 years later. A semiautomatic rifle lay at the foot of Busch's bed. A loaded sawed-off shotgun sat on a nearby table. Busch himself appeared dazed, his head and chest spattered with blood, according to Under the Influence, whose authors extensively interviewed Benson.

Busch told the deputies that he couldn't remember what had happened the night before. He thought he might have pulled over and slept beside his car. The truth was very different. Busch's Corvette had wrecked on a sharp curve on River Road in rural northeast Tucson. The accident had thrown Michele Frederick through the sunroof and into a tree. She broke her neck and died at the scene. Busch walked away from the accident and flagged a ride to his apartment. He didn't mention what had happened to the Good Samaritan who took him home.

The deputies arranged an ambulance to take Busch to Tucson General Hospital. Along the way, he admitted drinking "quite a bit" the night before. He said he'd had one or two vodka collinses, as well as several beers. A waitress at Viola's, and people who'd been with him, said that in reality Busch had drunk as many as seven vodkas in his four hours at the disco. The Corvette was littered with empty cans of Bud Light. But Busch insisted he'd been safe to drive, and some people with him said he hadn't appeared drunk.

At Tucson General, doctors treated Busch for a fractured skull, and took blood and urine samples for a potential criminal case. Five days later, Deputy Benson asked an Arizona court to measure the samples for alcohol and other drugs. Benson said the sheriff's department had found probable cause to believe that "the crime of manslaughter had been committed," according to Under the Influence. The judge agreed. But Tucson General couldn't find Busch's urine sample, and it had damaged his blood sample. Suddenly investigators couldn't prove exactly how drunk Busch had been on the night of the accident. A week after the accident, Busch was released from the hospital. He flew home to Missouri and refused to speak further with investigators.

The sheriff's office pursued the case, even sending Benson to St. Louis after getting a court order to take more blood samples from The Fourth. A friend of Michele's said Busch had been driving unsafely. But the Busches fought back, bringing in highway engineers to examine the curve where the accident had happened, hiring lawyers to fight requests for evidence. On July 6, 1984, after an eight-month investigation, prosecutors in Tucson announced they would not bring criminal charges. The circumstantial evidence showed that Busch was driving, they said. But Busch's claim of amnesia was credible because of his skull fracture, and even if they proved he was speeding, they could not prove that he had been driving drunk or had used other drugs, they said.

So The Fourth escaped prosecution in Michele Frederick's death. He stayed in Missouri and eventually graduated from St. Louis University, a private Jesuit institution. As years passed, Busch always denied knowing what had happened that night, or even whether he'd been driving. "I had a bad head injury. I don't remember that part of my life," he told Fortune in 1997. But he did remember that prosecutors hadn't charged him. "They couldn't prove blame." Later, Busch IV told BusinessWeek that the accident might even make him a smarter executive. "As painful as that memory is, the experience will make me a better keeper of responsibility for our products."

But Michelle's death — and a 1985 incident in which St. Louis police shot out a tire of Busch's Mercedes following a high-speed chase — left a taint on Busch that never disappeared. Even minor legal indiscretions will derail an executive's career at most big publicly traded companies. The Fourth's problems were far more serious, and the higher he climbed at A-B, the louder the whispers of nepotism became.

And at his most vulnerable moment Busch, too, would admit that the death in Tucson still haunted him.

* * *

When it comes to troubled American cities, Detroit gets the press, but St. Louis is hardly better off. In 1950, the city had 850,000 people. In 2010, it had 320,000. Like other Midwestern industrial cities, it suffered from middle-class flight, failing schools, and lurid crime. In 2010, only New Orleans had a higher murder rate among the 100 largest American cities.

Along the way St. Louis's biggest companies fled or were taken over. McDonnell Douglas sold itself to Boeing, May Department Stores to Federated. Southwestern Bell moved to San Antonio and eventually became AT&T. A century before St. Louis had been the fourth-largest city in the United States, a worthy rival to Chicago, 250 miles north. These days it scrapped for business with towns like Nashville. Its confidence had plunged along with its population. A few days before I arrived in St. Louis, McClellan wrote a column in the Post-Dispatch headlined, "What's wrong with us? Too hot to say." He speculated that the city had always been doomed because it had been settled by pioneers too lazy to go further west. He was joking, but the fact that the Post-Dispatch mocked its hometown so openly was telling.

