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“He’s a snake,” says a veteran journalist who asked not to be named. “The description is inapt,” Callow responds. “Most snakes rattle before they bite.” “He’s rather Machiavellian. He knows everybody, and nobody knows him,” says another critic who begged for anonymity. “He may have the most creative mind of anyone I’ve ever met,” says fellow publicist Jerry Berger. “In this city of feuds, he has an enormous influence on who the winners and losers will be,” says Steven M. Stone, a Clayton development lawyer.

Richard Callow has advised the past four mayors of St. Louis, the St. Louis Cardinals, Anheuser-Busch, the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, SBC Communications, City Museum, THF Realty, Downtown Now!, former Gov. Bob Holden and all sorts of agencies and individuals, including some who’d rather not admit it. He has influenced the content of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch; the decisions of the city’s historic-preservation board; the fates of Maplewood, WingHaven and Washington Avenue. He manipulates the media, his clients’ images and the public’s perception, shifting alliances and tactics so fast that nobody can keep him on radar.

A former campaign strategist and pollster, Callow came to St. Louis in 1991 and is now president of his own public-relations firm, Public Eye Inc. He’s adroit at getting publicity for his clients but resists drawing attention to himself. Told he was being profiled, he called it “a needless sacrifice of trees” and said, “You are welcome to report me missing in action. They will probably give you a more interesting assignment: paint drying, TIF reform, dog show.”

Yet he answered question after question, mainly via witty, carefully crafted e-mails.

Politicians love Callow—at least during the honeymoon—because he makes them look good. Some journalists hate him, because he makes them look bad; others are addicted to him, because he feeds them the most recent spin or plot twist so reliably, they never have to break a sweat. Those who know Callow (a litmus test for St. Louis insiders) either find him scary-smart or insist that his influence is greatly exaggerated. Hardly anybody trusts him.

At its Anglo-Saxon root, his surname means “young and inexperienced; immature.”

He’s anything but.

The founder of Public Eye wears Coke-bottle glasses. His mother was from Tokyo; his father was an Air Force officer. Richard was born on the Selfridge Air Force Base, 30 miles north of Detroit, but spent his early years in Japan. There, he was an outsider because he was part American; when his family returned to the States, he was an outsider because he was part Japanese.

Say what you will, he’s no longer an outsider.

Callow finished grade school and high school in San Antonio. “I actually attended both a military school and a preparatory seminary during my youth,” he says. “I think of it as my ecclesia militans period.”

“He was going to be a priest, and then they sent him to a military school because he was pedantic and incorrigible,” chuckles his friend Mike Owens, a KSDK (Channel 5) investigative reporter who met his wife, 28th Ward Ald. Lyda Krewson, through Callow.

Callow doesn’t argue with either adjective. He describes himself in childhood pictures as “the young owl” and in adulthood as a penguin—a philosophical bird who earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Dallas and a master’s in philosophy from Boston College.

“The study of philosophy took my natural curiosity about how things were connected to each other and gave it focus,” he says, then admits, “Studying mostly medieval philosophy in Catholic universities made me intellectually lopsided. I was 25 years old and hadn’t read much written after 1400 and pretty much everything written before it. I’m a stone killer at those 13th-century-trivia nights.”

As a grad student, Callow envisioned himself opening a consulting philosopher’s office or joining a university town’s police force. Instead, he went to work for two Boston polling firms and a national polling firm in Washington, D.C., then began managing political campaigns. He moved here from D.C. in 1991, taking a job as then-Mayor Vincent Schoemehl’s communications director.

Callow describes the gig as “a job for which I had great enthusiasm and no formal background. I enjoyed working for Vince, a man whose mind never sat down. When he decided not to seek a fourth term, I set up Public Eye, a PR firm with a focus on ‘contentious issues.’ I have a mix of clients whose common characteristic is having a sense of humor about my advice.”

And when his old philosophy classmates ask what he does for a living? “I’m a rhetor,” he says. “I teach persuasive ways to use words to convince people.”

Many of Callow’s clients adore him.

