The Case of the Golden Grifter — Chapter Three

— Washington Post photo

The Grifter’s Deadly Game

Not long after the Golden Grifter’s pink dump in Palm Beach was flopped by the bureau, our Sam Spade doppelganger who is chasing him was summoned to headquarters.

In a soundproof room, the rock-jawed G-man is informed that the Grifter hired several groups of ultra-right fascist thugs to lead the sheep into the Capitol on January 6. The news makes his guts ache.

The country is on the verge of exploding over post-search transparency, with the Beltway press tearing at each other’s throats. Slavering Fox hounds claim the search warrant was a setup, and the most outrageous Red Tide congressional headhunters are yelling for a clean sweep in the Justice Department.

The judicial magistrate who issued the search warrant is figuring out what to do. What nobody yet knows is why the contents of the boxes of confidential and top secret documents was so dangerous it caused a national furor.

Agent S is told to get back on the case.

An informer he debriefed in Michigan after his sotted buddies tried to kidnap the governor now pays off in an unexpected way. The jerk wants a deal, but the best he has to trade is his fumbling band of armed morons. As an afterthought, he claims his commander had gone to Washington, D.C. to meet a big shot with White House connections. 

Agent S’s new assignment is to discover who that White House insider was. He had to laugh. The fat man with bad hair ain’t the only Palooka looking for a fight.

While he’s getting briefed, Agent S eats a high-end, cream-filled doughnut and sips black coffee that tastes like it was strained through somebody’s socks. The bureau’s live-and-let-live attitude toward the former president ended after the Grifter urged the vicious Proud Boys to take over the halls of Congress. Agent S needs to find out who was the go-between. Otherwise, it will be hard to pin a jacket on the kingpin. Despite brave words about leading the way, the self-possessed tyrant kept a low profile inside the White House, watching his rebellion unfold on TV.

The Grifter reportedly ran around chortling while the Capitol was being attacked. Later, he got angry and threw a plate of fries and condiments against the wall. The faceless domestic staffers who suffered his daily abuse are among the flies on the wall who saw everything. The plate ordeal was a repeat performance, they say, as was their task of unplugging toilets the Grifter filled with unflushable documents. Several told Agent S that the Grifter was ecstatic when the Proud Boys beat their way past the vastly outnumbered police. They heard him declare that his running mate Mike Pence deserved to be hung.

Agent S already knows a lot about the Proud Boys. They had been growing in number and prestige among neo-Nazi nationalists since coming together in 2016. The Proud Boys are a menagerie of general racists, white supremacists and religious whack jobs on a mission from God. The dangerous, well-financed idiots marched along with other hate groups during extremist gatherings, but before long, they were leading the way.

A wealthy, well-educated, self-described racist named Richard Bertrand Spencer founded the group. He was a PhD candidate at Duke University in 2006 when he quit to “to pursue a life of thought-crime.”  During his stay at Duke, he joined the Duke Conservative Union where he met Stephen Miller, the Grifter’s future senior policy adviser and close confidant.

Spencer’s usual bodyguard is a large neo-Nazi named Brian Brathovd, aka Caerulus Rex. He is a dyed-in-the-wool, Jew-baiting fascist with a podcast called “The Daily Shoah,” an antisemitic shit show popular among extreme haters.

“If the Proud Boys were pressed on the issue, I guarantee you that like 90 percent of them would tell you something along the lines of, “Hitler was right. Gas the Jews,’” C Rex said on a recent podcast. The big blowhard is typical of the kinds of people the Grifter rubbed shoulders with before he sprang his revolution on live television. Apparently, Spencer was his crown prince. 

After the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., during August, 2017, Spencer was sued for allegedly acting like a “gang boss” and inciting the killing of a young woman after one of his alt-right supporters drove his car into a group of counter-protesters. In addition to the young woman’s death, 19 other people were injured.

On November 23, 2021, a Virginia jury found Spencer liable on two counts and were unable to reach verdicts for another two, awarding $25 million in total damages to the victims.

In Agent S’s mind it’s all birds of a feather, the Grifter had to know, and it’s his job to prove it.

What a string of coincidences, he muses. From Spencer to Miller and straight to the Grifter. What did Big Rudy G and his convicted sidekick, Roger Stone, have to do with it? Stone can duck and cover better than Tommy the Turtle in the Cold War.

Why would the president of the United States very loudly pardon a self-described swinger and part-time con artist after commuting his 40-month sentence for witness tampering, obstructing an official proceeding and making false statements to Congress. What does Stone know and why did the Grifter care so much? Why did Stone meet with the Proud Boys in D.C.?

It’s getting interesting.