Anheuser-Busch was the best antidote to the city's inferiority complex. It employed thousands of people in jobs prized by both blue- and white-collar workers. The Busches rewarded loyalty and long hours with above-market salaries. But the company's local influence went far beyond its economic impact. People around the world knew The King of Beers, the Clydesdales, the red wagons. Along with the Gateway Arch, the Anheuser-Busch brewery is the city's top tourist attraction. A mile south of downtown, the brewery is an attractive campus of red-brick buildings. It could pass for a retro apartment complex if not for the smell of roasted malt that hangs deliciously in the air. Hundreds of thousands of people visit each year to see the Clydesdales, walk past the giant fermenting tanks and bottling lines, and sample a beer or two.

Of course, other cities have their own hometown champions, some larger than A-B. Atlanta will always be known for Coke, Cincinnati for Procter & Gamble. But Anheuser-Busch was a family as well as a company. The Busches played a unique role in St. Louis. The city and its suburbs have long suffered from an identity crisis. Geographically, St. Louis is located at the boundary of the Midwest and the South. But it's still only a two-hour flight from New York. It has an excellent private university, Washington U. Some of its wealthier citizens fancy themselves as transplanted Boston Brahmins, sending their children to Ivy League schools, summering on Cape Cod.

Not the Busches. They had no interest in the East Coast's effete pleasures. They faced south and west. They hunted ducks at a Missouri farm known as the Shooting Grounds and bigger game at a ranch maintained by Anheuser-Busch in Montana. They loved NASCAR and nitro-fueled drag racers. On summer weekends, they flew their helicopters and planes to the Lake of the Ozarks, the drinkin', fishin', and misbehavin' capital of the red states. They had messy divorces and nephews older than their uncles. Their genealogy looked like the Saudi royal family tree, with Adolphus Busch playing King Abdul-Aziz. Gussie, who ran A-B from 1946 to 1975, was a profane, skirt-chasing tyrant with eleven children by four wives. As one of those fancier Missourians told me, the Busches were Appalachia with a few billion dollars.

The family's messes might not have played in the leafy, wealthy precincts around Forest Park, but lots of folks in St. Louis didn't mind a bit. If anything, the problems humanized the Busches. Gussie in particular had been adored — someone told me that his unofficial title had been "King of the Peasants." Further, while the Busches weren't quick to give away their own fortunes, the brewery's corporate largesse was legendary. St. Louis churches, charities, and civic groups all counted on A-B.

The ultimate example of the relationship between company and town is a zoo called Grant's Farm, which Anheuser-Busch operates on a Busch family-owned estate in the western St. Louis suburbs. Aside from a $12 per vehicle parking charge, the zoo is free — the best bargain in town. Like the brewery, Grant's Farm even offers free beer. To make sure that everyone understands who's responsible, signs around Grant's Farm — even now — feature the slogan, "From our family to yours."

* * *

Sep. 27, 2006.

The day had finally come. All those years shaking hands with distributors, giving speeches at wholesaler conventions. All those years learning the business so he didn't sound like an idiot when the Wall Street guys asked their questions. He'd even gotten married. They'd all wanted him to get married, prove that he'd put his partying days behind. He'd never been able to pull the trigger. In 1990, he and Judy had been engaged. They'd even set a wedding date. A few years later, his girlfriend Sage had moved from California to be with him. "Sage Busch," he'd joked. But Judy and Sage had both come and gone.

He'd done it now, though. A few weeks before, he'd married Kathryn Thatcher, a pretty, deeply private 25-year-old blonde from central Vermont with a marketing degree from Boston College. She was quiet and reserved, not like most of his girls. Sure, he hadn't entirely committed to her, not exactly. He doubted one woman would ever be enough for him. But he'd made Kate his wife, lawfully wedded her in the eyes of God, the state of Missouri, and, most importantly, the board of directors.

