- Mark McCloskey has run off trustees trying to make repairs to the wall surrounding his property, insisting that he and his wife own it. In 2013, he destroyed bee hives placed just outside of the mansion’s northern wall by the neighboring Jewish Central Reform Congregation and left a note saying he did it, and if the mess wasn’t cleaned up quickly he would seek a restraining order and attorneys fees. The congregation had planned to harvest the honey and pick apples from trees on its property for Rosh Hashanah.
I keep coming back to that original article. Mark says it’s remarkable that they’ve mostly only had to replace art and furniture rather than fixtures—after Anna and Edward died in 1935, the house sat empty for a decade, but nothing was stolen or stripped out. The McCloskeys have had fun seeking out objects original to the house as well as filling it with their own antiques, including a rare 1560 stipo a bambocci carved wooden cabinet made in Genoa and a Louis XIII homme-debout (“standing man”) armoire, so named because, during the Reign of Terror, a gentleman could hide inside one. Known any antique dealers? I find them to be quirky, shrewd bargainers - who will absolutely cut you a deal if they like you or raise the price when you're an asshole. It's a market segment where you are judged by character, not wallet. Unless this couple treats antique dealers very differently from the way they seem to treat everyone else, they've been overpaying a lot. Mutherfuckers paid to have an organ they can't play restored. I'll bet the "fuck you price" on that one is something to see.When Mrs. Wallace died, Mrs. Faust helped them comb through Selkirk’s listings so that they could buy back objects original to the house. But, they say, things sometimes magically showed up, too—like the time a friend in Atlanta called from an antiques fair to tell them about “this guy who’s been trying to sell these books of photographs of a house in St. Louis” that turned out to be big folios of the house. Or the little gold-and-silver–framed portrait of the three youngest Busch girls that randomly surfaced at an auction; it’s a reproduction of a painting that hangs in the house. Of note is the fact that virtually all of the art, furniture, and tapestries are authentic 14th to 17th-century antiques collected by the couple.
Typically these kinds of people tend to win big in society. They are like mini local trumps. Or the people that used a loophole to steal a cunk of beachside property here in Seattle. In the end they have enough resources to bully the local authorities into complying.
Dan Ariely made the point in The Honest Truth About Dishonesty that there are truly few impediments to ghastly behavior in human societies. In general, however, obedient children are trained by obedient parents how to get along in an obedient community. The little social habits we enforce and cultivate tend to enforce and cultivate big social habits and the world keeps spinning 'round. As OB points out, though, if you're good at toeing the line only when it's convenient and getting away with it you end up in a pretty good space. This is one reason why the top-down narrative in most societies is "if you're rich you deserve to be" because it's far more common for you to not deserve to be but since the rich write the history books...