Temperamental Tycoon

...Orson Swindle, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam who acted as Perot's adviser and principal spokesman in the 1992 campaign, also found out the hard way what little interest his former boss has in dissenting opinions...

...It is still unclear how this impression developed...

...Like others in his position, Lucas sounds a little like a veteran of cult deprogramming, as he describes the time he spent involved with Perot...

...I have a lot of faith in him...

...We're going to be the majority party," he says hopefully...

...In September 1992, the candidate, fears about his daughter's wedding apparently assuaged, asked his followers to help him decide whether to rejoin the presidential race...

...Way, the owner of a home improvement business in his late 50s, hardly fits the profile of a dangerous political extremist...

...At the Reform party's convention, which will be held at an undetermined location around Labor Day, party members will be able to put that principle into action by voting directly for their choice of presidential nominee (not that there is much question who will win), as well as for House and Senate candidates who will then receive the party's endorsement...

...Slated to sit on a panel that would discuss the idea of a third political party, Swindle was promptly bumped from the speakers list when it became clear that his views on the subject differed from Perot's...

...Still others have reported being pressured to sign "confessions" of their misdeeds...

...Verney treats it with all the gravity it merits...

...Perot finally acquiesced last month, then proceeded to tell Balz a bizarre story-"You're not going to believe this," Perot cautioned-about how one of the two major political parties had "called up" in 1993 and asked him to donate $1 million for a "dirty tricks" campaign against the other...

...Before it was over, the investigation of Larry Way cost the Perot campaign a total of $18,000, more than $16,000 of it in billing hours...

...Wilson seems content enough...

...When he first joined United We Stand in March 1992, Lucas says, "I was fresh out of a divorce...

...Silence...

...Verney, a former Democratic operative and air-traffic controller from New Hampshire, recently became the executive director of the Perot-funded Reform party-under whose banner the Texan hopes to go to the White House in November-so the question is more than merely academic...

...Perhaps as a result, spreading from the top of the campaign downward, Perot '92 became infected with a sometimes hysterical paranoia...

...Instead, Perot keeps chugging along, running his latest campaign, shaking up the dreaded establishment...

...In retrospect, it is surprising Perot did not see the assassins with his own eyes since, as his former security consultant told the New York Times, Perot "would sometimes prowl the grounds himself, armed with an automatic rifle...

...Both the local police department and the FBI subsequently dismissed the Vietnamese-killers story as ridiculous...

...As one Reform party organizer in Omaha put it, explaining her unwillingness to speak to a reporter, "big corporations own almost all of the big media anymore and they have a slant that they want...

...Plus, to observers of local politics, Way was not an unknown or sinister figure, having been the mayor of Burkittsville, Maryland, for eight years in the 1970s and a candidate for county commissioner in 1990...

...Instead, Perot prefers to appear on television-a medium he is better able to dominate and control-where the questions are apt to be softballs or at least easily ignored...

...Since August 1993, he has spent at least three days a week volunteering for the Cause...

...she asks without a hint of sarcasm...

...The telephone connection has gone bad for a moment, and a buzzing sound comes over the line...

...Yet days later, when he tried to retrieve belongings from his campaign office, Way was confronted by security guards hired by Perot headquarters in Texas and told he would be arrested if he returned...

...When Perot strays from it, the results can be embarrassing...

...Close your eyes as she speaks and you can almost hear Larry King in the background taking a call from Sioux City...

...And, as always, confusing those who listen closely to what he says...

...And Way continued to be investigated...

...And there're a lot of people like me...

...But it is Saucier who appears to feel harassed...

...Duane Schooley shares the sentiment...

...And yet the empty office space still seemed full-of Ross Perot...

...If five members of the First Baptist Church with rifles had come onto his lawn, we would have found out about it...

...I'm Ross, you're the boss," Perot is fond of saying, and it is clear that to his followers, this is the candidate's strongest selling point...

...Temperamental Tycoon By Tucker Carlson On the seventh floor of a nondescript office building just north of Dallas, Russell Verney is considering what may be the most pressing question of the presidential campaign season so far: Is Ross Perot crazy...