In return they'd given him the company that he loved. And something more: They'd given him the chance to prove himself once and for all to The Chief. "

August Busch IV, chief executive of The Anheuser-Busch Cos., St. Louis, Missouri.

Had a ring, didn't it?

* * *

A-B had faced a clear crisis when The Third kicked out his father in 1975. When he handed power to his son a generation later, the company's problems were less obvious but just as real. Anheuser's business in the United States topped out in 2002. The company had driven its weaker competitors to the brink of extinction and gobbled their market share. The major breweries that remained, Coors and Miller, were powerful enough to stop A-B from gaining further sales at their expense. Anheuser found itself capped at about 50 percent of the American beer market.

Meanwhile, Busch III focused so heavily on the fight for market share that he failed to react to broader changes working against his company. Even as the United States population grew, beer consumption was flat. The real growth in the American alcohol market was happening at the high end, especially in hard liquor, which had huge profit margins. With its powerful relationships with distributors, Anheuser might have been a natural partner for a big distilled spirits company. But the company never moved into the liquor business. Nor — aside from buying half of the Mexican beer company Grupo Modelo — did Busch III invest in major international expansion.

As the years passed, industry analysts debated why Busch didn't act. The explanation appeared to be a combination of financial — A-B feared overpaying for foreign breweries — and personal. Busch III's obsession with security and need to micromanage left him uncomfortable doing business too far from St. Louis. Whatever his reasons, his strategy left A-B low on growth prospects by 2002, when he officially passed the company's reins to Patrick Stokes, his most trusted lieutenant. Over the next four years, Anheuser's American market share and profits slipped.

By 2006, Anheuser-Busch clearly needed new blood at the top, executives who would reconsider its strategy. Maybe it needed to push into energy drinks and bottled water. Maybe it should bid for a wine or spirits company, or make an international acquisition. Those choices would have hurt Anheuser's short-term profits, but a respected chief executive might have convinced the company's shareholders they would pay off in the long run.

Instead, the board of directors gave the job to The Fourth, who had mostly been confined to the marketing department during his twenty-one years at A-B. He'd had hits and misses along the way; in the early 1990s, he'd overseen the launch of Bud Dry, whose slogan, "Why Ask Why? Try Bud Dry," was not exactly genius. Anheuser eventually dropped Bud Dry, but the failure didn't stop Busch's ascent. Later he encouraged his father to approve the three frogs "Bud-Weis-Er" campaign, which analysts considered a success. He'd also spent years cultivating A-B's relationships with wholesalers and distributors, which in plain English meant hanging out and partying with them — whether at the Lake of the Ozarks, off the coast of Florida, or at a ranch in Montana. An important skill, sure, but Busch IV had little experience in finance, manufacturing, or the international markets crucial to the company's future. He had been a heavy drinker for two decades. He rarely had less than three drinks a day, and often he had many more. Analysts and journalists questioned whether he was up to the task. He was caught in a Catch-22. He had to overhaul Anheuser to succeed. But until he succeeded he wouldn't have the necessary credibility to make a dramatic overhaul. Making matters worse, his dad stayed on Anheuser's board and kept meddling. In 2008, The Fourth told The Wall Street Journal that he had considered buying an energy drinks company but that his father opposed the deal, which went nowhere. The Third even tried to stop his son from picking his own executives.

So Anheuser spun its wheels through 2007 and the first half of 2008. Then the Brazilians at InBev called.

The Fourth promised he wouldn't sell, but he had little choice. By 2008, the Busches owned less than 5 percent of the company that bore their name. After a lost decade, shareholders were in no mood to listen to more promises of better times ahead. Anheuser tried to rally politicians against the takeover, but its argument that beer was a strategically vital product that had to remain American-owned went nowhere.

To keep A-B independent, Busch IV had only one option, buying the half of Groupo Modelo it didn't own already. Anheuser didn't have enough cash on hand to buy Modelo, so it would have to issue billions of dollars of bonds to do the deal. The debt would interfere with InBev's plans to issue its own new debt to buy out A-B's shareholders. Essentially, by messing up its own good credit, Anheuser could stop the InBev takeover.

