A widow and business owner from the Deep South, Lucy says that, since her husband's death, she has been fascinated with spirituality and is intent on exploring a variety of religions and belief systems.
"I believe there is a connection between our spiritual and sexual beings," she says, "not the way most humans interpret it, not through intercourse, but a sense of being at bliss. That's what I was looking for."
It was that search that brought her and her then-fiancé to Scottsdale this spring, where they had enrolled in what was billed in slick brochures as a seminar on "sacred sexual living."
But Lucy didn't find anything sacred about it. Day one was enough to make her suspect that she and her fiancé had unwittingly enlisted in a New Age sex club. Day two, she says, confirmed it.
"The first night we were told to dress like we were on a hot date," she says. "We walked in and there were all these ladies in negligees with their breasts and a lot of other things exposed."
After attendees filled out extensive paperwork, including a nondisclosure clause (Lucy is not her real name), the organizers spread towels on the floor and placed a pipe and tobacco in the center of the room. Then, Lucy says, the two female instructors quickly set the tone for the weekend. One pulled her dress above her knees, sat on the couch "and totally flashed everything. I mean everything." The other instructor was wearing a bra with no cups. Lucy says she didn't know what to think.
"On one side were these breasts just hanging out there, on the other side this woman who had never shaved in her life..."
Lucy tried to be open-minded. "I thought well, OK, maybe they're just trying to make us more comfortable with being naked. I was trying to convince myself there was nothing wrong with this."
Then came Saturday: Cowboy Day. Lucy and her fiancé arrived late, with the intention of asking for their money back and leaving. They walked into a room full of people wearing nothing but cowboy hats and bolo ties. The instructor from the previous night's cupless bra had switched to assless, crotchless chaps. Lucy decided to wait politely until the exercise was over and then ask for a refund. It wasn't easy, as the exercises were more intense than the previous evening's warm-up session.
"The smell was terrible," she remembers. "They wouldn't allow anyone to flush the toilet, and there was no air conditioning. Everyone was sweating like you wouldn't believe. It was disgusting."
But before Lucy could talk to anyone, the class segued into the next exercise — chakra cleansing, which the instructor demonstrated with a male partner. "The guy grabbed the lady, laid her on her back on the floor, took her legs and made a figure four with them, putting the bottom of her foot against her knee. She had her total crotch open, and you could see everything."
Lucy remembers the instructor saying, "'Now we will clean chakra number one. Put your finger in the first chakra, inside her vagina, and turn it clockwise 21 times.'"
"She was explaining this; meanwhile, the woman was getting a great masturbation right in front of us."
Lucy and her fiancé tried to leave again but were coaxed into a back bedroom, where they were told they could try the exercise in private. They also were told that the only way to get their $1,200 back was to complete the course.
Once inside the bedroom, Lucy and her fiancé were weighing their options when two bisexual women knocked on the door. "They asked us if they could do us. They said they really wanted to have sex with us, right then and there."
Lucy declined, only to be scolded by the couple. "They said, 'C'mon, you have to be more open.' We walked out of the bedroom, and everyone was naked on the floor with their fingers inside their butts."
Welcome to the world of Harley Swift Deer Reagan, leader of an international empire of martial arts, guns, sweat lodges and sacred orgasms, all headquartered in a quiet business park in North Scottsdale.
Reagan calls his followers the Deer Tribe Metis Medicine Society. He calls their activities the Sweet Medicine Sundance Path. And he calls himself a patriot, a sorcerer, a cowboy, a Cherokee, an alchemist, and an elder of a mystical order, dating back to prehistoric times, called the Twisted Hair Society.
His critics, who include just about every major figure in Indian Country, call him a charlatan and a cult leader. They say he's more sham than shaman, and that he appropriates Native American rituals and ceremonies and markets them to New Agers.
Reagan's sex seminars — which he calls Chulaqui Quodoushka, supposedly a regimen of Cherokee and ancient Mayan methods of aligning spiritual and sexual energies — draw most of the fire. But there's more than sex seminars to be concerned about. To his followers, Reagan is a near messiah. And he may well have more in common with Jim Jones than with Hugh Hefner. Reagan sees dark days ahead for America, and — between orgasms — he is quietly training a tribe of warriors for the battles ahead.
