A real Man of God Malice in Wonderland a real man of god

ARE

YOU

OUT

THERE?

VERSAILLES

1991

You should know something: The shoppers in the antique stores on Main Street don't just talk about what Christmas gifts to buy.

They talk about you, and about what you did a year ago at the Thornton's Food Mart out near the bypass on the edge of town.

They imagine what it was like for your victim and how the man driving to work on that isolated back road felt when he found her lying in the mud and gravel.

They say, "I guess we'll never know who did it."

You haunt this town.

"Maybe for real," Glenn Brooks says, "this guy dropped out of nowhere, snatched my daughter, cut her to pieces and then vanished."

Where did you come from, where did you go? People can't help but wonder whether you're the person walking behind them on the sidewalk.

You're the Ghost of Christmas Past: Nobody's sure whether they've seen your face; everybody fears you.

Why did you stab her so fiercely and so often that the knife broke?

Were you a friend? A stranger? Do you see what it's done to her family? To the town?

Are you out there?

Are you out there?

All anyone knows is this:

In the early hours of Dec. 31, 1990, someone spirited away Valeri Brooks, a 22-year-old clerk working alone at the Thornton's on U.S. 60. Sometime in the night, her abductor slit her throat.

Valeri was scheduled to quit work at 10 p.m., her grandmother Betty Todd says, but Valeri had stayed to cover the third shift for a co-worker who called in sick.

At 1:40 a.m., someone tripped the alarm in the store, and at 1:42 a.m. the alarm company in Louisville relayed the call to the Versailles police dispatcher.

Suddenly, it was radio mystery theater in Versailles. Anyone with a police scanner could hear the unfolding drama and the screech of rubber as police officer John Wilhoit responded.

It took Wilhoit eight seconds to reach Thornton's -- he was 100 yards away monitoring traffic from the Woodford Feed Co. parking lot -- but he found nobody when he arrived.

_{Wilhoit saw no signs of a struggle. The only thing out of place was Valeri’s purse, which was on the counter inside.}

And the cash register drawer was open -- short $230.

Outside, some of the trash cans had been emptied and lined with new plastic bags. Others had not.

The third shift was over.

They didn't find Valeri’s body until 6:50 a.m., when a man driving to work spotted her body along a private drive nine miles south of town in a remote area.

Woodford County Coroner Steve Ward pronounced Valeri dead at 7:55 a.m., but he wrote on the autopsy that she died between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. Despite the bitter cold weather, her body, including her arms and legs, was still warm.

Her throat had been butchered open and she had been stabbed dozens of times. Ward counted at least 37 puncture wounds.

Even longtime residents say it's the most horrifying thing they can remember happening in Woodford County. Tyler Purdy calls it "the biggest crime Versailles has ever worked." Purdy is the Versailles detective who has been pursuing the case for a year.

Besides his desk and his chair, the two biggest things in Purdy's office are a couple of 3-inch-thick black binders containing records of his investigation. He's conducted countless interviews and investigated more than two dozen people. He has made no arrests.

"It is a mystery," Ward says. "It's a real mystery."

Still, Purdy has not closed the case. But he has received no new leads since summer.

"I can honestly say I feel like I've done everything I can do."

That is little consolation to Valeri's family. Her father and brother and sister are angry. Her brother, Mike-Kane Brooks, has punched holes in the walls of his Connecticut home. But, as Mike-Kane says, "It's so hard being mad at somebody when they don't have a face, they don't have a name."

Much of the family's resentment is directed at police for not solving the case.

"The thing is, it never lets it be over," Valeri's mother, Caren Brooks, says.

Glenn Brooks' voice is edged with anger: "What is their motivation to find Valeri's murderer? I'm not seeing much."

It's been a hard year, Caren says. The family is still coming to grips with the loss: "When the phone rings, it's not going to be her."

Purdy understands. "I can't really blame them," he says. "I'd give anything for me to be able to bring it to a successful conclusion."

But the prevailing opinion in Woodford County is that the murder might never be solved.

And as the anniversary of the crime approaches, the family can't help but worry.