Julie Macintosh, a reporter for the Financial Times, chronicled the fight in her engrossing 2011 book Dethroning the King: The Hostile Takeover of Anheuser-Busch, an American Icon. Among other tidbits, Macintosh reported that investment bankers involved in the deal christened Busch III "Crazy" and IV "Lazy," because The Fourth so often seemed disconnected at crucial meetings. What outsiders didn't know was that by the spring of 2008, the stress of trying to run A-B had left Busch IV prone to panic attacks. To try to stay calm, he was taking heavy doses of the prescription anti-anxiety medication Xanax, a strongly addictive and often abused drug that can cause listlessness, slurred speech, and confused thinking.

Even so, Busch IV badly wanted to keep Anheuser independent. By Saturday, July 5, the company had agreed to buy Modelo. On Independence Day weekend, Anheuser-Busch looked like it might escape InBev and remain a standalone company.

Then August Busch III stepped in. On July 7, at an airplane hangar owned by A-B at the Spirit of St. Louis Airport, the Anheuser board met to talk about the Modelo deal. The Third came out against it. He questioned whether Anheuser's management team — including his son, of course — had considered the risks of taking so much new debt. He wondered whether the two companies could mesh, whether the deal would ultimately work. By the end of the meeting, the board had basically rejected the deal. InBev was the only alternative.

Six days later, on July 13, Anheuser announced that it was selling itself to InBev for $52 billion in cash. The name of the new company was Anheuser-Busch InBev, but that fig leaf didn't hide the fact that the Brazilians were in charge. August Busch IV was the only A-B board member to join the new company's board. One hundred forty-seven years after Adolphus Busch married Lilly Anheuser and began the Busch dynasty, Anheuser-Busch was no more.

The Third's influence on the Anheuser-Busch board cannot be overstated. If he had wanted the Modelo deal, it is hard to imagine the other directors saying no. The $52 billion question is why he went the other way, why he ultimately took A-B away from his son less than two years after giving him the top job. In the epilogue of Dethroning The King, Macintosh wrote:

Did The Third recognize that the company's days as an independent brewer were limited, and engineer things so that it would be sold on his son's watch rather than his? August III began supporting The Fourth's CEO candidacy once Anheuser's glory days ended, he blocked his son's efforts to resurrect the company… and then, once Anheuser was firmly established as a takeover target, he steered it towards InBev. He had hundreds of millions of dollars personally at stake.

Maybe Busch III hoped his son had the chops to run A-B but realized too late that The Fourth wasn't up to the task. Maybe — like more than one chief executive — he simply couldn't envision anyone else, not even his son, running the company he'd dominated for so long. Only Busch III knows what drove him. And he isn't telling.

But what is beyond doubt is the effect that selling Anheuser-Busch had on The Fourth. He'd always been prone to drinking and partying. Now he had $100 million, no job, and the burden of being held responsible for dismantling his family's legacy and losing a St. Louis icon. "I am proud to accept this challenge that carries a great deal of personal meaning for me," he had said when he took the job in September 2006. He was proud no more. He fell swift and hard.

* * *

Sunday, Feb. 7, 2010.

Cocaine.

The man with a thousand toys didn't have much to do, didn't have anything to do, if he was being perfectly honest. Even Kate had bailed, divorced his sorry ass, not that he could blame her. She'd walked in on him with another woman, and all his pleading couldn't change her mind.

So: here a bump, there a bump, everywhere a bumpbumpbump. Gram a day at least. Or more. He had a hard time keeping track, because he'd do a few lines, feel pretty good. Then he'd start getting edgy, the coke crawls, and the stuff would look like the poison it was, and he'd toss what he had left. But then a couple hours later he'd want more, want it bad. He'd have to call his dealer and hook up again. It was a damned stupid way to do drugs, inefficient. The money didn't matter at this point, but still. His three main expenses these days were coke, guns, and cars. He kept buying cars, he wasn't even sure why, an Audi for $160,000, a Mercedes that set him back $350K. He could hardly keep track of them all. Guns too, he'd always loved them, but his obsession had maybe gotten unhealthy. Several times lately he'd fired them in the house. Once he'd accidentally pulled the trigger on a rifle, a .308, the shot so loud that he could barely hear for a week. Worst of all his friends were in the next room. He could have killed them.

