Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 17, 1991 TAG: 9103140264
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It's talk that allows him to make cold calls on potential real-estate investors and charm his way into their bank accounts - no business cards, no briefcases, no notes necessary.
He's talking when he's in his car, a Ford Explorer with Eddie Bauer seat covers and a Cellular One on the floor.
He's talking - effusively - when he's walking you through Marketplace Center, the downtown redevelopment project he's putting together with his best friend, Richard Wells.
And he's talking, really loudly, when he calls you up on his car phone to discuss this story:
"HEY DARLIN'. You should let ME write this article; I'm a DAMN GOOD WRITER. . . . Have you talked to DOUG WILDER yet? You should call DON BEYER about me, too. . . .
"You talked to WARNER DALHOUSE? WHAT DID HE SAY?"
Developer Dave Saunders speaks loudly and carries a big shtick. He says outrageous things, really, things that sane people don't generally tell reporters. There's no question he won't answer. The phrase "no comment" never enters his mind.
Dave, are you a millionaire? "Uh, YES."
Dave, do you have an addictive personality? "ABSOLUTELY. WITHOUT QUESTION."
Dave, are you all talk? Grinning: "THERE'S NOTHING BULL---- ABOUT ME, DARLIN'."
Talk to him enough, and he'll tell you the same stories twice. Talk to Roanokers who have known him all his life, and even more stories emerge, no two quite the same.
There's the time he took over the pulpit at Cave Spring Baptist Church. His church youth group was giving short sermons to the adult congregation, and it was Saunders' turn to preach.
Fifteen at the time, he had sales skills that were already evident. The sermon went so well that Saunders had an altar call at the end - and saved two souls.
The early '70s, when he covered sports for the former Roanoke World-News and then for the Times-Herald in Newport News, produced a whole new level of lore.
One season he was assigned to cover the Baltimore Colts, the football team that starred Hall of Fame quarterback Johnny Unitas. Saunders was hanging out in the Colts' locker room after one game when Unitas had an impromptu press conference and announced he had time for one final question.
The other reporters moaned when they saw Saunders' hand raised. His question?
"Johnny, I've been watching you all year now as you go into the shower and come out, and I just have one thing to ask: Why do you always dry your [privates] before you dry your head?"
Saunders, the story goes, was thrown out.
Saunders doesn't write much these days, but he still fancies himself a Gonzo journalist in the style of Hunter S. Thompson. His will calls for The Doors' song "People Are Strange" to be played at his funeral.
Virginia Lt. Gov. Don Beyer calls Saunders "one of those rare adults who can quote verbatim pearls of wisdom from Jimi Hendrix, to the Bible, to Mark Twain, to Shakespeare. . . .
"He has that salesman's gift of gab," adds Beyer, for whom Saunders does political fund-raising. "And he's not afraid to ask for anything."
In particular, money.
Real-estate associates say they never know what he'll do next.
"I always joke that negotiating with Dave is like having a duel of wits with an unarmed man," says Roanoke developer Bruce Hobart, to whom Saunders sold the Townside Festival shopping center at a million-plus profit.
Now 42, with silver hair, Italian shoes and a BMW for a second car, Saunders is still unpredictable and still telling stories.
The only difference now is that people are starting to listen. Not just for the tales he tells, but because after two decades of talking non-stop, the boy is finally making some sense.
\ Climbing on the wagon
\ Early in the Marketplace Center project last year, Saunders had a troublesome task ahead of him: evicting the Samaritan Inn.
He knew the soup kitchen for alcoholics and street people wouldn't suit the upscale clientele he was hoping to attract to the new complex of shops, restaurants and offices. Still, kicking them out bothered him.
He prayed about it. He had second thoughts.
Then he and Wells went down to the shelter and gave them notice.
"I told the preacher I'd been a drunk myself," Saunders recalls. "But I also said that when I was drunk, the last thing I needed was something free."
Dave Saunders is a high-powered salesman and a drunk, he says: "Nothing more, nothing less."
Eight years ago, his real-estate career was foundering. He was $200,000 in debt and hadn't paid taxes in six years. In real estate with Boone & Co. at the time, he hadn't been in his office in four months.
When his daughter, Erin, was born, he'd been on a four-day drunk with a group of Kentucky coal miners. His marriage ended soon after.
There'd been three DUI charges against him, plus arrests for public intoxication and assaulting a police officer. His lawyer, Del. Richard Cranwell, D-Vinton, told him not to bother calling if he landed himself in jail again.
In December 1982, Saunders went deer hunting in Craig County and decided to kill himself. High from straight-shooting moonshine and snorting speed, he put his shotgun to his mouth, but decided that wasn't the way.
So he found a brush pile and fashioned a way to make his death look like a hunting accident. Then he said a prayer: "If you're there, God, help."
To Saunders, what happened next was a miracle. It's a story he's recounted numerous times for other recovering alcoholics and in church.
"It wasn't like Oral Roberts up there; I didn't see a 75-story Jesus," he explains over iced tea at Mill Mountain Coffee & Tea, jiggling an unlit, unfiltered Camel.
