#45 | August 13 - 26, 1998  

Carrying out its solemn duty as the official media organ of the American Subtropical Liberation Army-the radical American wing of the Subtropical Russian Party-the eXile this summer has sent two different sets of demands to Alaska Senator Frank Murkowski. We were ignored both times. With only a few weeks left in summer, we're not any closer to our party's goal of a minimum temperature of 25 degrees celsius wordlwide, although we are making some progress at harrassing people.

We'd focused on Murkowski because he was the more annoying of two senators from Alaska, certainly the most anti-tropical state in the union. This, we felt, was a man in need of reforming. But Murkowski not only failed to establish the desired 25-degree minimum temperature in Alaska or anywhere else, he completely ignored our other key demands-refusing, among other things, to wear a Lone Ranger costume to his Indian Affairs Committee hearings, or use the pronoun "me" instead of "I" in all his public statements.

Worse still, when we called his office in Washington, he didn't even have the decency to invite us to lunch in Georgetown to talk. Instead, he fawned us off onto his bumlicking yes-man Press Secretary, a creepy mouth-breathing type named Chuck Kleeschulte.

As we reported two issues ago, Kleeschulte took the call, but-shockingly-appeared not to take us completely seriously. When we demanded that his boss hire an armada of tugboats to drag Alaska south to the Hawaiian islands, Kleeschulte, apparently joking, complained that Alaska was "kind of heavy to pull." Clearly feeling in control of the situation, Kleeschulte went on from there to adopt a "one-of-the-guys" wink-wink nudge-nudge tone, bullshittingly assuring us that we could expect a letter from the Senator, that they'd call us, take it all into consideration, and weren't we all a bunch of funny guys, etc., etc.

Well, Chuck, guess what? We're not funny guys. We're serious. When we say we want Frank Murkowski wearing an army jacket and a ponytail, we fucking mean it. And we'll do whatever we have to do to make sure it happens.

After our phone conversation with Kleeschulte, the eXile bounded into action. We did public records searches for compromising information about Charles Kleeschulte. Of course, he wasn't really guilty of anything except working for a Republican and picking up the phone when we called, but that was enough for us.

To learn what we found out about Frank Murkowski's cheeky Press Secretary, read the article below.

Born on February 18, 1952, living with wife Penelope and daughter Victoria, Charles Kleeschulte is a man in dire financial straits. It's ironic, in fact, that his boss, Senator Frank Murkowski, is well-known as a champion of fiscal responsibility-one of the key supporters, for instance, of the A+ savings bill, which rewarded pennywise families with government tax breaks. Murkowski would probably have been skocked to know that during the very time he was voting on that bill, his press secretary was filing for chapter 13 bankruptcy at the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in nearby Rockville, Maryland.

That federal bankruptcy court has since moved to Greenbelt, Maryland, and it took some time for us to reach the administrator for case number 9614811, the Kleeschulte bankruptcy suit. A woman named Kia is in charge of keeping the records on Kleeschulte's case, which commenced on June 20, 1996 and is is still open. Kia told us that Kleeschulte filed for partial debt forgiveness from obligations to over a dozen creditors, among them American Express, Citibank-Visa, Ford-Citibank (Kleeschulte' car financing?), and Nordstrom's.

"Nordstrom's?" we asked. "You mean the department store?"
"Right," said Kia.
"Does that mean he might still be making payments on his clothes?"
"I suppose," she said.
"So if he fails to make his payments, they could be repossessed? Like in the middle of a Senate hearing?"
"I couldn't say," she said. "All I know is that any party can file a motion at any time, until his payment plan is completed. He probably has either a three or a five-year plan. That's why his case is still open."

We've ordered a transcript of Kleeschulte's case. In the meantime, we've alerted every major paper in Alaska to the high political drama unfolding at their representative's office in Washington. Will Kleeschulte keep his clothes on his back long enough for his boss to force more tax breaks and deregulatory legislation into law? Or will repossessors storm the Capitol building in the middle of a major vote, gang-tackle Murkowski's press chief, and strip him naked live on C-SPAN?

