Conspiracy at Lake of the Ozarks

By Ray Speckman

The Lake of the Ozarks is America's playground but has never had a casino. From the construction of Bagnell Dam that created the lake in 1934, there has been shenanigans' that shaped the commerce and entertainment at the lake. Two young men from the Ozarks combine to finally bring a casino to the lake. This historically based novel tells of days past when fortunes were made and dreams shattered by a deciding few, and then the future, as various interests compete for the new casino site and the lucrative license to operate the new casino. The two area young men who spearheaded the voter authorization of the lake, Eddie Bradley of Bagnell and Tim Moulder of Brumley, are caught up in the nefarious activities of those who covet the casino license.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ray Speckman
• Release date: Jul 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005010591

Ray Speckman

Ray Speckman has spent the largest part of his entire life traveling the roads less traveled, smelling each rose (and yes an occasional dandelion) he passes.He admits to being nosey and his brain is like a sponge always wanting more information.He is a widower. He has two children.Ray lived at Missouri's Lake of the Ozarks for many years where he was involved in the newspaper and radio business, taught at Columbia College at the lake, owned a restaurant and was involved in many philantrophic and community activities.Ray also produced and hosted a decade long television program, Ozark Daze on the Columbia, Missouri NBC affilliate, KOMU-TV. Ray also produced historically based documentaries for regional and national distribution.Today he resides near the Lake with a widow, Joyce Mitchell who he smiles and refers to as "my sugar momma." He also says they live "comfortably in sin as mature grandparents."Together they have a boutique shop that also sells antiques and wines in Versailles, Missouri.Ray and Joyce travel extensively and together enjoy the backroads and new people, places and opportunities together.Ray is compiling, updating and discovering new adventures for his continuing work of Ebooks that has published now on Amazon/Kindle and Smashwords.He also has published Ebooks "Stranger in the Mirror" detailing the strength of his wife Marti as she struggled with cancer.

Book preview

Preface

Six Months after the Election

Eddie (The Greek) Bradley was leaning back in a tattered overstuffed chair, his feet propped on a metal chair, smoking a Montecristo cigar in the basement of the Missouri State Capital in Jefferson City.

He was in a storeroom/office of Hank Dillinger, chief custodian of the Missouri State Capital in Jefferson City. It was his hideaway, his place of relaxation as it had first been for another Missouri governor, Warren E. Hearnes, many years ago when Hearnes befriended the custodian at that time, a fellow named Rippito. Thus the now tattered cardboard box top with a Sharpie sign on the wall, ‘The Rippito Governor’s Annex.’

Sitting next to the governor was Dillinger who had poured a generous amount of Wild Turkey into red solo cups.

It was here the first Democrat governor since Jay Nixon, now long ago gone and departed, sought solace a place of no pretense.

Nixon was followed by a string of Republican chief executives in Missouri, a state that in the past had elected democrat after democrat and ended when a young group of republicans led by John Danforth, John Ashcroft, Christopher (Kit) Bond, and others turned the state a Republican fiery red helped by the oratory of the presidential campaigns of Donald J. Trump. Not even a Republican governor, Eric Greitens, being forced to resign in disgrace had slowed the Republican hold on not only the governor’s office but other state executive offices as well, both U. S. Senators and all Congressmen.

That all ceased when along came Eddie Bradley and his band of young Democrats, just a year ago and swept into office the governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, five of the nine congressmen, and a U. S. Senator.

Things were good as the governor talked this late spring morning, the trees around the capital on a bluff above the muddy Missouri River were near full leaf, the dogwoods and redbuds decorating forests of green. Hank was explaining how the governor’s favorite baseball team, the St. Louis Cardinals, would falter and drop out of any chance to be a playoff team. The governor was disagreeing. It was a common banter between the two. Just over two months into the season the Cardinals were bouncing around the .500 mark yet-sill only two games behind the Central Division leading Chicago Cubs.

I’ll bet you a box of cigars, your Cardinals don’t make it, Dillinger said. The governor was about to respond when the door to the storage room burst open and Carolyn Caldwell, the governor’s chief of staff burst into the room, crying and sobbing, highly unusual for the governor’s right arm he called ‘the Steel Lady.’

What’s wrong?

Tim, it’s Tim, she sobbed.

What about Tim, said the governor, assuming Carolyn was talking about Tim Moulder, the governor’s close friend and newly elected Missouri Attorney General?