"It's just that I saw blue sky, and I hadn't noticed blue sky forever. I knew then that everything was gonna be all right. That was the greatest afternoon ever up there; I killed a deer that afternoon."
He came down the mountain and got drunk once more, but says his heart was never in it after that. "January 3, 1983, was the day I stopped," he says, noting that because alcoholism is a lifelong disease, alcoholics never technically quit drinking.
Saunders then sought emotional help and went about trying to undo the damage. His obsession with booze transformed into an obsession with making deals, and within three years, he was Boone's top salesman.
Not bad for a Virginia Tech dropout whom everyone still referred to as Mudcat, a nickname he got as a Cave Spring high schooler fishing for Roanoke River catfish.
"I don't want to paint the picture that lightning came out of the sky, and I'm all of a sudden walking with angels," he says. "I still have a long way to go spiritually.
"I still have to work at not drinking - every day."
Although he doesn't consider himself religious in the traditional sense, he does read devotions daily and spends a lot of time in counseling with other recovering alcoholics.
"I think life for him is both easy and hard," says Rev. Gordon Grimes of Cave Spring Baptist Church, where Saunders' family regularly attends. "I believe he's a good person, but I also know he struggles with his ego a lot. He likes the fast-paced lifestyle, being a member of the Jefferson Club and walking in those kinds of circles."
\ Dreaming and dealing
\ "Nobody thought Mud would amount to a hill of beans," says Bill Brill, this newspaper's executive sports editor and Saunders' former boss.
Why?
"He's the sort, if he got [millionaire heiress] Marion Via's money today, he'd spend it all tomorrow, and the next day, he'd be looking for another deal," Brill explains.
But Brill says he no longer rolls his eyes when Saunders calls up to ask him about some hot new sports deal on the burner.
An enthusiastic Virginia Tech sports fan, Saunders approached Brill last year for his thoughts on bringing the Florida State baseball team to Salem for a face-off with Tech. The concept was to make it a fund-raiser for Tech's baseball recruiting program. It went off without a hitch and brought in more than $14,000 for Tech's recruiting efforts.
And that surprised Brill. "This game I thought was a typical Mudcat promotion - it wouldn't fly. He's had a lot of no-fliers," says Brill.
Mudcat calls them dreams. Ever since he was a boy, he has fantasized about buying the Los Angeles Dodgers and moving them back to Brooklyn.
"Isn't that just one of the coolest things anybody could ever do?" he asks. In reality, the closest he ever came was an attempt to buy a minor-league baseball team that never got off the ground.
"Most of us have one big deal in our lives. Mud must have one a week; he wakes up with them," Brill says. "If you counted up all his big ideas, he's probably accomplished only like 2 percent, but his track record lately is definitely improving."
That's because once Saunders quit drinking, he could remember what he said from one day to the next. Don Peery, whose company gave him his start in real estate, recalls being astounded by how fast Saunders absorbed knowledge of the farm and coal industries.
Once he knows an industry and the people involved, Peery says, the sale is cash in his pocket. "He has an incredible memory" for numbers and for people, Peery says. "And he can shoot from the hip; he doesn't prepare for anything - he just relies on his knowledge and his power of persuasion."
The incentive came when he quit drinking in 1983. With a mounting debt and his family life in shambles, Saunders says his only chance was to become engrossed with deal-making.
"For 18 months, I cried myself to sleep every night over losing my family," he recalls. "I was such an emotional wreck, the selling was all I had left, and I sold everything I could get my hands on."
He sold farms and trailers to country people near Grundy. Smith Mountain Lake condos to Eastern Kentucky coal miners. He hooked up with some airline pilots from the Northeast and sold them lake property, too.
Len Boone, his boss at the time, says people were amazed at his turnaround. Just months before, Boone refused to let Saunders be in the company picture for an advertisement because he figured he'd be fired by the time it came out.
"We gave him a special recognition award the year after that, and it was one special moment," Boone recalls. "Because not only had he achieved something that few people do - the number-one salesman at the top real estate company in Southwest Virginia - but he achieved it at a time he was recovering from a disease that he alone had to handle."
A few years later, when Saunders entered the higher-risk market of commercial real estate, his first major moneymaker was the Townside Festival deal, which he and other investors bought in 1988 for $575,000 and then sold for $1.75 million.
Now an independent contractor with Waldvogel Poe & Cronk, Saunders has land in Richmond he's hoping to develop once the economy brightens, and a 20-acre tract on 220 South near Wal-Mart he and his partners would like to turn into a retail development someday, too.
"We're all dressed up right now with nowhere to go," he says of the current crunch in lending.
Meantime, there's Marketplace Center downtown, for which Saunders handles the leasing while Wells supervises construction.
"None of the other realtors saw the magic in that deal," says Wells, referring to the $400,000 tax credit the pair got for restoring it by historic standards. "But David knew . . . . He understands real estate in a way very few people here do."
Wells concedes that Saunders is totally unorganized - every few weeks he has to go through his desk looking for important papers they need on the project. But he jokes that Saunders knows more people in town than Mayor Noel Taylor, which makes him a natural at real estate.