Kleeschulte told us, in our last conversation, that he moved to Alaska "for the beauty." We wonder now if that's true, or whether he was just fleeing creditors. In any case, the question remains: will new motions be filed before Kleeschulte completes his payment plan? Or will Senator Frank Murkowski have his first national scandal on his hands? Stay tuned to the eXile, official media organ of the American Subtropical Liberation Army, for news.

by Matt Taibbi

One Saturday evening about three months ago, as I was on my way out the door to a dinner party, I got a frantic phone call from my father in New York. "Matt," he said, in a concerned voice. "There's something I have to tell you. I got a phone call from Will Englund of The Baltimore Sun. He says you're stalking his wife."

For a moment, I was too shocked to answer. I'd never met Will Englund, but I knew why he'd made that call. Englund was the husband of fellow Baltimore Sun reporter Lally, who about a month earlier had been the victim of a nasty practical joke in this newspaper. Taking offense with our overall sexism and offensiveness, Lally had called for us to be removed from an influential internet newsletter called Johnson's Russia List, despite the fact that we were always careful to keep the offensive stuff off the List.

In response, we'd called her and represented ourselves as a community action group seeking to petition the thuggish state media organ FAPSI to start a criminal case against our paper for incitement of racial hatred. When asked if she would testify against us as an "independent expert," Lally said she "completely sympathized" with the effort and asked if she could think it over. We published the transcript of that call, making in our usual vicious way what seemed to us an obvious point: that professional American journalists shouldn't go around advocating the jailing of other journalists by Russian secret services.

Lally had taken our story badly. Mutual acquaintances described her as frantic, hysterical, in tears even, messianically consumed with the understandable urge to exact vengeance upon us. We gloated at first, but then reports started to come back to us that Lally was taking what appeared to be quite disturbingly concrete steps to sabotage our business. No fewer than three reporter friends of mine called to tell me that Lally had e-mailed them a list of questions about my paper. She claimed she was doing a story on us, but she was asking questions whose answers could not in a thousand years have been used to fashion a story for The Baltimore Sun. Actually, whatever "story" she was writing would have been more interesting to the Russian immigration services or the tax police than any American publication. Judge for yourself- here's the list:

1. Where does the eXile get its money?

2. Which of the anti-Chubais oligarchs do you think might be financing them?

3. What is their relationship with Limonov?

4. Who supports their visas? Are they here on journalist visas?

5. Rumors abound that Ames and Taibbi have been turned down in their attempts to get jobs with the mainstream press in Moscow. How do you think this affects what they write?

6. As a reader, can you tell the difference between what they are making up and what they are not?

7. Do they reflect the Generation-X'ers flocking to Moscow to get in on the robber baron economy?

8. In the U.S., a liberal, anti-establishment underground newspaper would reflect a totally different sensibility toward women. The eXile tirades about women would only be found in the sleaziest of pornographic publications. What does their treatment of women say about them and Russia?

9. Who are their journalistic role models?

10. Do you ever send your stories to Johnson's List? If so, why? What does it mean to you when you are picked up on Johnson's List?

In all of this preposterous and somewhat psychotic "interview" query, only questions 1, 2, and 4 really worried me. Particularly 4. Any expat worth his expense account knows what that question is about. Lally was asking things that foreigners only ask about other foreigners when they're ready to take a conflict to a very ugly level. Suddenly I was faced with the ridiculous possibility that after surviving as a business in gangland Moscow for over a year and a half, the eXile would now have to fend off a full frontal attack by, of all things, a matronly middle-aged American print journalist, a former patroller of the education beat in suburban Baltimore, a person whose idea of a heavy-duty krysha is a Maryland PTA. Simultaneously amused and startled, I quickly called Lally's editors in the states. I told Deputy Foreign editor Myron Beckenstein about Lally's questionnaire, then added that, if Lally was indeed doing a story on us, we would be happy to answer any questions she might have.

"Of course," he said, sounding shocked. "I'm sure she'll call. I know Kathy, she doesn't do grudge stories."
"Well, there's definitely a personal conflict here," I said. "She's welcome to write whatever she wants about us, we don't mind. In fact, we don't even mind if she doesn't call us. We just-"
"Well, we would mind if she didn't call you," he said.

