The complete Duane Garrett article

[Randy Kielich]

The San Francisco Chronicle Sunday, November 5, 1995 · Page 1/Z6 ©1995
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A MASTER OF ALL WORLDS BUT HIS OWN
DUANE GARRETT -- POPULAR RADIO TALK SHOW HOST, POLITICAL POWER BROKER, SPORTS
MEMORABILIA AFICIONADO -- SEEMED TO HAVE EVERYTHING GOING FOR HIM. THAT'S WHY
SO MANY FRIENDS WERE SHOCKED WHEN HE TOOK HIS OWN LIFE INSTEAD OF ASKING FOR
HELP THEY GLADLY WOULD HAVE GIVEN.


Michael Taylor, Chronicle Staff Writer



To those who knew him, it seemed Duane Garrett had everything to live
for. Yet one day last summer, Garrett parked his car near the Golden
Gate Bridge, walked out to the north tower and jumped to the rocks
below.

A legendary and tireless campaigner for the Democratic Party, 48,
appeared to be on top of the world. A popular radio talk- show host,
he was also a lawyer and, as the president of Richard Wolffers
Auctions, an ardent collector and dealer of stamps and sports
memorabilia -- engines of his livelihood and the passion of his
eclectic soul.

On July 26, Garrett had told friends, he was to clinch a
multimillion-dollar deal to sell valuable sports memorabilia -- the
old bats, baseballs and jerseys dear to collectors' hearts -- to a
museum at Disney World's new sports complex in Florida.

The Disney deal was supposed to be worth anywhere from $2 million to
$8 million -- ``it was all he could talk about for the last six
months,'' one friend said -- and a meeting had been scheduled for 11
a.m.

Eleven o'clock came and went. Garrett never showed up, and the Disney
dealers were nowhere around.

If there was such a deal, nobody except Garrett knew the details. The
Disney spokesmen said later they had never heard of Duane Garrett. The
Disney deal, his friends say now, may have been something only Garrett
knew of and in retrospect they wonder if it was simply a self
delusion.

His body was found that afternoon, floating in the waters where he
often took politicians and friends fishing for salmon on his boat,
Laura, named for his older daughter. In his car was a letter to his
lawyer, indicating ``increasing and compounding stress,'' as the Marin
County coroner put it. Stunned is a word that barely describes the
reaction of Garrett's friends.

``In the last week, before he died, I saw no difference in him,'' one
close friend said. ``I saw no sign of it and nobody in his office saw
any sign of it.''

``If you were going to make a list of the people in the world you'd
not expect to take their life, Duane would lead that list in my
mind,'' said John Vlahos, a partner in Garrett's old law firm.

``The suicide was just so stunning and incomprehensible,'' said
longtime Garrett friend Phil Schaefer. ``He was a link between
communities and he helped people see the big picture. Here was a
person who built bridges, not leaped from them.''

``In his heart, Duane was P.T. Barnum -- the Barnum who always had to
stand in the center ring,'' Senator Dianne Feinstein said. ``He was
enormously talented, he was fun to be with, and he had a sense of
humor.'' Garrett was campaign chairman for Feinstein's senate and
gubernatorial races.

``Duane mastered more worlds than most men enter in a lifetime,'' Vice
President Al Gore said after Garrett died. That was Garrett's public
image.

Privately, Garrett was a man who had spent the better part of the past
year in an elaborate and desperate attempt to stay one step ahead of
the poorhouse as business deal after business deal apparently fell
through and he borrowed more and more money, in a futile effort to
stave off his rapidly escalating debts.

When he jumped from the bridge, Garrett owed more than $4 million (the
total may go as high as $7 million), most of it to banks and the rest
to friends -- the rich and the not-so-rich -- who had lent him money
over the year. After he died, court records showed, however, that his
known assets were probably less than $600,000, most of it in his
house. Garrett was strapped -- he was inexorably going under. Floating
lifeless and battered in San Francisco Bay was hardly the kind of
denouement anyone expected of the bright, witty boy who grew up in San
Francisco. His father ran a high-quality ice cream shop on Alemany
Boulevard. The family later moved to Pacifica, where Garrett plunged
into sports, playing football on the high school team. He graduated
summa cum laude from the University of California at Santa Barbara in
1969.

Three years later, he took a degree from UC's Boalt Hall School of Law
in Berkeley and joined the San Francisco firm of Hanson Bridgett
Marcus Vlahos & Rudy.

``He was a real rainmaker,'' said KGO-AM talk show host Bernie Ward.
``He could go through a room and know everybody in it, a whole room
full of clients or potential clients.''

He practiced law as diligently as he cast a fishing line -- one friend
said Garrett's first house, in Pacifica, was ideal because Garrett
could cast his lure out toward the ocean.