Unhealthy. Yeah. If he stepped back, looked at the situation, considered it, he could see the coke had stopped being fun a while ago. And not just the coke. The benzos and the oxy and the booze too. His family was yapping at him about it, his mom, his sister, his buddy Steve. He'd been losing weight. Plus he kept having flashbacks to the time the cops chased him through St. Louis all those years ago, like they were waiting for him, getting ready to beat on him. He knew the idea didn't make any sense, but it was plaguing him. So yeah, probably time to take it easy.

But by this point the drugs weren't so much a choice, per se. More of an obligation. He'd been depressed to start with, and jonesing made the blues so much worse. Blues wasn't even the word, everything went black, a river of black. The universe had played a crazy joke on him, given him the job he'd spent his whole life working for and then taken it away. He would have done anything to keep it, anything to prove himself to the Chief. But the Chief had made up his mind.

At least thinking about getting high kept him from thinking about everything else.

The cops came to the gate around 4 p.m., the sun low in the sky, another cruddy winter day. Seemed his mom had called CPS, Child Protective Services. All the drugs and the guns had her worried, what with Blake in the house. Blake, Adrienne's eight-year-old son. Like he would ever hurt Blake. The boy was the only good thing in his life right now, practically all he had to live for. He was always careful with guns and drugs when Blake was around. He wished his mom had known. He might have avoided some embarrassment. 'Cause, come on, he wasn't a hundred percent at the moment, but even he could see that having CPS show up at a mansion in Huntleigh… let's just say it didn't happen every day.

But what happened later that week was much worse. The cops came back, and this time they weren't talking. When he opened his door, they put him against the wall and cuffed him. Just that fast. When he asked if he was under arrest, they told him no, they'd explain on the way. Turned out they had a court order to take him in for 96-hour involuntary detention, figure out if he was a danger to himself or anyone else. If he was mentally competent. Two years before 30,000 people had been working for him. Now the cops were telling him he'd be better off at the psych ward at St. John's Mercy, where he could sober up, get some help.

The worst part was he hardly even had the strength to argue. He knew they were right.

* * *

Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011.

For six weeks, St. Louis had waited to hear whether August Busch IV would face charges in Adrienne Nicole Martin's death. Now County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch had the answer: No.

"It was clearly an accidental overdose," the prosecutor said at a press conference to discuss his decision. The post-mortem tox screen showed Adrienne had lethal levels of oxycodone in her blood. The hole in her nose showed she was a chronic cocaine user. The drugs that killed her "didn't just drop out of the sky," McCulloch said. But Busch had refused to talk about the case with police after that first Sunday afternoon. Without his help, "the investigation as to where the drugs came from is at a dead end," McCulloch said.

The announcement provoked a surprising debate in St. Louis, which showed up on the Post-Dispatch's comment boards whenever the paper wrote about the case. Some posters saw the refusal to bring charges as yet another sign that the Busches, especially The Fourth, were above the law. For the second time, August Busch IV had escaped legal sanction for the death of young woman.

But other writers disagreed. Adrienne was an adult who had chosen to use drugs, they argued. Only she was to blame for her death. And McCulloch had followed his own standard in the case. St. Louis County, unlike some nearby jurisdictions, did not generally prosecute drug suppliers in overdose deaths — whether the supplier was a dealer selling drugs or simply an acquaintance sharing his own stash. Only if police found that another person was present during the overdose and hadn't bothered to get help would prosecutors bring charges.

"I am not a Busch fan but if this woman was found in a crack house we would not be reading about her," a typical comment read. "She took the drugs, and unless they can prove someone held a gun to her head, she was the one that made the wrong choice."

