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

RESURRECTION

IN

A

BOWL

LEXINGTON

1993
Rude Osolnik bent over the chunk of wood spinning on the lathe and cut the Cuban mahogany into a bowl. The process sent wood shavings flying:

Into finished bowls on display behind Osolnik;

Into his white hair, which was raked forward to a point over his forehead;

Onto the backs of his hands, where it clung to the hairs there in thick patches, giving him the appearance of a man changing into a werewolf.

Stranger transformations have occurred in the world of wood-turning. One happened yesterday morning in the back room of a warehouse in downtown Lexington: Osolnik, 78, turned the piece of tree branch on the lathe into a work of art.

By noon, the raw chunk of wood became a graceful bowl. Hard to believe it had begun the day as a gnarled symbol of destruction.

Armed with a chainsaw, Osolnik had collected the wood last year as he rode around Homestead, Fla., after Hurricane Andrew.

Osolnik and a friend cut up fallen trees and limbs that had been blown to the ground by the fierce winds of the hurricane, then carted them back home to Berea.

Osolnik, one of the fathers of artistic wood-turning in America, lives on Poverty Ridge among the gentle hills of the small, college town south of Lexington.

Born in New Mexico, raised and educated in Illinois, Osolnik came to Kentucky in 1937 to begin a teaching career at Berea College that lasted more than 40 years.

Thousands who studied in Berea, a town with a rich heritage of woodworking and other crafts, were able to learn wood-turning from America's "turner emeritus," as one student calls him.

Osolnik, an internationally known wood-turner, earlier this year won the prestigious Governor's Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts -- the highest honor a Kentucky artist can receive from the state. But perhaps the greatest testimonial to his skill is that he was able to use his art to put his five children through college.

Osolnik's work, mostly bowls, candlesticks and weedpots, is on display in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the High Museum in Atlanta.

His simple yet graceful bowls, priced in the hundreds of dollars, are for appreciating -- not for eating cereal. "I'd die if somebody actually put something in one of Rudy's bowls," said Jamie Donaldson of Georgetown.

Osolnik is retired now but continues to teach weekend classes in wood-turning at his shop at home. And he travels the country conducting symposiums and giving speeches and demonstrations.

He refuses to let his advancing age stop him. "It doesn't take a great deal of strength," he said of his art. "The harder thing is to kill 24 hours with nothing to do."

He likes the nearly immediate gratification of wood-turning. "You have something you can show in a very short period of time," he said.

In woodworking circles, Osolnik is revered. Despite little public notice, about 60 people from as far away as Bowling Green drove in to see his demonstration yesterday at the Unfinished Universe, an antique-refinishing business on Short Street.

They watched in silence as Osolnik worked his magic over the whining lathe. Like his audience, Osolnik said little.

Some acquaintances say Osolnik is a fiercely private man; that he is hard to get to know; that he takes umbrage when he thinks people are trying to copy his style and pass if off as their own.

He works alone, almost out of necessity. His work habits make others nervous, Donaldson said. He has developed bad habits in all those years of wood-turning, becoming so comfortable with the lathe that he sometimes seems dangerously careless.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Osolnik has only one associate -- a force equally dangerous and wonderful:

Mother Nature.

She prepares the wood Osolnik is famed for using, what he calls "found wood" -- the kind nobody else wants because it is damaged or decaying or rife with irregularities.

Rather than being symmetrical, his work provides for and accentuates the uniqueness, the process of living and dying, in each piece of wood.

There is, for that reason, an irony in his work. From destruction and decay he finds the beauty that lives on in his art.

What Andrew started, Osolnik will finish.

WHERE

HEAVEN

AND

HELL

MEET
HARRODSBURG

1993
By the time the fire engines arrived at Arrowhead Farm in Mercer County, crackling flames and screaming horses had shattered the early morning peace.

"It looked like the gateway to hell," one firefighter said.

If you ever doubted that heaven and hell could meet in the pastoral hills of Kentucky's famed horse country, consider the Arrowhead barn blaze last summer -- and the slow burn of Joseph M. "Sonny" McMillen in the fire's aftermath.

The fire, which killed 20 horses, was bad enough. But McMillen, 63, was so outraged by how he was treated after losing two horses in the fire that he filed the first lawsuit of his life.

McMillen says in a lawsuit that his horses -- He's Bad and Legacy in Gold -- were victims of negligence by Tom Moore, Arrowhead's owner. McMillen says in the lawsuit the horses were worth $325,000, and he wants restitution.