"We're all watching the calendar," Glenn says, "and wondering: Is this son of a bitch coming back?"

It's not easy for the people in this town of 7,300 to deal with the murder.

Only four people have been slain in the 16 years Purdy has been on the force. This is the only unsolved one.

"This is one of those small towns where everybody says, 'It can't happen in our town,' " Thornton's manager Vicki Gilmore says. "But it did."

So now you know.

People still talk about you.

Motorists who roll into Kent Queen's Chevron across from Thornton's still ask: "They ever find out who killed that girl?"

The regulars who gather for coffee at the Corner Drug Store still ponder the case.

"I think most people feel it probably will never be solved," says Margaret Lewis, who works at the Olde Towne Antique Mall on Main Street.

That worries people, many of whom are convinced you're a local by the way you knew your way around. That private back road is an isolated place.

Jesse Rudd, who works at the Chevron station, considers that as he leans against the counter and stares at the passing traffic. "Could be somebody who lives right here and we see 'em every day.

"Don't know. Don't know."

Gilmore says if police solved the case, "I think it'd put a lot of people's minds at ease."

Did you act alone? And what were you doing those lost hours between 1:42 a.m. and the time you finally slit Valeri's throat? "That's one of the things that probably bothers this family more than anything," Glenn says.

You took Valeri's pants and shoes -- "nowhere to be found," Ward says -- but you didn't sexually assault her. "I wonder if that was the intent, but it changed," the coroner says.

Valeri's clothes -- a blouse, panties and stockings -- had not been torn or pulled. Did things not go as you planned?

If you killed her in your car, where is it now?

Police have eliminated several suspects after finding their cars neat as a pin. Purdy says there are some suspects he's had to discount but whom he still has "bad feelings about."

Purdy lights up a cigarette with two flicks of a disposable lighter as he sits at his desk. A photocopy of the register tape showing the last transaction Valeri ever made as a Thornton's employee is pinned to his bulletin board.

It was a gasoline sale at 1:32 a.m. Cash.

Purdy is looking for the man who made that transaction. He may be the piece of the puzzle that would allow police to put it all together.

A white man of average height and build with light brown or black hair (was it you?) was seen in the store about 1:30 a.m. He was driving a light blue or gray compact car, possibly a Chevette.

This, then, is where the case stands. You should know it's been the biggest and the most frustrating mystery Purdy has worked.

"To have something of this proportion happen here is rather unsettling and shocking," he says. Outside the police station, the bells of the courthouse strike noon.

Can you hear them?

1992

Contents

• 
  Calling Doctor Bones
  
• 
  The Secrets of Grave ‘E’
  
• 
  Monet Meets Stephen Foster
  
• 
  Saturday Night Forever
  
• 
  One on One
  
• 
  Poor Man’s Race Horse
  
• 
  Brotherly Love, Brotherly Loss
  
• 
  Stealing Time
  
• 
  A Mother-Daughter Story
  

CALLING

DOCTOR

BONES

KNOXVILLE, Tenn.

1992

When police found four decaying bodies in the woods beside Interstate 40 in late October, people couldn't stop talking about it.

But few think twice about the grisly scene in back of the University of Tennessee Hospital.

The hillside at UT makes the carnage beside the highway look like a Halloween prank. More than 15 bodies lie strewn about, rotting quietly in the sun as if the Civil War still were being fought in these parts.

The man responsible for this -- a cheerful college professor named William Marvin Bass III -- wanders brazenly among the bodies in broad daylight, dressed nattily in a herringbone sportcoat, stopping every now and then to admire his handiwork.

See the poor soul under the oak tree? Died of gross obesity.

And the woman in the Oldsmobile? Cancer. Died one night two years ago at the university hospital. Next morning, they propped her up on the front seat of that clunker -- as if she could make heaven in an Olds 98 with 95,550 miles on the odometer.

These are the townspeople of a macabre little city of the dead at UT known as the Anthropological Research Facility. One wise-guy lawyer in Knoxville calls it the Bass Anthropological Research Facility -- BARF. Bass laughs at the lawyer's good-natured jab.

