Site Presented By
Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Dot-com visionary David Wetherell could do no wrong -- until he started building a mansion on an ancient Indian burial ground.
Oct 23, 2002 | Booboo the insulator looked through the window upon the sight of the blue-jeaned ass of the kneeling archaeologist, hollered, "That's it! I've had enough! I'm going out there right now!" and headed toward the front door. Stevie the carpenter and Rich the electrician quickly grabbed him and I was afraid that I was going to have to jump on him too.
Booboo was a big man, recently released from Barnstable County Jail, whose hobby was weight lifting. I'm pretty big too, and at one time my hobby also was lifting weights, so I knew that the other guys on the site would expect me to pile on next. But I'm basically a conflict avoider, whereas Booboo allegedly got his nickname from the souvenirs he left on the bodies of the slow-paying clients of his former boss, some connected bookie from Brockton. So it was a great relief when Booboo stopped wrestling and started laughing. All the guys laughed too, standing amid the construction chaos of the unheated shell of the mansion we were building. But it was a rueful laughter, for indeed that ass was some provocation. Even to those of us who hadn't just spent six months in the pokey.
It was Jan. 20, 1999, my third day on the job as a common laborer on the four-bedroom, 7,000-square-foot vacation home that Internet billionaire David Wetherell -- whose CMGI stock had recently split and was trading at $163 a share -- was building on Squibnocket Point, formerly the most beautiful spot on Martha's Vineyard. In helping build this house I knew that I was participating in a desecration. But I needed the work, and this low-paying job was ideal in some ways. It paid cash, it was interesting work, the setting was spectacular, and I didn't need a car to get to the job -- my boss, Lou, lived next door, and I rode the 18 miles to work sitting on a pile of power cords in the back of his panel van. Also, the job provided lots of exercise and allowed me to work irregular hours; that is, whenever I felt like taking a day off to work on my manuscript, a novel about nanomachines and Iraqi biological weapons that I believed both Hollywood and New York to be interested in, I did. On those days somebody else, one of the Brazilians, vacuumed the table saw and carried the trash barrels to the dumpster.
Despite its irrationally exuberant embrace by Wall Street, the CMGI business model never made much sense to me. The idea was that CMGI, which Wetherell had created pretty much single-handedly, was to be an incubator of Internet technologies and companies that it would sell off or take public. As a former software grunt who had been with a couple of start-ups that had gone public and then bust, I checked out the Web sites of CMGI's companies and saw mostly pipe dreams. I saw ideas and ambition, but not a sensible business model. Or rather, CMGI made perfect sense as a business model for enriching Wetherell, but not much sense as an investment model for the average lunch-pail guy who was cashing in his paycheck and buying the stock, as were many of the tradesmen at Squibnocket. At lunchtime we would sit around the wood stove that we had jimmied into the unfinished fireplace in the great room, and the better-off guys would talk about how they were making more money on CMGI stock than they were building this house. From time to time I would meekly voice the opinion that to me CMGI looked like a Ponzi scheme, a bubble. But everybody knew that I was a flat-broke, no-tools laborer who couldn't afford a new pair of boots, so it was easy to discount my analysis. I'm sure it sounded like sour grapes, because I couldn't afford even one share.
The tradesmen were all guys, except the tilers Susan and Sue. The archaeologists were mostly all women. They kept apart from us, seldom even accepting our invitation to share the stove warmth. They took their lunch in their trailer. So I don't know if they discussed whether the house was jinxed or haunted, as we did. I don't even know how many human skeletons they found. Some said that they never even found one complete skeleton, just a lot of parts.
The work site was situated on 10 acres of what had been the old Hornblower estate. To get to it you went down to the little parking lot at Squibnocket Beach and then a mile or so up the private dirt road that started at the lot's back end. A chain was strung between two granite pillars at the entrance to that road, but the chain was down during work hours -- and anyway you could drive around the right post if it hadn't been raining.
Wetherell's property was spectacular. It wasn't only that the point provided such vistas -- from the roof peak there was a 270-degree water view, and from the great room it seemed that Noman's, that mysterious empty island, was floating in the air five miles offshore -- but also that the Squibnocket terrain is so much more extreme than that of other parts of Martha's Vineyard. There are few trees on the Hornblower land -- too much wind -- and rolling hillocks of high grass lead steeply down to giant dunes and a surf break full of boulders and strong currents. You generally wouldn't want to take your children swimming there. This is a lee shore better known for causing shipwrecks than for sunbathing. The point's most dramatic feature of all, perhaps, is the Devil's Amphitheater, a giant wind-carved hollow in the dunes where generations of Vineyarders had tasted their first beer or had sex for the first time around a driftwood fire. The cops left the kids alone there -- it wasn't worth hiking a mile from the road to bust them.
At the time I joined the crew the house had been framed and shingled, but nothing much had been done to the interior. There was one set of rickety exterior wooden stairs that led down into the basement, but on the inside there were no stairs, only ladders between floors. In January I worked inside, mostly helping Booboo to strap the batting and then blow in the cellulose. During a February thaw I worked with Lou and Stevie to build the permanent exterior basement entranceway. I demolished the wooden stairs, shoveled sand and earth to a rough slope, bent and wired rebar while Lou and Stevie made the forms and shot them into the foundation walls with a .22 caliber nail gun. Then we called for a 9-yard load of concrete and settled it with shovels and the snake, a 20-pound steel vibrating phallus at the end of a 3-inch-thick cable attached to a motor. Fifteen feet away the archaeologists went about their kneeling ministrations.
There were 18 steps between the exterior grade and the basement door. There were more than 18 companies in the CMGI stable, each more synergistic and visionary than the next. David Wetherell's picture could be found on every business page, and fawning articles about him graced every glossy from the blue-blood Boston Magazine to Upside, Silicon Valley's answer to "The Sopranos." Wetherell was the very darling of the new economy. "The rules have changed," the business journalists gushed. "CMGI is proving that the old rules no longer apply." Here was a man who soared on his own wings, generating wealth for anyone lucky or smart enough to come near him.
The story behind the archaeologists went something like this: Sometime in spring 1998 a backhoe broke ground for what seemed to be simply one more egomaniac's Vineyard trophy palace. But an odd thing happened: The excavators unearthed what appeared to be human bones. So the police were called, and the police took one look and said, "This person's been dead a long time. Like maybe a couple of centuries. Or more." So the state archaeologist of the state of Massachusetts was called, and it was determined that this was a potentially very significant site, as was reported in the local newspaper the Vineyard Gazette (which was considerately vague about the location of the site and identity of the landowner). A new foundation was begun 10 yards from the first. Evidently it was at about this time that the Wampanoag Tribal Council got into the act. They wanted Wetherell to build his house somewhere else on his 10 acres, more than 10 yards away, but he said no. That's what I heard, anyway.