Moore, on the other hand, disputes the estimate of the horses' worth and denies any negligence. He says he was devastated by the tragedy.

Whatever the dispute's outcome, its bitterness makes a broader statement: Behind the public image of a genteel sport set in Bluegrass paradise, Kentucky's equine business is as hard-edged as any other.

The saddlebred business gets particularly venomous, those familiar with it say, because so many who are involved are not just business partners -- they are family and friends.

"There's a huge amount of hurt feelings involved," said Lexington lawyer William Rambicure, who handles horse cases. "There's much more of a sense of personal affront."

The saddlebred industry's rougher side turns up in legal tangles: questionable insurance claims, which constitute at least 5 percent of all horse-related claims filed; a lawsuit pitting a daughter against her mother; police reports on recent barn fires that list arson as the cause.

McMillen's suit, scheduled for trial next month, is one of two bitter saddlebred cases pending in the Eastern and Western districts of federal court in Kentucky. The other, in U.S. District Court in Louisville, focuses on a common theme of litigation in the saddlebred industry: double dealing and secret profit-making among trainers and agents at the expense of owners.

Grace and good manners are for the show ring.

"Is it prim and proper?" McMillen said. "I don't think it is. I know many people who get in and end up getting burned out over the business deals.

"This is not a nice business."

Because of the closeness of the industry -- a unique quality dictated by tradition and the relatively small circle of saddlebred operations -- many owners ride their own horses or let their children ride while trusting the trainers to tend to business.

That arrangement can lead to problems. With the owners' blessing, saddlebred trainers often make business deals without the owners present, equine lawyers say. "The trainers control this industry," McMillen said.

They do that by discouraging their clients from getting together, one lawyer said. That makes it possible for an unscrupulous trainer to skim profits beyond his or her commissions off the top of a sale.

Such high-stakes secrets in close quarters make for explosives when something goes wrong. "I think it's an extremely volatile situation," Rambicure said.

That tension applies to the relationship between Barbara Thomas of California and her saddlebred trainer in Kentucky, Larry Hodge. Thomas is suing Hodge, saying he reaped secret profits when, acting as her agent, he bought a horse for her from actor William Shatner.

Shatner was involved in a 1990 suit in Kentucky. Lexington horsewoman Linda Johnson claimed in the suit that Shatner had violated a breeding agreement involving a saddlebred stallion she sold him in 1984. Judge John R. Adams ruled in Shatner's favor.

Johnson fared better in 1991, when she won a suit against horsewoman Donna Moore that lasted more than three years and produced a stack of paperwork almost 3 feet tall. (Tom and Donna Moore divorced in 1975. Both still work in the horse business.)

Until the suit was filed in October 1987, Johnson and Donna Moore were close friends, jetting off for vacations together in places such as Europe and Hawaii.

Johnson's feelings of betrayal ran deep when she thought that Donna Moore, her trainer and agent, had been using her to reap "secret, undisclosed profits" on the sale of horses, the lawsuit said. Johnson accused Donna Moore in the suit of secretly owning interest in 40 horses that she advised Johnson to buy.

Johnson sued for $187,750.

Johnson's sense of injustice was so strong she followed it to the bitter end: a $143,500 judgment in her favor that cost more than $250,000 in legal bills.

"From Linda's standpoint it was a cause, and it was cause for a number of reasons," Rambicure said. "One was the betrayal issue. There was also the fact that she wanted to stay in the business, in the game."

Donna Moore, who filed a counterclaim that said Johnson owed her $48,250 in commissions for the sale of horses, was awarded $15,000. In the suit, Donna Moore accused Johnson of slandering her.

Donna Moore has spent much of the last 10 years in one lawsuit or another. Her daughter, Melinda, sued her in 1982, claiming her mother had refused to pay her $8,000 from a commission she earned for the sale of a horse.

Donna Moore could not be reached for comment.

Although the hard-edged business practices and closeness of the saddlebred industry can make for hotly contested lawsuits, it does not necessarily make for more lawsuits, Rambicure said. Because judges rather than head-to-head competition determine champions, the saddlebred industry is a highly political sport.

Power is everything, and trainers -- many of whom are judges -- have it.

Challenging that power structure does not appeal to many owners. Some simply walk away from the business rather than rock the boat.

While Tom Moore, a widely known saddlebred trainer and judge, has lined up a formidable list of witnesses to testify in his behalf, McMillen has been unable to convince many in the industry to take his side in the courtroom.

He thinks he has been the victim of politics; nobody wants to alienate Moore. "I'm going up against this power-packed group of people," he said.

