BLUEBLOOD WAR

A family cringes as father and son wage a bitter, public battle of wills. The
father is E. Newbold Smith, who married a du Pont; the son is Lewis du Pont Smith,
who took his own vows with the radical Lyndon LaRouche. Newbold had Lewis declared
incompetent to manage his $10 million estate, then allegedly recruited a motley
crew of accomplices to "snatch" him. MAUREEN ORTH spoke to both men and found that
beneath the accusations is an odd kind of love

APRIL 1993 MAUREEN ORTH

JONATHAN BECKER
Rich, aristocratic Wasp families usually do not allow this level of dysfunction to
become public. Yet here was Philadelphia socialite Edgar Newbold Smith, whose
ancestors arrived on the banks of the Delaware River in 1677, listening to a judge
lecture him sternly about his son Lewis du Pont Smith in a federal courtroom full
of reporters. On this last day of 1992, the impeccably pedigreed elder Mr. Smith,
who had married into the du Pont money, found himself in Alexandria, Virginia, the
focal point of a trial in which he was accused of conspiring to kidnap his 36-year-
old son. In the company of three co-defendants, whom the judge charitably referred
to as "the gang that couldn't shoot straight," Mr. Smith had heard the government
portray him as the financier of a plot to "snatch" Lewis in order to "deprogram"
him.

For eight years, the determined Mr. Smith, a 66-year-old investment manager, a
former all-American football player for Navy, and a renowned sailboat racer, has
waged a Promethean paternal battle involving 20 legal actions, more than 3,000
pages of psychiatric testimony, $1 million in legal fees, and an arrest warrant for
burglarizing his son's house. He did it all for love, Newbold Smith explains to me,
to wrest the son he felt closest to from the clutches of the aberrant movement
founded by conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche, who is serving 15 years in prison
for defrauding the I.R.S. and swindling his supporters. Smith believes this "cult"
brainwashed his son.

After Lewis, whose inheritance is valued at roughly $10 million, gave a LaRouche
publishing arm $212,000 in 1985, and was poised to give $75,000 more, the family
succeeded in having a Pennsylvania court declare him "incompetent" to manage his
financial affairs, and this public disgrace has so humiliated Lewis that he has
denounced his parents and refused to have any contact with his two brothers or his
sister. "Do you have the right to go into court to manipulate your son, humiliate
him, destroy his reputation, and give him a stigma? He wants to possess me like his
yacht," Lewis Smith declares to me about his father. It's been "damn loyal of me,
thinking in terms of the money, time, and publicity I've sunk into this," counters
his father. "I've been very generous to my son, because I wanted to rescue him,
pure and simple. Because I think he needs rescuing."

At the heart of the matter are opposing attitudes toward patrimony and preservation
of capital. There is also a small and willful woman of Italian extraction, Andrea
Diano-Smith, whom Lewis married six years ago—not out of the Social Register, as
his mother, Margaret du Pont Smith, is, but out of South Philly. To his family's
horror, Andrea shares her husband's zeal for LaRouchian dogma and keeps him happy
feeding him the pasta he says he never got at home because it was considered
"peasant food."

In the courtroom, Judge Timothy Ellis was appealing to Smith father and son to get
beyond the underlying battle over Lewis's inheritance and to rise above petty
snobbishness. But that hardly seemed possible. For nearly three weeks the judge had
been hearing tapes of outlandish discussions among Newbold Smith and the three
other defendants, who all sounded as if they had been reading too many copies of
Soldier of Fortune.
The scenarios for "lifting" the du Pont heir included sexual bait in the form of a
skinny blonde cocktail waitress; if she could just lure the six-foot-four, 225-
pound Lewis into a compromising position, he could then be blackmailed, or stuffed
with Quaaludes or shot with a tranquilizer gun and hustled across state lines to
his father's 44-foot racing boat, Reindeer, which would then speed down the Inland
Waterway to an unnamed place "where bribery is king."

Since Lewis was so big, and usually surrounded by a gaggle of LaRouchies, they
would have to surprise the former national prep-school wrestling champ when he was
unguarded. One suggestion on the tapes was proffered by defendant Donny Moore, b.s.
artist extraordinaire, an ex-deputy sheriff and former tentmate of Oliver North.
Moore, who had spent years investigating LaRouche in Loudoun County, Virginia,
where LaRouche settled in the mid-80s, rattled on and on about "a grenade in the
chicken coop" and "busting the covey." Newbold Smith had originally hired Moore to
do surveillance work on Lewis because he was convinced that the huge 19th-century
stone house Lewis was buying in Philadelphia's tony Chestnut Hill section was going
to be used as a LaRouche headquarters—a place where little old ladies might be
enticed to part with their life savings. Unscrupulous fundraising was one of the
things Lyndon LaRouche was behind bars for, and Newbold Smith was terrified that
Lewis might get caught for the same thing. Throwing "a grenade in the chicken coop"
meant planting a story in the local press which would "bust the covey"—scatter the
LaRouchies and leave Lewis and Andrea vulnerable to a "lift." On one tape Moore
bragged, "I've got stuff, man, that will chill the pubic hair on an ant 500 miles
in a rainstorm."

Last June 26, Moore visited another out-of-work deputy sheriff in Loudoun County, a
would-be Serpico named Doug Poppa. Poppa had been fired for being too available to
the media about a case in which his testimony had contradicted the accounts of
others in the department and he had helped a man convicted of attempted murder get
out of jail. Moore felt sorry for Poppa, and asked him if he wanted to help in
kidnapping a du Pont. Poppa initially didn't know what a du Pont was, but he found
out soon enough, when he went first to his lawyer, who also did work for LaRouche,
and then to the F.B.I., which wired him to inform for the law. Poppa told the
F.B.I. that a kidnapping was imminent, and for the next three months he recorded 60
hours of tape, some of it in Newbold Smith's home.

