You remember Steve Guttenberg in Season 2 of Veronica Mars?
Guttenberg played Woody Goodman, a multi-millionaire who built his fortune with a popular chain of burger restaurants and expanded to car dealerships. He even bought the local minor league baseball team. Woody’s goofily charming TV ads for his businesses made him a kind of regional celebrity, and that along with his reputation as a successful businessman was enough to get him elected as mayor of Neptune, California.
OK, here’s where our scenario diverges from the show. Get rid of all the Sandusky stuff. The Woody Goodman in our story isn’t that guy, thank God. But he’s still haunted by his personal demons, so he’s still got that slightly panicked look and that exuberant over-eagerness to please. Guttenberg was terrific at playing that, so let’s keep him in the part. (He could use the work.)
In this version of the story, it’s Woody Goodman — not Terrance Cook — who has the gambling problem. This starts long before he ever decides to get into politics. He winds up taking out ever-pricier loans against every business he runs and every asset he owns to pay off his ever-increasing gambling debts. His 09-er lifestyle remains the same — big house, fancy cars and all the rest. But it’s all collateral and he’s struggling, bigly.
This went on for many years, with Woody somehow juggling all this staggering debt and still managing to keep up the facade of being a successful businessman. He even manages, somewhat, to keep his immediate family in the dark. (We’re keeping Krysten Ritter as his daughter, Gia, because who doesn’t love Krysten Ritter?)
Years later, Gia recalls this period, saying, “I think I was probably nine, ten something like this. I remember my father pointing to this homeless man and saying ‘That guy has $8 billion more than me.’ Because he was in such extreme debt at that point. And me thinking ‘What are you talking about?’ He was sitting outside of Shark Stadium, and I didn’t understand. It makes me all the more proud of my parents that they got through that.”
But Gia, at that point, didn’t fully understand how it was that Woody “got through that.”
See, even though most of his neighbors there in Neptune had no idea of his self-inflicted financial struggles, every banker in the area was aware that Woody Goodman was leveraged up to his eyeballs. After he’d already taken out loans against his burger chain, and car dealerships, and Sharks Stadium, and his mansion and luxury car collection, the legitimate banks refused to lend him any more. He was cut off.
And so Woody was forced to turn to some shadier, less legitimate sources of credit. It wasn’t anything so crass and obvious as a back-alley mafia loanshark, of course. Those are for the little people — people whose debts are merely in the thousands or tens of thousands. A guy like Woody Goodman deals with a better class of loanshark. And so Woody wound up turning to some decidedly mob-adjacent figures, and, despite all the polite euphemism involved, he had no illusions about where this new source of credit was ultimately coming from.
The arrangements were complicated and multi-layered. It would take a whole team of forensic accountants years of work to trace all the paper connections and front companies and shell corporations. But behind all of that, the reality was pretty simple: Some shady, very dangerous people now owned Woody’s debt. Some shady, very dangerous people now ultimately owned Woody’s businesses.
Those shady, very dangerous people now owned Woody.
He got to keep his lifestyle — the mansion and cars and all the rest. And as far as most of the people of Neptune knew, he still ran all of his businesses. But he was often asked — obliged, required — to look the other way as those businesses were used by his new partners for other purposes.
In a way, this only enhanced Woody Goodman’s reputation as a businessman. He started branching out into new businesses, many of which appeared to be spectacular failures as they were used to launder money for his new secret partners. Yet none of those failures seemed to touch Woody personally, to diminish his lavish lifestyle. And so even his failures reinforced the impression that he was relentlessly successful, resilient, an unsinkable survivor.
And that is when Woody decided to run for mayor. Or, perhaps, that is when his secret partners decided Woody should run for mayor. By this point, it’s hard to know which is which or whose idea this really was. I suspect it was a bit of both.
I think what happened is that Woody’s mob and mob-adjacent partners saw a political career for him as a new opportunity. Having their guy running the county might open all kinds of new doors for them. At the very least, installing their boy in a position of legitimate political power would help to shelter them from investigation and potential prosecution. They could count on him to look the other way, to protect their interests, and maybe, subtly, to do them the occasional favor.
But I think Woody also imagined that getting elected mayor could be his escape. He really is a kind of survivor, after all — wily, if not particularly smart. I think he was hoping that political power would shield him from the power these people had over him. If he became the Big Man in Charge — running the council, the sheriff’s department and all the rest — then he might at last be able to free himself from their ominous obligations and ever-present threat of violence, exposure and ruin.
Of course, I imagine that the very dangerous people pulling Woody’s strings also guess he’s thinking that. They likely realize that now that he’s won the election and become the Mayor of Neptune, he’s going to try to squirm his way out of their clutches, using his newfound political clout to rewrite the rules of their arrangement. But to protect himself, he’ll still need to protect them and their interests. And he can’t risk exposing them without also exposing himself. So we’re all set for an elaborate game of cat-and-mouse, with both sides constrained by the possibility of mutually assured destruction.
All of this unfolding in a version of Neptune that doesn’t have vicious little Veronica Mars or her dad around to save the day.
So maybe that’s where we are now, after Election Day. Maybe that’s our story.
Or, at least, that’s one possible story. Given what we’re able to know and what we can’t know, yet, it seems like it could fit.
It’s not the only possible story. Josh Marshall has valiantly tried to come up with some other version — see “The Innocent Explanation” and “Part 2.” And much of what he writes seems plausible. But I dunno. I try reading more to see if it fits and I run into things like Adam Davidson’s staggering Azerbaijan story and I just keep coming back to the Woody Goodman scenario above.
I think that Woody Goodman story would make a heck of a TV show. But if something like that were actually true, it would make for a terrible and terrifying reality.
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