In 1979, Garrett, his wife, Patricia, and their 5-year-old daughter,
Laura, moved up in the world, to a hilltop home in Tiburon with a
breathtaking view. A second daughter, Jessica, was born in 1983.

Already a serious collector of stamps, Garrett filled the house with
expensive paintings and soon had a fine collection of 19th century
American art. He entertained the great and near-great at his house,
showing them his collectibles or playing one-on-one basketball or
simply soaking in a crowded hot tub, exchanging political gossip and
trivia.

Attracted to the starlight of politics, he worked on campaigns and
rose through the ranks of back-room political advisers. He raised
money for Jerry Brown's ill- fated Senate bid in 1982. Two years later
he was on the dais, introducing Ted Kennedy at the Democratic National
Convention in San Francisco.

In 1988, Garrett ran the brief presidential campaign of Interior
Secretary Bruce Babbitt and later that year was a senior adviser to
Gore, when the Tennessee senator had his own presidential fling.

``He loved to be a player,'' Schaefer said. ``He had a large ego, but
as large as that ego was, it was an ego well earned and well
deserved.''

More than his ego, it was his facile ability as a public person that
made him so magnetic to people, both in and out of the legal arena.

``As a lawyer, he was very good in court,'' attorney Jeffrey Forster,
a close friend, said. ``He was a warm person and that came out when he
talked. He was fast on his feet and he could always mix his message
with an anecdote or reference to literature or history. He was very
good extemporaneously and he was very good in the company of people
running for (public) office. He could introduce them with great aplomb
-- he could pull something from their area of expertise and then weave
it into what they were doing now and then say why they should be
elected.''

What made Garrett different from many other men, his friends say, was
his infectious enthusiasm for life that flowed from subject to subject
in the varied interests of Garrett's world.

``He was always upbeat and vivacious, and he really seemed to enjoy
everything he was doing,'' said Wolffers executive Schuyler Rumsey.
``He felt people should get politically involved, to make this a
better place. He loved to talk to people at every level and make them
feel good.''

Successful as he was, Rumsey said, Garrett was hardly a man to put on
airs.

``He was strictly a meat-and-potatoes man -- wouldn't go to hoity-
toity restaurants,'' Rumsey said. ``He just wanted a hamburger. Duane
was sort of the ultimate all- American.''

This warmth, this seeming egalitarian spirit, overflowed into
practical philanthropy -- a penchant for giving that some said helped
lead to Garrett's financial ruin. As one associate said, ``he'd write
you a $100,000 check, no questions asked.''

``He was just an extremely generous person,'' Schaefer said. ``He was
like the pied piper of politics, in the best sense. At the drop of a
hat, he would write out a $1,000 check for this candidate, a $1,000
check for that candidate.''

He also liked spending money on himself and his family.

``Money was important to him,'' said a man who was close to Garrett
for 20 years. ``He liked to have the nicer things in life,'' such as
the fishing boat, the Rembrandt and the blue Lexus.

As an adjunct to his stamp-collecting, Garrett was president of the
Wolffers firm, a San Francisco auction house he bought in 1989 with
two partners -- prominent Democratic Party patron Madelaine Haas
Russell and her son-in- law, Bill Russell-Shapiro.

Garrett was a die-hard sports fan -- he was the historian of the San
Francisco Giants -- and when he took over Wolffers he said, ``my hobby
-- I mean my obsession -- turned into an avocation.'' In short order,
Wolffers became one of the biggest sports memorabilia auction houses
in the country. In 1992, the market for the arcana of baseball was
doing $5 billion a year and thriving.

By then, Garrett had stopped practicing law and, in addition to
pitching old pitchers' uniforms, was enjoying the limelight as radio
talk-show host on KGO-AM. He was famous and loved it.

But if he appeared to be rich -- one close friend thought Garrett was
worth $10 million -- it was an illusion. His annual income consisted
of his radio station salary, estimated to be under $90,000, as well as
any sales from sports memorabilia. It was in the world of sports
collectibles that Garrett was about to take his fall.

By autumn of 1994, experts said, that market began falling off. It
took a precipitous dive after major league baseball players went on
strike August 11. It was not the best time to be selling off old
baseballs, sweaty gray jerseys and weathered bats.

``Duane owned a lot of the stuff that appeared in his auctions and a
lot of that stuff was unsold,'' said an expert in the sports
memorabilia field. ``The whole sports memorabilia market had gone
south since early 1994.''

Nevertheless, Garrett inexplicably continued to do deals. In the
summer of 1994, he persuaded a friend in Southern California to invest
$140,000 as a 50-50 partner in a deal to buy a collection of New York
Yankees memorabilia and then re-sell it, presumably for a higher
price, at an auction in May of this year.

The friend, who did not want to be identified, said Garrett later told
him that ``the stuff sold at the May (1995) auction. He said we'd get
paid back, with a profit. But then he died. I have no idea what
happened to the stuff or the money.'' (Wolffers says it will make good
on any debts.)