"BARF is a good name for it," he says, grinning.

Bass, the UT forensic anthropologist who will re-examine the remains of a Lexington teen-ager exhumed Friday, believes too strongly in his research facility to be defensive.

The facility -- a 2-acre field secured by a massive padlock and razor wire -- is the only place in the world where scientists can study the decay of human tissue while processing skeletons for use in the classroom.

"It's really a beautiful process," says Murray Marks, a doctoral student in anthropology who frequently accompanies Bass to the scene of a crime. "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

The bodies lying in the field are those of people who, like the woman in the Olds, donated their bodies to science; and those of unidentified or unclaimed corpses, like those that turn up in the lush woods around Knoxville or get reeled ashore by fishermen on the nearby Tennessee River.

Few people in Knoxville have taken offense.

"They just say, 'Bass is kind of nuts, but he's really doing something that's going to benefit society,' " the professor says, chuckling.

Bass eventually won over a group called Social Issues of Concern to Knoxvillians -- SICK, for short -- who were taken aback when they learned about the research.

Jack Reese, an English professor and former university chancellor who supported Bass when he met with members of SICK several years ago and charmed his way out of a big stink, is one of the professor's biggest fans.

"He was just extraordinarily courteous and concerned," Reese says. "They expected to come in and see a mad scientist or something."

The locals respect Bass and his work, Reese says. The professor, who was named National Professor of the Year in 1985, has been profiled on "48 Hours" and in countless publications. He is disarmingly open about what he does.

"He is a showman," Marks says. "He loves the limelight. Part of that's the ham in him, and part of it is he's doing this wonderful thing."

Before Bass started his research facility in the early 1970s, police and medical examiners knew little about decay rates. If they found a body in the woods, how could they tell how long it had been dead? How long it had been lying there? And what if the body were in a car? Or under plastic? Or buried in a shallow grave? Would that make a difference? Which one would decay faster?

Bass, 64, has trained more than half the practicing forensic anthropologists in the nation, teaching them how to answer those questions. He is head of UT's Forensic Anthropology Center in the dungeonesque underbelly of Neyland Stadium -- home of the Tennessee football team.

His is the first number police from Memphis to Kingsport dial when they find a body somewhere that's, well -- not fresh enough for the state medical examiners to deal with.

Forensic anthropologists specialize in examining bones. Medical examiners stick to doing autopsies on the soft tissues of corpses. Bass, whom Tennessee police call Doctor Bones, gets all the jobs in between, too.

"The rule of thumb in Tennessee is, 'If it smells too bad, call Dr. Bass,' " Bass says. He is on call 24 hours. And he loves it. "It's exciting," he says. "I'll be in the office, feeling down, with a headache, and the police will call to say they've found a dead body, and the adrenaline starts flowing.

"There's nothing better than a dead body to make your day. It's a fun challenge. It's a puzzle."

Bass, a popular professor who sometimes delivers his lectures standing atop a table in some dingy classroom, loves teaching. But he feels most alive when he's surrounded by death and decay. He's cheered by the stuff of nightmares.

You would never guess from his demeanor what Bill Bass does for a living. This is a man who keeps his body bags in an old apple box.

It's not that Bass is morbid. He doesn't like funerals, and cases involving children sometimes get to him. But forensic anthropologists don't deal much with fresh corpses; it's harder to imagine their clientele having had dreams of glory once or having gotten their hearts broken or eaten too much at Thanksgiving.

"Once it loses its humanness -- I think that's one of the benefits we have," Marks says. "We don't get too close to things."

Bass sees it as a science. But an overriding passion for his work and an abiding belief in the good it does make him a tenacious detective in death's dark mystery.

That's why Brenda Wilson of Lexington called him in July. Wilson had seen a profile of Bass on "48 Hours" and thought he might be able to help.

Her daughter, Letha Corinne Rutherford, was 18 when she disappeared Dec. 17, 1991, from her home in rural Fayette County. Her remains were found April 14 in an illegal dump about 150 feet behind her house.

Authorities think Rutherford was murdered, but the investigation stalled when an examination of the teen-ager's remains failed to show how she was killed.

