Steve Brazile waited in the parking lot, heart pounding. An hour earlier, his cellphone had rung. The caller identified himself as an FBI agent and said they needed to talk; could he and his partner come to Brazile’s home that evening? Not in front of my wife and kids, Brazile thought.
He suggested a Saint Louis Bread Co. Half an hour later, he saw a black Chevy Suburban pull into the lot. Two guys got out. They were wearing dark suits, white shirts, skinny ties. Brazile’s nervous mind flitted to Men in Black—one of them really did look like Tommy Lee Jones, fit and grizzled. The other one was younger, blond, trying hard. They walked up, flipping open big wallets to show their shields. He was under investigation, they told him, for criminal activity during his employment at Sara Lee.
It was February 2012—more than two years since that employment was terminated. But when the younger agent opened an accordion file, Brazile instantly recognized one of the false invoices he’d created. The agents pressed for information, telling him they knew what he did, and they knew why. They even knew about his lawsuit—and they sounded sympathetic, which he found gratifying. But he refused to make a statement without a lawyer. He saw them trade glances, frustrated. They wanted to know if he’d had help inside the bank.
He hadn’t. He’d explain this as soon as he found a lawyer; he already knew he would plead guilty. He was guilty. But so, in his mind, was Sara Lee.
For most of his life, Brazile had done exactly what was expected of him.
He got his first job at 14, scraping dishes in the West Texas A&M University cafeteria. Before that, it was chores: rounding up livestock, delivering okra, getting up at dawn every Sunday to disinfect display cases at his father’s butcher shop, Harold’s Lil’ Market, in Amarillo. When they visited Brazile’s grandparents in Arkansas, and Brazile heard rain hit like shrapnel on the rusted tin roof and froze his backside using their outhouse, he started to understand why his father worked seven 18-hour days a week.
But Brazile also observed the market’s customers. Dr. Love, a lanky veterinarian who wore a gray beaver-felt cowboy hat and polished boots, talked about calvings that kept him up all night, sick horses he’d cured. He drove a Dodge pickup, nothing fancy, but it wasn’t covered in dust or beat up with dents. Mr. Hakins drove a Cadillac, wore hand-tied bow ties, and told crazy stories about his big legal cases.
Brazile didn’t want to be a butcher.
His brother went to Texas A&M University on a track scholarship, then came home to work in the butcher shop. Their sister taught home economics nearby. Brazile drove south to Lubbock, found a job at a grocer, and enrolled at Texas Tech University, double-majoring in accounting and economics.
His father was leery of formal education. He’d dropped out of high school at 16; his key to success was outworking everybody else. Whenever one of his kids had the slightest struggle with a class or a coach, he’d say, “You’ve learned enough. You need to get out of there and go to work.”
Brazile intended to take a different route. The day he graduated, he walked across campus and accepted a $15,000-a-year clerk’s job with Campbell Taggart. He was overqualified, but he threw all his energy into learning the baking business. He might still be working weekends, but at least he was dealing with ink, not sticky animal blood.
Anheuser-Busch bought Campbell Taggart in 1982, shortly after Brazile started. He was soon promoted to the corporate offices, doing internal audits. His father seemed impressed.
At Campbell Taggart, as long as you showed up and gave value, you had a job for life. Eager to prove his loyalty in return, Brazile left his new wife at home and traveled for months at a time; he spent more than one Christmas writing reports in his hotel room. His absence eventually wrecked the marriage, but by then he didn’t care. The job meant everything to him.
In 1993, A-B moved the food division to St. Louis. Employees age 53 or older could retire with two years’ salary, and many hurriedly strapped on that parachute, rather than leave Texas. Brazile, 30 and divorced, made the move. In St. Louis, he found an office full of new employees who knew nothing of the company’s workings. Promotions came fast; in two years, his salary doubled.
