Oligarch Games: A Novel

By Al Stotts

Jeffrey Wallace is a Manhattan billionaire with a hatred for government. As he positions himself and his empire to gradually capture the power of the state and the market, and ultimately control America and the world, he is oblivious to an unlikely opponent intent on stopping him from attaining his lofty goals.

Thirty-two-year-old Julia Craven is a financially independent former adult film star who has rededicated her life to taking action against a network of massively wealthy citizens who perpetrate crimes against the planet and humanity. When she learns about Wallace and his growing power through Village Voice reporter Nick Feldman, Julia begins a dangerous journey back into the adult film industry that places her in the center of Wallaces plan to execute his anti-democratic agenda. As she encounters her first obstaclehis hulky, ever-present bodyguard, DantonJulia has no idea that she has awakened a longing in his soul that will change everything for her, Wallace, and Danton himself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781532007071

Al Stotts

Al Stotts lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is the author of four previous novels: Pont Marie (2011), No Angels in Montmartre (2013), Oligarch Games (2016), and Mountain Road (2019).

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Copyright © 2016 Al Stotts.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-0708-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-0707-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016917753

iUniverse rev. date: 11/30/2016

Contents

The Oligarch of 740 Park

Danton

Brooklyn Taylor

The East Village

Oligarch Games

The Servants’ Quarters

Sexually Explicit Art

Ruse for Radicals

Crimes Against Humanity

The Naked City

An Impertinent Young Woman on Seventy-first Street

Post-Gargantua Stress

Nick Feldman

Storyboards

Olympia

Capitalism, Writ Ugly

Porn Prep

Warehousing the East Village

Non-Disclosure

Olympia and Brooklyn

Stories to Tell

Gentrification is Class War

Lunch with Julia

A Riot at Tompkins Square Park

Violence Begets Violence

Coitus Interruptus

Ruthless and Rapacious

Willow Weep for Me

Smile, You’re On Sordid Camera

Revenge Fantasy

Dinner and a Video Clip

That’s All, Folks

Anticipation

The Storm before the Deluge

Bastards of the Universe

A Crack in the Wall

The Building is Bleeding

When you begin a book, you say – and this always astonishes me – that you have no character or plot in mind, that those are secondary and interchangeable, that what is primordial is the desire to write it and that this desire one either has or hasn’t.

~He speaking to I in The Horrors of Love by Jean Dutourd

OMGGOPWTF

Thank you, as always, to my editor, Melissa Howard, and to my photo editor, Cody Stotts Rhodes.

And thanks to everyone who reviewed various iterations of the manuscript:

Melissa Stotts, Bill Barker, Jim Danneskiold, Eric Hajas, Ace Etheridge, Joyce Etheridge, Amanda Cardona, Steve Baca, Maureen Baca

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What comes below oligarchs? I guess mini-garchs. And below them, microgarchs. If you have a chance, try to refer to Donald Trump as a microgarch. It will drive him crazy.

~ Gail Collins, The New York Times

The Oligarch of 740 Park

What a pig, what a fucking pig, Julia thought to herself as she watched Jeffrey Wallace get into his black Mercedes SUV with its dark bullet-proof windows. He was followed by a bodyguard who seemed almost as large as the vehicle. The praetorian was a mountain of a man – tall, wide and fearsome looking from any angle. Just yesterday she had seen him talking on a cell phone in front of Henry Miller Opticians on Lexington Avenue near Seventy-first Street. As she passed by she looked him straight in the eyes. The angry intensity of his stare back at her and the ugliness of his visage lingered with her all day and spawned a nightmare that evening.

Julia wasn’t easily rattled or intimidated by men of any size or circumstance, but this one was completely outside her considerable experience with difficult males and difficult situations. Still, the prospect of seeing the monster again didn’t deter her from walking past the Seventy-first Street side-entrance to 740 Park, where Wallace lived. She strolled by at various times almost every day. In fact, her determination to overcome the fear generated by the bodyguard made her more dedicated to the informal surveillance of Wallace she had initiated after reading a Village Voice profile about his oil and gas-based empire. For the moment she wasn’t exactly sure what else she hoped to learn about Wallace or what she might do with the information.

The building Wallace lived in had been an object of lust for Manhattan’s wealthy elite since it opened in 1930. Julia grudgingly admired the architecture of the limestone-clad structure. It sat on half a block on Park Avenue and most of a block on Seventy-first Street. She particularly liked its fluted base and understated art deco entrance details. It was a standout among the sober neo-Renaissance apartment house facades of Park Avenue.

The massive grayness of the building’s nineteen stories didn’t bother her because the stepped-back upper levels made it easy to look at and did not block the sky above. The upper levels even reminded her of ancient Pueblo Indian architecture she had read about in anthropology books.

Overall, 740 Park’s elegance was pleasing to her, she had to admit. She certainly preferred it to the pencil-thin luxury condominium towers going up in Midtown. Their ultra-expensive residences were popular with shady foreign oligarchs who used Manhattan real estate as a way to stash stolen money. They rarely occupied those investment properties. Julia was equally disdainful of the owners of 740 Park’s exclusive residences. The giant who always accompanied Wallace into and out of the building apparently lived there as well.

Julia Craven was trying to decide what to do with her life. She was 32-years-old. She had migrated to New York from Los Angeles by way of Las Vegas. When she was 22 and broke, a boyfriend in LA convinced her to go to a pornographic movie audition. Julia’s pretty face, nubile body, long brunette hair and initial enthusiasm for a variety of sexual scenarios made her an instant hit on video.