Last spring, close friend Richard Blum, Feinstein's husband, lent
Garrett money, using three of Garrett's paintings -- two of them
co-owned by Blum -- as collateral. Blum said the loan was for ``about
$100,000.'' An art expert told The Chronicle the paintings --
``Portrait of a Woman'' by Thomas Eakins, ``Sailing -- Riding the
Breeze'' by Childe Hassam and ``On the Kattegatt'' by Soren Emil
Carlsen -- were collectively worth about $2 million.

``He just ran around doing these deals, and it's no mystery as to
where the money has gone,'' Blum said. ``It's the case of a market
evaporating. Duane borrowed money against his paintings and his stamps
and memorabilia. He was extremely knowledgeable, but a lot of those
(items) declined (in value) and some just collapsed.

``I just think Duane is a guy who probably bought a lot of paintings
and stamps and God knows what else at the wrong time, hoping to make a
quick profit,'' Blum said. ``When he couldn't make the profit, certain
loans came due and he had to borrow from Peter to pay Paul.''

``It appears he was working a giant Ponzi scheme,'' another friend
said, ``but he wasn't doing it for illegal intent. He'd buy something
for $200,000 and sell it for $150,000 and then use that money to pay
debts. He kept borrowing to pay off debts, and when he realized he
couldn't pay, he couldn't face his friends.''

As the months went by and he could not make his loan payments,
Garrett's panic apparently grew. In addition to borrowing $3 million
from Wells Fargo, he had refinanced his house, borrowing $805,000 and
using $500,000 of that to pay off an earlier refinancing. That left
him with $300,000, some of which he apparently used to pay off his
credit cards, which were already jammed against their limit.

In April, Wells Fargo gave Garrett a two-month reprieve on the payment
of a $150,000 installment on his loan. But the bank exacted a price --
it said the payment was now due on June 1, it would be $250,000
instead of $150,000 and the interest rate would go up by half a point.
Earlier this year, it had tacked on another bill, for another part of
the loan, of $225,000. Both payments would be due June 1, along with
another $200,000 he owed on a separate baseball memorabilia sale. It
was a crushing blow that forced Garrett against the wall.

Perhaps in an effort to keep these creditors at bay, Garrett told
friends about the deal he was engineering to sell at least $2.3
million worth of sports memorabilia to a new museum that would be part
of a $100 million, 160-acre sports complex under construction at Walt
Disney World in central Florida.

``For the last six months all he could talk about was the Disney
deal,'' one friend said. ``It was going to go maybe up to $8 million
or $9 million. Duane was the broker on the whole thing.''

But Disney spokesmen profess ignorance of the whole thing.

``I've never heard of Duane Garrett,'' said Disney publicist Dave
Herbst. Claims against Garrett's estate began September 12. Still
expected is a substantial claim (between $1 million and $2 million,
sources say) from Madelaine Haas Russell, who had helped bankroll the
Wolffers operation. Meanwhile, the Wells Fargo debt keeps mounting, as
interest charges pile up at the rate of almost $900 a day. Lawyers
from Garrett's old firm, which is handling the estate for Patricia
Garrett, say they are baffled about what Garrett did with his wealth
in the past year. The millions are gone, and so is the collection of
sports memorabilia.

``What happened to the money and the art and the sports stuff?''
attorney William Bush asks rhetorically. ``Those are the two key
questions. And I don't think the two key answers have been developed
yet. It appears to be somewhat of a mystery.'' Bush says there's no
evidence that Garrett was involved in criminal activity or was
spiriting money to secret offshore accounts. When you ask Garrett's
closest friends -- people who have spent hours on his boat, fishing
for salmon in the waters where he ended his life, people who spent
years with him on various political campaign trails or at stamp
auctions -- they rule out almost every traditional reason for suicide,
such as drugs, alcoholism, sexual affairs, gambling debts or terminal
illness.

``You throw out all the other reasons and it comes down to money,''
one friend said. ``He was obviously overextended. Then there was the
baseball strike, and that killed him right there.'' Even in the best
of times, this friend said, collectibles, such as art or stamps or
baseball bats, are ``not easy to move. All of these things went
against him at the same time.''

If Garrett's friends were surprised by his death, suicide experts were
not.

``It's not infrequent for this to happen to someone in this
situation,'' said Jerrold Mundis, author of the best-seller ``How to
Get Out of Debt, Stay Out of Debt & Live Prosperously.''

``If you move with the political crowd, the higher it is, the more
savage the fall,'' Mundis said. ``Big money or big fame, or a
combination of those, gets you into that area and so there's a fear of
being ejected from that society. So here you may have a man who is a
high- profile collector and now he's made poor choices and he's lost
money on the deals. He financed a style of life through credit and now
all will be revealed. He really can't take it.

