Who killed Steve Kangas?

Background on Scaife

...in Scaife's history a...steady thread of hurting people who don't like him or who he gets at cross [purposes] with." Some of his associates speculated that drinking contributed to a mean streak they saw in Scaife. Others weren't sure the drinking was a factor. From the time he was a teenager, Scaife earned the reputation of a bully....."People are really afraid of him," his reach is extensive,.... "Scaife is known to many acquaintances as a man who bears grudges." "When he gets a hate on for somebody, he tends to pursue it to substantial length,".... Scaife has often behaved like a man who expects the world to bend to his wishes....

and fesagr ysical evidence greahtr ts*($#o,

Throughout his adult life Scaife has worried about his personal security.... recalled Pittsburgh police cars stationed outside his house 20 years ago"
...according to the May 3 Washington Post, and found on this page.

This page contains extracts from that article, the second of a series on Richard Mellon Scaife (all emphasis added). This is intended as background to the debate of Web Warrior Steve Kangas' untimely death of Feb 8 1999. It was this Internet debate that eventually forced the Scaife-friendly police to acknowledge Scaife's cover-up of the Kangas-Scaife connection, five weeks after Kangas was mysteriously found shot (twice?) in the head on the 39th floor, 60 feet from Scaife's offices. Police ruled it a suicide, and no "complaint" has been filed with the FBI.
The first Washington Post article detailed how bored billionare Scaife is a huge player in funding right wing propaganda and mind-bending mills. In my opinion, Scaife's influence is a major reason why Republicans are seen as mean-spirited fear mongers in some circles. 

text version extracted from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
    at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/
clinton/stories/scaifemain050399.htm

An Heir's Paradoxical World
                Part 2: Money anxieties have marred
                relationships in the life of conservative
                donor Richard Mellon Scaife.
                 Database of Scaife's Fund Grants 
      
+ Part One is: 
The funding father of the right


     --------------------------------------------------------
$+      
 Money, Family Name Shaped Scaife

$+                  [photo]
$+             Richard Scaife greets President Bill Clinton
$+             during a 1997 reception at the White House.
                           (The White House)

$+   By Robert G. Kaiser
$+   Washington Post Staff Writer
$+   Monday, May 3, 1999; Page A1

$+ Richard Mellon Scaife, the most generous donor to
$+ conservative causes in American history, is
$+ astoundingly rich and has given away more than $600
$+ million, yet is known to people who have worked for him
$+ as a cheapskate.

$+ He has given at least $340 million to fund a "war of
$+ ideas" against American liberalism, yet no one
$+ interviewed for these articles could remember him
$+ discussing a book he had read or recall an original
$+ idea that came from him.

$+ In his own small world in Pittsburgh, Scaife is known
$+ as a man who wants to be in control, who wants
$+ employees who say "yes," who is capable of bearing
$+ grudges for years. Once, it is said by knowledgeable
$+ sources, he compelled the Mellon Bank to fire a newly
$+ hired attorney in the bank's legal department because
$+ the lawyer was the son of a former employee Scaife had
$+ turned against.

$+ Scaife has broken off relations with numerous friends
$+ and associates, waged a bitter, prolonged divorce
$+ battle with his first wife, has strained relations with
$+ his son and no relations with his daughter. He and his
$+ sister haven't spoken for 25 years.
$+ Yet his friends describe the man they call Dick Scaife
$+ as charming, warm, easy to be with. He himself said
$+ once, "I'm genial and I'm jovial."

$+ Conservatives regularly honor him.

$+
$+ Scaife became the leading financial supporter of the
$+ movement that reshaped American politics in the last
$+ quarter of the 20th century....

$+ So the available evidence will have to do. That
$+ evidence begins with his money. Thanks to genealogical
$+ good luck, Scaife has a personal fortune of many
$+ hundreds of millions. He lives a life thickly insulated
$+ from the workaday tribulations of ordinary citizens,
$+ with houses in Pittsburgh, the resort of Ligonier, Pa.,
$+ Nantucket and Pebble Beach. A private DC-9 flies him
$+ from one to the other.

$+ The Mellon family money he inherited, both in spendable
$+ cash and in trusts and foundations designated for
$+ philanthropy, shaped every aspect of his existence. Yet
$+ many around him can tell stories about how his
$+ anxieties over money disrupted his relations with other
$+ people.