Last August 19, Donny Moore took Poppa to meet Robert Point, also known as Biker
Bob, an ex-cop who had earned his nickname in South Amboy, New Jersey, tracking
down stolen motorcycles. Point had been forced to give up that line of work
because, as his defense lawyer explained to the jury, he's a narcoleptic—"the man
can't stay awake." Biker Bob did manage to put himself through night law school,
however, and one of his clients was an adviser to Newbold Smith named Galen Kelly.
Moore told informer Poppa, "Biker Bob cleans up Galen Kelly's messes."

In the netherworld of cults, Kelly is an infamous upstate-New York deprogrammer-

kidnapper on hire to parents in despair, and he claims hundreds of successes. "I
have no apologies whatsoever," he tells me. "Have there been occasions when I've
taken people forcibly, involuntarily? Yes. If you want to call it kidnapping, call
it kidnapping."

Over the years Newbold Smith has paid Kelly $30,000 to conduct surveillance of
Lewis and negotiate with LaRouche operatives about having him turned over to his
family. For most of last summer, however, Galen Kelly—who boasts that he has been
hauled into court seven times but has never lost or been found guilty—was on the
lam. (In May he had been involved in a kidnapping that went bad: he snatched the
wrong person off a Washington, D.C., street and told her his name. When Kelly
presented the snatchee, a woman in her 30s, to the aggrieved mother who had hired
him, the mother said, "That's not my daughter."
In fact, she was the daughter's girlfriend, a member of the same sect, the very
person the mother wanted her separated from. The woman then reported the incident
to the F.B.I.)

The jury listened to Galen Kelly muse on the tapes with Biker Bob, Donny Moore, and
Poppa about hiring British commandos to do the "wet work" in lifting Lewis, or
perhaps subcontracting the job out to bikers, a scenario Moore speculated might
cause Lewis to end "sneakers up in a ditch."

The F.B.I. had heard enough. Special agents arrested Donny Moore, Biker Bob, Galen
Kelly, and Newbold Smith. It was the first time the federal kidnapping statute had
ever been applied to an alleged kidnapping conspiracy within a family. For a Main
Line blueblood, Newbold Smith had been keeping very strange company.

184185 VIEW ARTICLE PAGES

The trial attracted a PARADE OF THE UNUSUAL, as one Philadelphia Inquirer headline
put it. There were parents of children who had joined cults and Lyndon LaRouche
operatives. Reporters were presented with damning affidavits about Galen Kelly from
a group calling itself the Deprogramming Survivors Network, which appeared to be
operating as a front for the Church of Scientology. Their mortal enemy was the Cult
Awareness Network (CAN), a clearinghouse for cult information based in Chicago,
with which Kelly was affiliated and to which Newbold Smith had contributed
generously.

Andrea Diano-Smith's vivacious mother, Martha Diano, wearing a fur hat and boots,
attended court regularly, as did Lewis's mother, Peggy, dressed down in skirts and
sweaters or slacks, a black velvet headband holding her blunt-cut silver-blond
hair. She would sit alone among the spectators, betraying no emotion. Martha Diano
said bitterly of the Smiths, "They have two tickets on the aisle to burn in hell."

"You don't know anything about this organization! Of course Lewis is happy. He's
their prize pig!"
The prosecution behaved as if they had an open-and-shut case, in spite of the fact
that two days before the trial began it had been revealed that their star witness,
Doug Poppa, had gotten so ticked off that he had not been paid by the F.B.I. for
his work that he demanded $250,000 before he would show up to testify. Although he
settled for considerably less, the defense made sure the jury knew about his
demands. From then on, Poppa's motives were suspect.

Newbold Smith spent two and a half days on the stand and admitted that he had
discussed kidnapping Lewis numerous times, even with F.B.I. agents, but that it had
all been hypothetical. The jury listened as Smith and Lewis's younger brother,
Henry "Hank" Belin du Pont Smith, talked about Lewis and his father's previously
extremely close relationship, which had begun to unravel early in 1985 as Lewis
became more and more enmeshed in the LaRouche organization. "I felt he became
withdrawn from the family, felt he said some extremely strange things, such as that
his mother contributed to his grandmother's death by pulling the tubes," said
Newbold Smith. "It was very clear to me that he had become captive of a cult."

John Markham, Smith's effective attorney, who as a government prosecutor had gotten
the conviction against LaRouche, asked Smith if his feelings toward Lewis had
changed. "There has never been a time that I didn't love him," he answered. "If I
don't love him, I wouldn't be here today."

That love was sorely tested. One day, totally unannounced, Lewis showed up in the
witness room. Prosecutor Larry Leiser had hoped the judge would allow Lewis to
testify against his father, but the judge had refused. When Peggy Smith saw her son
in the room with Doug Poppa, she approached him, but Poppa summoned a marshal, and
Lewis refused to speak to his mother. During the closing arguments, Biker Bob's
lawyer, Bernard Czech, wrung out the courtroom by reciting the lyrics to the Elton
John hit "The Last Song." As Czech recited, "I never thought you'd come / I guess I
misjudged love / Between a father and his son," Peggy du Pont Smith's sobs filled
the courtroom.

The next night, after the jury had been out for six hours, Lewis marched
dramatically into the courtroom in a long gray overcoat, with the unsmiling Andrea
in tow, and sat in the front row of the spectators' section with Doug Poppa, his
father staring at him from the defense table. "He was like a witness at the Rome
Colosseum," Newbold Smith said to me later.

"I wasn't in the least bit surprised, because I knew who was running that show."

The jurors sent the judge a question about whether merely considering kidnapping as
a viable option constituted a conspiracy or whether there had to be an agreement to
act on it. There had to be a specific agreement to carry out the plan, the judge
told them.

