Authors: Gabriel Sherman
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Corporate & Business History, #Political Science, #General, #Social Science, #Media Studies
In the days after the reporters defected, a cloud of suspicion enveloped the
PCN&R
newsroom.
“They thought everyone was a traitor,” reporter Liz Schevtchuk Armstrong said.
Alison Rooney noticed strange activity on her
PCN&R
laptop: her email box had been opened remotely. Later, Roger and Beth accused her of all manner of conspiracies.
“It was weird,” one person familiar with the events said. “There was this whole James Bond spy type of stuff, like we were dealing with national security here, but all her emails were like, ‘Dammit I hate my job!’ ”
As a final measure, just in case the reporters did not fully grasp what
Roger and Beth thought of their decision to leave, the
PCN&R
printed a reminder the week after they jumped ship.
Tucked between the articles, readers came across a small cartoon of a rat.
T
he exodus of reporters created an opening on the staff. A few days after the Philipstown.info walkout,
T. J. Haley, the
PCN&R
’s paperboy, mentioned to Lindsley that he was a good writer. Lindsley said he would give him a tryout. In June, Fox News HR had placed Haley, a twenty-three-year-old former Marine and
O’Reilly Factor
intern, with the paper. In his interview, the HR rep told Haley, who was eager for a full-time job at Fox, that working upstate was a way to get a leg up and impress Ailes. And so, after a month delivering papers for ten bucks an hour, Haley began contributing articles.
The commute to Cold Spring was soul-crushing. Haley was spending almost three hours in the car each day driving to and from his parents’ house on Long Island, paying out what little he earned on gas. Beth offered to let him crash upstairs on an office couch next to the conference room where Roger addressed local politicians. “When you are here at the office, you’re at home. This is a family,” Beth told him. He slept there for three months. In the mornings, Haley cleaned himself up in the paper’s bathroom.
The decor in the bathroom unsettled him: on one wall hung a decorative artwork with a small photo of Beth’s face, and on another, a drawing of Roger. Although Lindsley was a contemporary, Haley at first found his secretive manner off-putting. When Haley quoted lines from his favorite movies to Lindsley, the references did not register. Lindsley’s touchstones were confined to conservative politics, journalism, and Notre Dame football. He seemed more like a factotum for the Ailes family than a newspaper editor. “Don’t talk about them,” he would say. Haley got along far better with Carli-Rae Panny, a bubbly Catholic twentysomething from east Putnam County, who joined the paper around the same time he did.
Like Haley, Panny had been a Fox News intern, and they often had lunch together.
A
iles made zoning the litmus test by which politicians would be judged, even Republicans. Vincent Leibell, Putnam County’s long-serving state senator, soon learned this painful lesson. A successful estate lawyer, Leibell was the godfather of the Putnam County GOP. His wide shoulders,
jowly cheeks, and bald pate contributed to his bosslike persona. “Uncle Vinnie,” locals called him.
“Anytime that anyone new would come on the scene he’d want to know everything about them.
Everything
,” a local politician recalled. “Vinnie would co-opt them or if they wouldn’t do what he’d say, he’d kill them in the cradle. He called it a ‘crib death.’ ” Ailes, for a time, was a welcome presence.
“Vinnie thought it was great Ailes was buying the newspaper and it’d be a Republican propaganda machine,” Sam Oliverio, a Democrat on the Putnam County legislature, said.
Ailes heard the stories about Uncle Vinnie’s sway.
They ran into each other for the first time on the eve of the 2008 presidential election at a dinner sponsored by the Philipstown Community Council. A local politico in attendance told Uncle Vinnie that Ailes wanted to meet him.
“You’re the guy that runs everything around here,” Ailes said.
“No, I am actually not.”
Roger did not buy the modest schtick. “I
know
you run everything in this county.”
Ailes spent months trying to butter Uncle Vinnie up with dinner invitations and phone calls. In one conversation, he asked Uncle Vinnie if he wanted to run for governor. In another, he suggested that Uncle Vinnie build “a panic room” like he had. Ailes also liked to give his take on the national conversation or dole out bits of inside information. He said Obama did not have an American birth certificate and Murdoch was telling him to lie low on the Chinese because of his then wife, Wendi. But after Uncle Vinnie showed his independence by backing Shea for Philipstown supervisor, the relationship soured. “You endorsed a Democrat!” Ailes howled into the phone.
