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 pulclass="underline" 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.
The 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.”