In 1996, A-B spun off the company, which named itself The Earthgrains Company and went on the New York Stock Exchange. Frustrated by the IT department’s babble of acronyms and jargon, the CEO asked Brazile to take over and run the department like a business.
He didn’t pretend to be a geek, just tried to be fair. He added his business knowledge to the department’s IT expertise, and they had one success after another. “In the late ’90s, Brazile was a poster child for SAP implementation,” recalls Gerald Van Dielen, then a project manager on his team.
SAP was what everybody wanted: a set of software that could connect all of a company’s billing, purchasing, and payroll data in a single system. But SAP was hard to implement, and consultants were expensive. Brazile’s team managed the transition in record time, and he says their first SAP project saved the company $30 million. SAP’s developers photographed him sitting at a table in a wheat field, with a line about Earthgrains bringing millions of dollars to the table, and the ad appeared in USA Today and The Wall Street Journal.
Brazile began to feel competent enough to relax a little bit at work. He fell in love with Lorraine Bettini, a consultant who was working on her Ph.D. in psychology, had a great sense of humor, and was blissfully uninterested in business. They married and had a baby girl, Emerson, then a son, Camden. Life took on a sense of proportion, a contentedness Brazile had never felt before.
In 2001, soon after Camden’s birth, Earthgrains was acquired by Sara Lee. Overnight, Brazile found himself part of a global corporation making everything from Douwe Egberts coffee and Jimmy Dean sausage to insecticide and the Wonderbra.
What he noticed first, after the acquisition, was the silence. One day somebody spoke his mind in a meeting; a week later, Brazile heard he’d “left to pursue other interests.” There was less banter. His boss didn’t pop by, but summoned Brazile to his office in conventional fashion. Meetings felt like exercises in humiliation, with Sara Lee execs saying things like, “This place is full of idiots.” Severance got handed out, he told Lorraine, like Halloween candy.
Brazile started counting the number of longtime Earthgrains employees who’d vanished. The corporation had the money to offer generous severance packages that erased all possible complaints. Most openings never got posted, just swiftly filled by an internal candidate. “Within a year, the CFO and CEO from Earthgrains had been replaced,” Brazile says. “By 2009, there were less than five Earthgrains executives left, out of a couple hundred.”
When Addison, the Braziles’ third child, came along, Brazile took a week off to help Lorraine manage two toddlers and a newborn. Two days into the vacation, he got called back to work to write a report for his boss. “Like an idiot,” he says, “I left Lorraine at home and went back to work that very day.” He felt under the gun: The new COO had come from Bain & Company. “He called me up to his office and said, ‘Every turnaround company I was associated with at Bain, the IT department was a mess, and you are probably no different,’” Brazile says.
Consultants started showing up to examine contracts and do surprise audits. Brazile came home every night wound so tight, his body ached. He’d never drunk much in college or on the road, but now he tossed back a shot of Jim Beam or Wild Turkey every evening, just to take the edge off.
In 2005, a new chief information officer, George Chappelle, fired the IT vice president in Europe and hired a former colleague from H.J. Heinz Company named Steve Merry, a loose-cannon Brit who looked like a mature Austin Powers and had only two years until retirement. (On a Psychological Consultants personality assessment, Merry scored a 4 on a scale of 0 to 100 for the trait of “conforming.” “You don’t appear to be particularly concerned to avoid trouble,” the summary noted.)
Chappelle also asked for somebody young and aggressive to help him roll out St. Louis’ IT platform worldwide. A little hurt—he’d developed that platform—Brazile suggested one of his hires, Matt Spyers, a Washington University grad with tons of promise. Spyers looked like a young Mickey Mantle, Brazile thought, with a 1950s flattop haircut and a big, disarming grin. He was easy to like. But he was more ambitious than Brazile had realized.
“I’d go to Chicago, and all of a sudden a door opens and out comes Matt and George and a couple other people,” Brazile says. “Matt started doing things I didn’t direct him to do and saying, ‘If you don’t like it, talk to George.’ I was supposed to do his review and compensation, but I was not allowed even to view it.”