"I banged my fist on a table and thought, 'What can I do when everybody's afraid?'

"I've already been told I'm through in the industry, that I'll never win again." But that is secondary to a victory in the courtroom.

McMillen, who lives in Florida, has hired a detective from South Carolina to check into the Arrowhead fire. Private investigator William Graham, a 240-pound pit bull, sat holed up last week in the Sportsman Motel in Lexington -- smoking cigars, working the phone and sifting through the ashes of a fire long extinguished.

His objective: to prove Moore was negligent. Graham believes McMillen.

McMillen says the suit is strictly a matter of principle; Moore could have averted litigation with a simple apology, he said.

Many of the animals died, the suit contends, because they were not wearing halters, so no one could lead them from the flames.

"I just do not feel they handled that situation properly," McMillen said. "There are lots of conflicting stories."

Although two investigators said in depositions that the fire might have been set intentionally, Moore dismisses the idea.

"That is preposterous," he said.

Graham, who calls himself The Fat Man and has become nationally known for his tenacity and success rate, is not out to prove anyone committed a crime.

"The issue is whether or not Mr. Moore exercised due care and concern for those animals," he said.

Although lawyers say the volume of equine-related business has declined significantly as the horse industry has waned, the spectacle of the cases -- both civil and criminal -- remains undiminished.

The darkest underbelly of the showhorse industry was exposed last month when an Illinois man, Tommy Burns, claimed to have killed as many as 15 horses for owners who pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars in insurance money.

"I think it's dirty as heck," assistant state attorney Elizabeth Pooley of Gainesville, Fla., said of the horse business. She is prosecuting the Burns case in Florida, where some of the horses allegedly were killed.

The Tommy Burns case, while remarkable, represents only one end of the spectrum. Some argue the horse industry is no more ruthless than any other business.

"Real estate or oil or construction, business is business," said Lexington lawyer Ann Sturgill. "But it is a business, and since there's a lot of money at stake, people don't want to feel like they have been taken."

Rambicure agrees, although he says some of the industry's business practices are "a bit unsavory."

Graham, who specializes in investigating insurance scams in the horse industry, has worked many cases in which horses were killed intentionally. "I work 'em as a homicide," he said. "Greed is what it's all about. There is a degree of ruthlessness there."

In 15 years spent sniffing out insurance fraud, Graham never has handled a claim involving a thoroughbred.

Terry McVey has. He is president of Equine Adjusters, which investigates insurance claims in the horse business.

Questionable claims are filed on every breed of horse, he said. The structure and customs of the saddlebred industry are what set it apart -- not any penchant for wrongdoing.

"It's basically an attitudinal difference," Graham said. If horse racing is the sport of kings, he said, saddlebred is blue-collar; if thoroughbred is Mercedes, saddlebred is Cadillac.

Both McMillen and Tom Moore exemplify the depth of the feeling that can emerge in a saddlebred dispute.

Tom Moore, a widely known trainer whose skill, clout and business savvy have made him a respected and feared figure in the industry, sighs a lot when talking about the fire and the suit.

"I've been doing this professionally since I was 16," he said, "and this is the first time I've ever had anything like this happen to me."

Moore, who has a waiting list of potential clients, is building back from the fire. It took him awhile to overcome his urge to chuck it all.

"I couldn't even stand to walk out to where the barn was," he said.

But finally he drew up plans for a new barn on a piece of cardboard from a new shirt.

"I lost everything I've worked for in 45 years in less than an hour," he said. "It was a tragedy in itself. And then this (lawsuit). This is very disheartening."

At least the two men agree on that.

McMillen, a horse lover who said he once cried so hard over the death of a colt that he detached a retina, said he wants answers more than money.

"To this day, Mr. Moore has never once said to me, 'I'm sorry,' " McMillen said.

"When I see him at depositions, he turns his back to me or buries his head in his hands.

"He should be accountable for what happened. It wasn't like he was in Chicago. Mr. Moore was 300 yards away."

IN

TROUBLE’S

SHADOW

WHEELWRIGHT

1993




They come into town along Kentucky highways 122 and 306: Harry and Louearta Turner's new neighbors, all dressed in orange jumpsuits, arriving by the vanful.

They come -- state prisoners being transferred to the new Otter Creek Correctional Center -- right smack into the heart of this mountain town in which the mayor doesn't lock his door.