"Not guilty," the foreman's voice repeated for each count for every defendant.
Judge Ellis then delivered a dramatic soliloquy "about a tragic rift between a
father and a son," admonishing Newbold Smith and telling him to seek to repair his
relationship with Lewis. "If you have a lot of money and then you give money to
your son, you ought not to worry about how he is going to spend it. If he has silly
political views, grant him that." Of Lewis, who was not present, the judge said, "I
would hope that young Mr. Smith would realize that no political view he has,
nothing he wants to do in life, is any more important than his relationship with
his father."

Lewis was outraged. "My mother and father have gotten into bed with thugs,
perverts, and gangsters," he told me. "How could they put their own son at risk
with all these gangsters?" He added surprisingly, "I still love my father. You can
hate the sin and love the sinner." Newbold Smith called me to discuss the judge's
remarks urging him to repair his relationship. "I felt like rising and saying,
'Your Honor, I have no way of doing that. He is kept like a monk in a cell at the
top of MontSaint-Michel.' "

186187 VIEW ARTICLE PAGES

Lewis Smith has never seen the large, vaguely Colonial house in an affluent
Philadelphia suburb into which his parents moved last May. But he would recognize
the antique sofas, the old Orientals on the hardwood floors, the James Buttersworth
sailboat painting in the library. The Smiths, who look as if they just emerged from
a John Cheever novel, are in the library—the same room, Newbold Smith points out,
where informer Doug Poppa secretly recorded him talking about "lifting" Lewis.

"My mother and father have gotten into bed with thugs, perverts, and gangsters."
Following the trial, Lewis and Andrea left for a two-week vacation in the
Caribbean, and Lewis sent his parents a needling "Dear Mom and Dad" postcard,
telling them that he was having fun "swimming and snorkeling" without surveillance,
and that they could have dinner together "after you invalidate the incompetency."
To the Smiths, however, who had promised moments after the trial that they would no
longer oppose him, it was easier said than done. All Lewis and his lawyer wanted
was for the Smiths not to counter a new petition, or, better yet, for the Smiths to
join them in asking the judge to drop the court's protection of Lewis's finances.
Instead, the Smiths filed a new petition that would require that Lewis be
reexamined by a court-appointed psychiatrist in order to be found competent. Lewis
has heatedly objected. "If we went about it his way," says Newbold Smith, "it would
be that what we asked the court to do eight years ago was wrong. It wasn't wrong."

Besides, how could they assure the court that Lewis was O.K. if they couldn't see
him or talk to him? But Lewis remains adamant that it is a matter of the deepest
honor and principle, and that he will never go near them until they do whatever it
takes to nullify the incompetency. "There's a way of doing this," Peggy Smith
maintains. "Take a look and see if Lewis has changed. If he looks like he can
control his resources, we say fine. If he wants to piss away all the money he has,
let him. We were protecting him from doing wild things." "People do give money,"
Mr. Smith interjects. "You give money to the Catholic Church, but you don't give
half your fortune away, not to an organization considered as being a..." He lets
the sentence hang. "Peggy particularly does not like this label of his, which is a
stigma, but we need a little cooperation from him."

"Please explain to Lewis I never thought he should have been called an incompetent
per se," says his mother. "Incompetent to manage his financial affairs, yes, but
incompetent to tie his shoelaces, no. I never knew it meant no right to vote, no
right to marry. Don't get me on the subject of darn lawyers."

Lewis and Andrea and Andrea's mother think Peggy Smith should be standing up more
to her husband. ''She bore that son. She did not bear her husband. If your husband
dies, you get another husband. You can never replace your son, never," says Martha
Diano. "If he wants to go to bloodlines, Lewis is more of a du Pont than Newbold
is."

"Tell him I would love to get the judge on the telephone, but I can't," says Peggy
Smith. "Can't I just have a sandwich with him and Andrea somewhere? With me alone?"
Her husband looks sharply at her. "Never with you, Newbold, for years to come,"
Peggy Smith says. "With me."

"He doesn't have to leave LaRouche," Lewis's mother continues. "That's not the way
I'd put it," Newbold Smith interjects. "I'd still like him to leave." "But he
doesn't have to," Peggy Smith reiterates. She returns again and again to the theme
of how much she'd like to meet Andrea, to talk with her. But "she's been told I'm
evil."

When she leaves the room, Newbold Smith says, "I'm in despair all the time about
this. I just don't know where to turn. Most people say I ought to just drop it,
forget it, but I wouldn't be talking to you if—You are a message carrier. I'm
trying to get a message of reason to him." He hunches forward in his straight-
backed chair. "Deep in his heart, he knows I care about him. You don't take 28
years in your life and say it's all in the ash can."

188189 VIEW ARTICLE PAGES

Newbold Smith frequently evokes the similarities between himself and Lewis. "Lewis
has a wild temper; so does someone else.... Lewis has a very, very stubborn streak
in him; that works two ways, by the way." Even their lawyers agree. Lewis's lawyer
James Crummet tells me, "Lewis is a chip off the old block... a hothead and a bully
just like his dad."

Growing up on a 64-acre estate outside Philadelphia that his mother calls a farm,
Lewis kept all his father's medals and his 10 letters for sports on his bedroom
wall. "He just patterned his life after me," his father says. Lewis excelled at the
same sports his father had—football and wrestling—and Newbold Smith went to every
one of Lewis's high-school football games. "Dad and Lewis used to wrestle in my
parents' bedroom until one day Lewis picked Dad up over his head and deposited him
on the floor," remembers Lewis's brother Hank, an up-and-coming yuppie money
manager in Philadelphia. Despite their vast wealth, there was pressure on the
children to be achievers. "What my father had seen over several generations was
various people in the family being duped over silly ventures. He instilled the
importance of not pissing away what was given to you instead of what you earn on
your own."
Lewis remembers growing up hearing an additional set of rules: "Always tackle low,
the invincibility of the United States Marine Corps, the holy righteousness of the
Church of England, and never marry a Catholic." "Every time I had a date, my father
would rush to the Social Register to see if she was listed."