"From 2004 to 2011 will be a time of real testing and a challenge of people's hearts, minds, bodies and spirits," Reagan warns from his Scottsdale dojo. "It's called the razor's edge." Reagan adds that he intends for his warriors to be ready. "That's also why I include a lot of firearms training. I see us moving toward a civil war."
And where Reagan goes, his Deer Tribe follows.
Reagan sits in a corner of his dojo behind a low table. He wears a patchwork stars-and-stripes shirt and a baseball cap that shades his steely blue eyes. He looks a little like Roy Clark with a bee up his ass. Reagan's 62 years have been rough on him, and despite the grit of his gravelly voice and piercing stare, he looks much older than his age. His long arms are dotted with liver spots, and his face is splotchy and bloated. But he's the first to boast that he's lived more in his six decades than most people do in six lifetimes.
"The day I was born was a very exciting day. My mother was riding a little pinto pony; my dad was riding a little Morgan," he says as a twitch of a smile flutters like a moth through the silver hairs of his moustache. "The mare that my mother was riding was also with foal. All of a sudden, my mother started going into labor pains, so my dad jumped off the horse and went over to the shade. As soon as I was born, the little foal was born, and consequently, my dad reached in his saddle bag and pulled out a Dr. Pepper, poured it in a bottle and gave it to me. I jumped on the foal and we rode off into the sunset."
He chuckles, reaching for a lighter concealed inside a red plastic shotgun shell and lighting one of an endless parade of clove cigarettes, which move seamlessly from his lips to a turquoise ashtray in the form of a rattlesnake. Like any raconteur of tall tales worth his salt, Reagan delights in the telling of the story, not in the truth behind it. And he is a man with a lot of stories to tell.
Reagan is cantankerous and riveting. He is outspoken and outlandish at times, grandfatherly at others. Turquoise and gold cling to his wrists like scabs; his fingers bear chunky rings. There's an electric-blue Para-Ordnance .45 pistol on his belt, the handle engraved with a red, white and blue eagle and "Gunnie" in black gothic script. "Gunnie" is what he goes by on the range, and nowadays he admits, "People call me Gunnie more than they do Swift Deer."
He seems to have tired of the spiritual rhetoric with which he has filled books and the heads of his followers for the past 20 years. He'll discuss it, but he's much more animated when he starts describing some of his views for which he is less well-known — like the mess that the liberals have made of the United States. Anger spits from his lips as he growls about the government, the U.N. and the Latinos who are ruining this country for the true patriots.
Reagan says he was born in Texas, of mixed Irish and Cherokee blood. He straddled the two cultures, appearing white but raised Indian. His greatest influence as a young man was his grandmother Spotted Fawn, a Cherokee medicine woman.
It was she who arranged for Reagan to be sexually initiated by an adult woman when he was 14 years old. It was this "Phoenix Fire Woman," or sexual teacher, who showed Reagan the art of making love, the nine different kinds of vaginas and penises men and women possess, the five levels of orgasm and other ancient secrets, which, half a century later, his disciples are hawking in seminars — like the one Lucy attended — across North America and Europe.
Reagan says he joined the Marines in 1959 after being kicked out of the Air Force Academy. His habit of staying up all night and sleeping during the day — plus his love of masturbation — made it difficult for him to fit in with the rest of the recruits. Reagan completed four tours in Vietnam as a gunnery sergeant before being blown out of a helicopter by enemy fire and tumbling 300 feet to the earth. He then was sent to recover at the Bethesda Naval Hospital and was discharged in 1969.
Killing, he says quickly, didn't bother him at all. What did upset him was the way he was treated upon his return. Reagan says he felt "betrayed, not by my country, but by my government."
"I had dog shit thrown on me. I had people piss on my utility bag that I was carrying my clothes and stuff in. I was called baby killer, child killer, rapist, a war monger."
After his stint in the service, Reagan goes on, he became a Mormon, a philandering husband, a father of five sons, a doctor of philosophy, a world-champion martial artist, a shape-shifting sorcerer and, at some point, a secret agent.
"I'd really rather not go there," he says solemnly. "Let's just say I did black operations for the U.S. federal government, and that's all I'm saying. I was recruited in the Marine Corps, and I had a great deal of blame and shame about that — not about my service as a Marine, but the other things I was doing in covert operations. And I thought I was really doing something for the country when I found out it had nothing to do with the country, but the government and their own personal agenda."