$+ One is William J. Gill, who worked for Scaife's
$+ charitable foundations 30 years ago. Gill took a trip
$+ to Vietnam on foundation business and when he returned
$+ submitted an expense account that included charges for
$+ laundering his shirts during the trip. Scaife refused
$+ to pay for the laundering and wrote a memo that Gill
$+ could never throw out:

$+ "I have gone over the expense report that you submitted
$+ and I would ask that you remove the laundry and the
$+ valet charge. I have noted on previous expense reports
$+ as well as this one that a taxi costs $8.00 one way
$+ between your house and the [Pittsburgh] airport. I
$+ would suggest that in the future you either drive
$+ yourself or have your wife deposit you at the airport."

$+ Said James Shuman, who worked for Scaife nearly 20
$+ years ago: "He just assumed that everyone is out to
$+ steal every little thing he has."

$+ From His Mother, a Legacy of Riches and Alcoholism
$+ -------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------
$+ The potential significance of inherited wealth was
$+ foreseen, ironically, by Thomas Mellon, founder of the
$+ family fortune. In 1885, reflecting on his success, he
$+ observed: "The normal condition of man is hard work,
$+ self-denial, acquisition and accumulation; as soon as
$+ his descendants are freed from the necessity of such
$+ exertion they begin to degenerate sooner or later in
$+ both body and mind."

$+ This was a pessimistic forecast for what might happen
$+ to Mellon's heirs, but many of them lived up to it.
$+ Like other American families overwhelmed by great
$+ riches, the Mellon line has produced numerous unhappy
$+ souls. One of them was Thomas Mellon's granddaughter
$+ Sarah, who would pass a fortune on to the son everyone
$+ called Dickie.

$+ Sarah Mellon Scaife was "just a gutter drunk," in the
$+ words of her daughter, Cordelia. "So was Dick,"
$+ Cordelia Scaife May added of her brother in an
$+ interview. "So was I."

$+ If money was most important in shaping Richard Scaife's
$+ life, alcohol may come second. In a household dominated
$+ by his mother's drinking, Scaife's childhood was
$+ pampered but sad, according to his sister. "I don't
$+ remember any laughter in that house," she said. The
$+ children were raised by nannies and nurses.

$+ Friends describe Scaife as a hard drinker beginning
$+ when he was a high school student at Deerfield Academy
$+ in Massachusetts. Yale expelled Scaife in March of his
$+ freshman year after a drunken evening in which Scaife
$+ rolled a keg of beer down a flight of stairs, breaking
$+ the legs of a classmate, according to Burton Hersh,
$+ biographer of the Mellon family.

$+ As an adult, close friends said, he almost drank
$+ himself to death more than once. These people credited
$+ both his wives and his longtime aide R. Daniel
$+ McMichael for saving him. His second wife, Margaret
$+ "Ritchie" Battle Scaife - with help from the Betty Ford
$+ Clinic - finally got him on the wagon in the early
$+ '90s.

$+ Some of his associates speculated that drinking
$+ contributed to a mean streak they saw in Scaife. Others
$+ weren't sure the drinking was a factor. From the time
$+ he was a teenager, Scaife earned the reputation of a
$+ bully. His sister recalled one occasion when, home in
$+ Ligonier on a vacation from Deerfield, he got caught by
$+ the police making prank phone calls. "The police gave
$+ him a polite talking-to, but Dick was totally
$+ unconcerned," Cordelia May said. "The police didn't
$+ frighten him at all."

$+ Another friend remembered the young Scaife using the
$+ telephone to order anything he could find that could be
$+ delivered to the home of a merchant in Ligonier who had
$+ infuriated him. The merchant received numerous
$+ deliveries, from pizza to a load of gravel.

$+ Most of the people who agreed to talk about Scaife for
$+ these articles insisted on anonymity. Just the mention
$+ of Scaife's name seems to put people on their guard.

$+ "There's a bit of fear out there because his reach is
$+ extensive," observed Allen G. Kukovich, a Democratic
$+ state senator from Westmoreland County, Pa., who has
$+ been the target of hostile editorials in Scaife's
$+ newspaper.

