A news story about hazards in the parking garage was scuttled by Cowles media
Editor’s note: This draft is offered as background to the “Deathtrap” story. It has not yet been edited for the book.
RIVER PARK SQUARE reopened on the sunny Friday of August 20, 1999 amidst an atmosphere of celebration. A big man in a cowboy hat happened to be driving by just as the festivities were about to start. The scene reminded him of a “carnival,” he would say later.
When the passing cowboy noticed that Randy Shaw, the anchorman for Cowles-owned KHQ TV, was set up with his co-anchor in a mobile studio on a flatbed trailer in front of the mall’s towering glass atrium, he took the first parking place he could find.
Cameras were about to roll when Shaw glimpsed the familiar cowboy hat weaving through the crowd toward him. “Be right back,” he told his crew, stepping down from the flatbed.
“How the hell are you?” Shaw asked, tugging his visitor’s hand.
The cowboy’s name was Steve Rudd. He and Shaw had known each other for about ten years. What began as a professional relationship had grown into friendship and deep mutual respect. In the end, the two wound up cowboying together.
Shaw and Rudd exchanged a few pleasantries, asking after each other’s families. And then, according to the code of their friendship, Rudd came right out and said plainly why he had stopped.
“I’ve been working on this job, Randy,” he said. “It’s a mess. It hasn’t been inspected, and the workers are sick.”
Shaw grinned, looked over his shoulder at his crew, then touched Rudd’s arm and guided him to where they could talk without being overheard by Cowles personnel.
Both Steve Rudd (shown here) and Randy Shaw are cowboys.
THE FIRST TIME SHAW MET RUDD, in 1988, Rudd had conveyed a similar piece of intelligence about a troubled construction job he was working on. That led to a two-year-long investigative reporting series that sparked a criminal investigation, sent contractors to jail, won for Shaw and KHQ a clutch of prestigious journalism awards, and launched Rudd on a brilliant, though short-lived, career as a construction fraud investigator. That series was the first of several that Shaw and Rudd kibitzed on. Over a run of many years, Rudd had never given Shaw a bad lead, never told him anything that didn’t pan out.
Randy Shaw had learned that Steve Rudd’s word was gold. He was a dream source.
As a pipe layer on the federally funded multimillion-dollar project to finally sewer the Spokane Valley, Rudd discovered several kinds of fraud. One involved faking tests of the new sewer pipe. As a result, raw sewage was spilling into Spokane’s precious aquifer. Rudd had also uncovered a massive payroll and insurance fraud scheme on the part of the contractor.
Rudd had decided to call Shaw with the story, as opposed to any other Spokane newsman, because “he seemed like the best of the lot.” Soon, a series of amazingly aggressive investigative reports began appearing on KHQ.
For two years, in one installment after another, the reports offered a textbook demonstration of the show-and-tell power of television news. They showed live and animated footage illustrating how the falsified tests worked, and where the sewage was spilling—in some cases, pristine settings that could have been used in beer commercials about pure mountain water.
Other segments explained the payroll and insurance fraud. An installment on the latter showed the long scar on a worker’s neck where a potentially lethal tumor had been removed. The wound was financial as well. General Contractors, the company exposed by Shaw and Rudd, claimed the worker had no health insurance, even though it had deducted two dollars an hour for insurance premiums from his paychecks.
For the field shoots, Shaw wore denim jackets and jeans, or a red plaid Mackinaw. For the town segments he was elegant in a broadcaster’s tweeds and crisp business suits. He has a pleasant, open face, but he was no pretty boy. He had a deep voice and the upright manner of an old western lawman. He endlessly stuck his microphone in the faces of nervous county officials, construction workers, a consulting engineer. Before the camera’s staring eye, one source spontaneously succumbed to an ugly facial tick, momentarily resembling a bass trying to spit out a plug. When a county commissioner threatened Shaw if he reported on campaign contributions from General Contractors, Shaw merely reported the threat.
Meanwhile, the lantern-jawed Rudd, wearing his cowboy hat, handsome as the Marlboro Man, calmly explained on camera how the whole scheme worked. He had a ginger mustache, ginger hair that curled at the edges of his hat, and a dense beard so closely scraped that it gave his face the ruddy cast of oxidized iron.
It was great television.