About his roles as a husband and father, Reagan is candid. "I was a horrible father, a horrible example, a very violent, rash, disturbed human being. In fact, I was not a human being. I was a typical two-legged animal."
What saved him, he says, although too late for his family, was a relationship that would forever change him, a friendship and apprenticeship with Navajo Shaman Grandfather Tom Two Bears Wilson.
Wilson taught Reagan to be a sorcerer. He taught Reagan how to shape-shift, which he still does today as a party trick when he's feeling frisky. On one occasion, Reagan claims, he and his girlfriend were high on peyote at his house in California when his wife came in and caught him in mid-shift, with black wings coming out of his head.
In his autobiography, Reagan says that his wife then called the local Mormon bishop, who arrived with holy water, a silver chalice and other spiritual relics with which to perform an exorcism. Reagan was excommunicated from the church and soon divorced from his wife.
Upon closer examination of Reagan's life story, it appears he shape-shifts with the truth as well. Reagan's saga is a dubious blend of fact, exaggeration and lies, told with such apparent candor that distinguishing fact from fiction can be a dizzying process.
And despite what his tribe may believe, Reagan's story contains many deceptions.
Reagan says he is half-Cherokee. But the Cherokee Nation adamantly denies his claim. "What we find are numerous false prophets out there playing Indian and making a buck. Frankly, we are overwhelmed with these folks," says Dr. Richard Allen, a research and policy analyst for the Cherokee Nation who has been receiving complaints about Reagan for more than 10 years.
"To start with, [Reagan] claims he grew up on a Cherokee reservation in Texas. The Cherokee don't even have reservations. We've always owned our land, fee simple." Allen says Reagan's claims are merely a marketing technique. "He's not a member of the Cherokee Nation. Our people would never do what he does. He is a charlatan, a snake oil vendor."
Reagan also claims that, as a Marine, he received both bronze and silver stars for his accomplishments during the Vietnam War. But the Marines' Military Awards Branch has no record of bestowing any commendation whatsoever on Reagan. When asked about this in an interview, Reagan says only, "I had several commendations, yeah. I think those are irrelevant. The people who deserved those medals are the ones who are no longer around on grandmother earth."
Reagan claims to have received a Ph.D. in psychology from The Pacific Institute for Advanced Studies in Hollywood, California. The California Department of Postsecondary Education has no record of such a school.
Dale Bills, a spokesman for the Mormon Church, says the church does not perform exorcisms of any kind. Reagan, who claims in his autobiography that such a ceremony occurred in the late '70s, now says, "Well, the church never really performed the exorcism. The bishop basically didn't know what to do."
Reagan also claims to be the reincarnation of Billy the Kid. He says when he's in a playful mood, he may turn into a deer. Tribe members say that although they haven't seen the deer trick, they have seen him pull coins from the air.
Perhaps the most impressive of his claims, Reagan also says he is a nagual, or a member of the Twisted Hairs, a secret society of tribal elders from North, Central and South America as well as Australia. The society has been meeting every four years since 1254 B.C., sometimes in the fifth dimension, sometimes just in the third. However, Reagan adds, "The traditions go back well over a hundred and some odd thousand years of age. We can date it to 128,000 [years ago]."
This would be around the time Cro-Magnon man first appeared, 90-some-odd thousand years before music was invented or Stonehenge constructed. In his book, Song of the Deer: The Great SunDance Journey of the Soul, Reagan says that Native Americans are descended from extraterrestrial "Star People" who arrived on Earth 950,000 years ago from the planet Oiricanwiyah, near Sirius.
As outlandish as some of his claims may sound, Reagan estimates he has around 5,000 followers all over the world who believe what he tells them — with lodges, or branches, in Italy, New Zealand, Sweden, Wales, Canada and several major U.S. cities. The Deer Tribe Metis Medicine Society enjoys nonprofit status, describing its activities as "classes and workshops offered to students to teach them about Native American religious beliefs." In 1999, the society took in more than $370,000 in revenue.
Here in Phoenix, Reagan's inner circle is an odd yet utterly devoted bunch of marginal characters who have found new identities within the Deer Tribe. They include an awkward young man who is the Tribe's Web master by day and dojo master by night, a hands-on "sex coach" and Porsche Lynn: dominatrix, porn legend and nationally ranked pistol shooter.