Early on, Lewis was found to be dyslexic; math was always a major problem for him.
When he was 15, his father suffered a fall from a horse that left him paralyzed for
a time and with a slight limp today. Lewis says the accident exacerbated Smith's
serious drinking problem. Just as he now wants to rescue Lewis from Lyndon
LaRouche, so Lewis, early on, wanted to rescue him from alcohol, and was eventually
responsible for getting him into A.A. Two years earlier, Lewis's mother was also
hospitalized, for depression. The turmoil at home interfered with Lewis's learning,
and his athletic prowess was apparently the mainstay of his self-esteem. After
boarding school, Lewis was recruited nationally, and went to the University of
Michigan on a football scholarship. He also continued to wrestle. But his hopes
were dashed forever when he was diagnosed as having a congenital neck problem.

By all accounts, Lewis was fun-loving and bighearted, and he had lots of
girlfriends. Though he signed his papers Lewis du Pont Smith, he was not a snob.
Doug Beath, his college roommate and then best friend, says Lewis seemed to need to
prove he could be successful like his dad. "Once, he told me to buy all these gold
stocks. Gold was about to take off and we would be heroes," Beath recalls. "As nice
as he was," he did have "the need to do something big, cause some noise." Says Hank
Smith, "Lewis was always trying to hit it big and to hit it quickly."

Twice Lewis got duped financially and had to have his father bail him out of
trouble—once with silver bullion, for $25,000, and once with an $80,000 venture in
walnut groves. On the other hand, he made a windfall of $800,000 from selling his
Wang stock at its height. It was part of that windfall that he gave to LaRouche.

Lewis's first full-time job after college, distributing Time Inc. magazines in
Rhode Island, which he got through family connections, was a disaster and lasted
only a few weeks. In retrospect, his mother, whose own father had sat on the boards
of both Du Pont and General Motors when Du Pont owned the controlling interest in
G.M., and founded a prosperous private-aviation company, which Lewis's older
brother, Stockton, now heads, says she regrets that "we tried to steer him" toward
business. Lewis was attracted to teaching, but his first two teaching jobs, at the
Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and at the Rectory School in Pomfret,
Connecticut, didn't pan out either.

Turning to graduate work in history, he began classes at Boston College. At the

airport one day in the spring of 1984 on the way home to Pennsylvania, he spied one
of those LaRouche recruiting tables—the kind with the signs that read, FEED JANE
FONDA TO THE WHALES. He bought his first LaRouche literature—subscriptions for
publications that would determine his life for the next decade.

Because of his middle name, as well as his bank account, Lewis was a stellar catch
for LaRouche's fringe political organization. "They paraded him like a blue-ribbon
heifer all over the country and all over Europe," says former LaRouche follower
Chris Curtis, who testified at the trial that he had done surveillance for Newbold
Smith. "At press conferences he would issue amazing, astounding attacks against his
family." (The Leesburg, Virginia, Loudoun Times-Mirror reported that Lewis once
delivered it a press release "claiming that his brother was an alcoholic, that his
mother suffered from mental illness, and that his father had traveled to Texas for
an expensive 'sex-enhancement' operation.")

"He didn't have a peer group," says Dr. Judianne Densen-Gerber, Lewis's former
psychiatrist, who is sympathetic to LaRouche. "They became his peer group." But at
first Lewis resisted their blandishments. He was incensed, for example, when
LaRouche people placed fund-raising calls to his parents' summer house in Maine,
and told them to knock it off. But they didn't. Those who follow LaRouche and his
unorthodox conspiracy-haunted theories believe the world is in imminent collapse,
and they are under constant psychological pressure to provide the means for Lyndon
LaRouche to save it. Usually that means money, especially from the elderly, some of
whom have been separated from their life savings by LaRouche fund-raisers.

The world according to LaRouche holds that the Queen of England oversees an
interlocking system of worldwide institutional corruption that is responsible for
the global drug lobby; that Henry Kissinger is a K.G.B. agent; that B'nai B'rith
helped found the Ku Klux Klan; that Zionism is a state of "collective psychosis."
The organization's great enemy used to be the Rockefeller family, because of its
alleged control of the C.I.A. Today it's the Bronfmans; Lewis is indignant over
their control of the Du Pont company, and charges that they are part of an
international conspiracy of gangsters and drug smugglers. All H.I.V. positive
people, LaRouche believes, should be quarantined. There are many more astounding
tenets of perennial presidential candidate LaRouche's network of foundations,
organizations, and publishing companies here and in Europe, whose members number
perhaps 1,000. It is impossible to say, however, whether such bizarre views are far
right or far left.

LaRouche's network is maintained by various security, intelligence, and fundraising

divisions. It is a secretive and closed tribe which often attracts highly
intelligent, idealistic people, who are conditioned to feel a sense of moral
superiority, ex-members report. Family ties are often discouraged, says Curtis, who
knows women who were made to have abortions by members of the group. "LaRouche once
told a conference I attended, 'Your families are moral pigs.'"

Members hotly deny that they are in a cult, but one woman who spent 15 years close
to the center of power of the group says, "There is no question it's a cult. The
thing that defines a cult is that it creates a reality within itself that bears
little resemblance to reality outside," and even when "true" reality impinges, it
seems to make "no difference." The thing to remember, she says, is: "One big kahuna
runs the whole show. It's a shared delusion."

Lewis Smith, who enjoys a celebrity status in the group, explains that his work is
selling expensive subscriptions to LaRouche publications. His former sales-team
partner and best friend in the organization, Tony Zito, who recently left full-time
work with LaRouche, says that some weeks, working 10 hours a day 6 days a week, the
small team would raise $50,000. Zito says he taught Lewis to cook, and they would
bicycle for 50 miles at a time. "Inside the organization, we were striving to lead
a Renaissance life—the Renaissance ideal, where man is made in the image of God,
with divine potential."

