Truth In The Rear View Mirror

TRUTH

IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR

An Insider Exposes America’s Real Power Players

Non-fiction/Memoir/Crime/Politics

Michael Maris

www.truthintherearviewmirror.com

Copyright © 2015 by Michael Maris

All rights reserved - Library of Congress

Printed In The United States of America

No part of this publication may be stored in a retrieval system or reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author. This book is for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient.

People and events in this book are a true portrayal of the author’s encounters and observations in his life.

IN GRATITUDE

I dedicate this book to my parents, Gus and Effie Maris; to my wife, Songsri, the best wife in the world; her parents, and to all my family members.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

FOREWORD

CHAPTER ONE — Good Guys and Bad Guys

CHAPTER TWO — The Communist Agenda

CHAPTER THREE — The Real Powers That Be

CHAPTER FOUR — Lives of the Rich and Richer

CHAPTER FIVE — Whores and Big Shot Johns

CHAPTER SIX — Taking Back the Neighborhood

CHAPTER SEVEN — A Royal Treat and a Royal Pain

CHAPTER EIGHT — True First Ladies Who Set the Bar

CHAPTER NINE — An Old School Democrat We Can All Admire

CHAPTER TEN — The Great Pretender

CHAPTER ELEVEN — Men of Mystery

CHAPTER TWELVE — We Don’t Want Your New World Order!

AFTERWORD

Acknowledgments:

So many people contributed to the writing of this book, it’s hard to know where to begin thanking them all. There are too many of you to mention so all I can do is apologize in advance and ask for your understanding. You know who you are and what you mean to me!

I send my thanks and love to the Maris, Xenos and Pappademos families. You have no idea how much I admire and respect you —I’ll treasure your love, support and trust until the day I die.

"When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear."

--Thomas Sowell

FOREWORD

My father loved the United States of America. He didn’t get here until 1951 when he was twenty-nine years old but he made the most of every minute he spent as an American citizen. He and my mother taught my brother and sister and me to love our country and to never take for granted the advantages life in a free country gave us.

Kostadinos Maris died at the age of ninety-three fearing for the land of the free and the home of the brave’s future. He hated Communism because he had seen first hand what it did to his native Albania, his family and his friends. He fought against it all his life. It made him sad and mad in equal parts to watch his adopted country, slowly but very surely, become a Communist regime. He sat glued to the TV news and saw politicians lie, cheat and steal while the people who elected them just let it happen.

I’ve seen it too and like my old man, I believe in speaking out. You remember the scene in A Few Good Men when Jack Nicholson’s character barks at Tom Cruise’s character, You can’t HANDLE the truth? Well, if you can’t handle the truth you might as well stop reading right now because I don’t lie and I don’t pull punches. I’m sick and tired of being one of what Richard Nixon called the silent majority.

Are you as sick and tired as I am? Are you ready to have your voice heard over the roar of the leftist politicians and organizations that are hell bent on destroying our country? There are millions of us out there who’ve remained silent for too long while the loudmouths shout their contempt and hatred for the United States of America, chipping away at the great country our Founding Fathers fought and died to give us.

Maybe you feel alone in your beliefs. Maybe you think that your voice doesn’t matter; after all, you’re just one individual. Maybe you worry that speaking out will offend the politically correct Gestapo and land you on the unemployment line or in prison. Guess what? There are many more of us than there are of them. There is strength in numbers. If we join together to fight the plague brought on by Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, George Soros and their leftwing cohorts, nothing can stop us.

We can pull our country back from the brink but we can’t do it by keeping our mouths shut. We can’t do it by being passive bystanders. We can’t do it by hoping a super hero will come along and make things good again. We’re the super heroes. We’re the people who go to work every day, pay our bills and abide by the law. Now we need to do more. We have to stand up, speak our minds and work together. We don’t need to play the leftists’ game. We just need to beat them on our own terms.

I wrote this book for a lot of reasons but if I had to pick just one it would be this: to open the public’s eyes—your eyes—to the corruption and hidden agendas behind the fake smiles and false promises of our country’s leaders and those who will do anything and pay any amount of money to be part of that elite club. I built a career driving and protecting people I’d cross the street to avoid today. I entered the security and protection business with the best intentions but I was behind the wheel and I saw plenty in the rear view mirror. I heard plenty too. A lot of people keep what they know to themselves out of fear. They don’t want to end up in a morgue or disappearing Jimmy Hoffa-style like so many who dared to speak the truth about the power players.

Me? I say BRING IT ON! I’m spilling the beans and if I go down, I damn sure won’t go down quietly. I want you to read this book and I want you to share it with everyone you know who loves our country and fears for its future. Knowledge is power. The more you know, the more you can educate others—particularly the young people who are taught an obscene rewritten history in today’s schools.

Barack Obama talked about hope and change and enough suckers bought into his lies to let him waltz into the White House—not once but twice. He hoped to change this country into his leftist regime and he’s succeeded like no other liberal Democrat before him. I’m surprised that Marx and Lenin haven’t risen from their Russian graves to slap Comrade Obama on the back for bringing the United States to the brink of what the USSR was under their control: a country of people living in misery and fear.