Each of these people, for reasons that are their own, have found their identities in Reagan's shadow and stand firmly by his side, reborn as warriors and tribe members on a quest for spiritual and sexual enlightenment. The harder he makes them come, the harder they seem to fall for him.
Uli Lindemann sucks an iced latte and squints in the sun as he tries to talk about his life in the Deer Tribe. Lindemann, 36, is tall and lean. His long, thinning hair is pulled back in a ponytail, its color a perfect match to the yellowish-orange tobacco stains on his fingers and teeth. Gregarious and confident when teaching self-defense classes twice a week in the Deer Tribe dojo, Lindemann is guarded and visibly nervous when talking about Reagan; each word seems like another step through a mine field.
Lindemann moved to Phoenix in 1995 to be near a woman he met on the Internet. The relationship imploded and, shortly after, Lindemann found the Deer Tribe.
He's not sure how to respond to the question of whether he shares Reagan's views on immigration. Lindemann's parents emigrated from Germany, and he spends an interminable silence choosing his words before slowly saying, "I think immigration should be handled in a wise way. What is a wise way is a very tough question."
As he sits at a small cafe in a Paradise Valley mall, Lindemann is having trouble controlling his emotions, and soon tears are rolling down his face, spilling out of his narrow blue eyes when he's asked who his heroes are. "The Dalai Lama . . . and Swift Deer," he says, wiping his cheeks with the back of his hand, his voice barely audible over the booming bass of a car stereo out in the parking lot. "Swift Deer taught me how to love."
Literally, it seems, as well as figuratively. Lindemann is a veteran of the Quodoushka sessions. He glances down at his latte, blushing, and will only say that "it's a very powerful experience."
Ina "Laughing Winds" Gregory is short and Rubenesque, with long dark hair and saucer-like blue eyes. She favors chunky jewelry and earrings the size of canaries. Gregory says she had no idea of her orgiastic potential until Reagan showed her the light. Now, in addition to her private practice as a sex coach and therapist, she is a "Phoenix Fire Woman," trained by Reagan to teach Quodoushka sessions around the country. Gregory says she takes a hands-on approach. Her goal: to "help create greater intimacy and help people become multiply orgiastic using different muscle groups, organs, energy and breathing techniques." She hawks her skills in the back of New Times.
In her "Q sessions," Gregory shows men and women where the G-spot is located, she trains women to ejaculate, and she informs her students that some people in this world are omnisexual — able to achieve a full orgasm by simply hugging a tree or laying on a boulder. She pulls out a book full of close-up color photos of vaginas (she calls them "tipilis"), with animal names next to them, and compares the sizes of the labia and the locations of the clitorises. Different-shaped tipilis require different techniques to achieve orgasm, she says. "A lot of people never realize this." She wishes young children were taught these things in school.
"Q was the biggest of all accidents inside this path," insists Reagan,, shaking his head. "I have no idea why in the world it became so blown out of proportion. We have gotten more P.R. and more publicity on Q than anything we do."
Perhaps in part because Reagan and Gregory appeared on a titillating segment of HBO's Real Sex in 1992, touting Quodoushka as a Cherokee ritual (though they now are careful to clarify that it is a blend of many ancient sexual traditions). Then-president of the Cherokee Nation Wilma Mankiller threatened to sue HBO for misrepresentation, and a resolution was passed by the Cherokees condemning Reagan and other so-called "plastic shamans."
Dr. Allen of the Cherokee Nation says simply, "He's made it up. We learn about sex like everyone else does, behind the barn."
Allen estimates that Reagan is one of the most successful of the nearly 200 people he receives complaints about for falsely representing themselves as Native Americans for lucrative purposes. "The only thing that we can attribute it to is that there is a particular need for people to experience a new form of spirituality and religion. The traditional churches are failing. Look at what is going on in the Catholic Church now. It's ironic, really."
He adds, "Two hundred years ago, you people were trying to kill us. Now you think we have awesome powers and are mysterious, and you want to be like us."
Reagan really doesn't see what all the fuss is about. "[Quodoushka] is basically just plain, simple information that, if you were born in a matriarchal old tribal society over a hundred years ago, you . . . woulda learned by the time you were 10, 11, 12 years of age, right prior to puberty," he says. "There's no sexual intercourse, there's no oral or any other type of actual engagement, other than breathing," Reagan adds firmly. "The closest contact would be me picking you up and setting you on my lap, setting you in a cross-legged position and breathing through the chakra centers, or the energy centers, together."