"There's no forced anything," says Andrea Diano-Smith. "We just had 10 days in St.
Thomas. It's just ridiculous, the imagery that we're under some kind of guard. I'm
not saying it's not like a rigorous organization, but you can come and go as you
like." Both Lewis and Andrea take umbrage at the idea that LaRouche discourages
having children. "We can still be associates of the movement and have children,"
says Andrea. "I'm not some kind of doctrinaire LaRouche follower. Neither is
Lewis." Lewis himself says, "If I get tired of this, it's hasta la vista."

When I venture to Lewis's mother that her son seems happy, Peggy du Pont Smith
begins to yell on the telephone. "You don't know anything about this organization!
Of course he's happy. He's their prize pig!"

In September 1984, Lewis started a promising new job, coaching wrestling and
teaching history and English at the Friends' Central School in Wynnewood,
Pennsylvania. Students remember that he drove a VW Rabbit, cracked jokes, and
talked about beer and girls and the importance of safe sex. But over the course of
the school year his behavior changed. His former roommate testified that Lewis was
getting bombarded with several phone calls a night from the LaRouche people
soliciting his money. His students thought he was an interesting history teacher,
albeit a highly unorthodox one. "We never got to World War II, but we learned all
about irrigation in Africa," says Jim Ruttenberg, now an editor at Manhattan
Spirit. "He politicized me." Another student, Chris Bonovitz, says, "He was
bringing his political views into the classroom in a real overbearing sense,
forcing them on us without prefacing them."

Parents complained that Lewis was giving their children LaRouche literature. His
humor disappeared and, Bonovitz says, he routinely "flew off the handle." Toward
the end of the year, his students realized he was taking LaRouchian Platonic
Thought classes far into the night. Bonovitz said he appeared "brainwashed."
Another said, "He wore a khaki suit, and it was obvious he was sleeping in it for a
week at a time . . . He'd be a mess. I thought he was going through
indoctrination." The final exam was not soon forgotten. Lewis's favorite student
got his blue book back filled with the wisdom of LaRouche. "Remember," Lewis du
Pont Smith wrote, "the world is smothering in a huge oligarchical fart!"

The Smiths were alarmed. What was happening to their sweet child, whom his mother
used to call Precious? Over the fall and winter of 1984-85, Lewis and his father
would have knock-down-drag-outs about politics when Lewis went over to watch
football games. "They were telling him kinky things that were inimical to his
family," says Newbold Smith. "He became a different person," says his mother.

What really set the senior Smiths off was Lewis's revelation that he had made a
$212,000 loan to help finance the second edition of Dope, Inc., LaRouche's off-the-
wall "expose" of the history of the worldwide drug conspiracy. Lewis told his
father he would be getting 16 percent interest on his money, a usurious sum his
father scoffed at. A short time later, when his father was on a trip in Scotland,
the parents got wind that Lewis was trying to wire $75,000 more to the LaRouchies
to set up a WATS line. That was when they moved to get a restraining order from the
court. As a result of this action, Lewis cut all ties to his family and former
friends.

The concrete symbol in the battle for Lewis's soul is his money, which consists of
two kinds of funds. The larger amount —$8 million—is in irrevocable trusts willed
him by his maternal grandfather. He can never touch their principal; he has access
only to the interest. The second pile of money—about $2 million or so—is made up of
payments from his trusts and other investments, and formerly did not have any
strings attached.

When Lewis went home for Easter Sunday dinner in April 1985, he had no idea what
was about to unfold, nor did his parents tell him. The next week they filed a
petition with the Orphans' Court of Chester County, Pennsylvania, seeking the
court's protection of Lewis's finances by charging that he was mentally incompetent
to handle them—that he could, in the words of Pennsylvania's incompetency law, fall
prey to "designing persons." Thus began a massive clash of wills, an internecine
battle royal which has gone all the way to the Supreme Court and which continues to
this day.

At the heart of this conflict is the issue of proving Lewis's mental incompetence,
a task which so far has entailed a parade of nearly a dozen shrinks, hired by the
family, by the court, by Lewis. "The most corrupt, venal, and disgusting humans I
ever met in my life," says Lewis, "were psychiatrists."

Since this battle was joined, all parties have dug large holes which they've then
jumped into. Lyndon LaRouche has been tried and gone to jail. Lewis, who moved for
a few years to Virginia to be near LaRouche, has been arrested for using strong-arm
tactics twice at LaRouche recruiting tables at Dulles Airport, and was named in a
civil suit for trying to defraud a retired telephone operator of her AT&T stock.

After Lewis and Andrea got married in Rome in 1986, his father's testimony to
prevent the marriage from being declared valid was abruptly halted when Newbold
Smith perjured himself on the stand. After denying that he had ever been to Lewis's
house in Leesburg before Thanksgiving 1987, Smith was confronted with a police
report which showed that on November 19 of that year he had hired a locksmith under
false pretenses to gain entrance to Lewis's house while Lewis and Andrea were away,
and that documents of Lewis's were later missing. In 1988 the family got another
warning in the form of a restraining order. The judge was shown evidence by Lewis's
lawyer that the Smiths had hired Galen Kelly to supervise surveillance of Lewis and
Andrea in Europe before their marriage. The sealed order barred Newbold and Peggy
Smith, Lewis's two brothers, and his sister from interfering further with his
freedom of travel and liberty of association. "Don't compare father and son," says
Lewis. "This is not a father-and-son tug-of-war of wills. You got a man who is
flouting the law, who is breaking the law. How can you compare that with what I've
done?"