What viewers never learned is that the series made life pretty tense for Rudd. One of his bosses threatened to have him killed.
“It’ll cost me a hundred dollars to hire a man to shoot you,” he said.
“Send him around,” said Rudd.
At six feet, and two hundred and forty conspicuously hard pounds, Rudd exuded the capacity for physical violence he had exhibited as boxer—he boxed for six years—college football player, and a rodeo competitor.
On the football field he was a center, for three years the smallest offensive lineman in his conference. It was his speed—with a 4.5-second forty-yard dash, he was faster than the team’s fullback—intelligence, and meanness that allowed him to flourish. Plus, pain didn’t much bother him. Football broke his sternum, collar bone, every rib on his right side—twice—every rib but one on his left side, all his fingers. In one game that benched six players for the season, he shattered his helmet and faceguard crashing into an opponent. He borrowed a teammate’s helmet and kept playing, although his only recollection came from watching the game film. At the time he met Shaw, nine years later, he still had a big knot on his head. Wrestling steers and riding broncs bareback had also broken his bones, but he couldn’t remember which ones.
After the death threat from his boss, Rudd got a concealed weapon permit. He packed a pistol in a shoulder holster. He called the gun a “hog.” It didn’t conceal too well, but that was the point. It was a Ruger .44 magnum, a Super Black Hawk. Six-inch barrel. Shotgun rib.
Strangers started driving by Rudd’s house late a night. They yelled threats. The threats grew increasingly menacing. When this happened on several consecutive nights, Rudd decided to do something. He was hiding in the lilac bushes one night when a pickup truck laid a power skid into his driveway and a man leaped out and charged toward his front door carrying a box or something. Rudd calmly stepped from the bushes holding the big pistol in his hand.
“What’s up?” said Rudd.
The man reversed field, dove in the pickup’s open passenger door, and the truck sped off. The shouted nighttime threats stopped.
On the job, however, the harassment took a different form. Rudd was given the worst jobs, which often required him to stand in raw sewage much of the day. He was so vile when he got home at night that he stripped outside and had his kids hose him down in the horse trough.
By this time, Rudd and Shaw had gotten to know each other pretty well. They shared a cowboy heritage, both having grown up on cattle ranches, Rudd in Utah, Shaw north of Spokane. Shaw’s father had rodeoed and had been a country and western singer of some note. Shaw, too, had his own country/rock band. Most of Rudd’s family for generations had run cattle in the afternoon shadow of the Tetons, in Wyoming. The taciturn, do-the-right-thing cowboy ethic was an inseparable part of both men’s characters.
Shaw was visiting Rudd at his house one day when Rudd showed the newsman one of his prized elk horn-handled hunting knives.
“What’s that? asked Shaw, affecting a broad Australian accent.
Rudd was slow on the uptake. “It’s a knife!”
“Tha’s nah a knife,” said Shaw. “Tha’s a knife!” The KHQ anchorman whipped out a wicked Bowie blade that he wore sheathed beneath his coat in the middle of his back.
Rudd left General Contractors and went to work for another Spokane sewer and water company, Eller Corporation. There, he promptly stumbled into another case of insurance fraud. By now he was a veteran federal whistleblower and litigator, having been a named plaintiff in Steve Rudd and United States Government vs. General Contractors. As Rudd recounted the experience later, he confronted his new employer with the evidence he had found.
“You need to pay back your workers,” he told Chuck Eller, one of the company owners. Eller said he couldn’t, because it would bankrupt the company. Shortly afterward, Eller and his father invited Rudd to coffee at Denny’s, on Pines and Sprague in the Spokane Valley. They shoved a manila envelope across the table at him.
“Just take that and get out of town,” they said. “Go away.”
Rudd says he opened the envelope and found it full of hundred dollar bills in wrappers. He guessed there was ten thousand dollars in the envelope. He shoved it back.
“No,” he said. “That’ll cover the coffee, but it ain’t goin’ in my pocket. You just pay all the workers off.”
The Ellers said they couldn’t, because it would cost the company a million dollars or more. That seemed plausible to Rudd. The company averaged about thirty employees, and he discovered that it had been bilking its workers two to three dollars an hour in insurance benefits for ten years.
“Well, I’ll see you in court, then,” said Rudd. “I’ll sue you for RICO charges, corrupt organization.”