* * *

The threat of criminal prosecution had disappeared. But Busch IV had one more legal bullet to dodge. Under Missouri law, Adrienne's parents and son had the right to sue for damages, alleging that Busch's negligence had caused Adrienne's death. As a child, Blake had a much stronger claim. But since he was too young to file suit himself, Kevin Martin — Adrienne's ex-husband and Blake's father — would need to bring the case. A civil lawsuit could have forced Busch and his employees to give depositions under oath about what had happened on the night of Adrienne's death, or to plead their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

On March 31, 2011, Kevin sued August Busch IV in state court in St. Louis. Then the case took an odd turn. Lawyers for Kevin and Busch jointly agreed to move the case to Cape Girardeau, a town in southeastern Missouri 115 miles away. Kevin lived in Cape Girardeau, but St. Louis County made more sense as a venue for the case. Nearly every potential witness — police officers, Busch's employees, and Busch himself, among others — lived in and around St. Louis.

The reason for the move became clear soon enough. Kevin Martin didn't intend to put August Busch IV through a protracted legal fight. On April 15, Busch agreed to pay $1.5 million for Adrienne's death, with the money to be split among Blake and Adrienne's parents, who were divorced and estranged. The payment was sizeable, considering Adrienne was jobless and had died of an overdose. Even if a jury had found Busch liable, it might have awarded less. A quick settlement also meant lower legal expenses, so Blake would keep more of the money.

On the other hand, the two sides agreed to a deal before Kevin's lawyer deposed a single witness or saw a single document or email that wasn't publicly available. Most plaintiffs' lawyers want some idea of the strength of their case before they agree to a settlement, even one that seems favorable. Blake didn't need the money right away, so why rush? The quick settlement smacked of collusion between The Fourth and Kevin, who had become friends before Adrienne died and remained so afterwards. It would prevent Adrienne's mother or father from being actively involved in the case, though they could ask for a portion of the $1.5 million.

Adrienne's parents separately tried to assert their rights to intervene in the lawsuit. But in a bizarre ruling in May 2011, the Cape Girardeau judge, William Syler, denied their request. In December, a Missouri appellate court reversed Syler's ruling. Adrienne's mother and father then asked to return the case to St. Louis — and in July 2012 Syler again ruled against them, setting up more appeals. Lawyers for Busch could not have found a better delay strategy. After more than a year, the suit was stuck at its earliest stages.

Finally, on Sep. 25, 2012, the Missouri Supreme Court rejected the parents' request to move the case back to St. Louis. Busch IV and Kevin Martin had won. In a hearing on Oct. 9, Judge Syler was openly dismissive of Christine Trampler, Adrienne's mother. On Oct. 30, the judge approved a $1.75 million settlement that included a $200,000 payment to Christine Trampler, ending the lawsuit."

And so the Fourth's lawyers washed away the last legal fallout from Adrienne Nicole Martin's death.

* * *

Thursday, August 2, 2012. 8 p.m.

I'd spent the day talking to St. Louis notables and checking out the records from the Martin lawsuit at the Court of Appeals downtown. The city's emptiness was jarring. Lots of American city centers are deserted after dark. But the St. Louis core seemed hollowed out even on a weekday afternoon, like a neutron bomb had wiped away the people and left the buildings standing. Note to Hollywood: if you're looking to film a post-apocalyptic epic, STL will do just fine.

The folks I'd interviewed had been nice enough, but not too exciting. I was about to meet a more colorful character, a seventy-something professional sharpie named Norton Balber, a/k/a The Hat. He'd been a small-time bookmaker and backroom card player decades before, back when St. Louis still had a mob presence, before the Feds cracked down. Now organized crime was gone, but the state had more gambling than ever. Like the rest of the Midwest, Missouri had decided casinos were fine as long as the state got a cut. The Hat was still a good enough card player to take down the frat boys who came to the Lumiere casino downtown on Friday nights. But his main occupation was telling stories about the glory days.