Lewis and his side have always seen the competency issue as a civil-rights battle
in which he is being not just persecuted for his political beliefs but tried for
them in Chester County, the "heart of du Pont country," right on the border with
Delaware, the state where the du Pont family has held sway for more than a century.
Thus Lewis is condemned to wear a scarlet I and bear a deep humiliation for "not
acting like a du Pont," says his attorney James Crummet. "In this country, people
are allowed to hold kooky ideas." Crummet is certain that no one else in the United
States has ever been declared incompetent for "a mixed personality disorder at
least," which is what Judge Lawrence E. Wood ultimately found in Lewis's case. To
be declared incompetent, one must be "mentally ill," that is, divorced from
reality.

Lewis goes ballistic when he hears the name of the psychiatrist his parents hired
in the first competency hearing: Dr. David Halperin, who is affiliated with the
American Family Foundation, a group antagonistic to cults. "They're Nazi
psychiatrists. They're part of the network of psychiatrists that trained the
Serbian generals who are setting up rape camps to rape women and children in
Bosnia," Lewis shouted unreasonably at me one day. "These psychiatrists were
playing games on people the same way the C.I.A. was using LSD for mind control."

Dr. Halperin concluded that Lewis was mentally ill—suffering from depression and a
"schizophrenic affective disorder" that included delusions of grandiosity and
persecution and, to a lesser extent, a blunting of emotions and psychological
ambivalence. But Lewis's own two doctors, psychologist Gerald Cooke and
psychiatrist Robert Sadoff, said that Halperin was going too far. Cooke felt that,
given societal norms, Lewis did not always live up to expectations, but he was not
mentally ill "in the sense that term is generally used in the profession." Sadoff
diagnosed a mixed personality disorder, but said, "There was no break from reality
at any time."

Lewis's lawyers were so confident of the outcome that they waived their right to a
jury trial. Big mistake. Said Judge Wood in his eight-page decision, issued
November 12, 1985, finding Lewis incompetent, "Our own evaluation of Lewis from
examining the various letters which he wrote and from observing his testimony is
that he has a disorganized mind and compensates by setting up an oversimplified
view of the world in which he is one of the good guys and 'they' are conspirators
bent on mischief. As such he would be and has been an easy target for anyone who
pretends to support him in his efforts to combat the bad guys."
The Wilmington Trust Co., "the du Pont family bank," as Lewis calls it, chosen over
his protests to guard his money, canceled his credit cards without telling him.
Instead he received a $5,000-a-month allowance, which the judge has allowed to grow
to $15,000, or $180,000 a year after taxes. But even today, whenever Lewis wants to
purchase anything costing more than his allowance, he has to petition the court,
and his family has the opportunity to oppose his request. (In one instance the
court allowed him to buy a baby grand piano but would not give him extra money for
piano lessons; said his father, "How do I know it isn't a LaRouche person giving
the piano lessons?") The judge's order would not allow him to marry, and in the
state of Virginia, where he was residing in 1985, he was not allowed to vote.

In a videotape Lyndon LaRouche made for testimony at one of Lewis's trials,

LaRouche said it was his wife who came up with the idea of Lewis and Andrea's
marrying in Rome. They say the decision was their own. The two had met one night in
an Irish pub in January 1985, when Andrea was 20 and Lewis was 28 and teaching at
Friends' Central. For a month Lewis did not tell Andrea his middle name was du
Pont, and Andrea's mother tells me that at first five-foot-two Andrea thought Lewis
was "too tall, too preppy, too old." Andrea was enrolled in classes in restaurant
management and working summers where her father worked, at the Hygrade Food
Corporation, a meat-processing plant, where she took samplings from hot-dog vats.

Although Andrea grew up in a tiny row house in a run-down neighborhood of South

Philadelphia, she enjoyed opera, took piano lessons, and as a teenager studied with
the Philadelphia Civic Ballet. She went to parochial schools and was basically
apolitical until Lewis gave her Dope, Inc. She found it, and gradually Lewis,
fascinating. He proposed around Christmas 1985.

Believing correctly that his family would oppose the marriage—the Smiths have still
never been formally introduced to Andrea—the two decided to marry in Europe. "I
wrote to the Pope, and we sought protection from the Church of Rome," Andrea
testified. In October they went to Europe. They had no idea they were being tailed.

The couple made no secret of the fact that Lewis had been declared incompetent. But
after appearing in person, they got the necessary documents from the American
Embassy to be married civilly in Rome, and a sympathetic Italian priest gave the
go-ahead for them to be married in the famed Santa Maria del Popolo church.

Lewis is extremely proud of his wedding pictures, showing Lyndon LaRouche as his
best man and LaRouche's much younger wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, as maid of honor.
But his face clouds when he describes the honeymoon. "We got one night in a good
hotel but the next four on the floor of my mother-in-law's hotel room, because the
Wilmington Trust Co. would not give me any money until I got back."

When he did return, Lewis asked his mother for the wedding ring his grandmother had
willed him. She refused, unless the family could meet Andrea. Lewis said no. He
went to Cartier and chose a $31,000 two-carat diamond, which Judge Wood allowed him
to buy over his parents' objection.

Newbold Smith maintains that he did not oppose the marriage until he found out
LaRouche and his wife had stood up for Lewis and Andrea. "That appeared contrived,"
Smith says. "Lewis walked out defiantly," he explains, "leaving his whole milieu
from whence he came. Off he went to his new father, Mr. LaRouche. LaRouche and his
wife became his new father and mother."

Being an activist for LaRouche provided more self-importance and more excitement
than teaching school ever had. Lewis's special status within the group has allowed
him to run for Congress twice as a LaRouche candidate, in the Democratic primary in
1988 in New Hampshire, and as an independent in 1990 in his home territory of
Pennsylvania's Fifth Congressional District, which then encompassed much of the
heavily Republican Chester County, the site of all his legal battles. The West
Chester Daily Local News, published in the county seat, has editorialized that
Lewis ought to be considered competent. "Nobody would have questioned his
competency if he had given $212,000 to the local G.O.P.," said a reporter.

