Crime Beat

rundown strip bar—was his strangest yet. It seemed so far from the way he had started out. Born in Knoxville 37 years before, he had joined the Army out of high school, serving for six years, including a tour in Vietnam as a courier. When he left the military he decided to put on a new uniform, that of a cop.
    However, Savage found no lasting promise in the new uniform. After earning a criminal justice degree in Kentucky, he worked only briefly as a cop in Oklahoma, then as a federal prison guard in Lexington, Ky. He bounced around the Midwest and by 1980 had drifted into his series of failed business ventures.
    By 1985, Savage was determined to put the skills he had learned in his previous careers to good use. He decided to put himself out for hire.
    The back pages of Soldier of Fortune magazine are devoted to classified ads offering a whole raft of goods and services to what the magazine calls the “professional adventurer.” On any given month this marketplace might offer anything from countersurveillance information to mercenary manuals to handbooks on revenge.
    But in the early 1980s, the Soldier of Fortune classified ads offered more sinister services. Investigators have said it was through ads placed here that a variety of hired killers advertised their lethal skills. And it was into this market that Richard Savage placed his own skills the summer of 1985:
Gun For Hire: 37-year-old professional mercenary desires jobs. Vietnam Veteran. Discrete [ sic ] and very private. Body Guard, Courier and other Skills. All jobs considered.
    Sylvester Stallone, portraying Rambo, was on the cover of the magazine’s June issue in which Savage’s “Gun For Hire” ad promised that all jobs would be considered. The ad carried the telephone number of the Continental Club, and within days the phone was ringing with inquiries.
    The calls were from people both looking to hire and looking for work. By midsummer Savage had surrounded himself with a cadre of men seeking dial-a-gun work. There was 21-year-old Sean Doutre, a knockabout who signed on as a bouncer at the Continental Club. There was Michael Wayne Jackson, 42, the one-time police chief of a tiny Texas town but now a maintenance man. There was William Buckley, 35, a local security guard. And there were others—all men who apparently found the macho image of themselves reflected in the action stories and ads of Soldier of Fortune.
    Other callers were clients looking for a variety of questionable jobs done. Savage was asked to guard gold in Alaska, to find men still missing in Vietnam. But for the most part, people called because they wanted someone killed.
    “I couldn’t believe it,” Savage would tell a News/Sun-Sentinel reporter a year after his ad ran. “Nearly everybody wanted someone killed. They wanted me to kill their wives, mothers, fathers and girlfriends.”
    According to investigators, indictments and court records, Savage and his gang entered into deadly agreements with a number of the callers. The going rate was $20,000 a kill.
    Investigators believe that within a few weeks of his ad in Soldier of Fortune, Savage had accepted the first assignment and dispatched a crew of hit men to suburban Atlanta to kill a 43-year-old businessman named Richard Braun. On June 9, an explosive device was placed in Braun’s van, but it exploded before Braun got in the vehicle. The bombers would make up for missing him two months later.
    The second job was in Fertile, Iowa. A St. Paul, Minn., bar owner named Richard Lee Foster had called Savage, claiming that the Keough Poultry Company in Fertile had ripped him off. Savage assigned Michael Wayne Jackson and William Buckley to the Foster case, and on the night of June 23 an explosion ripped through the Keough plant. No one was hurt, but Foster got his revenge—for the time being.
    B Y EARLY AUGUST , the dial-a-hit-man crew was back in Georgia, this time in Marietta to kill a building contractor named Dana Free. Savage had been paid $20,000 by a Denver woman angry at Free over a failed business investment. But killing Free wasn’t easy.
    On Aug. 1, Buckley and Jackson planted two grenades under Free’s car. Free drove around with the devices under his car for a day but nothing happened, partly because the pin on one of the grenades had not been removed. So the next night, Buckley slid under the car and reattached the grenades with their pins tied to the drive shaft. If the car moved, the pins would be yanked out and .