Amish Confidential (22 page)

I wasn’t so worried about Mary Haverstick, her Amish-sploitation committee, or professor Donald Kraybill. I knew that soon enough, people would grow tired of them. I didn’t care about the chamber of commerce people and the visitors bureau people, although some of their members are friends of mine. The misguided business-promotion bureaucrats really weren’t worth my attention or my time. People were so glued to the TV show, hardly anyone was listening to them, anyway.

But what about Tom Corbett? He was, after all, the governor of Pennsylvania, and he was running for reelection. Did we really want someone like him messing around in our business for another four years?

Now, there was a target my size!

I hadn’t gone looking for this fight. He’d come after me. When people asked me what I thought about the
Amish Mafia
backlash, it was always the governor they mentioned first. After all I’d been through so far, I decided I couldn’t just ignore this Corbett guy anymore.

I’m not usually very political, but I decided this was one election I couldn’t sit out.

I started talking to my friends and neighbors. I pulled my mother aside before her quilters came by. I got my brothers and sisters, stepbrothers and stepsisters involved. When Governor Corbett came to Lancaster Airport on a campaign stop, I went to his speech to meet him.

I wanted to know why he was so comfortable trashing me and the other cast members. I wanted to ask him how he knew what was in our hearts. I was eager to hear what he knew about the realities of living Amish. When did he become such an expert? I suspected he had no idea what kind of lives we led. I’m not sure he’d ever even seen the show. I thought it was time we spoke face-to-face, man-to-man. I wanted to ask why he had such a problem with our little TV show.

We never got to speak. His security guards made sure of that. The governor’s lackeys were firmly planted between him and me. I guess they were nervous I might ask the governor a question, and he wouldn’t know what to say.

This was all new to me, being involved in an election campaign, but I kinda took to it. This whole thing reminded me of a story I had heard about Vice President Dan Quayle. As George Bush’s running mate in the 1992 presidential election, Quayle attacked the
very popular Murphy Brown, a television character who—shock! shock!—was a single mom. People thought he was a dope. He lost the race, and deserved to.

I urged everyone I ran across to be sure they were registered to vote. For those who weren’t, I told them how to register. For those who were, I reminded them to vote. “We have to get
him
out of office,” I said. “He’s a total disaster.”

I didn’t even have to say
Tom Corbett
. Everyone knew who I meant.

It turned out that the candidate running against the governor was actually a pretty good guy. Tom Wolf is his name. I don’t generally like many politicians, because in my experience, you can’t trust what they’ll do once they get into office. But Wolf seemed fairly honest, and he was an undeniable improvement over Corbett.

For one thing, he wasn’t building his whole campaign on attacking a cable TV show. He spoke about actual issues like the economy, getting jobs for people and paying for health care.

Some people warned me that getting into politics might be dangerous. They said, “You don’t want to land on the bad side of the governor.” They said, “You never know what kind of power he has.” They said, “He might target you and your family.”

I wasn’t swayed by any of that. I was already on the bad side of the governor, and whatever power he had, he had. He’d already targeted me. Even if the new guy wasn’t perfect, he had to be better than this blowhard.

It’s always hard to beat an incumbent politician, people who know the political world kept warning me. Governors who are finishing their first terms tend to get elected to second terms. That’s usually the way it goes.

“We’ll see,” I said.

Election Day was Tuesday, November 4. When the people had finally voted and the polls were closed for the night, I didn’t know what to expect at all.

The election results started trickling in.

I prepared myself for a long, tense night.

To my surprise, the television news people declared a winner almost instantly. They announced the election result in a matter of minutes after the polls had closed. Governor Corbett got creamed.

Tom Wolf got nearly 55 percent of the vote, beating Corbett by almost ten full percentage points. That’s a huge, humiliating defeat for a sitting governor.

I can’t claim my friends and I are the ones who made the difference because that’s a big spread. I will say this much—we made the margin significantly larger.