Among Reagan's most active critics is the American Indian Movement, which began condemning the Deer Tribe and holding protests outside Quodoushka seminars 10 years ago. Al Carroll, a graduate student at ASU and an AIM member, protested outside the Q ceremony Lucy attended in Scottsdale this spring.
"Quodoushka is a direct affront to all Native Americans," Carroll says. "These people are not authentically native in any sense, shape or form. Harley Reagan is one of the most despised people in Indian Country for that reason. He is a racist, a survivalist gun nut, a sicko pervert and a pimp."
Gregory staunchly defends her seminars: "This is not to play Indian, not to steal someone else's religion, but to embrace a way of connecting to the Great Spirit and honor who we are as sexual, spiritual human beings."
But Reagan is through arguing with the group he calls "Assholes in Moccasins," summarily dismissing them as "born-again Christians or at least half-wits. . . . What's so sad is they don't even understand what [Quodoushka is] about in the first place. . . . If you look at most of the people in AIM, they're at least 50 to 60 pounds overweight. Well, when you're fat, you can't fuck. You can't even find what you're looking for to even . . . you know, you know what I mean."
Reagan's wife Dianne "Nightbird" Reagan looks at him. "Swift Deer . . ." she warns gently.
But Reagan is on a roll. "When you look at them, they're so hung up, they're pathetic," he continues, "and look what they've accomplished in their life — virtually nothing, and they probably never will.
"By the way, not once has any one of them had the guts to face me face-to-face," he mutters. "They're afraid of me because I'm always carrying a firearm, but I'd gladly take it off. I'd like to meet them in this dojo, but they haven't got the guts. Now I'm 62 years old. To be real blunt, I'd like them to try to fuck with this old man. Bunch of racist, bigoted, prejudiced, national socialist and communist radicals!"
Whether Reagan's challenge is sincere or just a blast of Texas hot air and puffery is anyone's guess.
Porsche Lynn wears a button-down shirt and denim shorts. Tall and fit, she wears her blonde hair swept back in a topknot. Her eyes sparkle behind gold-rimmed glasses; her full lips naturally form a smile when her face is at rest.
There is an aura of absolute serenity about Lynn that mirrors her surroundings. Her home in Scottsdale sits on a peaceful suburban street — all SUVs, shade trees and silence. Inside, lights are low, a fountain gurgles and a Southwestern theme prevails, save for a Peanuts poster hanging in the hallway. Sitting at the kitchen table sipping water, Lynn looks like a housewife waiting for cookies to bake.
It's hard to imagine her with gunpowder on her fingers, a riding crop in her hand or Ron Jeremy in her mouth.
Well, not too hard.
There's a "keepandbeararms.com" logo on her shirt and a photo of a dungeon on her table, and she's got more than 700 adult films under her belt.
The dungeon is the easiest to explain. The photo is a promotional postcard from the Den of Iniquity in New York, similar to the dungeon Lynn plans to open in Phoenix this summer.
"It's about 5,000 square feet," she explains, in a seen-one-dungeon-you've-seen-them-all tone "You know, there are the theme rooms, a cross-dressing room, a school room, a wrestling room, an interrogation room, and then a real large dungeon room with a rack, wheels, a bed, suspension units, the works."
In addition to working as a dominatrix in Phoenix and New York, Lynn also is a nationally ranked pistol shooter and a devoted follower of Harley Reagan.
After having starred in films such as Buttwoman, Foot Fetish Fantasies and Waterworld III: Search for the Ultimate Enema, Lynn left Los Angeles and the porn industry six years ago for Arizona and Reagan. "I really wanted to study with [Reagan], and this is where he was at that time," she says. "That, and the political environment here is much more conducive to my beliefs."
Like Reagan, Lynn describes herself as a staunch constitutionalist, especially when it comes to freedom of speech and the right to keep and bear arms. "They're all our constitutional rights, and when that starts being treaded upon . . ." she pauses and shakes her head. "We really need to take a look at what's happening in the country."
When Lynn was 6 years old, her father shot her mother and then himself in front of her. She began shooting, she says, to overcome her fear of guns. "I had the conception that guns were bad and guns did bad things. I'm not one going through life being afraid of anything."