The private prison in Floyd County marks its grand opening today with tours and a speech by the governor. But the inmates have been coming in, 25 a week, since Oct. 27 -- turning up the side of a mountain toward the prison that sits above the Turners' white-frame house.

The couple, who watched from their front porch as the first two vans full of prisoners came up the road at lunchtime three weeks ago, share their neighbors' concerns about having a prison in the backyard.

"I don't like it," Louearta said. "I'm going to try to move out of here if I can.

"It didn't help Wheelwright none to put that in up there."

But other residents of this coal town disagree, allowing that the cargo of those white vans will help fuel the local economy the way the load in the coal trucks rumbling through town once did.
Mixed feelings
Wheelwright's economy is not in good health. All but abandoned by the industry that spawned it, the old coal camp, population 720, has unemployment estimated at 50 percent.

"Since the mines have went down, it's been pretty slow around here," Billy L. Hall said.

The closest mines these days, city councilman Luther Johnson Jr. said, are in Carr Creek -- a rough 18 miles away on winding, hilly roads.

But townspeople have mixed feelings about the minimum-security prison. Many inmates have escaped from Kentucky's other three private prisons since U.S. Corrections opened the first one, the Marion Adjustment Center, in 1986.

In its first six years, the Marion County prison had almost 80 escapes. And the Lee Adjustment Center in Lee County has had more than 50 since it opened in 1990.

In Kentucky's minimum-security prisons, there are no fences and the guards do not carry guns because officials say they are trying to condition inmates to re-enter society.

Under the state's classification system, even inmates who have escaped before or have been convicted of violent crimes are eligible for minimum security.

That does not sit well with the people who live at the bottom of the hill in Floyd County -- although their fears are generic and have little to do with Otter Creek's being privately run.

Coal miner Wiley Johnson said his wife, who attends Prestonsburg Community College during the day, has applied for work at the prison to help pay her way through school. But Wiley is not sure he likes the prison's being there.

"I work the evening shift, and I kind of hate leaving my wife and two boys here -- 'cause if they take a notion up there to leave," he said of the inmates at the prison, "they're gone."

Ronald Triplett, who lives behind Wiley Johnson, is not concerned about the prison, however. "I sleep with a .357 anyway," he said.

Besides, the prison has been good to the Tripletts. Ronald's wife, Kimberly, got a job as the warden's secretary.

Possible expansion
Nestled among mist-shrouded mountains near the Pike County line, the prison will house 300 inmates and employ 85 people full-time by early next year, director Timothy S. Maguigan said. About 90 inmates and 45 employees are there now.

And although it's not official yet, Johnson said yesterday, city officials have been told that the prison will be expanded some time next year to house 500 inmates.

That means even more jobs, and for that many in town welcome the prison.

"I was glad to see it come, myself," said Don Hall, a gate officer at the prison who used to work at a coal tipple.

There's just one problem, Triplett said: His wife, who makes $5 an hour, was drawing more in unemployment benefits.

Wheelwright residents, many of whom had grown used to earning $10-an-hour or more working in the mines, pinned their hopes for economic revival on prison jobs that are not delivering the wages to which they're accustomed, said Gary McCoy of Wheelwright Utilities.

Still, the prison has been a good neighbor, Johnson said. "I think we made a good decision. They've been good to us. We ask 'em for something, they do it," Johnson said U.S. Corrections Corp. bought the prison site from the city. "That's $50,000 they give to us," Johnson said.

The firm also gave the city about $4,000 worth of concrete blocks to build a new fire station.

Several local businesses also have benefited from the prison, including the pharmacy, that supplies drugs for the prisoners and the BP Oil Co. station in Bypro, which has seen business rise by more than $200 a month.

As for the state, the privately built and run prison provides a relatively inexpensive way to house prisoners.

Besides not having to pay for construction costs, the state will pay the Louisville firm operating the prison 10 percent less than it would cost the Corrections Cabinet to run it.

U.S. Corrections Corp. will receive $29.38 per prisoner each day under its contract with the state -- a bargain compared to almost any motel -- especially for a place with an indoor gymnasium and cable television.

The state also is off the hook for insuring the prison. The Louisville firm also assumes liability if something goes wrong, Maguigan said.

But it is that possibility that has some townspeople worried -- especially those who live in the shadow of the mountain.

"I don't like it one bit, no I sure don't," said Dolly Hall, 65.

Up the hillside behind her house, prison employees worked hurriedly in the drizzly gloom to finish painting the guard shack near the entrance to the prison before today's festivities.