...These are Perot's true believers, for whom nothing Perot does or says, no matter how strange, seems amiss-or, if necessary, goes undefended...

...I think that's just an absolutely irresponsible question to ask," he snaps...

...During the third presidential debate in 1992- before millions of television viewers-Perot claimed that 20 years before, "the Vietnamese had sent people into Canada to make arrangements to have me and my family killed...

...Swindle, who now lives in Hawaii where he is running for Congress as a Republican, was invited to Dallas last August to speak at a convention held by United We Stand...

...It did not happen," said the head of Dallas police intelligence...

...I was looking for something to do...

...Lucas stops speaking...

...Joan Vinson, the Perot official who fired Way (and who is now head of the Reform party in Maryland) continued to tell people, among them a local radio talk-show host, that Way was a bigot...

...Pat Muth, the Perot employee (and now Reform party coordinator for the state of Florida) who encouraged the confiscation of the newsletters, refuses to answer questions about the episode-and at one point refused even to acknowledge her own identity, pretending when reached by phone to be "just a volunteer who came to pick up a package...

...The Florida chapter all but disbanded shortly after the 1994 elections...

...For Perot's followers, it is a natural conclusion...

...In addition to tracking down his previous address and Social Security number, the investigators checked paternity records, his file at the Department of Motor Vehicles, and federal, state, and local law enforcement lists for evidence of a criminal history...

...He looks, for a moment, a lot like Ross Perot...

...Absolutely irresponsible...

...Our train came through town and they all jumped on it...

...We have never gotten an accounting of where the money went from an organization that was supposed to be ours...

...By the winter of 1995, Schooley and some of his colleagues were curious about what was becoming of all the money their organization had raised...

...When Perot says, 'It's not about me,' trust me, it's about him," says Marilou Stanley, former state director of United We Stand in Arizona...

...It was quite a claim, considering that during the appearance on Larry King Perot was referring to- November 8, 1995-the program had only 800,000 viewers...

...Needless to say, the heads of both parties vehemently denied having done any such thing, and Perot was forced to "clarify" his previous statement...

...When the will of the people contradicted his own, Perot simply bulldozed the people...

...Callahan & Gibbons did just that, hiring in turn two other private detective agencies, one in New York, one in Maryland...

...Larry Way later sued Perot campaign officials, and Perot himself, on the grounds his privacy had been invaded...

...In October 1994, an official in the Florida chapter of United We Stand named Sally Bell polled members of the organization and asked which candidate they planned to vote for in the upcoming governor's election...

...Blahnik's instructions to the head of the agency, it was later revealed in a deposition, were to "do whatever he felt was appropriate" to uncover information about the former volunteer...

...Perot turned out to be worse than the people he was fighting," says Sally Bell...

...The reason: Campaign officials had become convinced that Way was a high-ranking member of the Ku Klux Klan bent on committing acts of violence...

...A visit to the Reform party headquarters in Maryland one recent weekday shortly before noon found the spacious offices, located above an Italian restaurant in Annapolis, almost deserted...

...Lucas says he stopped going to Perot headquarters when it dawned on him that the new Reform party was not an exercise in rejuvenating democracy, but just "a platform for Perot to step up to the White House...

...In late March, Perot made yet another addition to his growing list of statements to ponder when he told Larry King, "The last time I was on your show, we got 800,000 calls...

...Before long, he was spending 20 hours a week at Perot headquarters...

...For instance, when comments that Perot made during a question-and-answer period after a speech at the National Press Club last year mysteriously failed to appear on C-SPAN, Perot employees knew exactly what had happened...

...Other volunteers say it is not uncommon for those who tangle with Dallas headquarters or its representatives in the states to be accused of embezzlement or sexual harassment...

...Wilson isn't sure how many calls came in after Larry King...

...Many volunteers for the Reform party are leery of being asked even the most simple questions...

...Certainly Perot himself has made a compelling case that he is unbalanced, at various times charging unnamed villains with everything from slander to trying to disrupt his daughter's wedding for political gain...

...At $15 per membership-plus the brisk business United We Stand was doing in Perot-related paraphernalia such as posters, books, videos, pamphlets, and phone cards-there were many dollars to be accounted for...