$+ Scaife is known to many acquaintances as a man who
$+ bears grudges. He has cut off old friends who angered
$+ him and never acknowledged them again. He has tried to
$+ blackball people he fired with other possible
$+ employers. "People are really afraid of him," said the
$+ director of a charity in Pittsburgh.

$+ Shuman said he saw in Scaife's history "a sort of
$+ steady thread of hurting people who don't like him or
$+ who he gets at cross [purposes] with."

$+ "When he gets a hate on for somebody, he tends to
$+ pursue it to substantial length," said a prominent
$+ Pittsburgh lawyer whose firm has had extensive dealings
$+ with Scaife.

$+ Scaife has often behaved like a man who expects the
$+ world to bend to his wishes. Hersh, author of "The
$+ Mellon Family," recounted an example. Nearly 25 years
$+ ago Hersh had an extensive interview with Scaife, who
$+ told him more than he has told anyone else about his
$+ early life, his disputes with members of the Mellon
$+ family and his political and business activities. Hersh
$+ was at home in New Hampshire writing the book when he
$+ received a telephone call from Scaife, who evidently
$+ had decided that he told the author too much. Hersh
$+ recently recalled:

$+ "He tried to bully me into not using parts of our
$+ interview, and he warned me ominously that I could
$+ regret it if I didn't do as he asked.

$+ "'No, I won't,' I replied.

$+ "'Why not?' Scaife asked.

$+ "'Because I'm tape recording this conversation,' I
$+ said. I never heard from him again."

$+ Hersh concluded that Scaife was "basically just a great
$+ big spoiled child."

$+ Several years ago Scaife got angry with the Mellon
$+ Bank, which owned the building in Pittsburgh where he
$+ had his office, for letting conditions in the building
$+ deteriorate. He complained, according to a member of
$+ the board of the Sarah Scaife Foundation, but the bank
$+ was not responsive. So he announced that he was moving
$+ and got a new office (on the same 39th floor he had
$+ been on for years) in a nearby tower. He also took all
$+ his and his foundations' money out of the Mellon Bank.

$+ Mellon Family History Left Scaife With Mixed Feelings
$+ --------------------------------------------------------
$+ Several of Scaife's associates said his complex
$+ feelings about the Mellons are a key to the man. Those
$+ feelings are the product of two generations of family
$+ history.

$+ By all accounts the Mellons were delighted in the
$+ mid-1920s when their rather plain and shy Sarah caught
$+ the eye of the dashing Alan Scaife, a handsome Yale....

$+ Alan's dash was not accompanied by business acumen. The
$+ Scaife Co. struggled under his command. When war broke
$+ out, Alan Scaife joined the Office of Strategic
$+ Services (OSS) as an Army major....

$+ ...in the late 1940s. "Alan Scaife was terribly
$+ worried about inherited wealth, apparently feeling that
$+ you have to be Republican to stay rich," Block said
$+ recently.

$+ Sarah's brother R.K. Mellon, whose successful
$+ investments vastly enlarged the family fortune in the
$+ post-World War II years, had little confidence in his
$+ brother-in-law, and gave Alan Scaife no meaningful
$+ authority in Mellon family businesses. "My father - was
$+ sucking hind tit," Richard Mellon Scaife told Hersh in
$+ the mid-1970s....

$+ -------------------------------------------------------- Page Two Burdens of Wealth --------------------------------------------------------

$+ Silence on Philanthropic Philosophy,
$+ Intellectual Beliefs
$+ --------------------------------------------------------
$+ Most of the $340 million Scaife's trusts and
$+ foundations have given to conservative causes has
$+ funded some form of intellectual activity. "Our funding
$+ is based on our support of ideas like limited
$+ government, individual rights and a strong defense," he
$+ said in a written response to questions from The
$+ Washington Post. But no one has ever accused Scaife of
$+ being an intellectual....

$+ Scaife has apparently never given a speech or written
$+ an article outlining his personal philosophy, the
$+ principles guiding his philanthropy or his ideas.
$+ Occasionally, he has dropped tantalizing, if also
$+ confusing, clues, as he did at a rally sponsored by the
$+ Heritage Foundation after the Republicans gained
$+ control of the House and Senate in November 1994.