Merry, meanwhile, had begun insisting that IT be outsourced to India. Brazile warned him that after the initial savings in salaries, outside consultants would charge high prices every time the technology changed, and Sara Lee would be left with no internal expertise. His opinion was ignored. Every day, he could feel the walls squeezing in, forcing him out. He watched and listened, noting other executives’ perfectly pressed designer shirts and cool ease. One VP, he told Lorraine, looked “like he could spill a bowl of spaghetti on himself and it would just fall off, no stains.” In meetings, he saw winks that seemed to signal a secret agenda.
Brazile was watching huge sums of money get spent—his department’s budget was nearly half a billion dollars, and he was sure outsourcing would cost them far more in the long run. If he kept his mouth shut, it meant tacit acceptance of something he was sure would hurt the company. If he resisted, they’d say, “We can’t work with this guy; he’s a malcontent.” So he’d push too far one day, reel it in the next, go home and drink himself into resignation.
By now he was throwing back a bottle of Scotch a night. Starting the day felt like ripping through cotton wool, but he knew his job well enough to compensate. By noon, the anger would have spiked, and he’d feel scared and helpless. He thought he’d be fired any day, and he was consumed by gut feelings he couldn’t prove.
“That’s all you talk about!” Lorraine finally exclaimed. “There’s more to life, and more to our marriage, than listening to you bitch about that job every day.” She thought he was paranoid. Some days, he thought so, too. “They are denying your reality,” he says. “I almost went crazy.”
He did not agree, however, when she said he was becoming an alcoholic. He didn’t drink at work. He didn’t drink at bars. “You drink every night,” she said. “You need help.”
By the end of 2006, not even Scotch could erase the frustration.
One December morning, Brazile opened a blank Word doc and started to cobble together an invoice. In the upper left corner, he put a business name: SCC. He’d registered Steve’s Classic Cars four years earlier, hoping to turn his car-restoration hobby into a side business, and he already had a separate bank account to pay utilities for a garage on Catalan Street, just off Broadway.
He made the invoice for about $35,000, and he messed with the font for a while, lining things up, making the company name bigger. What had started as play felt more and more real. He printed the invoice, adjusted a few more things, tinkered to make it look just right. His brain supplied a soundtrack—all the things he’d seen and heard that just didn’t seem right to him.
He walked the fake invoice up to the second floor and laid it in the in-basket on the desk of the accounts-payable clerk. A few days later, a check showed up at the Catalan Street address.
From there, it got even easier. Sometimes the clerk would say, “Hey, you dropped this off. Do you need the check right away?” And he’d say yes, and she’d bring it to his desk. Later he’d sign the back and take the check to the teller’s window at his bank. Not once did anyone raise an eyebrow.
Brazile used the money to buy more classic cars, put the rest in a brokerage account, and paid taxes on what he stole. He was already making $175,000 a year, and his bonus, stock, and perks took it to $400,000. He didn’t crave cash or luxuries. He craved what he couldn’t buy: security, revenge, control over his destiny, proof that he was just as smart as they were. Stealing cut through the hangovers and the thirst and the mental blur of suspicion and humiliation and resentment.
It kept him from feeling helpless.
“Your pattern of thought is ‘How am I going to steal this money?’ and that’s the end of the thought pattern,” he says now, admitting that possible consequences didn’t even occur to him. “You are just in a fog.”
Despite the angst, Brazile’s job still meant everything to him. He’d had no time to make close friends or connect with his neighbors. They lived in St. Louis Hills, in St. Gabriel the Archangel’s close-knit parish, so Lorraine wrapped herself and the kids in the warm blanket of community, participating in Mass, parish picnics, sporting events…
Brazile, working his BlackBerry on the sidelines, barely glanced up.
