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The Wright Stuff

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"This [the mayor's position] is a $600-a-month part-time job," Wright says. "The city manager was a full-time position. Any mayor that preceded me worked two hours a day. I do more than they did, and I spend four at the most. For the amount of money I get, I am not going to sit here eight hours a day and take all this abuse and all these headaches. That is what Mr. Butt was for."

But Michael Horskins, a former alderman and longtime political opponent of Wright's, says Butt's control of City Hall went well beyond day-to-day management. Horskins claims Butt orchestrated everything that took place within the borders of Pine Lawn, from creating a nonprofit agency known as Pine Lawn Development Inc. to cultivating development projects to paying every bill. Many of the auditors' concerns focused on Butt's management. Butt hadn't published the semiannual finance reports that are required by law in more than five years. City budgets were always late, and, as a result, the city often overspent by $10,000 or more a year. According to city minutes, Wright noted the trend by telling the Board of Aldermen, "If we keep spending like this, we are going to end up being bankrupt."

Nevertheless, the city continued to pay bills and award contracts to anybody but the lowest bidder. Horskins says a passive Board of Aldermen seemed content to remain in the dark with regard to the state of the city's finances.

"We never got to see the actual bills," Horskins says. "All we would see is what Mr. Butt said we owed. I repeatedly asked for a breakdown of the bills, but he wouldn't give us a breakdown on anything. I didn't have enough support on the board to push it through."

Rose Griffin says pressing for a breakdown of expenses got her on Butt's bad side. "He told me if I wanted to see the receipts that I had to come to City Hall. But when I got there, he told me, 'I am not going to give you nothing. You are uneducated.'" Griffin says she was especially concerned about the amount the city was paying to put gas in police vehicles. She says she felt the amount -- an average of $2,000 a month, according to auditors and city records -- was extraordinarily high. "I live in the city, and I knew they weren't doing that much patrolling," Griffin says. "Pine Lawn isn't that big."

When Butt wouldn't give her the receipts, Griffin went to Police Chief Donald Hardy and asked for records of gasoline purchases for a single month. The police-department receipts totaled $1,406 for October 1999 -- $608 less than the $2,014 Butt submitted for payment. "Nobody knows where the rest of the money went," Griffin says. "And even today I don't think anyone at City Hall really cares. They just took whatever [Butt] said as gospel. I challenged him and became the enemy. Both he and the mayor told me, 'We are going to make sure you don't win the next election.'"

Wright says Griffin's research into gas prices is reflective of her pattern of stirring up trouble. "She has sued me and claimed I threatened her life," he says. "These people are consistent, but that doesn't make them right. They cannot run for office and win, and so there is always a problem."

State auditors, in last year's report, also noted the discrepancy between how much gasoline Pine Lawn was paying for and how much it was actually using but stopped short of saying anything illegal was going on. McCaskill's office, however, did recommend that a mileage log be kept to document appropriate use of vehicles and to support the charges. Wright and Butt, according to auditors, made no clear promise they would do it. They called the log "difficult and time-consuming to implement" but said a written policy would be established by June 30, 2001. That has yet to be done -- in part, Wright says, because Butt's fatal heart attack on Jan. 16 brought everything, including the city's finances, to a screeching halt.

"I saw him at work that Friday, and the next day I got a call from his wife, telling me he was dead," he says. "It was shocking. This was a man who took good care of himself. He didn't drink, he watched what he ate and he walked every day. No one expected him to die at 50 years old."

Clearly Butt hadn't planned for his departure, either. After his death, Pine Lawn and Beverly Hills officials scrambled to locate and decipher the cities' financial records. Some were at Butt's home in Ladue, others in his car. Butt, they say, took computer passwords and bank-account numbers to his grave, fueling wild speculation about dozens of "secret" accounts he may have created. Horskins, for example, says he heard that Pine Lawn's money was held in 15 different banks. Horskins, who admits he has no real proof, believes something shady was going on. Tim Head, the city's new accountant, says there were actually 15 different accounts in four banks and if there was something untoward in Butt's accounting, "it would have likely been picked up in the audits."

Wright bristles at continuing accusations about how the city manages -- or mismanages -- its affairs: "All these accusations have been going on for years. If any of these people had change for a quarter, I would have sued years ago."

Undaunted, several organizations, including Pine Lawn ACORN (the local chapter of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and Concerned Citizens of Pine Lawn, filed a joint complaint with McCulloch, the county prosecutor. The groups charge that Wright violated state law by buying four city properties without first making them available for public auction. Wright admits to buying four properties but maintains he did it legally. McCulloch has yet to respond, but Wright says he isn't worried. "Let them investigate," he says. "We don't have nothing to hide, because we aren't doing anything wrong."

It is easy to see why Wright says his political opponents are behind the investigations.

Horskins is a member of Pine Lawn ACORN. Cheris Metts, who is acting as the organization's secretary and is also president of Concerned Citizens of Pine Lawn, has a longstanding feud with Wright, one that includes allegations that the mayor put a gun to her son's head not once but twice.

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