A

TASTE

OF

FREEDOM

LEXINGTON

1993
It happened in jail, a place that's all about time.

It happened on Thanksgiving Eve at the Fayette County Detention Center, where the trusty's white mop sweeps back and forth like a pendulum; where an inmate nearing freedom rises from a card game and says, "I got 11 hours left to go"; where the second-hand on the wall clock lurches haltingly, as though it might catch and stop.

It happened just inside the front door of the jail: The 77-year-old version of Bernie Brancaccio had a high-noon meeting with the young man he used to be.

Brancaccio, the jail's first food service director, was invited back to the detention center for a Thanksgiving meal of turkey and dressing, french-cut green beans, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes and rolls -- a tradition he started 17 years ago.

But when they rolled the gray-bearded man with the hearing aid through the front door in his wheelchair and steered him immediately to the left, he found himself face to face with a orange-and-black banner that reached from floor to ceiling.

Brancaccio peered up, up, up at the banner, which had been sent compliments of his old school, Purcell Marian High in Cincinnati. Staring back at him was a bigger-than-life ink portrait of Brancaccio in his youth -- a young man with thick, dark hair and a faraway look in his eyes who lettered in three sports in high school.

"Bernie Brancaccio," the letters on the banner spelled. "Football, Basketball, Baseball."

"It's real nice," Brancaccio said, smiling as he looked up the wall at the poster.

"I can't see half of it."

What Brancaccio could not see or hear of his past, however, he could touch and smell and taste. He rolled up to a table in the staff dining room for a Thanksgiving feast prepared in the same kitchen he ruled from the time the jail opened in October 1976 until failing health forced him to quit three years ago.

Once, Bernie Brancaccio, Class of '36, was a sports hero. In high school, he was a star in three sports. He played minor-league baseball for the Cincinnati Reds.

He was inducted into his high school's athletic hall of fame in October. In the program for the ceremony was a quote from a letter that fellow Purcell Marian alumnus Roger Staubach wrote to Brancaccio:

"You left a legend that the rest of us have to live up to."

These days, Brancaccio wears glasses with lenses as thick as soda-bottle bottoms, and his right leg is gone -- lost to the ravages of diabetes. A series of strokes have impaired his memory and his ability to talk.

But Brancaccio seemed at home yesterday at the jail. "I always did like it here," he said, smiling.

Brancaccio, who started and owned Lexington's first Frisch's Big Boy Restaurant franchises, began working at the jail after he retired.

"He didn't want to quit working," said Jailer Ray Sabbatine. Brancaccio loved to cook, a passion that occasionally flared into outbursts of obscene language. He did not suffer fools gladly in his kitchen.

Kitchen trusty Thomas Crockett of Lexington, 24, who is serving time in the jail for contempt of court, remembers Brancaccio's fire.

"He was spunky," Crockett said.

Brancaccio frequently was the brunt of good-natured practical jokes by jail staff, Sabbatine said, "because he'd get so mad.

"He'd get furious."

"He was a wonderful gourmet cook, and we'd call him a short-order cook."

Yesterday was different, however. Brancaccio smiled and pointed a crooked finger at those who joked with him.

"It tastes fine," he said of the food.

"It's not as good as yours, though, huh?" Sabbatine said, gently ribbing his friend.

Brancaccio shook his head and laughed.

The meal that staff members ate with their honored guest is the same one all 550 inmates will eat today. Trusties started Monday preparing the feast, which includes 27 25-pound turkeys and 240 pounds of green beans, said food services director Fred Anderson.

The holiday dinner is of some consolation to inmates. "It's something to look forward to," said Chris Horning, 21, of Lexington, as he mopped the floor yesterday. "It makes the time go by quicker, too."

"We love it," Thomas said. "We wish it was Thanksgiving dinner every day."

Still, most, if not all, inmates would rather be somewhere else. The holidays make being in prison all the harder, Horning said. He misses Thanksgiving with his family and the big dinner his mother cooks.

"And we put the Christmas tree up on Thanksgiving, too," he said.

As for Thomas, he would rather be at his grandmother's house. "Time passes slower in here," he said. And fellow kitchen trusty John Doneghy would rather be at home with his wife and daughters.

But to Brancaccio, the jail is like home. And there are few places he would rather be -- including Building 27 of the Veterans Administration Hospital in Lexington, where he lives apart from his wife because of his poor health.

"When I left here," he said of the jail, "I missed it all the time."

Yesterday, as the laughing and smiling Brancaccio relived a life without wheelchairs and hospital beds, he found freedom behind the heavy, metal doors of a jail. It tasted good.