The Great Welfare Empire Conspiracy - Page 06

In May of 1981, Ron and I and Hammerhead Enterprises, Inc. filed suit in federal district court in New York for libel and violation of our right to print and market freely. Both Mr. Brezenoff and his attorney, George Gutwirth, knew about the APWA plan to ban the game. In fact, Brezenoff had sent Edward Weaver a copy of his letter to the chain store presidents with a note, just as paragraph 2.d. of the APWA plan requested-"Keep us informed of your efforts." Brezenoff and Gutwirth resolved to do what they could, which included lying, to keep us from finding out about the APWA plan and Brezenoff's connection with it. In the course of discovery in that case, our attorney, Luther West, asked Mr. Brezenoff in several different ways if he knew of, or was involved in, a larger effort to ban the game. Under oath, Mr. Brezenoff answered in the negative each time.

If they were to keep Brezenoff's connection with APWA a secret, and to maintain the sham defense that Brezenoff was not working with others to ban the game, but merely responding to it by expressing his opinion and leaving it at that, they had to make sure, before the trial, that we didn't know about APWA and its plan. So when Mr. Brezenoff's attorney conducted a deposition of Ron, he asked if Ron had ever heard of a publication called Washington Report (the name of APWA's monthly newsletter where the directive to ban the game appeared). Ron answered that he had not heard of it.

Ron and I and our attorney wondered what the Washington Report question was all about. I recall calling Washington DC information to try to get a number for Washington Report, but since it was not the name of an organization, but rather its newsletter, there was no listing.

Liberal Religion Teams Up with Liberal Government

Just a few weeks later, a phone call from K&K Toys, one of our best retail customers, ultimately led us to the knowledge of APWA and its plan. We were surprised to hear the president of K&K tell us to stop shipping games to his 12 stores in Virginia. When we asked why, he said that the Roman Catholic Bishop of Richmond, William Sullivan, had threatened an ecumenical boycott if his stores did not stop carrying the game at once.

Ron and I made an appointment to see the Bishop in Richmond as soon as we could. We met with him and his administrative assistant who was really the one behind the boycott but whose name I forget. I can tell you what he looked like because he was the inspiration for our caricature of liberals on the Capital Punishment game box. Ron and I showed the Bishop and his assistant two board games we thought were offensive- Class Struggle, an avowedly Marxist game, and Assassin, a game whose objective we found disturbing-and asked if they had any plans to organize a boycott against stores carrying those games, which, of course, they did not. Then we asked, "Why our game?" In response, the Bishop's assistant handed us a copy of the APWA plan to ban the game right out of Washington Report.

Quibbling Evasions, Hazy Recollections, Distracting Liberal Babble

We naturally suspected that there was some kind of connection between the APWA's plan and Brezenoff, but Brezenoff"s sworn testimony of no involvement with such groups convinced us that calling Weaver as a witness would prove to be a waste of time and money. That Brezenoff told the truth in the discovery phase of the case was an assumption of ours that proved erroneous. And thus, when the trial began before Judge Milton Pollack in September of 1982, our understanding of events was woefully incomplete.

On the third and final day of the trial, our attorney asked Brezenoff if he knew Weaver. Evidently fearful that we were on to him, he answered, "Yes." He went on to admit that he had received a copy of Weaver's plan "remove the game from the marketplace," and had, in turn, sent Weaver a copy of his letter to the chain store presidents along with a "note." Although all correspondence such as this had been requested in the discovery phase of the case, a copy of this "note" to Weaver was not supplied to us until the day we went before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, long after the district court judge had ruled against us. It was not dated and it passed onto Weaver only the most minimal information. It looked to me as if they had destroyed the original "note" and replaced it with a fake.

In answer to his interrogatories and at his deposition, Brezenoff did lie, with his attorney's knowledge, about his connection with the central conspiracy to ban the game; but I don't want to give the impression that he lied about everything. His testimony was more a balance of quibbling evasions, hazy recollections, and distracting liberal babble punctuated with bursts of unpremeditated frankness. He admitted, for example, that he wrote his letter to the 13 chain store presidents because he feared that the sale of the game might adversely affect pending welfare legislation in Albany designed to increase welfare grants. He also admitted that he wanted to hurt the game nationwide.

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