``This is about self-esteem, and in the United States particularly
it's considered almost un-American to be incompetent with money,''
Mundis said. ``Somehow, we are defective -- or lack character -- if
we're revealed as a fraud.''

Last month, more than 100 of Garrett's friends gathered one evening at
the sumptuous Presidio Terrace home of Feinstein and Blum. Early on, a
motorcade drew up and deposited Al Gore, who had flown 3,000 miles
across the country to pay his respects to Garrett's family.

``It was a gathering of people whose lives were materially touched by
Duane,'' one guest said later. ``Most knew each other -- from
politics, from charity work, from fishing with Duane.''

It was a $1,000-a-head dinner, held to raise money for Patricia
Garrett and her children, ``a modern version of a barn-raising, where
your friends and neighbors come because your barn burned down, and
everybody pitches in,'' the friend said.

A trust fund established by KGO-AM and contributions from the party at
Feinstein's house have raised more than $170,000 for the Garrett
family. Duane Garrett's estate is winding its way through the probate
division of Marin County Superior Court, where creditors have filed
their claims. A judge has already approved a $10,000-per- month
allowance for Garrett's family -- more than $6,000 alone will go each
month to house payments. Under California law, once the probate case
is finished, the family allowance will be paid first, before creditors
get their crack at what's left of Garrett's assets.

Ted Hellman, the attorney handling the estate, said ``we're still
searching for assets. Things are in disarray.'' He said that if
Garrett's debts exceed his assets when the probate case is completed
-- an apparent certainty -- the judge would essentially rule the
Garrett estate insolvent.

``It works like a bankruptcy,'' Hellman said. ``She won't have to pay
off the creditors for the rest of her life.''

Right now, Hellman said, Patricia Garrett and her daughters are
``getting by with a little help from their friends, as the song
goes.''

At the Feinstein party, many of those friends wandered through the
expansive first floor of the senator's house, munching on elaborately
prepared lamb, shrimp, vegetables, strawberries and cookies.

Gore was one of the first to arrive and last to leave. He talked about
how Garrett ``touched everyone's life.''

``We will always be there for you,'' Gore said, looking over to
Patricia Garrett and her children. ``We will always be there for
you.''

The perplexing thing to Garrett's closest friends is why he so
suddenly killed himself. Why didn't he declare bankruptcy? Why didn't
he yell for help? It's not as if he didn't know people with money.

``I don't have a clue,'' Bernie Ward said. ``I have come to the
conclusion that there is no `why.' I've talked to a thousand experts
and most of them told me that when you get down that far, you're not
capable of rational thought.''

``The only thing I can think of,'' Feinstein said, ``is that Duane was
always bigger than all outdoors and I think he couldn't admit he had
made some mistakes. He couldn't admit that his only recourse was
bankruptcy. A lot of people have gone through bankruptcy, but his ego
wouldn't let him. He could have climbed out of it.''

``Why did he commit suicide?'' Jeffrey Forster asked. ``Pride. He
couldn't face his friends. He was embarrassed. But he could have come
to us. We all would have helped him.''

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Sunday, November 5, 1995 · Page 1/Z6 ©1995 San Francisco Chronicle
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[R R M Tweek]

In article <47ub6m$r...@crl11.crl.com>, David A. Kaye <d...@crl.com> wrote:
>
>But for the rest of your post, since 1978, any creative work is
>copyrighted immediately upon creation, whether it bears a copyright notice
>or not. The fair use provision applies only to short excerpts, not
>quoting the entire work.

Well... Strictly speaking, Fair Use *could* apply IF one were
critiqueing each and every sentence in the article. In the
example of the begining of this thread, it probably does not
apply however. [IMO, probably = definately]

--
tw...@netcom.com tw...@tweekco.ness.com tw...@io.com DoD #MCMLX SP-3
Fodder-Line: Rogue Agent Hubbard Thetan Scientology Clear OT Course Clam
http://www.io.com/~tweek/ tw...@ccnet.com OT-7 Dr. Doo's little Llama

[LJClark]

>Randy Kielich (ran...@emf.net) wrote:

>: The San Francisco Chronicle Sunday, November 5, 1995 · Page 1/Z6

©1995
>: San Francisco Chronicle · All Rights Reserved · All Unauthorized
:: Duplication Prohibited

>Are you allowed to post this here? Doesn't "All Rights Reserved" and "All
>Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited" kind of imply that you need to ask
>someone at the Chron before you post one of their articles? I didn't see
any
>statement saying that the Chron gave permission to post one of their
>articles here.

>mike

So where (on the net) was this full Chron piece posted?

=================================
L. J. Clark
"Just a windshield bug-splat
on the Information Superhighway."

[mike_p...@yahoo.com]

Duane was a scumbag. No wonder the Democrat politicians loved him.