“He’s an interesting person and very smart. He’s helped me a lot,” says Mayor Francis Slay. Callow helped create the mayor’s successful website, and Slay’s sister Monietta Slay once worked for Callow, helping him promote the ballot referendum that allowed Maplewood to replace homes and businesses with a Wal-Mart and a Sam’s Club.

“He’s one of the most fascinating persons I’ve ever met, and very well versed,” says Cardinals president Mark Lamping, who hired Callow to lobby for tax breaks for the new stadium. “He loves baseball, and he keeps the same 24/7 hours that we do. We use him to help sort through ideas and plans to find good ones and reject bad ones. He cares about downtown and knows people in both high and low places. He is also very funny and enjoys making me laugh.”

Other clients, less amused, see Callow as a necessary evil, wired into the core of power and able to make things happen—or stop them. He charges “about the same as a partner in the kind of law firm that allows its partners to wear bow ties,” he says, “or I don’t cost anything. I can pretty much pick my clients for the challenge their projects present.”

“Because he is a one-man relay team, operating without sidekicks, it is hard to trace his whereabouts or connect him to outcomes. As a result, both friends and foes often exaggerate his involvement in matters that he has had no hand in shaping.”

Is Callow as good as his fans say he is? Even they’re not always sure—because you never know what trouble you could have had if he hadn’t been around.

“He could certainly be featured in Reader’s Digest as one of the ‘Most Unforgettable Characters’ I’ve ever met,” says one of his PR counterparts, Joan Quicksilver. “Richard is definitely a rainmaker. I’m glad I’ve never been on the opposite side of the table, and I hope I stay on his side of the table.”

Both Callow’s friends and his enemies are convinced that, if provoked, he’ll uncoil and strike.

“It’s sport with him,” says an observer. “He enjoys the hunt more than the kill.”

“He is very vindictive and loves cat-and-mouse games, setting people against each other,” says Karen Isbell, special assistant to Mayor Clarence Harmon from 1997 through 2000.

Isbell says that Harmon took Callow on as campaign manager. Harmon was elected, defeating in- cumbent Freeman Bosley Jr. in April 1997, but, says Isbell, Harmon fired Callow after Callow said that he was also working for Bosley. “He later said he was only kidding, but Harmon did not trust him after that,” she says. “Callow retaliated by giving [former Post- Dispatch columnist Jerry] Berger all kinds of bad stuff about Harmon. People are afraid to come forward about Richard Callow.”

Callow’s response: “I don’t think of myself as vindictive, just thorough—and I am a lot more apt to be thorough on my clients’ behalf than I am on my own.” He adds, as though it’s an afterthought: “Unfortunately, picking up bad news about Mr. Harmon’s administration was a lot like walking blindfolded through a cow pasture: You really couldn’t help stepping in something.”

Callow says he was not a paid campaign employee. “I spent more than two years helping some good people put Harmon’s campaign together, but somewhere along the way I misplaced the gene that makes some campaigners hate their bosses’ opponents. In 2001, I helped Francis Slay campaign against— and beat—both Harmon and Bosley.”

Critics say that Callow’s compensation was not cash from the campaigns but the perception that he was hooked up with the eventual mayors. The payback came down the road, from clients eager to have access to those hookups. Callow climbed on the Slay bandwagon early, critics add, and his taking credit for Slay’s landslides would be akin to a rooster’s taking credit for the sunrise.

Callow, 53, lives in a loft in the old Paristyle dress factory on Washington Avenue. He cohabits with Barbara Geisman, deputy mayor for development, and they endure all manner of speculation about both their private and professional lives.

Often, their interests overlap. In 2001, for example, Callow was appointed by the mayor to the St. Louis Preservation Board. He cast the only vote in favor of letting Anheuser- Busch use faux tiles on the Bevo Mill’s roof. The next week, Berger’s column reported that Mayor Slay had asked the board to reverse itself. The faux tiles were allowed.

In 2003, the board approved a 28-story height for a proposed condominium at Lindell and Euclid—a project for which Geisman and Krewson had already worked to secure $7.5 million in tax-increment financing.

Callow saw no conflict. “I am appointed by the mayor to consider his viewpoints,” he says. “Barb is the mayor’s development director. I am Barb’s and the mayor’s appointment on that board. Nobody who supports a vote I’ve made on the Preservation Board has ever mentioned a conflict of interest. Understandably enough, the noise comes from people who think their ox has been gored. Most of what I do is of no concern to the mayor and irrelevant to the city’s interests.”

