WASHINGTON - When Sen. Ted Cruz brought national campaign consultant Jeff Roe to Houston to run his insurgent campaign for president, he knew he was getting the "bad boy" of Missouri politics.

He knew from experience, having himself felt the bad boy's sting.

In 2012, during his high-stakes battle with Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst for the GOP nomination in Texas' U.S. Senate race, his likeness was plastered over a Chinese flag in an eye-popping pamphlet attacking Cruz's past legal representation of a company with ties to the Chinese government.

"Mr. Cruz betrayed our country," the pamphlet read.

The man behind the attack was Jeff Roe.

An outraged Cruz called it "gutter politics." But for Roe, now the 44-year-old strategy wunderkind of the modern conservative movement, it was not personal. It was business.

"I was a vendor on the (2012) campaign," Roe said of his attack on Cruz during a rare interview in the campaign's sparsely furnished 7th floor office in the Greenway Plaza business complex. "I wasn't a strategic decision-maker."

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Roe relishes his role as a "bad boy." The moniker is part of the press clippings he keeps on a website documenting his pugnacious and sometimes controversial career in Kansas City. That's where Roe, who grew up working on his family's hog farm, ended up founding one of the nation's biggest Republican strategy shops.

The company, Axiom Strategies, has developed a well-earned reputation for hitting hard and early, a template Cruz followed when he became the first declared candidate of the 2016 election.

Now, as Roe takes the reins in Cruz's presidential campaign, he will be the central figure in a strategy team that has vowed to break rules and abandon the conventions of past presidential campaigns.

"There's a conventional wisdom that happens in politics," said Roe, an aficionado of Red Man chewing tobacco. "I don't accept it."

With an open, self-effacing manner, Roe talks easily of the data analytics, focus groups, and computer dial testing that underlie the creative content of his campaign messages. He aims for micro-goals like this: Keep a piece of campaign literature in a targeted voter's hands for 48 seconds or more – instead of the industry average of 24 seconds – before it goes in the trash.

"This is a pretty scientific deal," he says.

Tragedy in Missouri

Politics is not for the faint of heart, and the attention-grabbing ads flowing from Roe's research can be tough. Wherever Roe has trekked in politics, controversy has never been far away.

That history of aggressive tactics came to haunt Roe in February, just as he was settling into his new digs in Houston. Missouri Auditor Tom Schweich, a GOP candidate for governor, shot himself in his St. Louis home in the midst of a feud with Missouri Republican Party Chairman John Hancock.

Amid accusations that Hancock was behind a politically motivated "whisper campaign" about Schweich's Jewish roots, Roe entered the picture with an unrelated radio ad criticizing Schweich as weak and ineffective.

Roe, a personal friend of rival GOP contender Catherine Hathaway, footed the $8,300 bill for a "House of Cards"-themed parody portraying Schweich as the bumbling Deputy Sheriff Barney Fife on the "Andy Griffith Show."

Article and audio: Here’s a February radio ad attacking Missouri auditor Tom Schweich, who committed suicide a week later.

Although a subsequent police investigation attributed Schweich's death to a long history of mental anguish, in Missouri political circles he became the poster child for the excesses of negative attack ads.

In a biting eulogy at Schweich's funeral, former U.S. Sen. John Danforth, a stalwart among Missouri Republicans, decried the alleged whisper campaign. He also described Roe's ad as "bullying," and called the suicide a "natural consequence of what politics has become."

Roe calls Schweich's death "a tragedy." He said he knew Schweich well and respected him. He had even once considered a Schweich overture to work on one of his campaigns. They occasionally had dinner. He maintains the radio ad was not ill-intentioned.

"The whole thing was a parody," he said.

But he also sees the furor over the suicide as "natural and fair." And he can understand the backlash about what he calls "the contentiousness of politics."

Schweich's suicide also laid bare some old wounds. One of Roe's best-known commercials was a 2008 TV spot against former Kansas City Mayor Kay Barnes, a Democrat challenging Roe's then-boss and political mentor, U.S. Rep. Sam Graves.

The ad, dubbed "San Francisco Values," made use of a Barnes fundraising trip to U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi's California district. It featured a black man in a cowboy hat dancing in a bar with two women - one white, one black. The script suggested that Barnes, among other liberal sins, favored "abortion on demand."

It got more personal for Sara Jo Shettles, a Democrat who tried to oust Graves in 2006. Then 62 and disabled, Shettles became the target of a Roe TV ad suggesting she had worked for Penthouse. The letters "XXX" were splashed across the screen. Shettles says she only sold ads for a science magazine owned by Penthouse's parent company.

"He's always had the perspective that if you're in there playing the game, and there's any dirt to be had on you, it's all fair game," Shettles said. "Up to a certain point, that's true. But he has crossed a lot of lines of civil discourse."