...Perot's lawyers are now attempting to have her and her colleagues deposed, a process sure to be intimidating to retired volunteers...

...According to a number of people who have worked with and for him, it doesn't end with assassins in the front yard...

...By the 1980s, Perot was talking about the pressure he had come under to make a bid for the White House...

...Nevertheless, if his Reform party gets off the ground in the 50 states (which is likely) and nominates him at its convention at the end of the summer (which is certain), Ross Perot could also be a significant factor in the 1996 presidential election...

...Yet, as it turned out, there was nothing criminal about Larry Way...

...I don't know who they're operating on behalf of," he says conspiratorially...

...No one is more suspicious of the media than Perot himself, and since entering politics he has been particularly reluctant to grant interviews to print reporters...

...As Perot later explained, the Communist insurgents were expelled from suburban Dallas by his own crack security team using only a German Shepherd, which "worked them like a sheep dog," biting one of them as he ran off into the night...

...written at the top of the page and describes the search into Way's background as pertaining to a "criminal" case...

...There will be no delegates at this convention...

...Asked if the new Reform party will continue in the Perot tradition of management by private detective, Russell Verney replies cryptically, "I'm not going to prejudge that...

...Except, it turned out, there was no weighing in allowed...

...Acting on a tip from another Perot volunteer, Way called three different credit-reporting companies, including Equifax, to see if his credit history had been requested recently...

...Those who dialed the number were simply thanked for calling, their calls taken as proof of their support for Perot...

...During a videotaped meeting at the Marriott Hotel in Seattle with Russell Verney, Schooley raised the question...

...No evidence ever surfaced tying him to white supremacist groups...

...Officials in Dallas have admitted hiring at least four different private detective agencies to investigate volunteers, and a number of those volunteers have filed suit...

...Perot could teach dirty tricks to the Republicans and the Democrats...

...Democracy made pure by computers makes for great populist rhetoric...

...And, Verney explained, that applies to C-SPAN, which is "not immune to political leaders calling them up and saying, 'If you want access, make sure that this doesn't happen.'" In the world of Ross Perot, even Brian Lamb can end up looking like a political operative...

...Around the same time, Perot also came out in favor of Texas governor Ann Richards in her race against Jeb Bush's brother George W) A bitter, if mostly silent, battle ensued between Perot headquarters in Dallas and the rank and file they purported to represent in Florida...

...Reform party members who can't make it to the event can cast their ballots electronically, though the Internet...

...Before postal workers could send them out, however, a Perot loyalist showed up at the Daytona Beach post office and demanded the newsletters...

...As a matter of public relations it's not a bad strategy...

...Way began working for Perot shortly after the Larry King appearance and in a short time became co-chairman of the campaign in his hometown of Frederick, Maryland...

...As the vast majority of them later found-the group's membership has dropped to 100,000 or fewer-it didn't turn out that way...

...One former official in United We Stand America, the non-profit group Perot started after the 1992 campaign, was summoned before a gathering of his colleagues and humiliated after he made the mistake of arguing with a loyal Perot employee...

...An assignment sheet from Montgomery Investigative Services, the private detective agency in Maryland, has "RUSH...

...Yet despite all he was giving to the organization, Lucas insists, "I didn't want anything back...

...This conspiratorial understanding of the press extends even-perhaps especially-to the Dallas head-quarters of the Perot organization...

...Some of the first organizers in the states were Perot's former bodyguards...

...Instead of talking about the ideas Ross Perot has," Verney says, explaining why reporters ask questions like the one he just heard, "they call him crazy...

...Of course, by comparison, Russ Lucas is in pretty good shape...

...The Republicans and Democrats, Swindle says he told Perot at the time, "have a party structure that does a pretty good job of keeping [such people] on the fringes...

...His seat on the panel remained empty...

...In Dallas, the head of the Perot Petition Committee, Mark Blahnik, retained the Callahan & Gibbons Group, Inc., a private detective agency in San Francisco that also provided security for the Perot campaign (and which seems to have gone out of existence when Perot lost), to investigate Way...