The zoning debate was the final rupture. Ailes reached Uncle Vinnie at the office. “Well, what are you going to do about it?”
“I am not going to do anything about it,” Uncle Vinnie said. “That’s a local issue. I wouldn’t want the town trying to tell
me
what to do.”
In the spring of 2010, Uncle Vinnie decided to downshift from the state senate and run for Putnam County executive.
Some weeks after declaring his candidacy, Uncle Vinnie was invited to stop by the
PCN&R
to see Ailes, who accused him of “being behind” several new papers that were starting up in the county.
“You are trying to destroy these papers I got!”
“Roger, I don’t even know who owns these papers!”
“
No
, you are behind them. You are involved with them.”
“Roger, I don’t know anything about them. I wish you well.”
But Uncle Vinnie had liabilities.
For years, there had been talk of kickbacks and shakedowns. People wondered how Leibell, a country lawyer, could afford a sprawling home on horse pastures once owned by the television actress and
Bewitched
star Elizabeth Montgomery. Ailes knew the talk, and he had a lever to pull: connections to law enforcement.
Sheriff Don Smith called the FBI and fed the bureau information about Uncle Vinnie.
In June 2010, the
PCN&R
’s sister paper, the Putnam County
Courier
, broke the news that the FBI had subpoenaed his financial records. Not long after the
Courier
report, Uncle Vinnie received a call.
“Has the FBI been by to see you lately?” Ailes said.
“No,” Uncle Vinnie replied, trying to hide the panic in his voice.
“I know more about you than you think I do.”
“Well, that’s great you know stuff about me.”
The line went dead.
Uncle Vinnie told people Ailes was out to bring him down. He claimed mysterious cars were tailing him around the county, and they were not the FBI’s. One night at home, someone aimed flashlights into his back windows. He told friends he could not report the unsettling activity to Sheriff Smith because of Smith’s loyalty to Ailes.
“This was an ego fight about who was going to control the Republican Party in the county. And then Vinnie was stupid enough to do something illegal that Roger got wind of,” Sam Oliverio said.
Although Uncle Vinnie handily won the election, it was a Pyrrhic victory. The Feds were closing in. Just four weeks later, Uncle Vinnie revealed he would not take office as county executive.
Then, on Monday morning, December 6, Ailes got his man. Uncle Vinnie admitted to taking kickbacks from lawyers in his district. At the federal court in White Plains, New York, Leibell pleaded guilty to one count of obstruction of justice and one count of tax evasion, for which he would later be sentenced to twenty-one months in federal prison.
T
he Uncle Vinnie saga was a crucible that helped Lindsley finally bond with Haley and Panny. The three young reporters began to lunch together, and during these outings Lindsley let his guard down. Haley and Panny were beginning to realize that the unusual things they saw around the office—like the bathroom pictures of Roger and Beth—were only surface elements.
The story Lindsley told was deeply strange.
Roger and Beth were trying to inculcate in Lindsley their conspiratorial worldview. There were little things. At a restaurant, Lindsley once remarked on a cute waitress. “She’s probably a spy,” Beth said. And there were larger issues. They repeatedly told Lindsley they did not want him spending time with Haley. “They don’t trust you,” Lindsley told him. “They think you’re trying to use them.” Roger, in particular, was suspicious of Haley’s background. He claimed Haley might be an unmarried father because of an incident when Haley joined the family for Mass on Father’s Day. When the priest asked the fathers in the pews to rise, Haley, who was not paying attention, stood by mistake. But then Ailes would also tell Lindsley on multiple occasions that Haley was gay and that was the reason he had left the Marines. (Haley, who is straight, was given an honorable discharge for health reasons.) Beth and Roger also told Lindsley that Haley and Panny might be plants for MSNBC, or even Obama. Lindsley knew their claims were ludicrous, but confessed that the isolation was getting to him. When he went for pints at McGuire’s pub on Main Street, Lindsley found himself sitting in silence while eyeing the doorway, afraid that someone was trailing him. He feared no one would believe him. “It’s lonely at the top,” Beth told him once.
Initially, the proximity to power had been intoxicating to Lindsley. Roger called him Ailes Junior and intimated that he had big plans in store for him. He suggested his protégé could write his memoirs or perhaps become the youngest editor of
The Wall Street Journal
. Roger introduced him to George H. W. Bush and Rush Limbaugh. Beth joked morbidly about his future. “When Roger dies, you’re going to have some special responsibilities around here,” she said.