Hillary Clinton wants to take the baton from the urban agitator who kept her out of the White House in 2008 and continue his mission to turn the U.S. into a Communist republic. She wrote that it takes a village to bring up America’s children. I believe that it will take a village of patriots to save our children from a future under Communist rule.

That village is made up of you and me, folks. It starts with neighborhoods and builds through towns and cities until the whole country wakes up to real hope and change. I’ve taken the first step by writing a book that tells the truth about the people who want us to believe we can trust them. They’ve proven that they can’t be trusted. The chapters that follow rip the smiling masks off to reveal the ugly truth in their faces.

Don’t be afraid to look at the truth I saw in the rear view mirror. Jesus said, The truth will set you free. A couple of thousand years later, author Joe Klass added his two cents: The truth will set you free but first it will piss you off.

Get pissed off. Remember the people who died so that you could live free. Take an honest look at how much of your freedom has already been taken away from you and how much of what is left soon will be.

Honor other true Americans and yourself by doing your part to make this country great again…before it’s too late.

Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.

--John Wooden

CHAPTER ONE — Good Guys and Bad Guys

Maybe some kids dream of becoming a secret service agent assigned to the President when they grow up. Or they imagine how glamorous and exciting it would be to protect the lives of Hollywood celebrities. They watch movies like Line of Fire and Bodyguard and see themselves in the hero role.

I wasn’t one of those kids. Fact is, I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I was growing up. I was too busy running at top speed along that fine line between good and bad to give much thought to what the future had in store for me. I kind of backed into the security and protection business after I’d put a lot of miles and experiences under my belt. But the funny thing is, almost every job I’ve had since I was fifteen was behind the wheel of a vehicle, constantly looking in the rear view mirror.

I’ve seen plenty from that vantage point, whether I was delivering Dr. Pepper as a teenager in St. Louis, providing roadside assistance for the Auto Club of Missouri, driving a Trailways charter bus filled with tourists through every state in the country or making sure Saudi Arabian royalty made it safely across Washington, D.C. to their destinations. I trained and wrestled with Olympic heavyweight wrestling champ Larry Kristoff and his team in my younger years, studied judo and got certified in Hapkido by Grand Master Jun Saeng Yoo. I can still bench press 325 to 385 on a really good day. I’ve gone through seven intense driver-training courses, one anti-terrorist course and classes that certified me to carry a firearm. At the age of sixty-two I can say without bragging that I’m capable of handling myself in just about any situation that comes my way. I don’t look for trouble but I make sure I’m ready if and when it happens to find me.

When I look back over a quarter century as a security and protection specialist in our nation’s capital, I sometimes wonder if I’d have been better off staying in St. Louis and living like ordinary folks instead of putting my life on the line for a lot of people who didn’t even deserve the courtesy of a polite nod on the street.

I’ve known good guys and bad guys on both sides of the law. And you know what? I’ve got more admiration for the bad guys who make no bones about the fact that they are bad guys than our so-called leaders who lie like snake oil salesmen to convince us to vote for them, swear that they’ve got our best interests at heart and forget we exist once they get in office. As the old saying goes, actions speak louder than words. If you look at the politicians you’ve trusted and voted for and ask yourself how you could ever have been so gullible, you’re part of a big club. More and more of us are fed up and wondering how to fix this mess.

My parents started their lives as Americans citizens in St. Louis and reared their three children in the heart of the city, never even considering a move to the quiet and safe suburbs. The city was their entire world for most of their lives. It was mine too until my mid-thirties. It’s where I saw life’s good, bad and ugly and learned that rose-colored glasses are useless in the real world.

St. Louis isn’t a city most people think of when they hear the words Mafia or organized crime. But let me tell you, the place was crawling with mobsters. They came from places like Chicago and Atlantic City and made their presence known in every corner of the city, from the mayor’s office to the police department and down to the smallest mom and pop business. Seeing how things really got done wised me up but not even that prepared me for what I’ve seen in Washington, D.C. where corruption is as common and expected as the cherry blossoms in springtime.

* * *

Although my father had served as a guerilla fighter and intelligence officer in the Greek military after fleeing Albania, he had to take any work he could find when he and my mother came to St. Louis in 1951. He was a proud man but not too proud to take the most menial jobs to earn a living as a citizen of the country he believed was the greatest nation in the world.

Back in those days, immigrants had to go through the ringer to become U.S. citizens. Forget sneaking over the border and living for years as an illegal, never paying taxes and receiving enough government benefits to live a lot better than many hard-working and law abiding Americans. If you were an immigrant from any other country in the world—and there were plenty of them—you were prepared to earn the privilege of being an American citizen.

My parents met and married in Canada and moved to St. Louis because my mother’s Greek family had put down roots there before World War II. Besides, my father had escaped Albania and the certainty of death or imprisonment at the hands of the Communists and Nazis that took so many of his relatives and friends. He felt an allegiance to the city’s growing