Roe called 'poison' to politics

The hard feelings come from some Republicans as well. One of Roe's most bitter Missouri critics is St. Charles County Republican Committee Chairman Joe Brazil, who ran unsuccessfully for a state senate seat in 2006.

Brazil faced Republican Scott Rupp, who had Roe in his camp. Roe used his blog to dredge up a teenage driving incident in 1982 that killed one of Brazil's best friends. Roe suggested Brazil had been drinking, a charge Brazil denies.

"The guy is poison to the human race," said Brazil, who is now chairman of the St. Charles County Council. "It's just 'win at all costs.' No integrity. A liar. He's divisive to the Republican Party."

Going forward, political analysts see Roe's fingerprints on a Cruz campaign that has already jettisoned some of the old rules - though so far with no whiff of negativity.

The splashy March 23 launch before 10,000 Christian college students at Liberty University in Virginia made a gauzy, Norman Rockwell-like statement. Then came a Christian-themed TV ad over Easter - contrary to the conventional wisdom that says it's still 18 months before voters go to the polls.

Both got more than their fair share of "earned" - that is, free - media coverage, and helped push the tempo for Cruz's rivals for the Republican nomination.

"He really likes to get out early and knock the opponents off their feet," said Steve Glorioso, a Democratic consultant in Missouri who worked for Barnes. "That was the purpose of the ad against Kay Barnes, and it was the purpose of the ad against Schweich."

Many see Roe and Cruz as a natural pairing of two conservative activists who have made their mark outside the orbit of the Washington beltway. "A hardball consultant for a hardball candidate," Glorioso said. "It's a perfect fit."

Roe too sees a kindred spirit in his new client, even as he follows his professional obligation to deflect the credit. "I could be hit by a bus," he said, "and they'd still continue to break all the rules."

Meanwhile, he shrugs off the criticism that he sometimes takes it too far.

"I have never heard of a losing candidate say, 'Gosh, I really worked hard, raised money, ran a really good campaign, and the voters didn't respond to my message,'" he said. "I don't take it personally. I'm not proud of it. I'm not glad people think I'm the devil or something. But I think it's probably soothing for them to lay their loss at something beyond the political process."

80 percent win rate

Roe got his start in politics with Sam Graves in the early 1990s. He helped him win races for the Missouri legislature and then Congress. Roe and his wife Melissa Roe - a Mrs. Missouri United States 2010 pageant winner - both have worked in Graves' U.S. House office.

Glorioso, a sympathetic Missouri Democrat who has done charity work with Roe, likens the close Roe-Graves alliance to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."

The alliance has been fruitful for both.

Starting from the second floor of a bail bondsman's office in Kansas City a decade ago, Roe has built up a group of strategy and direct mail companies with offices in Missouri, San Francisco, and Washington.

He's also opened up shop in Texas, where he has done work for Dewhurst, former Gov. Rick Perry, and a host of state House and Senate candidates.

Roe debuted at the presidential level in 2008, when he worked with the campaign for former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Last election cycle, his direct mail firm, Candidate Command, racked up more than $4 million in billings from federal candidates. Altogether, over the years, he boasts an 80 percent win rate in congressional races around the country.

The 'backyard bulldog'

To play the game, Roe says, a campaign consultant has to choose an avatar, like a Monopoly piece: One is the slick, good-looking spinmeister on TV. Soft and rotund, Roe says, "I'm clearly not that."

Another type is what he calls the "frizzy-haired data guy;" A third category is the "backyard bulldog."

"I'm actually more of a data guy," Roe says. "But there's no doubt that I'm intense."

As for the bulldog image: "It's not unfair. I don't shirk from it."

For all of Roe's detractors, he also has plenty of friends and admirers in the industry.

To Washington lobbyist Beau Rothschild, who has worked for Roe at Axiom, it's a matter of combining smarts, hard work, and toughness.

"Jeff serves his clients to win," he said. "If I was running for office, president or dog catcher, he'd be the first guy I'd call. There's a means behind his madness. It's all positive. It's to win."

Candidate Command, Roe's direct mail operation, also has won a stack of Pollie Awards, the political equivalent of Oscars, doled out annually by the American Association of Political Consultants to recognize particularly creative and audacious work.

Jason Klindt, the former head of Command, says those who accuse modern strategists like Roe of coarsening politics ignore history. "A man was beaten to death on the Senate floor (in the Civil War era)," Klindt said.

As for hewing to modern sensibilities, Roe's former associates don't see anything in Roe outside the norm.

"Politics ain't bean bag," said New Hampshire political strategist Dave Carney, who worked with Roe on the Dewhurst campaign. "You've got to have tough skin and be able to make your point."