He says he thought about stopping the fraud a number of times, but something else always happened to inflame his outrage. He thought about quitting his job, too, but starting over felt impossible. He’d risen to vice president of application development and support for North America, but to the outside world, he was just an accountant who’d gotten rusty after 11 years running an IT shop.
At the end of 2007, Brazile’s leg started swelling. His doctor diagnosed him with deep vein thrombosis. One of the blood clots in his legs had moved to his lungs and was keeping him from breathing properly. He wound up in the emergency room and had to cancel a business trip overseas.
One month later, Spyers was promoted to vice president and North American chief information officer. Brazile would now report to him. Brazile says that after delivering this news, Merry asked him to continue mentoring Spyers in delegating, recruiting, decision-making, and follow-through. When Brazile asked why he was now reporting to—and supporting—a less experienced employee he’d brought into the company, he says Merry told him Spyers “was younger and had more career upside.”
A miserable year followed. “You’re sitting in meetings with people who used to look to you for leadership and direction,” Brazile says. “It’s this slow, torturous, methodical taking it away from you.” The pressure ratcheted up, like a heavy load slowly winched higher and higher. “The more hostile the work environment became, the frequency [of falsifying invoices] increased,” he says. “It was pretty much a direct correlation.”
(Brazile wasn’t tracking, but by the time the feds added it up, he would have used 104 false invoices to steal, over three years, $3.9 million.)
In mid-January 2009, Spyers told Brazile that he wanted him to lead the outsourcing project, transitioning the IT department to India. Afterward, his job would be eliminated.
Brazile pointed out that a director-level position would then open, as would several others, and he’d be glad to apply and take a pay cut. “I can’t travel long distances,” he said, “but I’m very qualified for a number of these other positions.”
He says Spyers and Merry told him they did not want him in a leadership role after the transition was complete, and they wouldn’t accept his application even for lower positions.
Steadying his voice, Brazile pointed out that he just might have grounds for legal action. He says they told him he was the only one who knew how to manage the transition, and if he’d do it and stop talking about suing, they’d either give him severance and a two-year contract with one of the vendors (IBM or HP) or a special completion bonus.
In June 2009, Spyers left Sara Lee. (He declined to comment for this story.)
Soon after, Mike Aufdembrink—another employee whom Brazile had hired and trained—was promoted over him. He says the vice president of corporate human resources, Lena Koldras, asked Merry to reconsider, calling it just another move to embarrass Brazile publicly. He says Aufdembrink confided, “I’m so embarrassed. You shouldn’t be reporting to me. I should be reporting to you.”
On June 23, Brazile plugged a recorder into his phone and taped his annual review. Merry told him to go ahead and describe what he thought his accomplishments were, “but, you know, we don’t need to troll through absolutely everything.”
Brazile talked about overseeing the outsourcing and smoothing Sara Lee’s relationship with IBM. “And all of that against the background of your own personal positions and circumstances,” Merry pointed out, adding that he’d “represented the company very, very well… So what are you thinking?”
“I guess I would like to learn more about the, you know, the offer that was presented to me back in January,” Brazile said. He reminded Merry of the choice: a job with IBM plus two years’ severance or an enhanced severance package.
Merry pointed out that IBM had been laying people off since the economic downturn. “Certainly at the time we were talking and building it into the deal, that looked like a real opportunity… So I haven’t pushed on the IBM thing in recent times.” He said he’d be glad to “drive forward…but what I would really want to know, is it in my best interest to do that? Sorry, is it in your best interest, therefore my best interest, to bother having that discussion?” Merry said he thought Brazile, with his health concerns, might want a severance package instead.
“What do you think that would look like?” Brazile asked.
“I would have to sit down with HR face-on again, Brazile, and remind myself of the whole details,” Merry said. “So I’ve got to do that. I owe you that. OK.”
Brazile added that it was tough hearing good things about his work but getting passed over for promotions.