Wilson has asked Bass to re-examine Rutherford's remains, which were exhumed Friday. Bass will examine the bones Tuesday morning at no cost to Wilson.

"I believe if anybody can find out why Letha died, Dr. Bass can," Wilson says softly.

Kentucky authorities did not consult with Bass on the Rutherford case. But police throughout the state, which has been without a forensic anthropologist since David Wolf died in July, occasionally have called on Bass for help in other cases.

In January, Ashland police sent one of his doctoral students a skull found in rural Boyd County to see whether it was that of Dixie Barker, a local woman who has been missing almost 10 years. It turned out to be a lost teaching tool -- a school skull.

Most times people stumble upon human remains, however, the discovery has no such innocent explanation. Most of the time, there's a Zoo Man lurking in the shadows.

That's how it happened Oct. 22, when a Knoxville prostitute led police to the woods at the end of Cahaba Lane. She said a man had beaten her there and left her in the woods nude.

The man was there again when police arrived. They happened upon him in the woods, having sex with a woman. Police arrested Thomas Dee Huskey, 32, of Pigeon Forge.

Huskey, a former Knoxville Zoo employee immortalized in the local media as the Zoo Man, was charged with more than 20 counts of rape, kidnapping and assault.

Then bodies started turning up.

Police returned the next day and found the body of a dead Knoxville prostitute in the woods, which brush up against I-40 east of Knoxville. They called Bass.

The professor was preparing a class lecture when the phone on his desk rang. Reaching across a clutter of blue message slips and other papers, he picked up the receiver and felt the adrenaline rush.

Would he come with police to Cahaba Lane to look for more bodies? Bass did not hesitate. It had been a slow Monday. And he had not sunk his teeth into a good case in weeks.

"It certainly made my day," he said.

He packed up his white pickup with the Tennessee state seal on the side, rounded up three of his students and hit the road. Investigators found two more bodies that day and a fourth on Tuesday. But two were too decayed to determine a cause of death.

Several days later, Bass pulled on his blue coveralls and hiked into the woods in search of clues. There, on the moss-covered ground, he found a hyoid -- a small, wishbone-shaped bone in the human neck.

The bone was fractured. The victim had been strangled, Bass ruled. But he could not determine a cause of death in the other case. The potential for failure is perhaps the only part of Bass's job that haunts him.

On a hectic Thursday, Doctor Bones grows quiet as he stares death in the face. He is gazing deep into the dark, brooding eye sockets of a dead woman's skull.

"I can't find anything that tells me how she died," he says, almost to himself. "I keep looking and looking at her.

"I'm worried that with Mrs. Wilson's daughter we'll get this."


THE

SECRETS

OF

GRAVE

‘E’

LEXINGTON

1992

The discolored, water-soaked coffin hung over its grave, dangling from the end of a long hydraulic boom as if from the scales of justice.

"Letha, maybe now we'll find out," Brenda Wilson thought as she watched the exhumation of her daughter's body.

The remains of Letha Corinne Rutherford, the Lexington woman whose remains were found in April in rural Fayette County, were taken from her grave just before noon yesterday -- nearly a year to the day after she disappeared.

Wilson had her daughter exhumed so the bones can be re-examined for clues to her death, which police think was a homicide. The investigation has stalled, partly because medical examiners were unable to determine how she died.

A cold breeze blew out of a gray sky yesterday as funeral directors, police detectives, medical examiners and cemetery employees huddled around Grave E in Section 11 of Hillcrest Memorial Park in Lexington.

A hydraulic boom with a small U.S. flag fluttering from its tip dangled chains, hooks and straps into the darkness of the grave and lifted the concrete lid off the vault first. Then it dipped back into the ground, motor thrumming, for the coffin.

The lid appeared to be cracked open slightly as the coffin -- a plywood model covered with what once was a velvety cloth -- rose from the ground.

"Brenda, it looks in pretty good shape," said the funeral director, William Neal of Kerr Brothers Funeral Home. But Neal, state medical examiner John Hunsaker and David Jones, administrator of the medical examiner's office, wondered aloud whether the interior lining was as soaked as the exterior cloth. How much water was in the coffin?

