Alien Agenda: Why They Came, Why They Stayed Read online

  Charles found a job with the state as an assistant electrical inspector for state-funded projects. He travelled all over Alabama. It was during this seven-year period that he discovered his passion: metal detectors.

  He had stopped at a rest area on Highway 72 near Russell Cave close to where Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee meet. A man and his teenage son walked through a field behind the rest area holding metal detectors similar to what he’d seen used in Vietnam to detect mines.

  Charles watched them longer than he intended. Curious, he walked out and hailed them. When close enough, the father said hello, and the conversation began.

  The father-son team used metal detectors they made from kits to search for objects just beneath the soil. During the Civil War, elements of both Union and Confederate armies had passed through this area numerous times, and by doing detailed research, the pair of historical prospectors believed the immediate area had been the scene of at least two minor skirmishes in the 1860s.

  Charles walked along with the father and listened to tales of cannon balls, Minié balls, belt buckles, and uniform buttons found during previous outings. After a while the son was ready to stop for the day, so the father handed Charles his metal detector and a hand trowel, showed him how to use it, and sent him searching on his own for a half hour.

  Fifteen minutes into it, the detector yowled, beeped, and whistled. After two passes over an area, Charles set the awkward machine down and began to gently dig with a trowel. In short order he unearthed the remains of an officer’s sword from the Civil War. The blade was broken six inches above the guard, and it was about as rusty and pitted as any metal Charles had ever seen, but it was somehow beautiful to Merit and he was hooked.

  He worked for the state by day, and by night he studied local history, and designed and built metal detectors in his garage. On weekends, or if he were travelling overnight, he would head out to some place he’d discovered in books or articles. His reward was a quickly growing collection of historical, metal junk. His garage was filling up with boxes on shelves that held the ruins of hairbrushes, buckles, plows, hatpins, buttons, pieces of Civil War weapons, jars with tin tops: pretty much anything that could be associated with metal that was used between 1800 and 1950. His pride and joy was a tommy gun, a .45-caliber submachine gun favored by gangsters during the Roaring 20s through the Great Depression.

  Early on in his hobby, Charles began meeting men with similar interest walking the same fields. They were usually friendly and willing to talk late in the day when they were walked-out and it grew too dark to scan the ground. He enjoyed the conversations and sharing places new to each other.

  Charles met up with an older gentleman from Ohio named Daniel Parker. Retired and widowed, hunting for relics had become his whole life. Parker had actually written a book about it, and was the editor of a self-published, quarterly magazine cleverly named Metal Detectives.

  They became friends and wrote letters back and forth a couple of times a month. Charles started writing articles about how to build better metal detectors, and had the idea to advertise his design in the magazine and build to order.

  Pretty soon he was building two or three detectors a month and selling them for $250.00 each. Merit had advanced the state of the equipment by adding a discriminator dial that theoretically allowed the operator to dial out lighter metals and avoid digging up worthless bottle and jar tops.

  Three years into making detectors in his spare bedroom, two things happened that changed the course of his life. Had it not been for these things, he may never have become Charles Merit, billionaire.

  Though still selling only eight to ten detectors each month, Charles knew of an appliance-repair shop for sale and thought he could build his hobby into a thriving business. His wife nearly left him with their two-year-old daughter when he quit his job and rented the lawnmower-repair shop. He convinced her to stay. He was so convincing she became pregnant with their second child that night.

  Charles knew it would be rough at first, but between making and selling detectors and making simple repairs to televisions, radios, toasters, irons, and vacuum cleaners, he could make a go of it.

  The purchase of the repair business came with what goodwill could be garnered from the sparse population of Piedmont, Alabama. It also, he learned, came with a sub-distributorship, if he wanted to keep it, for comic books. Those superheroes needed help to reach Rexall Drugs, Winn-Dixie groceries, and other local retailers. Why not? thought Merit, hedging his bets to provide a thriving business for his family.

  Things took an unexpected direction. The limited circulation of Metal Detectives magazine capped Merit’s metal-detector business at nine to twelve units a month. He was not able to find another, similar magazine to allow him to build his market. It turned out Charles hated repairing appliances. But he did pretty well selling comic books.

  Two years into his diverging businesses, Merit hired a young man to build metal detectors and run the repair shop. He had expanded the comic-book business enough to add the extra salary.

  Merit focused his fine engineering mind on expanding his comic-book business and territory. The aging distributor who provided Merit comic books wanted to meet, and that is how Merit ceased to be a sub-distributor and became a distributor with a warehouse in Huntsville.

  One Saturday he came into the repair shop to check with the young man he had hired to run it for him. He found fifteen kids ranging in age from 12 to 20 sitting at card tables playing a game with a strange-looking deck of cards. Before he could throw them out, Jim emerged from the back work area holding a greasy lawnmower blade and explaining two of the kids were his little brothers and he let them bring their friends to play a card game called Magic: the Gathering on Saturdays. Merit didn’t think he liked the responsibility, no, not just responsibility, the liability of having kids on the premises.