I could have warned the governor about some of this—I would have been happy to—if he’d have been willing to call his bodyguards off long enough for us to speak.

But he didn’t, and he lost, and I know part of the reason why.

Don’t mess with
Amish Mafia,
and don’t mess with Levi.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

F
irst, as always, thanks to God for sharing His love, helping to guide me down the right path and protecting me always. Now back to earth. There’s a reason Amish families are so large. It takes a lot of us to watch one another’s backs. I have been blessed with an amazingly loving and supportive family, Stoltzfuses and Peacheys both, starting with my late father, Eli, my mother, Mary, and my father, David. Thank you, thank you and thank you. My deepest appreciation also goes to all my brothers and sisters, and I do mean
all
: Samuel, Sadie, Katie, Mary, Henry and Christian Stoltzfus and Naomi, Rebecca, Sylvia, Mary, Esther, Daniel, John and Nancy Peachey. You guys have always been there for me. Special thanks to two other family members I love with all my heart and soul.

I am lucky to have world-class friends, Amish and English. For their own protection, I won’t name them here. You know who you are. We have loved one another and trusted one another. We have led each other into occasional heaps of trouble and fun. Here’s hoping that never changes.

I did not wake up one day and say: “I should write the Amish book no one has ever dared to.”
Amish Confidential
bubbled up gradually and with lots of help. Big thanks to all my coconspirators: To Todd Shill and Kevin Gold at Rhoads & Sinon LLP, brilliant lawyers and so much more—career advisers, business managers and true friends. To Eric and Shannon Evangelista and the super-talented crew at Hot Snakes Media, who somehow delivered a camera-shy Amish guy to millions of living rooms around the world. To Matthew Kelly, Dolores Gavin and all the other pros at Discovery Channel, who’ve taken a lot of heat for us and never bent once. To Anthony Mattero and Peter McGuigan at Foundry Literary + Media, who took my book dreams seriously. To Jeremie Ruby-Strauss, Louise Burke, Jennifer Bergstrom and Jennifer Robinson at Simon & Schuster’s Gallery Books, who understood that Amish fans and
Amish Mafia
fans also love to read. To the Henican lit posse, James Gregorio, Janis Spidel, Larry Kramer and Roberta Teer, who made the book so much better. To Ellis Henican, my storytelling partner in crime, who can make you care about anyone, including me and my least favorite ex-governor.

Covering the Amish is one of American journalism’s toughest beats. Many of the anecdotes and incidents described in this book rely on wonderful prior reporting by the talented writers, reporters and producers at
Mennonite World Review
,
the
Budget
,
Amish Country News
,
Die Botschaft
,
Legal Affairs
,
Rolling Stone
,
Philadelphia
magazine,
Rodeo News
, the
Intelligencer Journal
, LancasterOnline,
the
Patriot-News
, PennLive,
the
Reading Eagle
, the
Indianapolis Star
, the
Blade
(Toledo), the
Hannibal Courier-Post
, the
Philadelphia Inquirer
,
USA Today
, the
New York Times
, Al Jazeera America
, Dateline
, and others.
They and others have done inspiring work under impossible circumstances.

One last note of appreciation: To the noble Amish of America and to those who visit Amish Country to see for themselves. All of you are seekers of the righteous. You also understand: Truth is a journey, not a destination. See you on the back roads!

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Copyright © 2015 by Levi Stoltzfus

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Gallery Books hardcover edition March 2015

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Interior design by Jaime Putorti

Jacket Photograph by Scott McDermott

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stoltzfus, Levi.

Amish Confidential / by Levi Stoltzfus and Ellis Henican. — First Gallery Books hardcover edition.

pages cm

1. Stoltzfus, Levi. 2. Television personalities—United States—Biography. 3. Amish Mafia (Television program) I. Henican, Ellis. II. Title.

PN1992.4.S79165A3 2015

791.4302'8092—dc23

[B]

2014047846

ISBN 978-1-5011-1030-6

ISBN 978-1-5011-1032-0 (ebook)