I'd met Balber playing poker at the Lumiere in 2009, on a tour to promote my novels. Most folks you meet at the table stop thinking about you the minute you get up, but The Hat had turned into a fan of my books. We emailed every so often, and when I told him I was coming to St. Louis, he said we should have dinner.

So I made my way to an Italian place not far from the train station. The restaurant was mediocre, but Balber presented me with a most pleasant surprise. He knew "a gorgeous girl" — a woman almost forty, but forever a girl to the Hat — who knew August Busch IV. Knew him well, in fact. Her name, almost too good to be true, was April Twist.

April Nickles Twist and her ex-husband Tony are a story all their own. Tony's a retired professional hockey player, a forward on the St. Louis Blues for six years. His real job, though, was fighting. "It takes a special talent to stand on skates and beat someone senseless, and no one does it better," Sports Illustrated once wrote about him. April's an ex-waitress turned bar and cigar shop owner. She's small and busty, with curly hair brown at the roots and a wide, inviting smile. April has known August almost twenty years; they met cute on his boat on the Lake of the Ozarks. "He said what's your name, 'I said, I'm April.' And he said, 'Oh, I'm August.'"

April, sick of jokes about her name, thought The Fourth was mocking her. "I was like, 'Oh, that's really funny, dude.' I definitely wasn't reading the paper to know what August Busch looked like. I think he was really intrigued by the fact that I was on his boat, and I had no idea who he was."

Of course, The Fourth had other reasons to be intrigued. "I'm wild and fun, so he liked that about me," she said. "It was always fun when you were with August, you got the best dinners, you got the best treatment. He always wanted to go have fun, and he always wanted to bring his friends."

April and August slept together occasionally, but the relationship was never serious. April watched with amusement as his women came and went. "There was always a couple girls like me who he had hidden away," she said. Even after April married Twist in 2001, she stayed friends with The Fourth. She said she believed he appreciated the fact that she never asked him for money or tried to take advantage of his wealth. Over the years, she grew to see him as deeply lonely, despite — or because of — his drinking and late nights.

"He's a normal guy who happened to fall into a lot of money, and he doesn't have very many friends," she said. "He doesn't have a lot of people who care about him who he's not paying to care about him."

The day after Adrienne died, The Fourth called April. "He was so upset," she said. "Told me that his girlfriend had died, that she'd died in her sleep. He was crying, really upset, not upset like, 'Oh my God, I got another dead girl, he was genuinely, genuinely upset.'" He denied using drugs on the night Adrienne had died. "He said, 'I didn't do coke, April. I just went to bed and I went to sleep, and she's dead.'"

Busch stuck to that story in an interview Jan. 4, 2011 with the Post-Dispatch. "I went to serve her breakfast in bed, and I couldn't wake her up," he said. "It's the saddest thing I've ever dealt with." He acknowledged that he'd been depressed since the A-B sale and had been hospitalized in 2010, but didn't mention his alcohol or drug problems. He seemed intent on convincing the world, or maybe himself, that Adrienne had not died of drug abuse.

But the toxicology reports proved otherwise — and raised the question of why Busch had ruled out the possibility so vehemently. He too had been a chronic cocaine user. Either he had kept using after his stint in rehab, or he had quit and somehow missed the fact that Adrienne hadn't. He appeared to be a fool at best, a liar at worse. His professions of devotion for Adrienne made matters worse.

"She was the only girl I've ever been with that I didn't want to have someone on the side," he said. "You know, I'm this notorious bachelor who always wanted someone on the side, but I didn't with Adrienne."

A sweet sentiment. It would have been, anyway, if Busch hadn't been married less than three years before. The comment reinforced the popular perception that he'd married Kate Thatcher only because he wanted to become Anheuser's chief executive.

Not surprisingly, The Fourth gave no more on-the-record interviews about Adrienne's death.