She won't say how many guns she owns today, just that she has a wide variety. "I have lots of favorites, my guns are like my babies, like the diamond rings you love to put on. My favorite gun is a pistol, I guess, a 19.11, but I love rifles, the long guns that reach out and touch you. Have you hugged your assault rifle today?" She throws her head back and laughs.
Lynn met Reagan in Los Angeles nine years ago and began shooting with his encouragement. "I found in him an amazing, magnetic attraction. I sat down with him, and he gave me reflections," she says. "I had been kind of living my life as a victim, and he called me on it. He said, 'You have to figure out why you chose these parents, to be birthed into this place at this time.' Part of me was like, 'This guy's full of shit,' but he said it with such honesty and sincerity that I really had to take it to heart."
Lynn had been dallying in martial arts and spirituality for some time. "I was 30, kind of at that age when you're looking for things. I was definitely looking for some kind of spiritual path."
What she found in Reagan's teachings, she says, is a complete package of martial arts, shooting, healing ceremonies, spiritual and sexual teachings, medicine wheels and teaching circles.
There are five levels of Quodoushka, and Lynn says she has been through them all. "After 20 years of fucking, I should know how to do it." What saddens her, she says, is how out of touch many people are with their sexuality. "The Quodoushka teachers really have to be honored for doing the work they do, going into different cities and teaching people to be more orgiastic, to love their bodies."
She says Reagan has taught her the meaning of life — and not to be afraid to die for what she believes in.
Lynn, who won a national pistol championship in 1999, is relaxed and nearly joyous on the shooting range, as she and her boyfriend Angus, a grandmaster ranked fifth in the world, shoot steel with friends.
Reagan, too, seems to let down his guard when he's shooting with the Deer Tribe gun club at the Ben Avery Range near Happy Valley. The air is gritty with dust. Smells of gunpowder mingle with the sweetness of the clove cigarette that dangles from Reagan's chapped lips as he slides bullets into a magazine.
Reagan drops the racist rhetoric and cracks jokes, sipping a Dr. Pepper at his shaded table and shouting encouragement into a bullhorn. Ina's having trouble with her ammo, and it's affecting her time. Another gun club member loaded 500 rounds for her the night before, and they're jamming in the chamber. Reagan allows her to switch ammo and reshoot the target. He's awash in smiles, more like a shopping mall Santa than the war chief he claims to be.
But Reagan can shape-shift from teddy bear to grizzly bear in an instant. Just wind him up on AIM or immigration, and watch him go.
"Look at the whole Latino, viva la raza, re-con-quest-ah," he says. "Look at the population distribution that is going on now, the open immigration, the amnesty, the insistence on bilingual education and, I'm sorry, when your relatives and all of ours came over from Europe, wherever they came from . . . they had to learn English." He leans forward, elbows on his knees, and raises his index finger in the air. "This is America, and we speak English. And we should not allow anyone to come into this country who does not use that as their main language. That frightens me."
He announces that he will now explain his frustrations with AIM and the rest of them in the Cherokee manner — with a parable:
"It's like there's a woman who calls up the police department and she says, 'Get over here as quick as you can! There's a man who's masturbating in his bedroom. I can see him through the windows!' The cops arrive and say, 'Can you show us that?' She says, 'Yes, come and look.' The cop looks through the window and says, 'Well, I don't see anything.' She says, 'Well, pull over the chair, stand up on the counter and look out through the window with binoculars, and you can!"
Reagan slips another Dr. Pepper from the cooler, pops it and takes a long sip, letting his wisdom settle before he continues.
"There is always someone that is concerned about what other people are doing to progress themselves, to mature, to become more part of the solution than part of the problem," he says, weary of critics who focus too much attention on him. "They resent the fact that they haven't got the courage to do so. That's what it's about, it's fear-based. Fear is the unknown; it will always be the unknown. They're cowards in heart, spirit and body."
Reagan follows his Cherokee-style masturbation parable with some Gunsite-style brilliance from gun guru Jeff Cooper. "There are four conditions of human kind. The greatest position in the world is to be a living hero. Second is to be a dead hero. Third is to be a dead coward. Fourth is to be a living coward. That pretty much says it all. These people are living cowards, and they're the lowest level of the echelon."
He puffs on a Jakarta and sits back in his chair with an impish smile.
"Now you can see why I'm controversial."