How many answers?

That will become clear Tuesday when William M. Bass, forensic anthropologist for Tennessee, examines Rutherford's bones in the state medical examiner's lab in Frankfort.

Rutherford was 18 when she disappeared Dec. 17 from her home on Dry Branch Road in rural Fayette County. Her remains were found April 14 in an illegal dump about 150 feet behind her house.

Wilson called Bass in July after seeing a profile about him on the TV program "48 Hours" and asked him to re-examine Rutherford's remains.

Bass, a college professor, is head of the forensic anthropology department at the University of Tennessee. He agreed to donate his time after a Herald-Leader article about the case. An anonymous donor paid the $600 for the exhumation.

"I've got this gut feeling Dr. Bass is going to find something," Wilson said.

"I feel deep down in my heart if he can't find it, it can't be found."

At the very least, Wilson hopes to find peace of mind in the coffin. At best, she hopes for justice. She thinks the case fell through the cracks of Kentucky's criminal justice system.

"Had it not been for me contacting Dr. Bass, this would still be laying," she said.

Wilson hopes the backhoe and men with shovels unearthed more than bones yesterday. She is optimistic the killer's secret also was uncovered.

"This may be the best Christmas present I could ever have, if Dr. Bass finds something."

Wilson smiled as she talked to Hillcrest assistant manager Carolyn Trump near her daughter's open grave.

Some men slid her daughter's coffin into the back of the medical examiner's van, Jones slammed the doors shut -- thunk, thunk -- and a train cried in the distance.


MONET

MEETS

STEPHEN

FOSTER

GREENWICH, Conn.

1992
The millionaire limps stiffly across his country mansion, causing bottles on the wet bar to clink together below the Renoir as if in toast to the owner's good taste.

So what if Henryk Richard de Kwiatkowski is wearing the same old navy blazer he always wears. So what if there's a little stain midway down his tie. There's a Degas in the dining room. And that's Monet's "Haystacks" hanging in the den. De Kwiatkowski paid $20 million for that one -- $3 million more than he paid for Calumet Farm in Lexington.

De Kwiatkowski -- pronounced de-fiat-cough-ski -- became the toast of Kentucky when he flew into Lexington March 26 and plunked down $17 million for the world-famous horse farm.

For a man with his own polo team, half a dozen homes, millions of dollars worth of race horses and priceless museum pieces on his walls, the purchase might have seemed small-time. But Calumet's new owner says he values the farm more than any of his other worldly possessions.

"I've never loved anything like I love Calumet," says de Kwiatkowski, 68, as he sits in his Greenwich home. Two wooden bookends sit on a shelf, jockey figurines painted in Calumet red and blue.

"It's a lifetime dream for me, Kentucky.

"It reminds me of my youth that I have lost."

De Kwiatkowski's youth is quite a story in itself: part mystery, part myth, perhaps; all fascinating. So fascinating, in fact, that British novelist Jeffrey Archer patterned a character after de Kwiatkowski in his best-selling novel, Kane & Abel.

"I was looking for someone who was Polish from a poor background and who had succeeded in the United States," Archer says. "He was one of three or four people I talked to, but his stories were far more interesting, far more graphic and vivid."

The story of the man who saved Calumet Farm begins -- when? Over the years, newspaper and magazine articles have given widely varying ages for de Kwiatkowski.

De Kwiatkowski says he is 66, but his driving record in New York says he was born Feb. 22, 1924. That would make him 68.

This much seems clear: de Kwiatkowski was born in Poznan, a town in west-central Poland.

He was the youngest of seven children in a family doomed.

Advancing German forces killed his father as World War II began, de Kwiatkowski says. His mother and sister were captured and killed, too.

Later, his brothers would die in battle, leaving de Kwiatkowski as the only member of his immediate family to survive the war. But there were times when de Kwiatkowski thought he wouldn't make it, he says.

As a boy, he hid beneath a stack of hay while invading German soldiers searched the barn around him. They didn't find him, but their bayonets lashed his legs as the soldiers jabbed the straw.