“The things—and I guess I do need to respond to that—the circumstances turned a little against you, obviously, with your health and so forth, and none of that is being used in this thing,” Merry replied. “But it has meant you are St. Louis–bound…”
“From what I’m hearing, it’s nothing performance-related on my end or any—”
Merry interjected: “No.”
“—anything in terms of shortcomings.”
“No, no, no, no. I mean, jeepers.” A minute later, Merry said, “When you look at yourself and choices…there aren’t so many really out there within sight anymore. You are a vice president. We’ve got rid of a lot of vice presidents.”
In the Talent Review Profile, under “Comments on Development Planning,” Merry wrote, “Possible retirement on health grounds, Brazile suffers from DVT.” (Top HR executives would later admit that they’d never before seen a talent review refer to someone’s medical condition—and that Brazile had never expressed any interest in retiring.)
On August 11, a letter from chief financial officer Mark Garvey was hand-delivered to Brazile. It stated that neither Merry nor Spyers had the authority to amend Sara Lee’s standard severance plan. Brazile had spoken to Garvey just a few days earlier and had hung up feeling sure his claim would be investigated. But there was a date stamp of August 3 from Sara Lee’s labor attorneys at the bottom of the letter. They’d drafted it a week before that conversation.
In September, Merry was fired for creating a “hostile work environment.”
In October, Brazile filed a complaint of age discrimination—he later added disability discrimination—with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Two months later, he was terminated.
The week after Christmas 2009, Brazile packed the salvage of 27 years into cardboard boxes. People glanced in as they passed, then looked away. He felt like he was in one of the old Famous-Barr display windows downtown, separated from the crowd by glass. He saw pity on his colleagues’ faces, but nobody spoke.
Soon his trash can overflowed, his desk drawers were hollowed out, and the walls were stripped bare. All the struggles and tiny workaday triumphs were gone, dissolved so thoroughly, it felt like they’d never happened. When he carried out the last box, it was dark and freezing cold. He sat in the car for a long time, unable to bring himself to turn the ignition.
Two weeks later, cards started arriving at his home: “Wherever you go, I’ll come work for you.” “Thanks for your help over the years and your unwavering confidence in me.” “Thank you will never adequately express my gratitude for all you’ve done.” “No one will ever take such good care of the department as you have.”
He was beginning to realize how much that had cost him. Emerson was on a swim team—how could he have missed that? Lorraine kept a family calendar. Camden was reading the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. Addison was preparing for her first communion.
Brazile made it a point to be home when his kids got off the bus. He heard the lively details that would have faded by the time he got home, drained and angry, at 8 p.m. Now, 8 p.m. was the time he and Lorraine walked the dog around Francis Park. A rescued pit bull, Noel had scared Brazile at first, then won him over with her pure, unquestioning loyalty. That’s how dogfighters were able to train them, Lorraine explained. They capitalized on misguided loyalty.
Brazile moved ahead with his discrimination lawsuit. He’d hired Jerome Dobson to be his attorney, and he spent hours sifting through boxes of documents that Sara Lee had turned over to Dobson. “Lorraine!” Brazile would yell. “Remember when I told you…”
It was all there: Brazile’s evaluations, Merry’s personality-test results, hundreds of emails…
Back in a September 4, 2008, email, Spyers told Merry, “We will not communicate any [outsourcing] transition thinking with him now. We are just going to move him to report directly to me… He is aware there is no landing spot for him but is committed to ensuring a smooth transition. We need Steve to remain fully engaged in leading this effort…”
On August 5, 2009, Merry emailed HR: “We should not let this get out of hand and become a difficult situation. Steve is a good guy who has worked his heart out for Sara Lee and continues to do so…also remember he suffers from DVT and perhaps he could claim that travel on behalf of SLC was a contributing factor.”