  While he was thinking about the best way to run the kids out of the store without pissing off their moms, who brought in the toasters, waffle irons, and hair curlers for repairs, he overheard two kids talking. The younger wanted a ride into Gadsden so he could buy some more Magic cards and try to buy some kind of special card called a Black Lotus.

  As he listened to these kids excitedly chattering away about having to drive forty miles to buy more cards to add to their collection, he had an epiphany: these were the same kids who bought comic books. They were paying eight dollars for a box of Magic cards, and $3.99 for a foil-packed set of cards they called a booster pack. Finally, whoever invented this game was either lucky or a genius. The kids had to keep adding hard-to-find cards to their decks to stay in the winning column, and it was addictive.

  In a burst of inspiration, Merit said he would take as many as would fit in his SUV to Gadsden. On the way down and back, the six kids were delighted to tell him more than he wanted to know about this new collectible card game. It seemed they knew all about it.

  They directed him to a store in a rundown strip center called The Dragon’s Lair. It was a dingy, small store that sold games and sports collectibles. The owner was a short, round, middle-aged man with a too-thin mustache in a stretched-too-tight, grayed-out T-shirt that advertised a game called Dungeons & Dragons. His name was Howard.

  Howard was as free with information as the kids. Merit left the store knowing everything he needed to start distributing this game if he wanted. The kids left, by Merit’s calculation, close to three hundred dollars behind in the store. Merit decided in that second that he wanted a piece of this.

  Two Saturdays later, twenty kids showed up at the repair shop to play their games and found an eight-foot metal rack of comic books, and a glass case displaying recently released new editions of Magic: the Gathering boxed sets and booster packs. The kids stayed until the shop closed at six that evening. They left thrilled that the nice Mr. Merit allowed them a place to play and buy comics and Magic cards. What a nice man he was.

  Merit counted over $500 from the kids’ purchases for that day. He drove home im
aging how much money he could make distributing this product with his comics.

  The next week he took orders. At first it was slow, as none of his merchants had heard of the phenomenon, but every time a store tried it they sold out and ordered more. A month later, all of his accounts were buying the cards from him. A month after that the cards were selling as well as comic books everywhere.

  Charles was on a weekly trip to check up on his warehouse in Huntsville. Before long he would need to expand. While in Walmart buying office supplies and printer paper, he checked out their comic-book section. It was a mess. It and the sports collectible trading cards that were next to the comic-book section had been rifled through and sold down until there wasn’t enough there to make it worth searching. In fact, it didn’t even look like a section at all.

  Two weeks later the lightbulb went off in Merit’s head, and he turned around and drove back to the Walmart in Huntsville.

  He spoke with the manager for ten minutes trying to learn how he might approach Walmart with his idea. The manager was busy and of little help at the moment, but gave Merit his card and told him he could call. Working with the store manager, they set up a test where Merit Distributors stocked and maintained the comic book and collectible trading card section. After three months the store’s sales had skyrocketed. The manager sent the test plan and results to Bentonville and was told to conduct a regional test using seventeen Walmart stores in the areas around Huntsville and Birmingham and report the results after six months.

  The total sales of comic books and trading cards at Walmart represented less than a tenth of one percent of the chain’s sales. The category shone in dollars generated per cubic foot of shelf space, but the volume wasn’t there to make it a major initiative for the retail giant. The fact that is was so small a portion of Walmart’s business and no one at corporate really cared about it so long as it made money allowed Merit to succeed.

  After the six-month test, there was another test in three hundred stores. After that the program went nationwide and this insignificant, miniscule wedge of the Walmart pie chart under the ‘other’ label made Merit a millionaire many times over.

  His new two-hundred-thousand-square-foot warehouse in Huntsville became the hub of ten national distribution centers, each with its own team of store checkers who were paid commission to stock, check, and restock Walmart stores with comic books, baseball and football cards, and, of course, Magic: the Gathering.

  By now his wife and two children had moved out. She left him for a man she said was more attentive and concerned with her needs above the coarse demands of business. She said business like it was a dirty word. Of course, she and her man friend did not marry after she divorced Merit, so she lived in a big house on some islands off South Carolina in a gated community and was neighbors with Barbara Streisand. Another ‘of course’ was that Charles paid for the house as well as a huge amount of monthly child support.

  But Merit, deep down, really didn’t care. He worked his employees like dogs. Driving, driving, never relenting, always expecting and demanding more. He built commission incentives so that the better an employee did at a store in one month, it was in the employee’s best financial interest to sell more the next month. Always more, never retreat.

  Merit hired a CEO, a COO, and a CFO. Between the three of them he paid almost one and a half million dollars in annual salary. There were only three rules for them to follow: increase sales, increase profits, and don’t piss off Walmart. It was made clear any infraction resulted in the loss of employment with Merit Distributors.

  Merit found himself returning to his love. He spent more and more time leisurely strolling fields with his ever-improving metal detectors. Sometimes those fields were in Europe or Australia or South America. While metal detectors still weren’t a staple in American households, Merit was determined to make and sell his brand.

