Here’s a story from Kalispell, Montana,published three years ago on the New West website. Hal Herring wrote it.
Another part of the power, Jenna and Summer said, was to stop payment on the checks that were written to the women for sex. “You’d go to cash the check, and the bank teller would say there was no money in that account, and then you’d go call Dick, and he’d be out of town,” Summer says, “and it would be right when you needed the money the most.” And then they would wait, as long as it took, for him to call them back and tell them the money had been deposited to cover the check. “That’s how I finally lost my trailer,” Jenna said. “The money didn’t come through in time, and they foreclosed on it.”
There is little doubt that the flow of money, when it did come — and it usually did, eventually — was not the lifesaver that everyone imagined it would be. It seemed like just another trick, kind of like the meth they all bought with it, that seemed like it would make everything alright, but actually it just disappeared, wrecking your life in the process.
“I don’t know of anybody who did anything positive with the money,” Connie said. Thousands and thousands of dollars went into local keno and poker machines, hours and hours spent sitting, high on meth, staring at the blinking lights, smoking. “They could never tell any of their families where they got all that money,” Amy says, “So they could never give them any of it. But if they claimed they’d struck it big on the keno machines, then they had an explanation for some of it, anyway. That was the low, low budget way to launder Dasen’s money.” For the first time that afternoon, everybody laughs, because what she said was so indisputable, and because there is an almost tangible feeling around that kitchen table, now that everybody is working jobs for such short pay, of all the money squandered on keno machines and pounds of brain-killing chemicals and boyfriends who didn’t like where it came from but didn’t mind spending it.
Sounds familiar. I wonder how many similar stories you could find around Redding. Probably not anything like the Dick Dasen aspect, but you never know. Sad, sad, sad, sad.
Investigators at the Montana Department of Health and Human Services are still trying to determine what happened to about $500,000 that remained in a trust for Chad Emery, who was awarded a product liability settlement after choking on a marshmallow as a child and being rendered brain damaged. Dasen was the conservator of the trust, and in 2000 filed a one-sentence report saying that the money was all gone.
More…
Deana Dimler, finishing up a jail term for meth-related charges at a Butte pre-release center, offers one line of defense. She freely admits that, some years ago, she had a sexual relationship with him in return for his financial help. “You know, everybody’s talking about Dick, how he gave us all this money and made us victims, like we can’t take any responsibility for ourselves. I don’t buy that. I’m a grown woman and I’m responsible for what I do, and for what I did with the money. You ask if I’m pro-Dick Dasen, and yes, I am. Dick for Mayor! I notice nobody is asking if just maybe Dick is a victim of all of us. How come nobody’s asking that?”
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