He’s been shot, she blurted out and collapsed into the arms of her boss.

Chapter One

Chicanery is the Foundation

Brumley, Missouri is located very near to Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks. It is hardly mentioned in any of the slick tourism pamphlets designed to lure vacationers, second home owners, and permanent residents to the lake mecca in Central Missouri.

Today Brumley is like the black-sheep stepchild, long considered by some as the ‘armpit’ of the Lake of the Ozarks where the small burg shows lack of pride of ownership, crass behavior, and filled with relatively undesirables in an undesirable place. But in 1906 there was no Lake of the Ozarks, no towns of Lake Ozark, Osage Beach, or Camdenton but there was Brumley and in that year a bank was formed called the Bank of Brumley.

James Franklin, Sr. was born in the depths of the Ozarks, the twelfth of fifteen children. He had become a teller at a bank in the new Camden County Seat town of Camdenton in 1959.That town replaced the old county seat town of Linn Creek which was inundated with the waters of the Lake of the Ozarks when Bagnell Dam was built across the Osage River by Union Electric Company in 1930.

He and a group of friends had raised enough capital required by the State of Missouri to form a bank in Lake Ozark. That bank was never born as the group discovered the Bank of Brumley was for sale.

Promising not to move the bank out of Brumley, Franklin bought the bank and in 1960, changed the name to Bank of the Lake of the Ozarks and, breaking his promise, within a few months, moved the bank to another of the new towns, Lake Ozark, near the dam.

While Union Electric was getting the necessary permits for construction of the dam, it was purchasing land that the proposed lake would inundate. Farmers were reluctant to sell their land in the Osage River bottoms but more than willing to rid themselves of the higher land, covered with rocks, brush and scrub trees. Eventually the price point was reached and Union Electric acquired the bottom lands along with the ‘worthless’ higher ground that Union Electric intended to subdivide and sell.

To accomplish that, Union Electric executives thought that the myriad of small one-room schools located in hamlets or small communities such as Dogcreek, Elm Springs, Bagnell, and the Bowlin School, would not be at all attractive to potential buyers.

A sparkling new school could help entice land buyers to buy the Union Electric lands.

So it was put to a vote of the collective areas to determine if the small schools should be reorganized into one district with the new school located in Lake Ozark at the eastern entrance to Horseshoe Bend and the upper land there, above the water of the new lake.

Of course locals had no interest in losing their schools and were against the reorganization. However, Union Electric had established a town on a hill overlooking the dam site that housed the workers constructing the dam. Hundreds lived there. They voted in favor of the reconsolidation for no other reason than they were told to by Union Electric supervisors.

Consolidation was approved. Small communities lost their schools.

A new school was built near the gateway to the thirty-five thousand acres that encompassed the Union Electric owned Horseshoe Bend. It was called ‘School of the Osage’ designed by architects paid for by Union Electric who also paid for the school’s construction.

Later the Federal Power Commission ordered Union Electric to divest themselves of either the land or the power business. You can’t be a land developer and a power company at the same time, they were told. The land was sold first to Cyrus Willmore and then Harold Kopler both of whom developed and sold property there. That is the land where now resorts and restaurants along with thousands of condominiums sit alongside of homes worth millions.

Along the way, the president of Union Electric, Louis Egan was charged with bribery of members of the Missouri Legislature to approve and expedite the necessary permits to build the dam and was sent to prison. No member of the legislature was ever charged.

In 1935, just five years after the dam was constructed and the lake formed, a hotel was built just four miles away on the highway, The Arrowhead Lodge. It burned in 1950 and was rebuilt. Later television celebrity Bill Geist served as bellman and pool boy, eventually writing a book about his experiences.

It was at the Arrowhead Lodge dining room, that each day, a group of men, led mostly by Franklin met regularly and made decisions as to who would win and who would lose in the slowly but steadily development of business at the Lake of the Ozarks area, keeping in mind their own well-being and thwarting any competition for the hardware, grocery, wood-working, entertainment, and other business either owned by them, their family, or good friends.

During the dam’s construction, the tiny hamlet of Bagnell, four miles down the Osage River from where the dam was being built, was a bee-hive of activity. It was the end of a spur of the railroad that hooked up with the main line in Eldon. Before the dam construction, Bagnell had been the place where railroad ties were harvested from the hills as far away as nearly 100 miles up the Osage River at Warsaw and floated to Bagnell where they were loaded onto railroad cars located at the end of the spur and mostly used for railroad ties and more and more railroads were being built in America.

