Lobbyist to the Damned Kills Self in Customarily Flamboyant Fashion

Edward "Baron" von Kloberg
January 9, 1942 - May 1, 2005

Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo got its name in 590 AD, after St. Gregory the Great, while leading a procession to pray for the cessation of the plague, saw the archangel Michael sheathing his sword on top of the fortress. This vision, he believed (accurately, as it would turn out) announced the end of the plague.

It took only about four seconds for Edward von Kloberg III, another kind of plague altogether, to travel from a parapet atop Castel Sant’Angelo to his unfriendly end on a street 52 yards below, but an exit had been on his mind for some time. Months earlier, this lobbyist of choice for dictators, tyrants, and mass executioners had called the Washington Post to arrange an interview that he hoped would lead to “a better understanding of his life.”

WHEN IN ROME: A body takes just under four seconds to travel from the top of Castel Sant'Angelo to the street below.

“He had no ethical qualms about [his work],” said Adam Bernstein, the Post reporter with whom he spoke. “He said just as any client had a right to a lawyer, any tyrant had a right to a spin doctor.” “Shame is for sissies,” von Kloberg liked to say. His clients were an astonishing array of atrocious human beings, many of whom wound up dead or serving long prison terms. When he represented Saddam Hussein, he billed the dictator for several op-eds in the New York Times and other newspapers that advocated a US tilt towards Iraq in its longstanding conflict with Iran.

Von Kloberg did not, in fact, write these op-eds. When confronted, von Kloberg is reported to have said, “If I was doing my job for Saddam Hussein, you would condemn me for that as well, wouldn’t you? Maybe it is best that I not do my job so well all the time.”

Among his other clients were Swaziland, Burma’s military junta, Bahrain, Gambia, Pakistan, India, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Honduran Maquiladora Association, Juvenal Habyarimina of Rwanda, Samuel Doe of Liberia, “Baby Doc” Duvalier of Haiti, and both Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire and his usurper, Laurent Kabila, who displaced Mobutu in 1997 and renamed the country the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Mobutu Sese Seko had many outfits but only one hat for every occasion. He was also, as observed by Norman Mailer, still quite ugly in the fashion of most dictators, with the possible exception of Stalin, who was undeniably hot.

“I’ve had every great dictator in the world except for Stroessner,” he said regretfully in 2003, referring to General Alfredo Stroessner, who ruled Paraguy from 1954 to 1969 and granted asylum to Nazis.

Von Kloberg’s clients paid handsomely for his services, and he claimed to “test” prospective clients by requesting they pay his first-class airfare plus a $5,000-a-day retainer. In turn, von Kloberg used the money to lead a life of gluttony and hedonism characterized by his “taste for outmoded splendors.”

At the lavish parties he often hosted at his Washington, DC, penthouse, he was known to greet guests in a cape-—he had one with a red lining and another covered with pictures of doves-—and black slippers embroidered with a devil and pitchfork. He travelled with Louis Vuitton steamer trunks full of tailor-made suits and an array of dinner jackets. Even his voice, according to one friend, carried the affectation of an “almost Rooseveltian, high-class accent.”

Born simply Edward Kloberg, he added “van” to his name in his 20s, and later changed it to “von” when a fellow Washington insider told him it “sounded more distinguished.” He is reported to have thrown great parties at Princeton University before he flunked out. After graduating in 1965 from Rider College in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, he was hired by American University as a fundraiser. He quickly advanced to become the dean of admissions and financial aid, before embarking on his public relations and lobbying business in 1982.

Things got off to a rocky start when, in 1984, von Kloberg pled guilty to faking letters from ambassadors in an attempt to procure a loan for his then-failing firm, the Washington World Group. In the early ’90s, von Kloberg also fell victim to a journalistic sting operation when Spy magazine set out to find out how despicable a client had to be for a Washington lobbyist to turn them down. The magazine sent a woman posing as a representative of the German People’s Alliance—-a fictitious neonazi group seeking the re-annexation of Poland and a stop to immigration into the fatherland—-to a number of lobbyists and PR firms. The only person to accept the job was von Kloberg, who expressed sympathy: According to Spy, von Kloberg referred to the defeat of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke in the Louisiana governor’s race as “a pity,” and said the re-annexation of Poland “should be high on the agenda for the return [of] greater Germany.” After his subsequent drubbing in the Spy article, he remarked, “You’d be surprised how much business I got as a result.”

Von Kloberg’s later years were marred by diabetes, cancer, and a persistent ringing in his ears. His business declined in the late ’90s until his retirement in 2001. He lost his prized DC penthouse. Life apparently soured still further when his relationship with long-time companion Darius Monkevicius dissolved. Roman police officials reported that the would-be baron bitterly blamed his ex-lover in a suicide note found on the body, alongside a copy of a 1997 issue of Prime magazine, the cover of which featured von Kloberg shaking hands with former president George H.W. Bush.

Von Kloberg once recounted a story by a writer he admired, socialite Violet Trefusis, who was warned by her doctors that the frequent rich lunches she enjoyed would kill her. As von Kloberg told the story, “She pleaded, ‘One more lunch, doctor. One more lunch,’ and then she died during dessert on her beautiful porcelain. I think that is the way to go.”

But for an amoral caped buffoon with a penchant for defending villainy, a heartbroken dive into ancient, unyielding ground seems an infinitely more fitting end.

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