She made a six figure income from her movies, but because there wasn’t a porn industry equivalent of the Screen Actors Guild, producers rarely delivered on promises of residual payments. To supplement the film income she created her own Internet fantasy site, made personal appearances at sex industry shows in Las Vegas, wrote a series of erotic novels and occasionally made high-priced escort deals with Wall Street hedge fund titans who wanted to show her off at special events.

Julia’s entrepreneurialism helped her to achieve a certain level of financial independence. After eight years of artfully avoiding the abuses, drug use and corruption of the sex worker trade, she knew it was time to do something else with her life. A friend in New York provided her that opportunity, so she gave up almost all things sexual and moved to the East Coast.

For two years Julia shared a two-bedroom East Village apartment with her friend Annie Vélez, a former porn actress who quit the business two years before Julia because she was diagnosed with HIV.

Annie was a native New Yorker who lived at Umbrella House, an affordable co-op on Avenue C between Second and Third streets. The co-op was created by the efforts of a group of 1980s squatters who took over the abandoned, dilapidated tenement built in 1900. The squatters named the house Umbrella because they hoped it would become the center of East Village housing activism. In 2002 they finally won ownership of the building from the City of New York and spent years making it a habitable, resident-controlled home for themselves and others.

While she was still working in LA, Julia visited Annie as often as she could, especially after she realized Annie was alone in New York. Her siblings had moved to other states and her parents were in Puerto Rico. Annie’s declining health motivated Julia to leave the pornography business and it motivated her to tell Annie she wanted to relocate to New York to help take care of her.

I’m so glad you’ve decided to leave the porn business, Annie said. I always worry about you and the other girls we worked with. The industry doesn’t care about our health, just its profits. But I wouldn’t want you to get stuck caring for me. I’ve developed AIDS symptoms. Living with me wouldn’t be easy. There’s so much else you can do with your life now. Besides, the New York Visiting Nurse Service is providing me with excellent care.

And you should continue to receive care from the visiting nurses, but both of us would benefit by renewing our friendship full-time, Julia said. I can help you with everyday tasks and be a full-time companion. Let’s fight your health battles together.

How can I say no to that? Annie said. The only thing I can offer in return is a place to live and the opportunity for you to become a real New Yorker.

How can I say no to that? she replied.

Julia withdrew from future commitments in LA and Las Vegas, sold her condos and her cars in both cities and flew to New York. She was shocked by Annie’s weight loss and fatigue. Annie had recurrent infections despite the use of anti-retroviral regimens intended to slow the disease’s progress. There was no cure for AIDS, and in Annie’s case there was no respite either.

Julia made friends with most residents of Umbrella House and let them know when Annie was strong enough for visitors. They admired Annie for her determination to live, but her willpower was not enough to overcome the persistence of the pitiless infection.

After Annie died, the co-op’s board asked Julia to purchase the apartment she had shared with Annie. She said yes and established a memorial fund in Annie’s name to assist with the expenses of any other Umbrella House resident who faced severe illness.

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Jeffrey Wallace was not one of the New York billionaires Julia had encountered in her porn star life. But everything she had read about him told her that, like the ones she had met, he had a sense of entitlement and superiority; lacked sympathy for the problems of everyday people; and engaged in misogynistic and racist behavior. She had also learned that Wallace nursed a hereditary hatred of government and wanted to dismantle it.

Wallace fit the physical stereotype of a plutocrat. He was tall and his Anglo skin was pale. His face featured an aquiline nose, thin lips, long ears that lay flat against his large head, and a chin that jutted defiantly at the world. He had a receding hair line above his considerable forehead. The hair was thin, short and graying. Naturally, he parted it on the right. Julia had read that in his youth Wallace was a star basketball player at an Oklahoma high school, but his waist had obviously spread since then, though his well-tailored clothing mostly hid the growing paunch from casual observation.

The Village Voice profile of Wallace, The Oil Oligarch on Park, had opened Julia’s eyes about the incredible political reach of Wallace and his Oklahoma-based family. Their political action committees and sham philanthropies had funneled billions of dollars over several decades into not only Congressional and Presidential campaigns, but even into local school board, city council and state judicial and legislative races throughout the nation.

Ostensibly, they sought to spread the libertarian political philosophy they had inherited from their father, but the real motive, she realized, was to sustain and enhance their massive wealth by destroying the government’s ability to tax it or regulate it and to bequeath the deregulated affluence to other like-minded family members.

Julia was increasingly distressed that the continued expansion of Wallace’s wealth meant that all other Americans would suffer from his family’s attempts to destroy the social compact whereby citizens consented to give up some individual freedoms to gain collective protections from the state: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

To accomplish their anti-democratic goals, Wallace and his family created foundations and a variety of non-profit organizations designed to propagandize against public funding of all government functions they opposed. The clan also deployed an army of attorneys, tax consultants and lobbyists who served as their wealth management technicians and engineers.

Jeffrey Wallace wanted to end all taxation of wealth, but in the meantime he was proud of his ability to manipulate loopholes in existing tax laws and regulations. His private anti-tax militia constantly fought for relief in Congress and in state legislatures. They were highly skilled at inserting stealth language into legislation that would result in new tax benefits for the family and their comrades-in-wealth.

No wonder Wallace employed such a frightful protector to accompany him everywhere he went, Julia thought. He was prepared to be ruthless in the defense of his person and his empire. What to do about the spreading cancer of the Wallace wealth and power became Julia’s raison d’être. There were hundreds of other super-rich American families engaged in the same conspiracy of wealth, but it was Wallace who captured her imagination and fueled her indignation.

Perhaps bringing down a high profile scion of the elite like Jeffrey Wallace would have a domino effect, or at least make the rest of the plutocrat class feel vulnerable for the first