West Chester radio-station manager— and J.F.K.-conspiracy buff—Mark Crouch became

Lewis's friend and let him use the phone to buy airtime around the district. "The
man was the shrewdest negotiator for advertising time I've ever seen—he wants 110
percent for his money." Crouch scoffed at the idea that Lewis could be declared
incompetent.

Lewis's losing 1990 campaign, in which he garnered 5,795 votes, is still talked
about, and not just because he spent $100,000 of his own funds, which he had to
petition the court to get. Lewis's ads on car radios "caused accidents," said his
Democratic opponent, Sam Stretton. Lewis filled the airwaves with Beethoven and
LaRouche conspiracies of "the Anglo-American elite" laundering drug money, and
quoted German poet-playwright Friedrich Schiller. "When you meet him he's a very
nice fellow, until you step on or hit the right buttons. This guy goes off."
Stretton remembered a debate on the local radio station in which Lewis "was making
very good points, and then suddenly started talking about how Prince Philip was
involved with the environmental movement, which was controlled by satanic
worshipers. It was fascinating to me. Here was a man who was obviously articulate,
but at times he would say things that didn't make rational sense."

During the campaign, Lewis was in the middle of hearings to reverse his
incompetency status. He had lost all appeals on the first round, all the way to the
Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case. But with money no object, and his
"state of mind" subject to change, his lawyer James Crummet decided to try again to
persuade Judge Wood that he had interpreted the competency statute too broadly.
Crummet spent a year and "three or four hundred thousand dollars" researching the
incompetency law and hiring several renowned experts to testify on Lewis's behalf.
Crummet felt all was going well until something odd happened. The court-appointed
psychiatrist who had examined Lewis changed his original written diagnosis of
"personality disorder—mixed type" with "no gross evidence of mental illness" to
read, "This condition is a mental illness that affects his competency to handle his
financial affairs . . . rendering him vulnerable to the influence of designing
persons." The revision occurred after the judge, on his own, called the doctor to
tell him that he was sending him a letter explaining some expert testimony he
hadn't heard. Lewis smelled a conspiracy and denounced Judge Wood's "corruption" so
vociferously in ads during his congressional campaign that Judge Wood recused
himself from the case. Lewis was overjoyed, but Crummet wasn't. All his work had
gone down the drain.

To celebrate, Lewis bought airtime for another outrageous five-minute ad, attacking
Wood, the Bronfmans, and the various "corrupt interests" that had made his case a
"politically motivated fraud against my constitutional rights of political
expression." His diatribe against the judge ended, "Tonight my wife, Andrea, and I
and my political colleagues are celebrating the beginning of the end of the corrupt
Get LaRouche Strike Force, which jailed political leader Lyndon LaRouche. We are
reciting Schiller's poem 'The Cranes of Ibycus,' which poetically demonstrates how
natural law asserts itself, and I am preparing gnocchi Gorgonzola, a dish only a
competent human being could prepare and appreciate."

Said Daily Local News reporter Michael Rellahan, who covered the campaign,
''Politically, Lewis is way beyond the point where the streetcar stops."

With hindsight, it's not hard to see all the times in this twisted tale when
Newbold Smith made the wrong turn. He himself admits as much: ''Lewis in the
beginning wanted to be part of the family, but I was so determined. I was too much
of a mad dog for them." By reacting so furiously, Smith may well have driven Lewis
far deeper into the shelter of LaRouche than Lewis ever thought of going.

The Smiths' attitude may even have hastened the relationship with Andrea. Martha
Diano thinks so. Several times she was contacted by the Smiths to intercede, but
she demurred. She says she was incensed when Newbold Smith told her, "Of course,
you have nothing to lose." "I was sure he meant in a monetary way," says Mrs.
Diano, speaking in the kitchen of her small row house. "I told him, 'Maybe you can
afford to lose 25 percent of your children; I can't afford to lose 50 percent of
mine.' " She was again infuriated when Lewis's brother Stockton called and told her
Andrea could be raped in the LaRouche organization. ''If Stockton had the idea he
was going to be speaking to some little old ravioli-maker!" Mrs. Diano says with a
huff. ''I said, 'What you have done is, you have placed Lewis and Andrea in a
situation such as the Montagues and the Capulets. They have become Romeo and
Juliet.' " Mrs. Diano says Lewis's parents "cemented the relationship."

Odin Anderson, Lyndon LaRouche's Boston lawyer, whom Lewis has also consulted, said
Newbold Smith "became an enemy," bent more on destroying LaRouche than on
reconciling with his son. "He became more involved in the partisan effort to
undermine the political movement than anything else, maybe thinking the prodigal
son would come home, but that's a terrible misjudgment."

Like many other distraught parents, Peggy and Newbold Smith turned for help to the
Cult Awareness Network, the major national group with a full range of services
regarding cults. Newbold Smith became a major CAN contributor, and says it "does
God's work." The Church of Scientology and Lyndon LaRouche think otherwise,
charging that CAN is nothing more than a referral service for deprogrammers who do
illegal kidnappings.

During 1992, according to evidence submitted at the trial, CAN paid kidnapper-
deprogrammer Galen Kelly more than $10,000. He helped prepare a pamphlet on Lyndon
LaRouche, says CAN executive director Cynthia Kisser, and helped her with
investigative work on her own lawsuits charging defamation in retaliation for 30-
plus lawsuits CAN faces from individual Scientology members. Some of the money paid
to Kelly came from Newbold Smith, but, Kisser declares, "since I have been director
—since June 1987—neither I nor my staff has ever taken money from a family to
facilitate involuntary deprogramming, nor have we knowingly facilitated in any way
criminal acts." Kisser goes on to say that the world of deprogrammers is a "small,
close community.... Frankly, anyone who wants to do something, who's desperate
where a loved one is concerned, they'll find what they want."