  One fall Merit got a wild hair up his ass to go search a Civil War battlefield known as the Wilderness in northern Virginia. He jumped in his new Ford pickup truck, ramped on to Interstate 20 East, and imagined the century-old treasures he would find in the thick woods that had been fertilized by the blood of 20,000 soldiers a hundred years ago. The idea to go to the place came from a Civil War buff that lived in Virginia. They had met at a Civil War memorabilia convention some months before. Merit had a booth showing some of his treasures, but his prices, like most of the others there, were too high. He went to meet other metal detectives and swap tales of rusty treasures.

  My research had led me to Merit, among others. He already had enough wealth to be of use if I could win him over.

  I traveled to the memorabilia convention and, feigning interest in his hobby, stood looking at collection of rusty objects. After a while he looked up from the convention program, looked at my name badge, and said, “Can I help you, Mr. Tate?”

  “I hope so,” I responded, and leaned forward so he could see me studying his badge, “Mr. Merit. I’ve been interested in learning about the hobby for a few months now, and a friend told me this is a great place to meet people who know it inside out.”

  Merit’s face seemed to lose interest as he said, “It’s great fun. If you don’t already have a metal detector, I can sell you one of those. They are the best.” He pointed to a stack of six, long narrow boxes stacked on the end of his table.

  “Merit, Merit,” I said, then acted surprised. “You must be Charles Merit. I’ve read your articles in Metal Detectives. You are the one that got me interested in this in the first place.”

  Merit beamed.

  “Yes, yes,” I acted excited. “Of course I will buy one! I understand yours are the best. Handmade.”

  He pulled a box on the stack and leaned it against the back side of the tabletop while he opened a manual receipt book.

  “You lucked out,” Merit said as he pressed a ballpoint pen too hard against the paper and carbon in the receipt book. “Brand-new model. This baby can be tuned to pick up specific types of metals. You are going to love it.”

  “This is so cool,” I said. “I thought I was going to have to order one by mail.” I pulled out my checkbook. “How much?” I asked.

  I got Merit to promise to show me how to work his detector before dinner. We spent thirty minutes while Merit proudly demonstrated his device’s abilities. About halfway through, I mentioned that I did research for the Federal Parks Service and had access to all sorts of maps and information about historical battles, routes of march, and campsites for armies during America’s wars on our soil.

  Before dinner he bought me a drink. Merit was particularly interested in where armies set up camps. Finding battlefields was not difficult, and if you went to one on a bad day you might find an army of men with detectors prowling the ground.

  Merit insisted on taking me to dinner, and proceeded to pump me to see what kind of information he might have gained access to. By the end of the convention, I had a new friend for life. It is easy to make friends if the other person thinks you have something they want but can’t find themselves.

  Before Merit came to visit the area that had been part of the Wilderness Campaign in 1865, I spent a weekend with a friend of a friend who taught history at Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia. As a favor to his friend, he took me into the bowels of VMI’s archives and showed me where I might go to have a good chance of finding artifacts.

  A week later, Merit and I worked our way through thickets, shrubs, and briars, trying to make room to operate metal detectors. In short order the excitement of beeps and buzzes began to show us where to dig, and we found more bounty in a few hours than Merit had ever imagined could be in one place.

  After two more shared field trips we became fast friends, but my job took me out of the country, so it was going to be a while before we could hover our metal hoops over hard dirt again. Thank God.

  Merit and I corresponded two or three times a year and stayed connected. Then, a few weeks after the World Trade Center towers were brought
down by planes carrying hijackers who believed that a merciful God wanted them to kill several thousand innocent people, I called Merit.

  We chatted for a few minutes about the good old days. Finally I told Merit the reason I called and asked if he could come to Washington, DC as soon as possible. I waited for him to break the long silence on the phone.

  “You sure about this?” he asked.

  I could almost see his brows furrowed and his head tilted as he listened for any hint of fallacy. “I’m positive,” I said, then added, “we can work out the details when you are here.”

  It was a short conversation, but interesting and urgent enough that Merit grabbed a flight out of Atlanta the next day and met Jim in Georgetown for dinner that night.

  Jim brought a friend, the soon-to-be-retired General Conway. Conway had spent the last ten years of his career heading up a military physical-security unit that examined ways to provide security for bases. Conway had an idea. The idea had been carefully fed to him by Jim Tate so that it would seem to originate in the general’s mind.

  By the end of that evening, a handshake confirmed the start of a new company. Merit was going to muster his assets and answer his country’s call to secure it from terrorists. Conway was going to provide Merit’s company the connections and inside information to sell the US government.

  Next time you go through an airport security area, take a moment and read the name on almost all the equipment used to detect contraband. Eight out of ten times, no matter where you are in the Western world, the name on the equipment is Merit Electronics.

  What did I receive in appreciation? Charles Merit owes me a huge favor. That and a small finder’s fee, a tiny fraction of a percent royalty in a Swiss bank account that over the years has grown into several million dollars, which allows me the ability to do the things that need to be done.