My brush with an elite strike force
In a previous life, I worked for a travel company specializing in “active luxury travel.” What is that, you may wonder?
In practice, it meant cycling trips, but not the kind you do on a shoestring. Oh, no. These trips involved Relais & Châteaux hotels, Michelin-starred restaurants, and over-indulgence in wine and foie gras. Then the very next morning, grinding and cursing your way up some French or Italian hillside on a bicycle (surrounded by picturesque vineyards, of course).
While there was certainly a dissonance between the “luxury” and “active” sides of the equation here—the rich foods and decadent hotels at night, the punishing exercise during the day— the concept seemed pretty popular, at least with those who could afford it. And that usually meant obscenely rich Americans.
I’m being unfair. The truth is, I met a lot of fascinating and accomplished people on these trips. I met a famous crime novelist. I took a scientist and his family on trip once; he was a bigwig at Pfizer. Right now, he’s probably saving the world from COVID-19.
But perhaps my closest brush with greatness happened on the second trip I ever led.
It was in Provence. Before each trip, we used to double-check food preferences, birthdays, and other clerical details. We went over the baggage list. This one showed a couple with six full-sized suitcases between them. For a six-day trip. Surely there was a mistake?
Well no, it turned out.
A few days into the trip—when I got comfortable enough with the couple—i teased them about the suitcases. Why three each? The wife claimed it made perfect sense. One for dinner clothes, one for biking clothes, and one for everything else.
The funny thing was, they weren’t even good dressers. That sounds snobbish, but it’s true. Typically, heaps of luggage meant designer brands and a certain unmistakable polish, like models in a lifestyle magazine.
Yet Vicky dressed like an eccentric English teacher I once had in high school, with her big sweeping earthtone dresses, loud hoop earrings, jangly bracelets, and hair the colour of a freshly minted penny.
Her husband, Joe, wore the same outfit each evening: a turtleneck with a jacket. ( Did he fill a whole suitcase with jackets and turtlenecks?) With his combed-back hair, his greying mustache, and his sardonic “I’ve seen it all” expression, he looked like a gangster, though one grown somewhat philosophical with age.
They liked to drink. They loved their French wines. They were lawyers, and very brash. I don’t mean to stereotype. But let’s just say they were the kind of lawyers that turn people off the profession in general.
Fast forward a decade or so. I was watching a late-night comedy show where they were poking fun at somebody named Joseph digenova, apparently a regular on Fox News. They put his picture up and something inside me jolted. Hadn’t I seen this man before? The mustache, the baldspot, the shabby jacket over turtleneck.
Then they showed his wife and law partner, Victoria Toensing, still with that garish penny-coloured dye-job. Vicky and Joe.
At the time (spring 2018, I believe it was) they had just been courted by the American President himself, who had seen Joe’s regular rants on Fox, and decided that this legal couple was exactly what he needed to fend off his administration’s latest existential threat: the Mueller probe.
But after Trump invited them to the White House, he abruptly decided they weren’t the right fit. The reason, apparently, had to do with their looks. According to reporters from the Washington Post, the president soured on the pair for the simple reason that Vicky “showed up in the Oval Office wearing a bohemian-style wrap and fingerless gloves” and Joe “wore an illfitting suit.”
That’s pretty much how I remember them too.
Recently, Trump has changed his tune on Toensing and Digenova. As he attempts to cling to power like a thirdrate autocrat—and as his real lawyers abandon him in droves—he has turned to his most shameless stalwarts, his litigatory B-team, his cadre of grifters always eager to defend him, no matter the damage to their reputations.
That includes Rudy Giuliani, of course—but it also includes his old friends, Vicky and Joe.
A couple weeks ago Trump tweeted that he had added the couple to his “truly great team” now actively trying to subvert the American election. Even more comically, at that disastrous press conference last Thursday—where Giuliani’s hair started melting—vicky and Joe were described (without irony) as being part of an “elite strike force … working on behalf of the president.”
Well shucks, if I’d known how elite they were, I would’ve appreciated my time with them more!