According to two senior Fox executives, Ailes spoke often about Lindsley at the office. “We thought he would be brought in to run the Fox News newsroom,” one executive said. “Roger would talk about how great he was, and how he had the best news instinct.” Ailes bragged about his papers’ role in bringing Uncle Vinnie down. “He talked about these local politicians like it was national news. He said we should be doing more stories like this ourselves, more
investigations
,” the executive said.
But Lindsley began to feel unnerved by Roger and Beth’s attentions. Instead of letting Lindsley go home to visit his family in North Carolina, Roger invited his sisters for an extended stay at the mountain. When Lindsley said he wanted to go on vacation to visit relatives in Ireland, Roger and Beth said they would go with him. They flew together on News
Corp’s private jet. Some days Lindsley felt that Champ, Roger’s German shepherd, was his only friend.
Haley and Panny tried to convince Lindsley to leave. “No, it’s disloyal,” Lindsley would say. When Haley threatened to leave, Lindsley warned him, “Don’t quit. You don’t know what they will do to you.”
At his apartment one night, Lindsley turned on Martin Scorsese’s noir thriller
Shutter Island
. He felt an unsettling resonance watching Teddy Daniels, the anguished U.S. marshal played by Leonardo DiCaprio, lose his moorings inside a sinister mental facility. Lindsley wanted to spring for the exit, but didn’t know how to get out.
J
oe Lindsley’s awakening came at a delicate moment for Roger and Beth. Ailes had learned that
New Yorker
journalist Peter Boyer was interviewing locals for an article about the contretemps surrounding the
PCN&R
. As was his custom, Ailes expressed wariness about his intentions.
“You going to talk to that guy? It’s going to be a hatchet job!” Ailes told Gordon Stewart.
But as Boyer was a serious reporter who had published an acclaimed book about CBS News in the late 1980s, Roger and Beth eventually agreed to speak with him. Although Boyer wrote for a magazine that Ailes labeled a liberal rag, he had reason to trust him. Boyer was a southern gentleman and a conservative.
When Boyer showed up at the
PCN&R
one morning in December to interview Beth and Lindsley together, the mood in the newsroom was tense. Despite the rift emerging between Lindsley and the Ailes family, Lindsley played the good soldier in front of the journalist. But Roger was wary. He began peppering Lindsley with phone calls about the impending article. “So how’s your friend Boyer doing? What’s your friend Boyer doing today? Hey man, what’s up with Boyer?”
“I’m not talking to the guy,” Lindsley would tell him. “When he calls, I tell you he calls.”
The
New Yorker
article hit newsstands on January 24, 2011. Headlined “Fox Among the Chickens” and written along the lines of Dr. Seuss’s
The Butter Battle Book
, Boyer’s story portrayed Roger and his liberal antagonists, like the Yooks and the Zooks, as destined to destroy any hope for peaceful coexistence. But unlike the Seuss book, which ends without any resolution of the conflict, by the end of Boyer’s tidy fable, mutual understanding ensued. “Many places a thousand times larger are
served by only a single newspaper; Philipstown now has two, each distinctly better than what was there before,” he wrote.
Ailes was pleased with the result. “He called me the day after the story ran,” Stewart recalled, “and said he liked it and thought Boyer was really good, and Beth loved her picture.” Stewart and other townsfolk had a much dimmer view. They felt Boyer got spun.
A
s Boyer was completing his article over the Christmas holiday,
Lindsley finally decided to resign. He told Roger and Beth about it in early January, a couple of weeks before the article was published. He said he would keep the information confidential and stay on for several months until they found a new editor in chief.
Roger and Beth did not take the news well, and it seemed to draw out Roger’s paranoid nature even more. One day, Roger called Lindsley with instructions for Haley: “Tell him not to wear a hoodie. It’s creepy.” Lindsley realized that Roger must have watched Haley leave the office on the security cameras, which were installed after a vandalism incident. Surveillance became a fact of life for the three reporters. During their lunch breaks to Panera Bread, a more discreet location in the next town, they wondered if they were being tailed by Ailes’s security detail. They wanted to leave, but had no place to go. Aware it was a gamble, Haley decided to call Boyer for help. He agreed to meet him, Panny, and Lindsley for a beer.
“They made it clear that they were unhappy—which, frankly, quite surprised me,” Boyer later said. Boyer told them that, unfortunately, he did not have any promising leads.