After that, Rudd met with the Ellers and their lawyer in the office of his attorney, Leroy Schuster. The Ellers agreed to pay back the million dollars owed their workers over the next two years. Rudd had to sign an agreement with Eller saying he would never work for the company again.
“I had grown men coming to me, crying, saying I had saved their kids’ Christmas,” Rudd said later.
But Spokane area contractors no longer wanted to hire him. Construction laborers, however, were so grateful to him that they helped establish Northwest Fair Contracting Association to help stamp out the kinds of abuses Rudd had singlehandedly exposed. He was hired as the organization’s lead investigator.
Rudd developed a take-no-prisoners style of investigation and compiled a distinguished record. Seward Dinsmore, the wage-hour investigator in the Spokane office of the U.S. Department of Labor, well aware of how widespread was the abuse of laborers’ compensation in Spokane, was impressed with Rudd’s success. So he tapped him to spearhead a unique federal investigation.
Violations of the Davis-Bacon Act, the federal law that prescribes fair wage practices, were out of control at the Fairchild Air Force Base, west of Spokane. Neither the Department of Labor nor the colonel in charge of construction on the base had been able to arrest the violations.
The problem, “nasty to begin with, went Congressional,” as Dinsmore put it. Every time the colonel tried to crack down on a particular California-based contractor, the contractor used his political influence with a California congresswoman to get him called off.
The predicament called for a “bulldog.” Dinsmore considered himself a bulldog, and he recognized that trait in Rudd. In arranging for Rudd to lead the investigation, Dinsmore did something that he has never heard of before or since in a career spanning more than thirty years with the Department of Labor: he used a civilian, Rudd, to head a federal probe.
Fairchild had nuclear weapons on base at the time, so getting Rudd the security clearance he needed took some doing. There was nothing subtle about the violations Rudd found. Within his first two hours on base, he uncovered $30,000 in stolen laborers’ wages. Violations were literally lying about in plain sight—rebar, and no steel workers on the payroll, heavy equipment, and not enough operators on the payroll. He dropped a fistful of records on the construction boss’s desk.
“You need to call your lawyer,” he said.
That was the beginning of the end of Fairchild’s Davis-Bacon problems. In no time, the base went from worst offender to exemplary compliance status. Two or three of the cases Rudd and Dinsmore cleaned up involved kickbacks.
“We would never have got that compliance without Steve,” Dinsmore told his superiors.
Rudd was awarded the prestigious federal “Vision Award” for innovation that improves government practices, one of the few non-federal employees to ever do so.
“He was born at the wrong time. He’s
an old-fashioned, straight up and
down cowboy, tenacious, willing to put
his neck on the line.”
—Seward Dinsmore, U.S. Dept. of Labor
Years later, Dinsmore would say of Rudd: “He never got the recognition he deserved. If I could have given him money, I would have. He was born at the wrong time. He’s an old-fashioned straight up and down cowboy, tenacious, willing to put his neck on the line. You would not want that man on your trail.”
During seven years with Northwest Fair Contracting, Rudd recovered close to $1.3 million in stolen laborers’ wages. In the identical period, seven counterpart investigators throughout the rest of Washington State recovered $1.6 million in stolen wages.
This was the experience that opened Rudd’s eyes to Spokane’s comparative corruption.
“I just think it’s a crooked little town, myself,” he concluded. “I think it’s been crooked ever since the days of the North Idaho silver mines. They’d bring the miners to Spokane, get them drunk, take all their money and send them back. It’s like a virus. Once you get it in, you can’t get it out.”
Spokane’s rampant theft of construction workers’ wages also helped Rudd understand something else that had happened during the General Contractors investigation. Even while KHQ and the county prosecutor were compiling evidence of General’s criminal activities, the county commissioners were in the process of awarding the company yet another $2 million contract to do still more sewer work atop Spokane’s aquifer, one of the finest metropolitan drinking water sources in the world. County officials explained that General promised not to use workers on the new job who were implicated in the company’s previous illegal activity.
“We had to fight the county and the city tooth and nail to get them to investigate this problem that we made them aware of on the city’s sewer,” Rudd said later.
WHILE RUDD WAS WRACKING UP recovered wages for the area’s laborers, he was feeding story leads to Shaw. The two wound up doing several stories together over many years. In the course of doing so, they became fast friends.