"If he went about it in a contrived way, you'd say he was `cultivating' business," Wells says. "But he doesn't; he doesn't have to.
"When most people are cultivating, David is talking Tech sports or hunting."
\ Having fun raising funds
\ When Saunders isn't dealing, he's doing one of four things: boostering, politicking, hunting or parenting.
And he combines them all aggressively. Daughter Erin, 8, goes to most Tech games with him. Former Tech quarterback Cam Young is his business assistant; Tech baseball coach Chuck Hartman hunts with him on the farm they own together in Catawba. Saunders is an expert marksman and has the hanging deer heads in his Hunting Hills town house to prove it.
He spends a lot of time with his parents, who live in Cave Spring. He hunts with his father, Frank. And he's not too old or too rich to call up his mother, Agnes, on weeknights and ask her to fix him a hamburger.
"People ask me all the time, am I proud of his success," Agnes says of her middle child. "And I tell them I'm the proudest that he's quit drinking and turned his life around.
"If anybody would've told me he'd be the father he's become, I'd have said they were crazy."
As for the politicking, Saunders - you guessed it - absolutely thrives on it.
"The governor of Virginia calls me Mudcat," he's fond of saying, right before he tells you about the fund-raiser he organized for Doug Wilder's election campaign in 1989, which brought in more than $100,000.
Saunders is a big fan of the lieutenant governor, too, and is organizing a March 27 Roanoke fund-raiser for Beyer, "a man I am very interested in becoming governor of Virginia."
Says Beyer: "He's been able to open doors for me that I didn't even know existed."
Saunders and Wells have made appearances at the General Assembly, lobbying for Western Virginia to get more of the state tourism budget.
"For an independent business person like Dave to spend a lot of his own time and money on those kinds of broader issues, it's not very common," says Brian Wishneff, Roanoke's economic development director.
"People tend to underestimate him because he's a fairly new player," Wishneff adds. "But all the grass-roots things that people don't like doing, he's out there and he does it."
Saunders and Wells both campaigned for consolidation last year, and Saunders has been known to stay up until dawn dreaming up television ads for the proposed Explore project. (His latest concept stars Iron Eyes Cody, the tearful Indian in that famous anti-litter commercial of the '70s.)
All of these things he does not because anybody asks him to, but because he feels it's his civic duty. And because he knows that what's good for Roanoke's business is good for Dave Saunders' business.
Two years ago, back when friends were calling him "Mudtrump," Saunders' dream was to do a deal in Manhattan. But as Donald Trump has fallen in stature, so, too, have Mudtrump's ambitions. He says he'd just as soon keep his business in Roanoke, where he has a better chance of making his mark.
And becoming rich. "I'm not rich now," he says. "But if Roanoke ever decides to take off, I'll be real rich."
Though he claims that isn't important to him, describing a recent scene in which he was bellyaching to another recovering alcoholic about the recessionary real-estate market.
"He brought me back to Earth real quick," Saunders recalls. "He said, `Boy, have you wanted a drink today?'
"And I said no.
"And he said, `Well, then you ain't got any problems.' "\ Can this 'cat get cultured?
\ There are people who think, of course, that Saunders is all talk and no action. But none would comment for this story.
"Mudcat's got only two speeds - full speed and full speed," says delegate Cranwell, who's been a friend of Saunders' family for decades. "Naturally, that kind of attitude is gonna rub some people the wrong way."
People fall into the trap of thinking Saunders is superficial or flip because of his flamboyant personality, says Warner Dalhouse, Dominion Bank chairman.
"But there is definitely a more substantive and prudent side to him . . . . That's why he's been able to put together a stable of investors who are willing to invest their personal money on his advice."
Hotel magnate Adolph Krisch was a trusted investor in many of Saunders' projects. The two met when Saunders was an 18-year-old parking-lot attendant; they gradually became friends and business partners over the years.
"Adolph thought Dave was brilliant in business," says Heidi Krisch of her late husband. "Both of them were a little wacky and eccentric, so they operated on the same wavelength."
Krisch, who considers Saunders one of her best friends, says many Roanokers still resent him because of the hard-drinking, womanizing lifestyle that made him infamous in the '70s.
When his name came up at a recent symphony function, she recalls, another friend laughed and made a critical comment. Krisch responded by cussing the man out right there on the spot.
"I think this stigma that's attached to people, just because they admit they were alcoholics, that's wrong and very snobbish," she says.
"I think it's very courageous that he talks about it. He does it because he doesn't want others to fall into the same trap. He is always taking other alcoholics under his wing."
Saunders calls Krisch "the first lady of Roanoke." He says the woman he wants to marry someday "is Heidi Krisch, only not so rich and not so cultured."
"She's teaching me to be cultured, and I'm teaching her how to be a redneck - and I'm winning the race," he says, noting that already she's become a fly-fishing expert under his guidance.
Just how do you culture a guy named Mudcat, a guy who's favorite book is "The Hardy Boys - No. 27"?
You don't, he says.
"You can put a tuxedo on a pig, but you've still got a pig."
by CNB