"If someone's on a ledge and you climb out to get them to jump back, and at that
critical moment you grab them by the hair and toenails and yank them back, is that
wrong?" asks Galen Kelly. Judge Ellis apparently thought so. He told Kelly that
"under no circumstance is it ever justified to snatch, lift, or pull anybody off
the street against their will." Kelly says he has already been offered a deal by
the Justice Department in the kidnapping that went wrong. "If I plead, I get no
penalty, just so they can get a conviction," says the ever defiant Kelly. "I told
them to go pound salt." A grand jury will decide his fate.

Paradoxically, there were times when Newbold Smith, personally or through lawyers,
actually called on LaRouche's hierarchy directly to effect what amounted to a
P.O.W. swap: You give me Lewis, I'll try to help spring LaRouche. Lewis says that
at one time his father even offered money through his lawyer David Foulke. Foulke
denies the charge. Astonishingly, though, Galen Kelly was Smith's principal
emissary. In 1988, Smith and Kelly had fairly serious negotiations with Paul
Goldstein, co-head of LaRouche's security division, who, according to Kelly, was
worried at the time that he too would be prosecuted by the government, and was
thinking of setting up a consultancy. "Finally it came down to: You give us Lewis,
you can have the Du Pont company as a client," says Kelly. "It was that crass."
There was a series of meetings in Philadelphia and Washington. The idea, which
Newbold Smith testified to at the trial, was to get Lewis to go work with Kelly in
an upstate-New York anti-drug program run by CORE and its controversial director,
Roy Innis. LaRouche would get good publicity for the drug work, and Kelly would
have a shot at deprogramming. Kelly says Goldstein wasn't positive he could deliver
Lewis, but he is clear that "Lewis was a pound of flesh absolutely.... They called
him Baby Huey. They said he'd be a real problem. They said his wife would be an
even bigger problem." How so? Kelly claims, "She wanted out of the group. She
figured she married this Prince Charming—he's big and rich and good-looking—and
what's she doing? She's getting petitions signed in the rain in a New Hampshire
parking lot." But the swap was not to be. "We had meeting after meeting," says
Kelly. "Suddenly it broke off.... The curtain dropped radically and arbitrarily."

The latest pass at negotiations was made in January of this year. Newbold Smith
sent John Markham to explore whether Smith could write a letter to the parole board
on LaRouche's behalf, telling of LaRouche's efforts to reunite him with his son.
Markham, the man who put LaRouche behind bars? I ask. "A lawyer is a lawyer, my
dear," answers Newbold Smith. "Getting access to my son is more important than
keeping Lyndon LaRouche in jail."

Lewis and Andrea suggest that we meet for dinner in a small but chic Italian
restaurant in South Philadelphia. Lewis looks strikingly like his father, and is
immediately at ease. "He's got great manners," Newbold Smith has told me. "They
can't take that away from him—he learned that here at home." Lewis specifies that
the Negronis be made with Stolichnaya, and follows them with pasta and caviar. If
these two are in a cult, it has nothing to do with self-deprivation.

But Lewis does feel deprived—of a normal life. Incompetency is such a humiliation
that Andrea won't have children until it's lifted; he refuses to have his children
labeled. "When you're declared mentally incompetent, you're disgraced to all your
friends.... How can I look my friends in the eye or have any kind of relationship
with any self-esteem?" Lewis asks. "It's a miracle I didn't go insane. The fact I
didn't have an emotional breakdown is a testament to my character—not my
competence. I hope you're getting a picture of how enraged I am."

I ask Lewis what it is about his family that would make this titanic clash of wills
so intense. "In the families of the aristocracies, money is not it—it's bloodlines.
My father thinks the du Ponts are upstarts," alleges Lewis. "My father thinks he's
got bloodlines that go all the way back to William the Conqueror's army. When he
married my mother, he believed she was too impure." Lewis then relates the story
that he often heard his father tell of asking for her hand. "My grandfather Henry
Belin du Pont told my father, 'You're bound to come into a lot of money. The money
is family money; it really wasn't made by any of us. It must be passed down in
trust.' My father sees this as his primary purpose. His role as a parent is to
ensure that these family trusts are passed down to the next generation... so the
ideology of what protects the aristocracies' bloodlines is safely passing down the
corpus of the family money—the Blob.

"My father serves the Blob," Lewis says. "If I had pursued the life of a ne'er-do-
well and invested in racehorses, in yachts, in ski resorts or fast women, that
would have been O.K. The more eccentric and decadent, the better. Because then
you're not a threat to the Blob and the political milieu that controls the
Establishment."

The question that remains is: If the money's so tainted, Lewis, why soil your hands
by touching it?
Lewis says that his father paid "an enormous amount of money" to research that he
was a sixth cousin of Diana, Princess of Wales, and that he sent her his book about
sailing, Down Denmark Strait. He got a response from a lady-in-waiting. "So did my
sister," says Andrea, pushing her diamond back and forth on her finger. "I think
everybody gets a response back from a lady-in-waiting. My sister as a child wanted
to be Queen of England. She was a small child; she wasn't an old man pretending to
be related."

Early the next morning, Lewis gives me a tour of his cavernous house, built in
1858. It's still undecorated, and largely empty. Andrea stays in bed. In the living
room is the baby grand and a cello Lewis is learning to play. He's also an
enthusiastic Italian cook and sells Chinese herbal remedies as a sideline. Of
course, he's also writing a book, which he urges me to read from. It's not hard to
guess its subject. "It is not love that motivates all the cruelty he has heaped
upon them," writes Lewis of his father, "in all that he has done to smother them
and to try to brutally force Lewis into the mold that he requires of one who is a
du Pont... " Lewis already has a design for the book's cover. It is the seal of the
United States next to the family crest of the du Ponts. The title is Blood Feud:
The Sensational Scandal That Is Rocking the Richest Family in America.

The illustration really should be of two rock-ribbed men on two separate cliffs
overlooking the deep chasm between them