Sara Lee had responded to the EEOC complaint by denying any knowledge of Merry and Spyers offering Brazile a “special program” if he stayed to see them through the outsourcing transition. The company also denied any knowledge of Merry saying Spyers was younger and had more upward career potential. It blamed “the inability to travel, especially prolonged air travel,” for limiting Brazile’s job options, but also noted that “Mr. Brazile was perceived as being resistant to change and rigid in his ideas regarding how things should be done.” Sara Lee maintained that “Mr. Brazile did not file any complaints with Human Resources,” noting that he hadn’t called its hotline.
When Brazile read the response, his head nearly exploded. Not every position required prolonged air travel—and what about videoconferencing? As for discrimination, he’d talked about it with two HR managers, as well as the vice president and global business practices officer. “He’s the wizard behind that hotline,” Brazile says. “He said to call the hotline, and I said, ‘Well, you’re the guy at the end of the hotline.’”
When depositions started, things got even more interesting. Koldras said Merry told her “that what he meant about younger was his ability to take on broader responsibility, it had nothing to do with age, and that Steve knew that.”
CFO Mark Garvey initially insisted that Brazile was never promised a “special program.” But on May 1, 2009, Garvey had received a forwarded email in which Brazile referenced “IBM, and payment terms.” Koldras prefaced the forward “FYI and pretend u don’t know.”
“Is that part of a culture within the company,” Dobson asked Garvey, “that one is supplied information with the instruction to pretend you didn’t know?”
An August 3, 2009, email from HR gave Garvey more details: “Per Steve B, Merry has committed to an enhanced severance package or a guarantee 2 years with IBM in addition to the standard severance. When I spoke to Merry, he did not deny these commitments.” Six days later, in Merry’s performance review, Garvey criticized “discussions around Steve Brazile’s severance in which case communication to the employee was inappropriate and may have put the Corporation at risk.”
Dobson repeated his question: No knowledge of special promises?
“There was no special programs [sic] to offer,” Garvey replied, “so from that perspective, I do not believe he was offered a special program.”
Last summer, Brazile showed some of the transcripts and emails to his criminal-defense attorney, Sandy Boxerman. “You know, rarely do depositions live up to their hype,” Boxerman said slowly, “and in discovery, you don’t get anything. But you got a lot. Now I can stand up in front of that judge and say, ‘Your Honor, there are some unusual circumstances. He was treated very poorly.’”
What had finally alerted Sara Lee to the fraud was a complaint from an unpaid vendor. Brazile, his brain soggy with all the whiskey and stress, had mistakenly deposited that vendor’s payment in his own account instead of delivering it.
Years later, after the FBI met him at Saint Louis Bread Co., he went home and tried to explain to his shocked wife just how and why he’d put their family in jeopardy. Then he tried to come to grips with it himself, in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and visits to a psychologist.
For their kids’ sake, he and Lorraine were determined to continue life as normally as possible. One day last August, Brazile was watching Camden play soccer in Francis Park, and St. Louis Circuit Judge Mike Mullen walked up. They’d known each other since their boys were in kindergarten together.
“I’d ask how you’re doing, but I imagine you’ve had better days,” said Mullen, who’d read the news in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “How are your kids doing?”
Remembering that moment, Brazile’s mouth twists. How could he have done this to his kids? He’d felt so alone in those muddled, angry years. Now his children were the ones suffering.
Mullen offered to write a letter about Brazile’s character and his transformation as a father. “Steve was at all his daughter’s track meets. He was at every school event, band…” Mullen says now. “Straightforward, sincere, earnest. I’m certainly not excusing the behavior. But I see people in front of me all the time, good people who make bad decisions. I think those two things can be separated, and I think Steve is a really good example.”
Worried as he was about his own trial, Brazile was still determined to proceed with his civil suit. “Even if I only get a dollar,” he says. “Just, this is what you did.”
But after he was charged, Dobson withdrew as his attorney.
