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Listen to more tapes by Gary Nash
More about the White Russians
White Russians in China

I would like to dedicate this page to Elizabeth Kelly Johnson one of the senior closing attorney's for the FDIC. She passed away in 2004 and I had the pleasure of knowing her a short time while working with the FDIC. It seems she also went along with the "White Russian" girl to Lockheed Martin in 1991, as did I. Elizabeth passed away in 2004. Yes, for every action there is An Equal and Opposite Reaction.

Working for two years on the 11th floor Knoxville's Plaza Tower for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was one of the better paying government jobs that I had, but with lots of exceptions. Many of the employees there were previous UAB employees or people, like myself, who had some sort of dealings with the Butcher's before. I was lead General Services Technician and was assigned three clerks to help with delivering the office mail and supplies. Additional duties included going out after records from different parts of the region and picking up and disposing of classified shred at the end of each day. Another duty was seeing that the fleet of more than 15 vehicles were serviced.

Having to open all the office mail was interesting to say the least. On one occasion I can remember opening a letter that was a affidavit from a coroner reporting of suicide that in fact the body found on the side of I-75 was that of George W. Ridenhour, Jr., a lawyer that was on his way to turn himself in to serve several years in the Butcher Banking fraud case. Quite gruesome to say the least.

Working on the 11th floor meant that you were on the administrative floor of the FDIC. The managing liquidator was in the North East corner office and all the liquidation personnel also on that floor. The personnel office was just outside of my supply room and was where most of the activity took place.

Two of the clerks assigned to my section had been there since 1983 when they first came to Knoxville after the closing of United American Bank. Both of those employees had signed up on the government Employee Assistance Programs and were receiving the benefit of seeing doctors for habitual drug problems. This was just great. I was told that both were within one written reprimand of being fired by my department head when I was hired. That didn't take long to happen. They challenged me immediately. I compared this to the personnel officers as similar to a student in highschool, who had challenged me during my student teaching experience. The regular teacher had missed one day and I was left alone the entire day. This kid got up and shook a bottle of prescription drugs and asked if anyone wanted to buy pills. This was 1982 and I immediately took the kid to the principles office. Rather that do anything about it the principle repremanded me for leaving the classroom unattended and because the kid did have a prescription he did nothing at all. That child died of a drug overdose several years later.

Back to the two EAP employees I was trying to work with. I had written both up for tardiness and outright verbal abuse before the first three months were up. I spent most of my time looking for them and writing them up. Evidently from somewhere in the politics of the office these two employees had more clout than I thought. For two years this unbelievable abuse of my authority continued. I had written so many complaints and gotten no response that not only were we not speaking to each other, they were most of the time somewhere else in the building when it came time to deliver the mail or supplies or pick up classified shred at the end of the day. These were duties that I was to assign to them since I had lots of paperwork, etc. to contend with on my own.

Drug use within the entire office seemed to be a norm rather than something you reported. The entire 8th floor, the investigation division, was known to be a big party crowd. Not only after work happy hour but late night party people. I spent quite a bit of time chasing one pretty little blond who loved drinking "White Russians". She bragged about how she was going to sue the pants off any man that ever married her and how she used to R__ D__gs from the Plaza Tower for B__nose W___tt. When I finally learned that she was more into the heavy social drinking scene than I, I learned my lesson and quit chasing her. I also arranged a transfer to another location in the department where I didn't have to deal with these two individuals that had made my life pure hell at work. My father passed away in late 1986, so I had quite a bit of responsibility with my mother being alone in the house in Tazewell.

I was let go in July 1987. But not before being visited by my big brother, George "Eddie", when I got to take the "White Russian" girl to Regas Restaurant, where he met her. I just wonder if the same drugs moving through the FDIC at that time were the same moving through the Evergreen Air, Marana, Az facility, and that moved through the 1982 Worlds Fair organizing committee? You know how fast and furious that kind of politics can be. If your getting too close there is always the old "this way to the door" trick, right, before you let the old cat out of the bag, peer-a-mid thingy. Maybe Scott West, during his plea bargain agreement with the F.B.I. could shed some light on that. I would be at Witts In without talking to them.

While with that group we saw the great Berlin Wall Speech by Ronald Reagan in June 1987 as well as watching the terrible Challenger disaster in January 1986.