De Kwiatkowski rocks back in his chair, kicks his foot in the air and pulls up his pants leg to show his scars. He revels in telling old war stories.

"He's got a tremendous ego and can talk about himself endlessly," says Whitney Tower, a former racing writer for Sports Illustrated who attended de Kwiatkowski's second wedding and the christening of his youngest child, Nicholas.

"I don't know if people ask him anymore about what he did in the war because they usually don't have two hours to kill while he answers the question."

It took novelist Archer all of a day and a half to get the whole story: De Kwiatkowski was captured by the Soviets soon after his father's death and taken by cattle car to a prison camp in Siberia.

He escaped in 1942 and made his way to England. Along the way, he survived the sinking in 1943 of the Empress of Canada after the ship was torpedoed off Sierra Leone.

On April 21, 1943, de Kwiatkowski enlisted in the Polish Squadron of England's Royal Air Force, his war record shows. His serial number was 705662. He says he manned the guns on combat flights and operated wireless radios.

His record says he was awarded several medals before being discharged in 1947.

That record also lists his birth date as Feb. 22, 1922 -- exactly four years earlier than the birth date de Kwiatkowski claims. De Kwiatkowski says the recruiting officer told him to provide false information so he would meet the minimum age for enlisting.

De Kwiatkowski's tales seem so sensational, and he is so careless recalling dates, that some of his stories have been called into question.

Newspaper and magazine stories have sought to debunk some of de Kwiatkowski's stories. Sports Illustrated's William Nack described de Kwiatkowski in a 1982 article as "a romantic figure with a colorful -- some say colored -- past." It doesn't help that some of his claims cannot be verified and that others contain historical inaccuracies.

De Kwiatkowski has said his father was killed when he was shot off his horse while attacking a German tank with a saber.

He says he attended Kings College at Cambridge University, but the college has no record of him.

And he has been quoted many times about being one of only seven survivors of the Empress of Canada, although 800 were rescued from that sunken ship.

"I was one of seven survivors on the raft that I was on," de Kwiatkowski says. But he is at a loss to explain why Kings College might not have any record of him. A senior tutor's assistant in the registrar's office said it was possible for someone to have taken classes at Cambridge without having an academic record there.

The story about his father's heroic death while attacking a German tank with a saber probably is fiction born of a common Polish legend, says Janusz Yanush with the Jozef Pilsudski Institute of America for Research in the Modern History of Poland. "It's very common for some people to try to use this to their advantage," he says.

A regiment of Polish soldiers was attacked in 1939 as they were being transported near Krojanty, Yanush said, but they did not try to fight back against the tanks.

"The cavalry didn't fight on horseback, that's for sure."

Friends and acquaintances are not quite sure what to make of ol' Ryk's stories. But most of them enjoy their delivery.

This might be why: As he sits in his Greenwich home describing a prank he once played on a stuffy European at a posh dinner party, de Kwiatkowski seems more like a teen-ager than a millionaire.

He is clearly delighted as he blurts out the punch line of the story: "He jes' leaped over that table like a ballet dancer."

His thick Polish accent breaks into laughter like horses from a starting gate and his boyish mop of silver hair stands up on the crown of his head and dangles in his face as he doubles over the table howling.

"He's a great storyteller," says horseman Lev Miller.

De Kwiatkowski is philosophical about being taken with a grain of salt. "Any story you tell, it's suspect, it's unbelievable," he says.

"But only 10 percent of what I have done has ever been written about."

After studying in England, de Kwiatkowski says, he moved to Canada in 1952. He became a naturalized Canadian citizen, then made his way to the United States. In 1961 he married a 21-year-old woman named Lynne Sawdon only six months after they had met.

It was not his first impulsive decision. It would not be his last.

"When I first married him," Sawdon says, "he didn't have a penny." De Kwiatkowski was working for an aircraft resale company in New York City.

In 1962, with $3,000 in capital, de Kwiatkowski founded Kwiatkowski Aircraft Inc. and set up an office in New York's Rockefeller Center. Since then he has made millions buying, leasing and selling all types of new and used commercial airplanes.