...People are very fearful of their phones' being tapped," Saucier says...

...I didn't want any money...

...As in his Dallas headquarters, Perot's face appears everywhere, accessible from every vantage, peering forth from photos on the walls, grinning from the covers of books, handouts, and videotapes stacked on the shelves...

...These are people like Tom Overocker, a 48-year-old professional Reform party organizer from Virginia who quit his job as a real estate appraiser in 1992 after seeing Perot on Larry King...

...On the other hand, details like how many calls Perot actually got don't appear to bother followers like James Wilson, a retired volunteer who mans the phone bank at Reform party headquarters...

...In 1987, it was an admiring Bill Clinton, then the chairman of the National Governors' Association, who publicly urged Perot to run...

...A diminutive (but still life-size) cardboard cutout of the candidate stands in the corner, seemingly keeping watch...

...Yet it is not clear that Perot has ever been very attentive to the desires of his beloved People...

...It didn't take long for Perot's side-those insistent critics of "dirty politics"-to get out the big guns...

...Every circumstance brings out its course of action...

...But it is more than Perot's physical likeness that pervades his organizations...

...Other plaintiffs, however, may be luckier...

...In one instance from the 1992 campaign, all 11 of Perot's electors in the state of Missouri found their computer files had been searched by investigators retained by Dallas headquarters...

...Still, the Perot campaign remained unconvinced...

...More than two decades ago, a Nixon aide wrote in a memo that Perot's "major complaint" about the administration was that he was "never called by [the] president...

...Though it is tempting to ask Wilson why one of the richest men in the world would rely on the free labor of lower-income people like him to achieve a vain personal ambition, it doesn't seem like a very nice question under the circumstances...

...Anne Saucier, secretary of the United We Stand America chapter in Ohio, believes some of that money went to build the Reform party...

...Perot, they believe, is a threat to the cabal they call "The Establishment," of which the mainstream press is a central conspirator...

...Intimidated employees in the bulk-mail department turned over all 8,000 copies, still in federal mail bags...

...Or like Sharon Holman, Perot's longtime spokeswoman, who seems almost bewildered when told that some people consider her boss's story about Vietnamese soldiers on his front lawn a sign of mental illness "Why do they think that's delusional...

...One of the early victims of that paranoia was a middle-aged volunteer named Larry Way...

...Reporter Dan Balz of the Washington Post tried for longer than a year to secure an interview with the selectively reclusive billionaire...

...For 16 months, beginning in May 1994, Schooley, a 62-year-old delivery-business owner in Seattle, was the chairman of United We Stand in Washington state...

...Like many volunteers, Saucier is upset that United We Stand, a nonpartisan, tax-exempt organization, has been effectively transformed into a vehicle for Perot's presidential ambitions...

...There was only one problem: Perot himself disagreed...

...and holding forth on the evils of "the pundits" in Washington...

...In all three cases, it had (probably illegally, as it turns out...

...Working for him has given me the freedom to do things that I never dreamed I could do," says Overocker mistily...

...Stories like this help account for the paranoia one often encounters among people associated with Perot...

...Bob McNatt, the editor of the newsletter, managed to track down the stolen publications days later and re-mail them, though it is not clear whether they reached United We Stand members before the election...

...One who never got off the train is the conductor himself, Ross Perot...

...The most significant effort they had one night is five people coming across my lawn with rifles...

...When Saucier saw that, in violation of federal election law, assets from United We Stand-"the databases, the personnel, all the equipment, the fax machines, telephones, Xerox machines"-were being used to build the Reform party (a charge confirmed by volunteers in other United We Stand offices), she and other volunteers filed a complaint...

...Basically, Verney told us it was none of our business-to go take a flying leap," Schooley says...

...The Reform party's platform, known as the "Principles of Reform," calls among other things for the elimination of the Electoral College, which Perot considers a useless structure designed to keep citizens-"You, the owners of America"-from exercising real control...

...For a public persona rich in contradiction, this may be the greatest irony: that a man ostensibly committed to radical populism is also something of a dictator...

...Ross Perot isn't just kooky, he's dictatorial and duplicitous...