* * *

The deaths of Michele Fredrick and Adrienne Martin have created an indelible image of Busch as a feckless playboy, a drug addict who couldn't care less about the women he beds. In a Post-Dispatch column in February 2011, Bill McClellan went to The Great Gatsby to explain Busch:

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

The analogy is seductive. But it misses a crucial point. The Buchanans had each other. August Busch IV has no one. His family is tired of his messes and keeps a wary distance. On that cold December morning when Adrienne died, The Third and the rest of the Busch clan were in Hawaii. The Fourth has no children. He destroyed his marriage. After the A-B sale, he had $100 million, but the only woman who would stay with him was a drug-addled single mom. Despite his protestations of love for Adrienne, he liked her more than anything because she put up with his depression. "I've been through some pretty bad times the last two years, and she was always by my side," he told the Post-Dispatch.

August Busch's relationship with his father has defined his life. In interviews with business magazines — interviews intended to demonstrate his fitness to run a publicly traded company — he spoke over and over of his desire to prove himself to The Third. In 1997 he told Fortune that he kept letters from his father in his briefcase. "Five notes of compliment from the Chief over ten years of full-time employment here… I cherish them." In 2002 he was even more effusive, telling Businessweek: "Take a walk through my house, and it looks like a father museum. Every picture on the wall is of my father, or me and my father… But he has been extremely tough on me. Maybe you can call it tough love." Even in 2007, after becoming CEO, he told Forbes that a better relationship with the Third would be a "dream."

But that respect, that awe, they go one way only. The Fourth never should have run Anheuser-Busch; his qualifications were laughably thin, and he had Michele's death hanging over him. But then The Third never really let him. Soon as InBev came along, he forced aside his son as coolly as he'd driven out his father a generation before. He keeps his feelings about The Fourth to himself — Goodbye, Alex — but his will tells the tale. August Busch IV isn't in it.

So Busch bumbles on, with his cars and his guns and his helicopter and his empty mansion. He's trying to stay off cocaine and oxycodone, though he hasn't quit drinking. He roots for the Cardinals. For a while he even had a new girl, Yolanda.

Most of all, he waits for just one more chance to prove himself to his dad. The Busches were born just one day apart, The Fourth on June 15, 1964, The Third on June 16, 1937. This June, The Fourth had happy news for April Twist. His dad had suggested they meet to celebrate their birthdays.

"He's like, 'My dad asked me to go out to dinner,'" Twist said. "And he was excited."

* * *

Not long ago, I got a call from the 314 — St. Louis — area code, a number I didn't recognize. I had reached out to The Fourth through several channels, but I didn't expect him to call back. The civil case wasn't yet settled, and he didn't know me.

But there he was. And he wanted to talk. And talk some more. The conversations were off the record, so I can't reveal their substance, but I will say this: they were profoundly depressing. The Fourth isn't dumb, but he seems to lack basic insight into how he's ended up in such a lonely place — much less the desire or ability to change his path. He's always shifting blame to others, a classic trait of addicts. He's always explaining why mistakes he's made aren't really his fault. The drugs and the drinking seem to have taken a toll on his memory, too — he regularly repeats himself. He has half-formed plans about what he might do with the rest of his life, but his history suggests he'll have a very tough time motivating himself enough to carry them out.

Despite the money The Fourth has blown the last couple years on Learjets and Rolls-Royces and his other toys, he's still vastly wealthy. At forty-eight, he could still have a family, if he wants. Even a few months of sobriety would convince plenty of women to take a chance on him.

The odds are long, and I wouldn't bet on him. But if he's going to have any chance at all, August Busch IV will have to take a crucial first step. He must give up trying to impress his father. He must stop being The Fourth.

THE END

Table of Contents

Title Page

Sunday, Dec. 19, 2010.

This may sound like a murder mystery.

Wednesday, Aug. 1, 2012. 7 p.m.

Sunday, Dec. 19, 2010. 1:20 p.m.

May 1975.

Monday, Dec. 20, 2010. 2:30 p.m.

Sunday, Nov. 13, 1983. Just past midnight.

When Pima County Sheriff's Department...

When it comes to troubled American cities...

Sep. 27, 2006.

A-B had faced a clear crisis...

Sunday, Feb. 7, 2010.

Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011.

The threat of criminal prosecution...

Thursday, August 2, 2012. 8 p.m.

The deaths of Michele Fredrick...

Not long ago...