The name on his business -- Kwiatkowski Aircraft Inc., without the de -- is the same name that appears on his war record. Where did the de come from? De Kwiatkowski says his grandfather added it to the family name after fighting under Napoleon. He says he sometimes has chosen to simplify his name by dropping the de.

But Stanislaw Jordanowski thinks de Kwiatkowski must have added it himself.

"De is no such thing in Polish use," says Jordanowski, president of the Pilsudski Institute. "It should be Henryk Kwiatkowski. He added it. Some people would add it to show they're from nobility. Some people add it when they get money. They never use it in Poland because everybody would be joking. It's French, de, it's French."

De Kwiatkowski's specialty was brokering the sale of used commercial airliners, a unique line of business that enabled him to enjoy huge success with little direct competition.

His biggest coup came in 1975, when de Kwiatkowski virtually saved struggling Trans World Airlines with a deal that sent nine used TWA 747s to Iran for $150 million.

Hungry for cash, TWA relied on de Kwiatkowski to hammer out the deal with his old acquaintance, the shah. De Kwiatkowski's fee: $15 million.

"He was a consummate salesman, but without the temptation of many salesmen to give things away," says former TWA chief executive officer L. Edwin Smart.

"He negotiated hard and effectively, but not to a degree that people disliked him."

Business acquaintances describe de Kwiatkowski as hard-nosed but fair. His reputation is spotless, de Kwiatkowski points out proudly. And no one argues.

"I have left no black spots behind," he says.

"You can only be a free man when you cannot be reproached."

De Kwiatkowski defends to the end his pristine image. When Sports Illustrated's Nack questioned the veracity of de Kwiatkowski's war stories, de Kwiatkowski shook it off. Whether they really are true didn't matter: Embellishing ancient history never hurt anyone.

But de Kwiatkowski took Nack to task for the way the writer portrayed him, in a business deal in 1982.

That business deal ended in the syndication of de Kwiatkowski's prized Horse of the Year, Conquistador Cielo. But getting there was rough, Nack wrote -- especially for Seth Hancock.

Hancock's first offer -- to syndicate the colt at $30 million -- was written on a yellow legal pad, Hancock told Nack. Nack wrote that de Kwiatkowski tossed the legal pad back across the table at Hancock, saying, "That's meager."

Hancock, reached at his Claiborne Farm office earlier this month, said he could not remember the details of the meeting.

But de Kwiatkowski remembers:

"I read (Nack's) article. It's so much against what I am.

"I don't even talk like that."

Woody Stephens, the great trainer who worked closely with de Kwiatkowski for 12 years, says de Kwiatkowski is not hard-edged at all. "I don't remember ever having any argument with the man," he says.

Hancock says de Kwiatkowski is "tough but fair," a description at least one other businessman confirms.

"He's a tough old bird when it comes to negotiating," says Jack Gentile, a competitor in the aircraft business.

"But he's a good businessman. I have nothing bad to say about him.

"You can keep him a hero."

Before 1973, nobody had reason to predict de Kwiatkowski would one day be a hero in horse racing.

But his wife developed an interest in the thoroughbred industry -- "My children were getting older, and I needed an occupation," she says -- and at her urging, de Kwiatkowski reluctantly bought a horse -- Cannonade's sister, Kennelot -- for $300,000 at Saratoga, Sawdon says.

The next 10 years were giddy with newfound success. De Kwiatkowski's Kennelot Stables, whose horses race under the same shade of red as those from Calumet -- produced two national Horse of the Year champions and the first of two Belmont Stakes winners.

"Everybody thinks he's been extremely lucky," fellow polo player Alan Scherer says, "and that if his luck holds over to Calumet . . ."

There are other reasons for de Kwiatkowski's success, too, says Greenwich neighbor Adalbert von Gontard: "He's very energetic, a dynamic person. He's a kind guy, too, and what I like about him is he knows how to make money but he knows how to spend it."

At the peak of his success in the thoroughbred business in 1983, de Kwiatkowski watched his life dip into a deep valley.