$+ Invited to speak, Scaife said: "With political victory,
$+ the ideological conflicts that have swirled about this
$+ nation for half a century now show clear signs of
$+ breaking into naked ideological warfare in which the
$+ very foundations of our republic are threatened and
$+ that we had better take heed."....

$+ Had he not inherited a lot of money, said former aide
$+ Shuman, "I don't think he had the intellectual capacity
$+ to do very much."
$+ others attribute the success of his giving largely to
$+ the influence of his two longest-serving aides,
$+ McMichael and Richard M. Larry....

$+ McMichael has a conspiratorial bent as well....
$+ .... Larry, a former Marine who
$+ handles grants involving domestic policy, was largely
$+ responsible for Scaife's involvement in the "Arkansas
$+ Project" that attempted to find dirt on the Clintons....

$+ The people who run the big organizations Scaife has
$+ supported, not surprisingly, are quick to forgive
$+ Scaife's idiosyncrasies. Asked about Scaife's
$+ predilection for conspiracy theories, for example, the
$+ head of one big recipient organization shrugged: "I
$+ don't know why he goes off on these toots."

$+ Weymouth, a painter and restorer of horse-drawn
$+ carriages whose mother was a du Pont, described Scaife
$+ as someone "passionate about flowers" who has a refined
$+ taste in gardens and paintings. "He's a wonderful
$+ person, very good sense of humor," Weymouth added.

$+ "He's a very attractive, very pleasant, very amusing
$+ person," said William Boyd, a lifelong friend.

$+ So Scaife is as kind to friends as he can be harsh to
$+ perceived enemies. James Whelan, the founding editor of
$+ the Washington Times who worked for Scaife when he
$+ owned the Sacramento Union, said this was
$+ characteristic. Scaife's world, Whelan said, is starkly
$+ divided between allies and adversaries. "If you're not
$+ my friend, you're my enemy - he lives by that kind of
$+ code."

$+ Maintaining Privacy Under Newfound Notoriety
$+ --------------------------------------------------------
$+ Throughout his adult life Scaife has worried about his
$+ personal security. Shuman, his former aide, recalled
$+ Pittsburgh police cars stationed outside his house 20
$+ years ago. This year those fears were realized in a
$+ bizarre episode that grew out of Scaife's new notoriety
$+ as a bogeyman of the left.

$+ Scaife is the topic of much discussion on the Internet.
$+ One of his critics in cyberspace, Steve Kangas,
$+ maintained his own Web site where he wrote diatribes
$+ against the the "overclass," a combination of the
$+ wealthy and the CIA. He considered Scaife an
$+ influential member.

$+ On Feb. 8, Kangas was found dead in a men's room on the
$+ 39th floor of the Oxford Center office building, where
$+ Scaife's Pittsburgh offices are now located.
[Scaife covered up the Scaife-Kangas connection
and tampered with physical evidence and witnesses,
as well as outragiously smearing Kangas's name.]
$+ Police ruled it a suicide.
$+ Kangas had come from Las Vegas with
$+ a gun; Scaife concluded that he was Kangas's target,
$+ according to knowledgeable sources.

$+ Kangas's suicide was not publicized for [5] weeks
$+ after the event, but the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette finally
$+ got wind of it and wrote several stories. So did Scaife's
$+ Tribune-Review. Scaife apparently didn't like the
$+ Post-Gazette's coverage, which raised questions about
$+ why Scaife had hired a private detective to investigate
$+ Kangas (the same Rex Armistead who worked on the
$+ Arkansas Project) instead of relying on Pittsburgh
$+ police.

$+ Scaife's Tribune-Review ran an angry editorial
$+ denouncing the other paper's coverage - an editorial
$+ that had to have the owner's personal approval,
$+ according to a former editor of the Tribune-Review. The
$+ editorial described Dennis B. Roddy, the Post-Gazette
$+ reporter who wrote the stories, and John G. Craig Jr.,
$+ the editor of the paper, as "Scaife haters" who should
$+ have realized that "Kangas, an unstable man who became
$+ fully unhinged, was pushed over the top by liberals
$+ like them who joined the Clinton White House and their
$+ friends to demonize Dick Scaife."

$+ ¦ Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company