Callow and Geisman met when they were both “just south of 40,” Callow says, “making us sound a little like MapQuest directions.” Asked what he believes in unshakably, Callow lists “news deadlines, the beauty of language, the power of ideas and Barb Geisman, not in that order.”

Yet not even Geisman claims to know the real Callow.

“Richard is both easier and more difficult than he appears to be,” she says. “I can’t figure him out 95 percent of the time, after more than 13 years. I think that’s why we get along.

“I met him just after he moved here in the early ’90s, when I was working for Tom Villa in the president of the Board of Aldermen’s office,” she continues. “I received a bunch of calls from the staff of then-Mayor Schoemehl, begging me to be nice to this new media guy. I told them I would be happy to be nice to the guy if he wasn’t an idiot like the last three or four Vince media guys. Instead of being an idiot, he turned out to be really smart.

“Our early courtship was a staple in Jerry Berger’s column,” recalls Geisman. “That amused my parents more than it did me. I’m not sure Richard even knew who Mr. Berger was in those days. He subse-

quently learned.”

For years, the alternative to working the Post-Dispatch crossword puzzle was circling all the bits Callow fed into Berger’s column. Not only did Callow keep Berger supplied with news, but the teamwork lent both men power. In 2001, for example, D.J. Wilson, writing in the Riverfront Times, quoted Ken Jones, then editor of Missouri Lawyers Weekly, describing how Callow had warned a lawyer not to press the Post for a correction of a Berger item, lest his name never again appear in Berger’s column.

Even as a fledgling political consultant back east, Callow found his way into ink. Boston Globe columnist Michael Frisby once followed serious political news with a miniature saga about young Callow’s losing his Burberry trench coat. Years later, when the Cardinals played the Red Sox in the 2004 World Series, a Boston Globe reporter interviewed Callow, Geisman and their friend Christine Bertelson, editor of the Post-Dispatch editorial page. Callow, the Globe staffer wrote, “has everyone who matters in the city programmed on speed-dial.”

Callow makes news—or rather, he makes sure his clients make news. Or rather, he makes sure they don’t.

“Most publicists work to place stories,” says an observer. “He works to kill them.”

“He is like the St. Louis managing editor, balancing all kinds of broadcast reporters’ needs, and in return, they do stories that he needs done,” says another observer. “He’s always been tight with Mike Owens at Channel 5 and former Channel 4 [KMOV] investigative reporter Jamie Allman and current mayoral chief of staff Jeff Rainford,” who once reported for KMOV.

“I tend to pay more attention to TV reporters than to writers,” Callow says. “That’s because TV reporters have a tougher audience. People are better at watching TV than they are at reading.”

He doesn’t ignore print, though. He used to turn up at Post-Dispatch parties, a former staffer recalls. He had a clique of friends at the paper, and higher-ups worried about his influence—especially because he showed up, coy as an Alfred Hitchcock cameo, in the background of nearly every major city story.

“You couldn’t cover City Hall without dealing with Callow, even back in the Bosley administration,” says Post investigative reporter Carolyn Tuft. “And often you’d find Callow working both angles of an issue.”

Callow prefers fiction to nonfiction (“though I’m a sucker for those nonfiction books with one-word titles—Salt, Longitude, Cod,” he says). He listens to world music and alternative rock. He’s a satellite-TV and CNN junkie. He’s not exactly the paternal type: “Barb and I have cats, not kids.” He calls himself “a Bill Maher Catholic.”

And beyond all that?

The big question about Callow, for people who sit up nights trying to figure him out, is whether he cares about anything beyond his own machinations.

“Although I am aware of the fact that he never draws a line without blurring it and that a multitude of contradictions abound, he has, nonetheless, always stood for something more than his own career,” says development lawyer Stone.

But what is it?

“I’ve stood for Steve Stone’s career,” Callow deadpans.