An elevator took him down.

As de Kwiatkowski was leaving his high-rise apartment building in New York City one morning, a doorman shoved something into his hands.

Divorce papers.

It was the first clue de Kwiatkowski had that his wife was unhappy, he says -- "a deadly surprise, worse than the Russian army and the Germans put together."

"That was the darkest moment of my life."

De Kwiatkowski says he thinks his hectic business schedule took a toll on the marriage; his ex-wife, he says, didn't want a divorce. She simply wanted attention.

But Sawdon does not agree with that assessment. She declines to say why the marriage ended except that "business had nothing to do with it."

De Kwiatkowski, who remarried in 1988, remains close to his first wife and their seven children.

On March 25, the day before Calumet Farm was to go on the auction block, Sawdon called her ex-husband at his home in the Bahamas.

The thousands of miles of telephone cable between them was a lifeline for Calumet.

Sawdon had just read a newspaper article about how Calumet was going up for sale the next day.

Buy it, she said.

De Kwiatkowski decided to go for it.

The next day, he flew into Lexington barely half an hour before the auction and saved Calumet from ending up as a subdivision. He saved the white fences and the shed-row floors you can eat dinner off of. He saved the varnished stalls and the clean smell of leather and liniment.

"That atmosphere -- it was Calumet. That's what I wanted to see preserved," says Ric Redden, a Central Kentucky veterinarian who attended the sale.

De Kwiatkowski received a standing ovation for 15 minutes. The adulation continues.

Kentucky Gov. Brereton Jones, a horseman himself, threw a dinner party in de Kwiatkowski's honor two weeks ago at the Governor's Mansion.

A restaurant owner in Lexington refused to let de Kwiatkowski pay for a meal.

The postal service has delivered bags full of thank-you notes from around the world, many containing money.

"I'd never known so many people in one state refer to me as a savior," de Kwiatkowski says.

Stephens laughs and says: "Somebody said, hell, if you go down there with him, you could be mayor of Lexington and him governor of Kentucky."

But von Gontard points out: "If he wants to be governor, he'll buy the whole damn state."

When Calumet's racing silks came up for sale, de Kwiatkowski sat out the bidding. He had been shocked at having to buy the name Calumet separately, and he wasn't about to pay extra for the famous devil's-red silks, too.

De Kwiatkowski stood by and watched a man from Brazil hand over $12,000 for the silks. Although the man thought he was buying Calumet's colors, de Kwiatkowski knew the silks represented nothing more than a souvenir shirt.

The next day, de Kwiatkowski re-registered the colors with the state racing commission; the $35 fee was considerably cheaper than what the silks had gone for. And he has since raced horses under the same old Calumet red and blue -- much to the consternation of the Brazilian who bought the silks.

"Later, a letter came from his lawyer saying, 'Do you realize he bought these silks?' " de Kwiatkowski says. "And I told my lawyer, 'Will you please, on my behalf, congratulate the man for having bought the shirt.' "

It's a bright late-spring day in Kentucky, and Calumet Farm looks pretty as a picture. It's Monet meets Stephen Foster.

"Nothing is prettier than Calumet," de Kwiatkowski says.

He is in town for a couple days to show the farm to his son, Stephan, 21, and daughters, Lulu, 20, and Nicole Timonier, 29. De Kwiatkowski hopes that someday his children might take over Calumet. "We certainly don't want it as a family to end up the way it did with the Wrights," Sawdon says, referring to the previous owners.

Sunlight glints off the gold buttons on de Kwiatkowski's blazer as he stands listening to the drone of lawn mowers working inside the white fences of Calumet. He leans on a cane. Nine months ago, he broke his leg playing polo, and the steel pins are still inside. That's why he limps.

De Kwiatkowski takes antibiotics for his leg and another kind of medication to ensure the cancer that doctors cut out of his throat two years ago won't return. The combination of the two drugs and the hot sun makes him feel woozy. He steps inside the stately office building seeking shade and a glass of water. His fever has shot up to 102, and as he looks back out the window over the rolling fields of Calumet, he sees two of everything.

What a bargain.