“Jerry was of the highest integrity, a real defender of the little guy,” Brazile sighs. “He said, ‘Look, you got screwed. In 30 years of practicing law, I haven’t seen a better discrimination case. I understand you got frustrated, but I really wish you hadn’t done what you did.’”
Lorraine watched her husband scramble to find another attorney. “You have all these lawyers,” she said. “Who’s looking out for my interests? I’ve still got three little kids to raise.” A lawyer friend recommended Art Margulis to represent Lorraine. And after hearing Brazile’s story, Margulis agreed to take on his civil suit as well.
Ironically, Sara Lee no longer even existed as a corporation. After all those years emphasizing global travel and global operations, it split its North American and international operations in 2012, breaking into Hillshire Brands and D.E. Master Blenders 1753. Merry was back in the U.K., far from reach for the civil suit. And on April 29, 2013, Brazile reluctantly agreed to dismiss the only other named individual, Matt Spyers. Brazile was advised that dropping Spyers would go a long way with Sara Lee—and if he could settle with Sara Lee and make restitution, that might go a long way with the federal judge.
In June 2013, it had looked like Sara Lee—which had filed a countersuit against Brazile—was ready to settle. Brazile had been waiting to plead guilty to the criminal charges, hoping he could tell the authorities that the two parties had settled their civil suits and agreed on restitution. In the third week of June, he met with Boxerman and Margulis. Boxerman told him the prosecutor was leaning on them for a guilty plea. “That’s fine,” Brazile said, “but we have to redo the plea agreement, because now that we’re settling, the restitution language has to be changed.”
Margulis cleared his throat and said he had some bad news: Sara Lee had changed their mind about settling the civil suits. “They want to see what the full power of the federal government can extract from you,” he said.
“Art, what the hell, man? You’ve told me for months now that it’s over,” Brazile protested.
“It appeared the matter was going to be settled,” Margulis said apologetically.
The case goes to trial in October 2014. (The company’s spokesperson declined to comment because of the pending litigation.)
On November 13, Brazile showed up early to U.S. District Court in Chicago. Since his arraignment, he’d been on supervised release, with phone check-ins and urine samples and random visits from probation officers who looked around his house and asked questions like, “You buy in bulk a lot, huh?” His bank called and asked him to close his accounts. The FBI had seized his father’s 1959 Ford farm truck, the possession it hurt him the most to lose.
Without his customary harvest-gold ball cap, his bald head looked somehow vulnerable, the pink skin on his scalp lighter by a shade than his face, and a stark contrast to his dark suit. He sat at a table in the faux-teakwood courtroom, licking dry lips and staring straight ahead. When U.S. District Court Judge Elaine Bucklo entered the courtroom, he stood straight, feet braced apart, while Assistant U.S. Attorney Sarah Streiker summed up his crime. The probation office had decided that it involved “sophisticated means” (more planning or concealment than typical). That added 11 months to the suggested sentence.
Boxerman had filed a protest, saying there was nothing sophisticated about this crime at all. Brazile had no co-conspirators. He’d created false invoices, not shell corporations or offshore bank accounts. And getting the checks hand-delivered to him wasn’t as unusual as it sounded. A senior associate in accounts payable told the FBI that anyone could request an “immediate need” invoice, and she’d bring them a check.
The judge dismissed the protest.
Boxerman then launched into a history of the federal sentencing guidelines, pointing out that back in 1998, the recommended range for this crime was less than half the current length.
“I was one of those who think it was way too low,” Bucklo said crisply.
Brazile groaned inwardly. Now it was up to Boxerman. Brazile had begged him to somehow make the judge see him as a human being, to explain his behavior without excusing it. Brazile knew he couldn’t find that delicate balance himself.
He’d tried, in the written materials they submitted. But at his arraignment the month before, Brazile had already sensed Bucklo’s disgust. He was a professional, with a college education and a good job, and he’d done this? Boxerman had to summon enough passion to make her at least see why.