Bagnell was a rowdy town, complete with whore houses, and bawdy gambling joints and the scene of many duels and shootings.

While the dam was being built materials were sent by railroad to Bagnell and then continued up river by a second spur built alongside the river from Bagnell to the dam site.

The main channel of the lake was the Osage River. The lake is about eighty miles long from Bagnell Dam upriver to the town of Warsaw and the current Truman Dam.

The Lake of the Ozarks in addition to mainly fed by the Osage River is nourished by three main arteries, the Niangua River, Grandglaize Creed, and Gravois Creek plus many other streams and creeks bringing its total size to fifty-four thousand acres and 1,150 miles of shoreline.

The lake is measured by mile markers (MM). Bagnell Dam would be considered the 0 MM from there it goes in increments of miles, 1 MM, 2MM, 3MM and so on.

Eddie Bradley grew up in Bagnell where his parents owned a successful campground and restaurant. Interestingly, the campground was built by Clyde Hawken who partnered with a local lawyer to construct the camp lots, mostly with supplies stolen in Alaska by Hawken where he worked and when he returned home to Missouri occasionally he loaded his pickup with the supply necessities, literally stolen from his employer.

Eddie attended the local high school, the School of the Osage, and was a classmate of Tim Moulder who hailed from Brumley where his parents ran a feed supply store.

Eddie was a star basketball player, played halfback on the football team, and ran the mile in track. Tim, professing only the ability to tie his shoes, was elected student body president.

The Brumley Moulders were descendants of a former U. S. Congressman, Morgan Moulder, so there was politics in his genes.

Eddie Bradley was recognized as a leader early on, serving as class president every year, where both attended the School of the Osage.

Chapter Two

Disbelief

Carolyn was incoherent in her hysteria as she cried and sobbed, searching for words, gibberish, and near collapse, held on her feet by the governor.

Finally she began to control herself after sitting in a chair with both men close by.

I’m sorry sir, I know you like the privacy here and …well…I just thought you would want to know.

Of course, said Bradley. Can we get you something to drink?

Oh, water would be fine, thanks.

Dillinger went to the refrigerator in the corner, pulled out bottled water and handed it to the shaking hand of the very upset lady whose hands shook and entire body trembled.

"He was shot. He was on his sail boat, all alone. Some power boaters noticed the boat making erratic moves, checked it out and found Tim just outside the lower cabin door in a pool of blood. He couldn’t wait to get on the water. He just loved his sailboat.

"They called the Missouri Water Patrol who took their statement, got personal contact information, let them leave and made investigation. He is alive but in critical condition. He is being helicoptered to the University of Missouri hospital in Columbia.

Who did you talk to?

A lieutenant with the Water Patrol; I have his name and phone number upstairs on my desk. What me to get it for you? I didn’t think to bring it; I just jumped up and grabbed your private elevator to come tell you.

No, not yet. I’m going to take the tunnel over to the governor’s residence. Please alert my staff that I have no comment when asked about Tim and I will have something after I find out more facts. Also tell my security detail that I am going to the residence. When I get there I will call you for the name and number you have.

Carolyn left and the governor pulled out his cell, frowned and then said to Dillinger, Damn I forget that one of the reasons I love it down here is there is so much concrete and steel above me there is no signal that keeps people from bothering me but it works the other way also. I can’t use my cell. Hand me your land line please.

He dialed a series of six numbers. Good, its’s ringing, I didn’t know if the code would work on other phones besides the one in my office or not.

On the second ring, the answer came, Yes sir. It was the superintendent of the Missouri Highway and Water Patrol, an emergency phone of such for use by only the governor and superintendent.

Have you heard about Tim Moulder?

The superintendent, Sam McGovern, was quick and succinct: Yes, about five minutes ago. We have investigators on the way right now, along with the FBI and local Camden County law enforcement. It occurred at the seven mile marker at the Lake just past where the Gravois Creek intersects with the lake on the west side across from all the commercial and residential development at the end of Horseshoe Bend. There is a small island there and his boat was found and is now tied up to the north side of that island while investigators are on the way.

