In the midst of all the Vice President's Eve frenzy, I'd like to encourage all of you to take a break and check out this interesting NY Times piece further exploring Cindy McCain and her and her husband's complicated finances.
I mean how can you not love a piece that includes details like this:
She crisscrosses the country on the company jet, keeps an accountant on the company payroll to mind her personal finances, drives a company Lexus with "MS BUD" plates and says she oversees the company’s "strategic planning and corporate vision." Yet she almost never shows up in the office, is deemed an absentee owner by Anheuser-Busch and has left scarcely a mark on the company, present and former executives say.
Now some might say it's out of line to go after Cindy McCain and that her life and business should be kept personal the same way we would want the Republicans to respect Michelle Obama as she is not the person running for ballot on our side.
Well... first of all that ain't happening... but more importantly, as the NY Times points out, it's worth exploring Cindy's life and finances because it is through her that McCain was able to attain his political career.
So let's start out getting a little history lesson about Cindy's late father, Jim Hensley:
The tale begins somewhat similarly to that of John McCain, a husband goes off to war leaving a wife and child behind and when he comes back he takes up another one and makes another child. Except Hensley doesn't get rich by marrying rich, but by being a hard-nosed, politically active businessman who isn't afraid to get involved with a few unsavory characters along the way.
The NY TIMES tells us that after WWII...
Back in Phoenix, he and his brother, Eugene, went into the liquor business with Kemper Marley, a businessman who had cornered much of the market in Arizona after Prohibition ended.
In March 1948, a federal jury convicted both Hensleys of concealing sales of black-market liquor. Jim Hensley’s six month sentence was suspended. A second indictment, in 1953 for falsifying records to evade taxes, was dismissed.
The Hensleys bought a New Mexico horse track in 1952. Eugene Hensley’s role at the track led to lawsuits, tax-evasion charges and prison. In 1969, he sold out to a mob-connected company with close ties to Mr. Marley, according to published reports. (The Phoenix police named Mr. Marley as the man they believed ordered the 1976 assassination of Don Bolles, an investigative reporter for The Arizona Republic. Mr. Marley, who died in 1990, was never charged.)
Jim Hensley sold his stake in the track in 1955, and took a job at a beer wholesaler. After buying the business, in 1959 he got a federal wholesaler’s permit as Hensley & Company.
It is there that Hensley built his fortune and built the platform that affords the McCains their lavish lifestyle. And by all accounts Mr. Hensley was very generous with family providing Cindy with many automobiles according to an anecdote told at his funeral.
If he had one flaw, they add, it was being unable to say no to his wife or their daughter, Cindy Lou, who was born in 1954.
At her father’s funeral, Cindy McCain told of his gentle reaction when she wrecked the car he had bought her after she graduated from the University of Southern California, according to people who were there. She did not mention, as a former employee recalled, that it was a Porsche and that he replaced it with a Mercedes-Benz.
But apparently this generosity toward family was not inherited according to this account that fleshes out more of the unfortunate situation between Cindy and Cindy's half-sister Kathleen.
Mr. Hensley also quietly subsidized his first daughter, Mrs. Portalski, and her family. He paid for her children’s schooling, gave them credit cards and wrote company checks of $40,000 a year to Mrs. Portalski and her husband, the couple said in an interview.
But in his will, Mr. Hensley left Mrs. Portalski just $10,000 and her offspring nothing. "It’s so disappointing, just being pushed aside," she said. Mrs. Portalski said Mrs. McCain added insult to that injury by referring to herself, in her eulogy for her father, as his only child — while her half-sister sat in a front pew.
Shortly after Jim Hensley’s death, Mrs. Portalski’s daughter said, she tried charging a meal and had her company credit card rejected. Her son says he learned that Mr. Hensley’s promise to pay his graduate-school tuition was no longer operative.
Pretty cold.
Moving on... the piece strives to flesh out Mrs. McCain's role with Hensley. Basically it sounds like she's a jet-setting ex-officio executive who has no idea how much money she has and only pays attention to what her accountants tell her she can spend.
In the late 1980s, she set up a charitable organization out of Hensley headquarters, distributing medical supplies in developing countries. But she disbanded the group in the early 1990s after she became addicted to painkillers and was caught stealing from its supply of drugs.
Since then, her parking space has seldom been occupied. In fact, Anheuser-Busch treats her as an absentee owner, requiring Mr. Delgado to have total control over business operations and capital investments.
The article also throws another of McCain abodes into the mix: TEN HOUSES.
And it talks about the political clout that Hensley & Co. has in Arizona fighting any taxes on beer to benefit public welfare, has an anecdote about Jim Hensley trying to give an Anheuser-Busch lobbyist money to pay of lawmakers and talks about what the beer industry does to lobby its interests in the capital.
The story says McCain recuses himself from alcohol issues, but that doesn't change the fact that HE GETS THE MOST MONEY FROM THE BEER INDUSTRY of anyone in Congress.
You know for all the sin and harm that alcohol brings to people's lives, you'd think MAYBE someone would bring that up to religious voters.
You'd also think the media might care to report on Cindy and her finances a little more given the obsession reporters had with Hillary's finances and her career in the 90s, but to this point I haven't seen much more than this single story on what it would mean to have a beer baroness as First Lady.
It's also curious that in this piece there is NO MENTION WHATSOEVER of the Keating 5 Scandal, the article's biggest defect.
In any event though, it's a good read if you can't sleep waiting to find out who's the veep.