The death knell first tolled over the intercom. “Attention, please,” the familiar voice of Debbie the receptionist was almost formal in its intonation. “Everyone meet in the main conference room for a brief but important meeting. Everyone please meet in the main conference room.”
Never before had the entire firm been summoned all together. Earlier that day, October 19, 2000, company president Jim Hradecky was in his office with the door closed, another disturbing first at Berry-Brown Advertising Inc. And had anyone seen Phil?
The staff hurriedly hung up phones, shuffled papers, shut drawers, and closed computer windows before heading to the conference room. More than 40 people squeezed around the 12-seat table and stood along the walls, when Hradecky and partner Sharon Griesing walked in. There was near silence.
“As some of you may know, Phil has been missing,” said Hradecky. “We just learned from his family that police found his body at his ranch in Oklahoma.” They weren’t sure yet about the circumstances, Hradecky continued, but he would let them know as he found out more.
What they found out over the next few days was that Phil Schieber, the company’s chief financial officer, had been embezzling money. When they learned the extent of the theft—about $6.25 million—they also discovered that as of November 22, the day before Thanksgiving, the company was broke. Forty-six employees were out of work.
Schieber, 38, had ended his own life with a single shotgun blast just above the nose. But it might as well have been an atom bomb that dropped into the heart of Berry-Brown, which was wiped out after 23 years as a major player in the Dallas advertising world.
Dust has barely begun to settle in Suite 1100 at the Citymark building, which has a beautiful view of the Dallas skyline, southeast over the azaleas along Turtle Creek Boulevard over Crescent Center to downtown’s skyscrapers. But other than the vista, there’s nothing left at the old Berry-Brown office space, save for a few stray screwdrivers and a few piles of swept-up debris. All the furniture, computers, appliances, and other salvageables have been auctioned off. There’s not a file folder in sight—many of them are now in the possession of lawyers and accountants. All the signs, pictures, bulletins, and comic strips are gone from the sand-colored maze of corridors and half-walls. It feels like the inside of an ant farm without the ants.
“It’s pathetic,” says Bill Siegel of Seeberger and Siegel, the law firm representing Berry-Brown in a probate action against the estate of Phil Schieber. “One month you think you have a successful ad firm. The next….”
Hradecky doesn’t want to talk about it. And who can blame him? He’s cleaning up after Schieber, who was a trusted friend and business partner for 10 years. Not only is an investigation ongoing, but Hradecky has also been left trying to rebuild bridges with longtime clients and vendors who are owed money the company doesn’t have. And as much as this kind of thing isn’t supposed to happen anywhere, it really wasn’t supposed to happen at a place like Berry-Brown.
The company was a bay of stability in a sea of local ad firms, a business that tends to be tumultuous by nature. Its accounts were hardly sexy—Quaker Oats, Daisy Sour Cream, Jimmy Dean Sausage, and Aunt Jemima syrups and pancake mixes, to name a few—but all were solid. Several clients had been in business with Berry-Brown for 20 years or more. More concerned about keeping old clients than acquiring new ones, the company prided itself on its old-fashioned customer service. Berry-Brown competed successfully with larger, flashier firms for national accounts, and it did so without an entertainment budget. Clients knew they wouldn’t be wined, dined, or golfed, but they also knew they could call their representatives—or even the president—at home, if a problem ever arose.
Berry-Brown got and kept its employees the same way—with a personal, unpretentious touch. “It was the perfect job,” says former employee Melissa Bohnen.“The owners were great. They took really good care of us.” It was a corporate family where people generally signed on thinking about their retirement benefits more than their potential for a diagonal move. The big firms often came recruiting, tempting employees with higher salaries, glitzy perks, and better chances for promotion. But Berry-Brown employees usually turned the offers down, intent on ending their careers in an office that had become home. Women with designs on motherhood felt secure that Hradecky would create part-time positions for them. And in a symbolic token of graciousness, upper management took all the inside offices, leaving the rest of the staff an inspiring view of Dallas.
Schieber helped engender this family philosophy while climbing from accountant to upper management to ownership. Company founder Bob Berry hired Schieber 10 years ago, along with Jim Hradecky and Sharon Griesing. After years of grooming, Berry sold a majority interest of his company to the three of them in 1998. Schieber’s slice of the pie was 11 percent.
He never married or had children, but Schieber left behind 45 co-workers who believed he was taking care of more than just the books; they believed he was taking care of their financial futures. “It was really hard and most bizarre,” recalls Bohnen, who says her emotions swung from shocked to saddened to “pissed off” that she didn’t have a job. “It didn’t make sense,” she adds. “It still doesn’t. The owners were so good to us—all three of them. I don’t know what to say.” Even now, few want to speak publicly about the man who crossed their paths every day, knowing full well he was stealing from them.