Brazile held his breath while Boxerman listed, in a matter-of-fact tone, the strides his client had made and the hardships he’d suffered.
Less than a minute later, it was Brazile’s turn. “I want to apologize for my conduct,” he began, his voice shaking. “I am embarrassed and humiliated to be standing in front of the court today…”
When he finished, Bucklo said, “What I see is a lot of self-pity, a lot of ‘Well, I should be excused because I became a workaholic because I had a lousy father and I started drinking because of my employer.’ I mean, we see lots of discrimination cases… You don’t decide to steal multimillion dollars of money from your employer.”
She glanced down at the guidelines. “The sentence needs to reflect the seriousness of the offense…and provide just punishment as well as adequate deterrence… I am not particularly concerned in this case about protecting the public…. I do hope you will be able to get the treatment you clearly need for alcohol and mental-health counseling in prison. Is there any issue I have not dealt with?”
Boxerman assured her that they’d covered everything. Brazile’s heart sank.
“Where are you on the civil suit?” Bucklo asked. Brazile looked up, elated. She’d brought it up herself! She must understand that’s what drove his actions. He waited for Boxerman to say something about the strength of his case; about Sara Lee withdrawing just before they’d finalized the settlement; about depositions that had substantiated his client’s claims…
Boxerman said he wasn’t representing his client in that matter.
Bucklo sentenced Brazile to 48 months in prison, a sentence shorter than the range suggested for “sophisticated means” but longer than the standard guideline’s minimum.
He would pay $3.9 million in restitution.
“If I had a ‘happy wagon,’ it would only have 3–5 pebbles in it,” Brazile’s son, Camden, wrote for an eighth-grade school assignment in November. “That would be for a very personal reason, but I guess I’ll talk about it. Recently, I’ve been informed that shortly after Christmas, my dad is going to jail. I’ve never been without him, and the thought of being alone scares me. My parents put a lot of pressure on me to grow up and help my family, but it’s all happening so fast. I have nervous breakdowns at home, and I think about him a lot.”
By the time he read that paper, Brazile had implored his therapist to tell him what went wrong inside his head. “I’m breaking a federal law. I’m going to be exposed to the IRS, the FBI, the federal penitentiary, rehab. I’m throwing away my college degree and my license. All that didn’t even occur to me?”
He’ll never forget the succinct answer: “You were raised by a workaholic father, you instilled his values in yourself, you became a workaholic too, you didn’t have any work-life balance, work was how you defined your life, and you chose to self-medicate. You became an alcoholic. And an alcoholic and a workaholic is a lethal combination.”
You might think drinking too much and working too compulsively would cancel each other out. But they’re both attempts to stop feeling helpless, says Peter Ruderman, a training and supervising analyst at the Saint Louis Psychoanalytic Institute. “You’re trying to get a little control back. But the problem with any addiction is that it takes over, spiraling you further out of control. You start justifying things that otherwise might feel unjustifiable.
“[Low] self-esteem is a key factor going in,” Ruderman adds. Once the alcohol blurs reality, however, people start to feel omnipotent. “There’s a sense that ‘nothing can touch me.’ You want to skate over ‘I’ve got a problem here,’ because the vulnerability is unbearable. Then you make decisions based on this childish omnipotence. The internal capacity to observe yourself, to know right from wrong and to know what’s in your best interests, is impaired.”
The number of white-collar embezzlements is increasing. Marquet International, an independent investigative and security consulting firm, analyzed 528 major embezzlement cases (those over $100,000) in 2012—up 11 percent over 2011. But most embezzlers use the money to buy diamonds or racehorses. For Brazile, the crime was less about acquisition than a twisted sort of defiance, a way of getting back on equal footing. He felt betrayed and humiliated. He lived in terror of losing his job, and no matter how bad it got, he couldn’t quit. He’d built his sense of self on somebody else’s scaffolding.
He’d become a version of his father that Harold Brazile wouldn’t have even recognized.