I had only just gotten off the phone with Beckenstein when my father called to tell me about Englund. It took me a minute to recover from the shock. "Wait a minute," I said finally. "You talked to Englund? What did he say?" "No, I didn't talk to him," my father said. "He just left a message on my voice mail. What he said exactly was, 'Mike, hi, this Will Englund of the Baltimore Sun. I just thought I'd give you a call...I'm in town to pick up my Pulitzer Prize. I just thought I'd let you know that our son has been harassing my wife to a degree that borders on stalking. I'd like to speak with you about it...' That's it. Then he left his number."

I couldn't believe it. What kind of sick maniac calls up someone he's never spoken to before, and leaves a message on an answering machine saying, "Hello, I just won the Pulitzer Prize, your son is stalking my wife"?

Hard as it was to believe that Englund had had the nerve to call my father, it still made sense in the weird high school popularity contest dynamics of the world these people lived in. My father, a correspondent for NBC Dateline and a multiple Emmy-winner, was a fellow "popular kid" whose support they thought they could safely enlist. These people were so steeped in careerism that they actually believed that family ties came second after allegiance to the elite.

The irony of the whole thing was that Englund had won his reputation by being jailed by the Russian secret services in 1995 for writing an expose on the Russian chemical weapons program. The guy was a champion of free speech, somebody who would otherwise have been a hero of mine. The whole thing was incredibly depressing.

And here was Mr. Hero accusing me of stalking...Now, stalking is a serious crime. It's a felony. Men go to jail for it. It involves harrassment, threats, physical provocations, unsolicited surveillance...I had never seen Kathy Lally, nor had I ever spoken to her. The sum of my communications with Kathy Lally are as follows: one prank phone call (made not by me, but by a female eXile staffer) after Lally called for us to to be banned from the internet list, one follow-up phone call (again, not made by me) after we had been accused of fabricating the first call, and two calls to Beckenstein with entirely legitimate complaints as the ostensible subject of a Baltimore Sun story. This is the traffic of an intellectual disagreement, not a felony sex crime in progress.

As for Englund, he was clearly an embarassment to his gender, and a weak husband. Of course, no man sincerely interested in defending his wife would have acted as Englund had. If it had been my wife, and Will Englund of The Baltimore Sun had publicly attacked her and reduced her to tears, I would have had to confront Englund personally, and that confrontation would have ended either in cautioning words or a fight, depending on how wrong I'd privately known my wife to have been.

One option I would not have considered in 10,000 years would be to call Englund's relatives, find them not home, leave a message on an answering machine reminding them in the first sentence of my recent Pulitzer Prize award, and then wait five days for a return call. But that's what Englund did.

Five days after Englund'd first call, my father called me back.

"I reached Will Englund," he said. "He sounded reasonable."
"What did you say?" I asked.
"Well, we talked for a long time," he said. "But among other things, I told him that if he had a problem with you in the future, he should call you himself. I told him that you can be an asshole sometimes, but you're basically reasonable in the end." He laughed. "I asked him-what the hell did he want me to do, take away your allowance?"

I don't know what else they talked about. The important thing was that, after that call, the menacing questions about my employees' visa status, the preparations for the "article," they all stopped. I didn't hear anything from Lally or Englund again. There were no more battles. And that was fine with us. Until last week, when we finally decide we'd had enough. Reliable sources have been telling us for months that Lally and Englund have been spreading a story around town that Englund's call to my father had "shut me up," as though they'd engineered some kind of long-distance spanking.

Now, as willing as I am to let Lally and Englund live with this illusion, I can't have people around town thinking this is true. I mean, it's outrageous. So I'm left with no alternative but to announce, publicly, that I plan on beating Englund silly the next time I see him. Incidentally, I'm bigger than he is, and I can do it. If he wears glasses, I'm going to have to punch him in the glasses. Then I'm going to have to give him a monster wedgie, pulling his designer underwear over his head and leaving him there on the street like that, all balled up in his jammies. And I won't need him to provoke me any more than he has. Trust me, I'm pretty pissed already.

I really have no choice. If I don't do this, people might think it's true that he actually "shut me up," that I've been afraid all this time to call him names in public like "blowhard" and "coward" and "pussy-whipped dickhead." Come on, Will. Write me a note. Apologize. You know you're in the wrong.

Here's my address:
exile.taibbi@matrix.ru.