Meanwhile, Rudd and Dinsmore had also become good friends. Dinsmore and his children visited Rudd on his ranch, and Rudd took them on a horseback ride into the mountains they would never forget. Dinsmore’s friendship with Rudd, however, did not keep him from sweating some of Rudd’s techniques. It made Dinsmore nervous that Rudd would tip off Shaw to some construction infraction, and then these two cowboys would show up armed with the formidable firepower of KHQ television cameras. In Dinsmore’s world, the federal presumption of innocence until proven guilty mandated that investigations be done quietly. Once you had a conviction you could go public, but not until.
In Rudd’s world, there was so much corruption, so many authorities looking the other way, too many lazy, sleepy media watchdogs to trust an approach like that. He developed his own style. Evidence is what mattered to him. He wanted to present it in the court of public opinion as quickly as possible. That’s how justice got done.
Still, Rudd has a passion for fairness. He never went to Shaw without hard documentation in hand. When Shaw and his KHQ crews showed up on a Rudd-tipped story, they had the evidence that enabled them to simply seek comment from those implicated.
While Seward Dinsmore knew that his job at the U.S. Dept. of Labor would never permit him to use their techniques, he came to respect the work Rudd and Shaw did together. They got the truth out, and that was what mattered.
Rudd became a familiar sight at the old KHQ broadcast center on Spokane’s South Hill, this rugged cowboy who often looked as though he had just stepped off a movie set or out of one of those coffee table books about the modern West. He made dozens of visits, many with his wife and kids. They would watch Shaw do the evening broadcast on studio monitors, and then go have dinner together at the Denny’s on Fancher Road in the Valley. Rudd and Shaw took turns picking up the tab. The two men visited each other often at their homes. Rudd helped Shaw build a boat dock at his Eloika Lake home north of Spokane.
Shaw was horseless at one point, and Rudd loaned him his horse and tack and cow dog to make a KHQ TV News commercial: Spokane’s cowboy newsman.
Another time, Rudd took Shaw and a KHQ camera crew to one of Rudd’s favorite places on earth: the Katich Ranch, in the Swawilla Basin, on the Colville Indian Reservation up the Columbia River in Northeastern Washington. There, Red Knection bulls, some of the most famous bucking stock in the professional rodeo circuit, are raised. The place was sheer heaven to Rudd. He went there at every opportunity. It’s where he got the poison out of his system from all the corruption he was busting. Dinsmore tried to coach Rudd about how not to take his work home with him. But the only place Rudd could go to get away from it was his good friend Steve Katich’s ranch. KHQ ran a several-part series of Rudd and Shaw pushing cows up into the mountains, guiding them down through the coulees. It was beautiful footage. Rudd particularly liked it, because it showed Shaw for what he really is.
“Randy’s quite a cowboy in his own right,” Rudd liked to say.
Rudd was president of the Spokane Junior Rodeo Association, vice president of the Washington Junior Rodeo Association, and Shaw, the most recognizable television personality in Eastern Washington, would come announce the events for him.
Shaw bought the Cotton Club lounge in Hayden Lake, Idaho. It had a rough reputation. More than a few of its patrons were unsavory characters, some Neo Nazis, some just old-fashioned roadhouse brawlers. Shaw wanted to turn the place into a family restaurant with good entertainment. Rudd came out and worked as Shaw’s bouncer—although “bouncer” didn’t describe Rudd’s approach. Rudd was a diplomat and clown, albeit a physically imposing one. He could defuse any situation with warmth and humor and have the most rancorous belligerent thanking him out in the parking lot as he headed off into the night. The town badass who came in one night to take on the Cotton Club’s new stud left laughing, feeling about Rudd the way Randy Shaw and Seward Dinsmore did: greatest guy in the world.
Rudd cleaned up the Cotton Club faster than he had cleaned up the corruption at Fairchild Air Force Base.
AS RUDD AND SHAW STOOD VISITING on the day of River Park Square’s grand opening, the deal was still a raw sore in Spokane. None of its controversy had abated, the most troubling questions were unresolved, critics remained convinced that it represented a robbery in broad daylight that threatened Spokane with financial disaster.
But for many in Spokane, the worst thing about River Park Square was that it tore open still another old wound.