...Perot doesn't make the mistake of meeting with news outlets like the Washington Post often...

...The sole occupant happened also to be the party's one full-time employee in Maryland, state coordinator Joan Vinson...

...They had me bad...

...To the world beyond his friends and employees in Dallas, the unpleasant side of Perot's personality first became starkly obvious during his 1992 bid for president...

...Then he explodes...

...His voice rises, his eyes bulge, he stares straight ahead, never once blinking...

...Many members of United We Stand, fed up with Perot's efforts to control "their" organization, didn't wait around for confirmation of the episode...

...The results were definitive: By a large margin, Florida's Perot voters preferred Republican Jeb Bush to incumbent Lawton Chiles...

...Some of his former co-workers still haven't caught on, and theirs may be most depressing plight of all...

...Forethought, however, is not the same as planning, and once in the race Perot soon discovered he could not control his diffuse and growing campaign, despite the fact it was being run largely by trusted acquaintances...

...His control does, too...

...Contrary to the myth he helped construct, Perot seems to have been interested in political power, even in the idea of running for president, long before he announced his intentions on the now-famous Larry King show in 1992...

...When he left, "I felt like there was a death in the family...

...I was really depressed...

...Ten days before the election, members of the state's United We Stand office mailed the latest edition of the group's newsletter, which contained the results of Sally Bell's poll...

...His ostensible offense, denied by the alleged victim: groping a female member of Congress while appearing with her on a television show...

...Russ Lucas, a 40-year-old Dallas machinist who once volunteered to man United We Stand's computer system, is one of the sadder one-time Perotistas...

...For its money, the Dallas headquarters got a fairly detailed accounting of Way's life...

...I don't think it is an accident," campaign head Verney told volunteers at a meeting in April 1995...

...I hope that's not Ross," he says...

...Way worked uneventfully as a volunteer for about six weeks until late April, when he was contacted by state headquarters in Annapolis and told he had been fired...

...Right...

...Fortunately, you don't need to talk to Ross Perot to catch a glimpse of his personality-it saturates everything he touches, particularly his two political organizations, United We Stand America and the Reform party...

...In a subsequent attempt at cover-up, the expenses were described in FEC filings as "legal fees...

...Strangest of all, the only other live human being in the offices, Joan Vinson, herself comes off as a kind of female Perot impersonator, punctuating her sentences with a nasal "Right...

...To make the process easier, Perot advertised an 800 number that citizens could call to weigh in on the subject...

...In Dallas, Verney responds by claiming that Saucier, a 74-year-old retired social worker, is waging a campaign of "harassment...

...Nor is Larry Way the only Perot worker to find himself the subject of strange allegations...

...If I didn't think that, I wouldn't be here...

...I had been asked to be there," Swindle says, "but when I got there I was told, 'Well, maybe not.'" Evidence of his anti-democratic impulses notwithstanding, Perot was able shortly after the 1992 election to rally more than a million people to his United We Sand America organization, mostly on the promise that by joining him, they would increase their power in the political process...

...For all of Perot's obvious flaws, many of his former followers are crestfallen when they find that he is unable to fulfill their desires or assuage their inadequacies...

...Political operatives manipulate the information that you are exposed to...

...Of course, Perot's political ventures have always drawn more than their share of the credulous...

...He lost when a judge decided it hadn't...

...A long-time enemy of the Bush family, Perot adamantly favored Chiles and at one point considered traveling to Florida to throw his weight behind the governor...

...Larry Way never went back to the campaign, but the campaign did not forget about him...

...But there is another reason for the skittishness: One of the major tenets of the Perot faith holds that the media intentionally distort coverage of "Ross...

...Orson Swindle remembers the 1992 campaign as being heavily populated by oddballs...

...But he is sure he likes Ross Perot...

...Verney is so convinced of his boss's sanity that even to ask about it is repugnant to him, practically sacrilege...

...The FEC is now investigating...

...some won't talk to the press at all without permission from Dallas headquarters...

...He keeps staring intently, as if he's trying hard not to throw a punch...

...He had none...

...I felt bad about eating snacks there, to tell you the truth...