“You never really know what Callow’s agenda is,” an observer says, “so everybody pays him not to work against them.” As a campaign strategist, he has advised opponents of former clients and even switched political parties midstream. Initially a registered Republican, consulting, polling and campaigning for Republican candidates, he went to work in 1987 for Rep. Chester Atkins, Boston’s Democratic Party chairman, and immediately changed his party affiliation to Democratic. “It was not a job requirement,” he told the Boston Globe. “I did it to vote for my boss.”

What others see as fickle opportunism, Callow sees as open-mindedness.

“There are some people who have the same enemies their whole lives,” he says. “I’m not one of them. I’ve never had a good enemy that I didn’t think might become a good friend. I’ve always figured that people who disagree with me might have a good point—and I ought to try to find out what that point is.”

So are Callow’s critics just too blindly loyal to understand cool objectivity, too rigid to trust someone capable of shifting alliances?

“No, it’s more than that,” says someone who’s dealt with him. “He’s manipulative to the core, and he uses his information to hurt people. When you’re up he kisses your ass, and when you’re down he twists the knife.” Another observer once compared Callow and Geisman to John Malkovich and Glenn Close in Dangerous Liaisons: no powdered wigs, perhaps, but just as much mischief-making.

Callow follows the careers of those who show promise, flatters them, swoops in when they’re vulnerable. Maybe it’s sincere interest and mentoring; maybe he’s laying a foundation for future favors.

Maybe both.

Callow has lived in St. Louis longer than he has in any other place—even though, when he arrived 15 years ago, he had no intention of staying. “I like St. Louisans more than any other group I’ve lived with,” he says. “As a people, St. Louisans are frank, polite, determined and decent. You can get pretty much anybody on the telephone. Try that in Boston or Philadelphia. I spend a lot of evenings and afternoons attending government meetings in the surrounding counties and munies. None of them has the charm—or, frankly, the skill level—of the St. Louis Board of Aldermen.”

For all his devotion, he’s realistic about the convoluted political structure he’s learned to navigate so well: “I’m fairly certain that the political structure of St. Louis city and county was first proposed by a grad-school political-science class at the University of Constantinople in about 1022 A.D. The Syrian Monophysites would have felt right at home here.”

As does Callow.

“You shouldn’t miss my funeral,” he advises. “I expect a crowd pretty evenly divided into people about whom others will say, ‘I didn’t even know Callow knew him,’ and those who came just to make sure I’m really dead. I spend my life as the liaison between groups of popularly distrusted people who also distrust each other: lawyers, journalists, developers and politicians.”

For all the political prowess attributed to Callow, perhaps his most powerful skill is his ability to skate through disasters and escape with little or no blame. He helped manage Schoemehl’s disastrous gubernatorial bid in 1992, when the St. Louis mayor lost 113 of 114 Missouri counties, including the city of St. Louis. Callow also lobbied in Jefferson City for stadium help for the Cardinals, to no avail, and worked on the city’s home-rule proposal before it went down in flames.

His most recent nonachievement was his campaign management of the mayor’s slate for the spring school-board election. Callow went after rival candidate Peter Downs with a public vengeance, but Downs still managed to unseat a mayoral pick and shift the balance of power on the board. Somehow the defeat of the mayor’s slate was spun to blame apathetic voters who didn’t turn out, leaving the election open for “angry” voters to decide. Hardly anyone voiced public criticism of how the campaign was waged. Some of that reluctance was due to players’ not wanting to cross a man who’s tight with the mayor and who shares living quarters with the deputy mayor in charge of development.

Callow wields the kind of power that’s easy to overrate.

“Because he is a one-man relay team, operating without sidekicks, it is hard to trace his whereabouts or connect him to outcomes,” says Stone. “As a result, both friends and foes often exaggerate his involvement in matters that he has had no hand in shaping. He is more present by his absence than anyone in St. Louis.”

Callow agrees: “I am given credit—or blamed—for many more things than I could possibly have accomplished.”

Is it Callow’s doing that we have a new stadium and Maplewood has a Wal-Mart? Is it his fault that the home-rule amendment failed and Slay’s school-board team lost? Hardly. As one blogger wrote, “He’s more a mercenary than a general.” And even those who hire him aren’t sure which angle he’s playing at any given moment.

They just know they don’t want him as an enemy.