Ten years before, the city decided to build a municipal waste incinerator over widespread public objection. So bitter was that community battle it had been dubbed “Spokane’s Vietnam.”
Spokane’s was the last big waste burner that would be built in America. The rest of the nation had by then abandoned such facilities as antiquated—too environmentally dangerous, too expensive.
By petition, Spokane’s citizens passed a resolution demanding the right to vote on the incinerator. The court overturned the petition, and the city built the incinerator. At $100 million, it was Spokane’s largest public works project up to that time.
It was also a vintage episode of Spokane’s electoral disenfranchisement and a bitter moment in the city’s history. Police were dispatched to keep middle-class incinerator protestors—gray-haired senior citizens, many of them—out of city council meetings during incinerator debates. Meanwhile, inside city hall those who followed The Spokesman-Review’s editorial lead in supporting the incinerator were feted with a free buffet.
In the wake of what most Spokanites regarded as the railroading of the incinerator, the city’s charter was changed. All future projects involving such large expenditures of public funds would have to be approved by voters. But when the Cowles mall proposal came along, involving an appropriation of funds requiring a public vote under the new charter amendment, the city council simply declared an emergency. That sidestepped the charter amendment and cut Spokane’s voters out of the picture again.
The disconnect between Spokane’s citizens and municipal government was a thing to behold. In this way River Park Square didn’t so much reopen a wound as expose a chronic civic illness that could never heal. River Park Square was just the latest rip-off of Spokane’s taxpayers, critics charged. At least this time the public’s health didn’t seem to be endangered.
SHAW HAD TO GET BACK TO HIS FLATBED STUDIO to start filming the festivities. “Come up to the studio,” he told Rudd.
A few days later, Rudd did. He and Shaw met in the outdoor employee break area and Rudd summarized the problems he had seen on the River Park Square job. The biggest one was that the contractor had improperly applied a flame retardant. It was a hazardous substance and was supposed to be handled only when wet. But there was too much of a rush on the job, and during abatement work the material was handled dry. As a result, the fine particles invaded everyone’s lungs. Every worker who handled the material was sick, Rudd told Shaw. Coughing blood, developing cysts on their sinuses, going to the doctor. Rudd was very sick himself, coughing uncontrollably. Rudd gave Shaw the names of union officials and state Department of Labor and Industries personnel who could confirm the problem.
But that wasn’t all. Rudd told Shaw that the facility wasn’t being properly inspected, something a quick check of records would confirm. And the fire system wasn’t working when the mall opened. And it had been the most dangerous work site Rudd had ever seen, accident-risking clutter left everywhere, workers on open scaffolding, workers using the escalators that rose five stories with no outer rails attached. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) rules had been ignored on the job.
What really galled Rudd, he told Shaw, was the way Betsy Cowles would periodically come through with an entourage and KHQ cameras in tow. The cameras always were pointed away from the many safety violations.
“She painted the picture she wanted the public to see,” Rudd told Shaw. Then he said, “I don’t think you should try to cover this. It’ll cost you your job.”
“You let me worry about that,” said Shaw.
Rudd had told Shaw about the problems with the River Park Square job, because he knew from countless conversations that Shaw didn’t much care for his employer. “He didn’t respect the outfit,” Rudd said.
A couple months after Rudd came to the KHQ’s studios, Shaw called him back. “You were right,” said Shaw. “They’re not going to let me cover it.”
Afterward, life got ugly for Shaw. A story appeared in The Spokesman-Review reporting that Shaw was being terminated for cause by KHQ. The cause: Shaw had allegedly sexually harassed one of his female co-workers. Shaw sued for wrongful termination and defamation of character, eventually settling with KHQ out of court. Under the terms of the settlement, he could never talk about the case.
He went to work for the local CBS affiliate station, KREM, which is owned by broadcast giant Belo Corporation.
“Anyone who knows Randy Shaw knows those accusations weren’t true,” Rudd said years afterward.
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As a contractor, Steve Rudd worked on the renovation of the mall garage, where he was alarmed at the poor quality of the existing concrete and lack of inspection.
Former news anchor at Cowles-owned KHQ-TV, Randy Shaw confirmed Judd's account: superiors wouldn't allow a report on RPS construction anomalies.
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