Billionaire’s Bird Shoot Ruffles Law

Roland Leap proudly hoisted the Stars and Stripes at his Green Mountain Store last week, his faith renewed in the American system of justice.

Leap, a witness for the prosecution in the trial of three British subjects charged with violating federal game laws on the Virginia estate of billionaire John W. Kluge, had vowed never to raise the U.S. flag again if they were not convicted.

“I know that’s extreme, but that’s how strongly I felt,” said Leap, 47, who operates a general store at Keene, near Kluge’s sprawling Albemarle Farms.

Leap was not so upset about the specific charges, that Sir Richard Musgrave and British gamekeepers Paul J. Shardlow and David Amos illegally killed hundreds of hawks and other federally protected birds; farmers in the area admit that they too have killed the predators. No, what riled Leap was that the gamekeepers also shot dogs--including two of his--that wandered onto the Kluges’ 5,000-acre estate.

Disruption of a Way of Life

Since their decision four years ago to settle in the lush, rolling hills of the Virginia Piedmont, Kluge and his wife, Patricia, have disrupted the balance of nature, according to federal game officials, and the life style of many of their neighbors, acquiring farms the way others buy hunting dogs.

In the process, a way of life was disrupted. “Nothing has fractured the community as much as the Kluges’ presence,” said an official at the University of Virginia.

Gary R. Wood of Palmyra, a “country boy and proud of it,” who lived in a tenant house at Oakwood Farms before the Kluges bought it, said that before Musgrave and his helpers set traps and snares on Albemarle Farms to protect the game birds being raised for shooting by Kluge’s jet-set friends, Wood and his neighbors freely hunted on one another’s land and allowed their dogs to roam the gentle hillsides.

Emotional Testimony About Dogs

Since the Kluges opened their “shoot” two years ago, Wood testified in the trial that ended last Thursday, he has lost three of his hunting dogs. Another dog, a walker hound that survived, was severely cut by being trapped in a snare, he said.

“They let one of my dogs suffer for two days in a trap,” Wood, near tears, testified.

It was while looking for his dogs, he said, that he stumbled upon a pit that contained some of the hundreds of hawks that Musgrave and his associates were found guilty of killing or conspiring to kill. (Although the offenses are misdemeanors, a prison sentence of up to two years could be imposed against Musgrave. Shardlow could get up to 2 1/2 years and Amos up to 6 months. In addition, fines could be levied. Sentencing is expected within the next several days.)

Then there is the tale of the Doberman.

Courtney Peck of nearby Scottsville said that just before Easter, 1986, Musgrave came to his farm and warned that he and his “English boys” planned to trap “fox or any other animal that came across” any of the five farms that were being converted into an English-style driven shoot.

To protect the dogs that had freely roamed the area, Musgrave said, a 12-foot fence would be erected around the perimeter.

But the day after Easter, Peck testified last week, his Doberman pinscher hobbled home, a trap still on its neck and a bullet hole between its eyes.

Musgrave showed up later, Peck said, and admitted “we did it.”

Musgrave testified that after the 3-year-old dog was snared in a trap, one of his gamekeepers shot it “straight through the muzzle” to put it out of its misery. But the bullet only caused the 80-pound animal to “take off, with the trap around his neck,” Musgrave said.

Lawsuit Threat

Peck said the Kluges offered to pay his $180 veterinarian’s bill but he refused.

“I’m going to get $100,000 out of Mrs. Kluge,” Musgrave said Peck told him.

Peck, however, did not pursue a lawsuit. He said the Kluges paid him $1,000 and offered to have their security force watch his property line.

“I wouldn’t have paid a penny, but he (Peck) was paid,” Musgrave said, adding that “the dog, remarkably, is all right.”

“Mr. Kluge is a very rich man,” Musgrave went on, “and people are always trying to shake him down.”

Shardlow said the government’s star witness, Brian Heath, once remarked, when asked to use a chain saw: “If I cut myself, I’m going to sue the Kluges.”

Threatening to sue the 79-year-old Kluge, whose $2.5 billion makes him the nation’s second-richest person, according to Fortune magazine, and his 39-year-old British-born wife, has become something of a cottage industry.

‘Lean Beef’ Scheme

Among those who have actually taken them to court are five prominent Charlottesville residents who contend that they were duped into participating in a “lean beef” scheme at the Kluges’ farm.

The plaintiffs--who include a real estate developer, a construction company owner, a physician and a pharmacist--complain that at a 1985 New Year’s Eve gathering at the Kluges’ Georgian mansion, they plunked down $525,000 to cover the cost of caring for, feeding, breeding and marketing an exotic brand of cattle imported from Europe.

Giant Foods had agree to sell the lean beef, the investors said Patricia Kluge told them.

Kluge said he “would not allow investors to suffer financially . . . they faced no real financial risk,” the complainants said.

Kluge was acting out of a “desire to provide members of the public with an opportunity to profit from such a venture,” according to court documents.

Money Diversion Alleged

Instead, the investors allege, the Kluges used the money to help Albemarle Farms show a paper profit for 1985 so that the huge operation would not be taxed by the IRS as a “hobby.”

But when the Tax Reform Act of 1986 changed the law, wiping out any tax advantage, the Kluges announced they were abandoning the cattle operation.

Among the 100 or so potential investors invited to the Kluges’ estate for an investment seminar was Lindsay G. Dorrier Jr., the local commonwealth’s attorney.

Dorrier didn’t invest, and last Thursday he announced that he was asking the state Fish and Game Commission to revoke the Kluges’ license to operate the shooting preserve.

“Nothing more than political newsmongering,” said a Kluge attorney, John C. Lowe, one of the growing number of local lawyers who have been retained, by one side or another.

‘Excellent Customers’

“The Kluges are fine folks, excellent customers,” said Grant Cosner, whose body shop has repaired one of the Kluges’ 150 horse-drawn carriages.

Not a few of the Kluges’ admirers here have been recipients of the couple’s generosity.

The University of Virginia, for instance, received $2.5 million from the Kluges for a new wing at his Children’s Rehabilitation Center and $500,000 from a grant that Kluge gave to the United Cerebral Palsy Foundation (of which he is national president) on the condition that it be used at the University of Virginia hospital.

Patricia Kluge is the moving force behind a film festival scheduled to be held in Charlottesville next year. Detractors have dubbed it the “film flam.”

She is also helping a drive to restore the Paramount Theater downtown, and she works with the local museum and other civic ventures.

Former Nude Model

Lamented one friend, “What does the woman have to do?” to put behind her a reputation for the flamboyant that dates to her days as a nude model for a British skin magazine owned by her then-husband.

Apparently, a bit more.

Near the end of the six-day trial of the gamekeepers, one courtroom observer, a friend of the defendants, said their attorneys had called “everyone but Lady Chatterley herself.”

Stella Clements, a nurse who lives near the Kluges and whose family befriended gamekeepers Shardlow and Amos, said there are “two schools” of thought about the Kluges: “Some resent them; others are just curious to see what they’re going to do next.”

A ‘Scorched-Earth Policy’

Thomas Bondurant, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the three defendants, said their “arrogance sticks out” and accused them of carrying out a “scorched-earth policy . . . all for the purpose of killing tame game birds in a manner that can hardly be described as sport.” He added that “the boss cannot escape . . . just because underlings do the dirty work.”

Some in the courtroom wondered why that view did not extend to Musgrave’s boss, the Kluges.

U.S. Attorney John P. Alderman said later that “we carried the investigation as far as it took us, and it didn’t reach the Kluges.”

For her part, Clements said she thought the prosecutors were “out for big game and had to settle for a couple of English sparrows.”