Thanks, Sam, I am headed to the residence right now to duck all inquiries, please keep in touch with me and I am sure you know but I want to reinforce this, please no statements to press or other people, using the usual ‘still investigating’ statement. Oh yes, the Special Agent in Charge locally for the FBI offices here in Jefferson City. Patch me through to him. I know that sometimes there can be some conflicts between different agencies, especially when as high profile as a State Attorney General and I want to nip that in the bud.

Will do and I will keep in touch.

The governor heard a double buzz on the line and then Hello governor, I was just getting ready to call you.

Chapter Three

The Upstarts

It took the second Republican governor in twenty years to resign in disgrace to change things in Missouri. He was Mac Evans who went to prison for multiple violations of campaign finance laws and income tax evasion.

Finally, Missouri was released from the stronghold the Republicans had on state offices.

Along with the governor, booted from office were the Attorney General, State Auditor and Speaker of the House of Representatives, a dozen senators and over fifty representatives who wouldn’t have had to depart because of Missouri’s term limit laws and in sundry other non-elected bureaucrats.

Tim Moulder and Eddie Bradley were raised in the Lake of the Ozarks area and attended high school together.

Both enrolled at the University of Missouri at Columbia and pledged fraternities, Tim joining Sigma Nu and Eddie with Pi Kappa Alpha. Both houses were located on Providence Road within sight of the enlarged football stadium Faurot Field.

Tim graduated from the business school and then enrolled in Law School. After graduation from Law School he practiced law in Osage Beach a town located at Lake of the Ozarks and eventually was elected a Missouri State Senator.

Eddie attended business school. He married Phyllis Bloom when both were juniors at Mizzou. Phyllis was a journalism student from Moberly and was first a reporter and weekend news anchor at KOMU, the university’s commercial journalism teaching lab.

Following graduation they moved to the lake where Eddie sold real estate and she became first a reporter and then evening news anchor at KRCG-TV in Jefferson City. Eddies real estate firm grew to be the lake’s largest. "Eddie’s On It’ was the mantra. He was then tapped to be the Executive Director of the Lake of the Ozarks Tourism commission. He sold his real estate business; carried back a good portion of the purchase price and still maintained a sufficient income from both sources.

About the same time Phyllis was offered a position as the nightly news anchor at ABC news in New York. It came out of the blue. The network was undergoing a change dictated by its owner, the Disney Corporation, after having dropped miserably in the ratings and Phyllis provided a fresh face. It didn’t hurt that the new head of the news department was also Missouri alum. They have no children.

The Lake of the Ozarks Tourism is a tax supported organization dedicated to bring people to the area to visit, buy second homes and condos, and live permanently. Nearly one-hundred thousand people were permanent residents to the towns that surrounded the lake. Among his duties was to lobby on behalf of the area with the Missouri Legislature.

Eddie became well known to state politicians. When the Republican governor and several other state officials were forced to resign, their replacements were mere seat warmers.

Eddie had been working closely with his friend and senator, Tim. One of their top priorities was pushing a constitutional amendment to allow casino gambling at the Lake of the Ozarks.

Both were tapped for statewide offices by the Democratic Party in the upcoming election, Eddie for governor and Tim for attorney general.

Casino gambling was established in Missouri by a constitutional amendment passed by the public in 1993. At first casinos were restricted to being on either the Missouri or Mississippi Rivers on boats but later amended to allow to be built in moats along those rivers.

Several years later a push was initiated to allow a casino to be located on Lake Taneycomo in south west Missouri on a lake impoundment and not on a navigable river. That was opposed by the entertainment industry in Branson with the Herschend Corporation headed by devout Christians and owners of the area’s biggest attraction in the Branson area, Silver Dollar City. A deal was cut.

The Herschend Corporation while vocally disdaining any connection with the state gambling industry cut a deal with the casinos in Missouri. "Let’s work together to defeat the proposed amendment allowing the casino on impoundments and include in the same constitutional proposal that the number of casinos would be frozen at the current number, fourteen. With the strange bedfellows, the Herschends and their unlimited resources and the Missouri gambling industry with their deep pockets that saw it a way to limit competition, the additional casino amendment was defeated with a clause that also lifted the limit on daily bets at the existing casinos. The entertainment mecca of Branson remained free of the curses of gambling and the existing casinos freed of additional competition.

Eddie and Tim had long been advocates of expanding gambling, to attract tourism and as an income flow for local and state governments.

The duo of Eddie and Tim’s response to