Jovially referred to as Berry-Brown’s “grumpier old man,” Schieber was a bit of an outsider—a left-brain number cruncher surrounded by right-brain creative types. Still, he seldom missed the company’s bimonthly happy hour, and in fact, he usually picked up the tab.
The company seemed to be thriving under the Hradecky-Griesing-Schieber team. It consistently made the Dallas Business Journal’s list of Dallas’ top 10 advertising firms, and the company won a handful of Addys, Effies, and other industry awards. Grupo Cuatro, Berry-Brown’s Spanish-language advertising division, was admired in the industry.
Pulling in $58 million in 1999, Berry-Brown was growing and, supposedly, profiting. “They were always one of the stronger and more vibrant places in town,” says Pete Rozier, vice president of Dallas-based Saunders-Ream and Bob Berry’s co-worker in the 1970s. “The fact that they managed to stay independent is pretty impressive, too.”
Consolidation is a fact of life in the advertising industry. There were 250 mergers last year alone. During Hradecky and Schieber’s time at Berry-Brown, any inquiry into an acquisition was usually over within two meetings. But that changed last year when a large national firm (Berry-Brown officials and attorneys refused to say which one) approached them. This time meetings went on for nearly six months. With a deal on the verge of being inked, the two companies had a meeting set up for October 18 to begin due diligence. But Schieber was a no-show.
If he had been there, he would have had problems answering questions about multiple fund transfers from Berry-Brown’s operating account to its money market account, which had been set up as an investment vehicle. And when the acquiring company’s accountants dug deeper, Schieber would have had serious problems with questions about transfers from the money market account to accounts with Shorecrest and MAP Investments. The accounts transacted no business other than cutting checks to Schieber. By the time of his death, $6.25 million had been transferred through these accounts.
Most of that money now seems to be gone. “He basically just spent it lavishly, from what we can tell,” says Berry-Brown attorney Bill Siegel. Much of it appears to have been given away in the form of expensive gifts. He bought a few vehicles—a Suburban, a Corvette, and a motorcycle—and more than 200 acres of ranch land in Oklahoma, where he kept two dozen racehorses, for which he paid nearly $30,000 each.
The day after Schieber failed to show for the merger meeting, Hradecky called Jim Pratt, the caretaker of Schieber’s ranch. Pratt found his boss on the ranch house’s soft green lawn lying on his side, curled up in a fetal position with a 12-gauge shotgun between his knees and a hole through his brain. According to Love County Undersheriff Charlie Hughes, Schieber had whittled a small stick, about 8 inches long, that he used to push the trigger.
In the last days before Berry-Brown shut its doors, the somber hallways were thick with tight-lipped strangers carrying huge briefcases. They were accountants mainly, trying to make sense of Schieber’s books and trying to find money. Walking with them were Griesing and Hradecky, the two remaining partners. Hradecky, already a slim man, appeared to have lost about 10 pounds since that first all-staff meeting.
The merger fell through, as did other efforts to find a buyer for Berry-Brown. Hradecky had to face the reality that his once profitable company was $4.9 million in the hole. With Schieber’s estate worth not much more than $1.2 million and with Berry-Brown’s lease at the Citymark due to expire in December, no amount of creative accounting could keep the ship afloat.
Instead of declaring bankruptcy, Hradecky held off on dissolving the company officially. Siegel says this move, though more difficult, gives creditors a chance to recoup more money. They are still trying to find assets in the Schieber estate and are weighing the costs of hiring a forensic accountant to dig deeper. “We’re not discounting anything,” says Siegel, “but nothing so far has suggested there are any off-shore accounts or shown us that there’s anyone else holding any money. Right now it just looks like he spent most of it.”
There was some hope that that his $30,000 racehorses could generate extra capital, but as it turned out, Schieber had grossly overpaid. Each horse was worth only about $5,000. The only good news came when attorneys learned Schieber’s two life insurance policies did not have suicide clauses to render them null and void.
Since the abrupt shutdown, most of the Berry-Brown family landed softly. Dallas-based Slingshot absorbed some of the Grupo Cuatro team, and Houston-based Fogarty Klein Monroe hired most of the management team, including Hradecky and Griesing, to expand and run its Dallas office.
For the former partners and employees of Berry-Brown, the view from Suite 1100 will never be as bright as it once was. Certainly not as innocent. Phil Schieber darkened all that when he stole the company’s money and ended his life. Perhaps worst of all, Schieber took with him the answer to the question that haunts everyone left behind, “Why?”
Dan Michalski is a Dallas-based freelance writer. His work has appeared in Cosmopolitan, Maxim, and Texas Monthly. He also teaches at St. Mark’s.
