7-Up vs. Coke Part 2

When he graduated from high school back in 1980, Gladney's classmates at John Burroughs predicted that by age 28 he'd be "Chairman of the Board of the Coca-Cola Company."

Though it was a riff on the wealthy Gladney's family ties — his grandfather, Franklin Gladney, was a co-founder of the 7-Up Company — by the mid-1990s the soft-drink scion was indeed running his own business, having launched the Internet startup Diamond.Net (soon to be renamed Savvis Communications Corporation) and assumed the dual role of president and CEO.

But beneath the big-time boardroom veneer of success lurked less-glamorous realities. By the time Savvis held its initial public offering, Gladney had been cast aside. A second ambitious Internet-based sports media venture, MAX Broadcasting Network, went belly-up almost before it got off the ground.

And now, as the fabric of his marriage was fraying, Gladney spiced up his trust fund-draining lifestyle by embarking on a new love affair — with cocaine.

Big time, all the time!"

It was the MAX Broadcasting slogan, but as one former colleague puts it, "it's how Andrew lived his life."

Money was a main accessory. A Harley, a Porsche, a $30,000 stereo system, lockers at private clubs — Bellerive, Racquet, Fox Run — Gladney relished them all, not to mention family heirlooms like his mother's Steinway piano and his father's antique guns.

He refused to marry in 1992 without a prenuptial agreement, and was insistent — despite Cindy's efforts to change the clause — that in the event of a divorce he would never pay alimony. (She acquiesced.)

Ex-Diamond.Net/Savvis employees recall Gladney carrying wads of hundred-dollar bills. He held court Fridays after work at the old Ramon's Jalapeño in Clayton, regularly picking up the tab. Gladney also fancied himself a ladies' man, former associates say. "I always called him a buck in rut," Gary Zimmerman remembers. "If you went out to lunch with him and a good-looking woman walked by, the next thing you knew he'd be off trying to get a date with her."

It was during Diamond.Net's first year of business that Gladney's marriage dissolved. Cindy complained of her husband's alcohol and drug use and infidelity, going so far as to include in court documents an allegation of "an attempted sexual relationship with [her] sister." Gladney in turn griped that Cindy was controlling and uninterested in him sexually. The couple's only child was nine months old when they separated.

Tim Roberts says the domestic drama caused collateral damage: "I teamed up with Cindy, and that ended Andrew's and my relationship."

Gladney's wandering eye is also said to have contributed to his demise at Savvis. For years stories of questionable after-hours activities at the office had swirled among the rank and file. (Dick Ford, John McCarthy and then-company president Clyde Heintzelman did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

The Gladneys fought it out in a five-day trial in 1997. In the end they shared custody of their son. Cindy failed to obtain alimony and Andrew kept the couple's home on Picardy Lane in Ladue. His girlfriend, Jeanie Haines, a Savvis employee, moved in.

And for a time Gladney kept up his lavish lifestyle. According to a New York Times real estate article from 2000, Gladney and Haines were looking forward to spending part of that summer in a $25,000-a-month East Hampton rental on Long Island. But by early the following year, MAX Broadcasting was no more and Gladney was out of work.

In the spring he was arrested on a felony drug charge for delivering cocaine to a woman at the (since-shuttered) T.G.I. Friday's on Brentwood Boulevard. Represented in court by Scott Rosenblum, Gladney received three years' probation and a suspended sentence.

Around the time of the arrest, Gladney struck up a relationship with a nineteen-year-old woman from Springfield, Illinois. Subsequent court records indicate the two met via an Internet sex chat room for which she worked part-time, where paying customers could chat with her online or by phone and watch her simulate various sex acts. The first night Gladney telephoned her, the woman would later state in a sworn deposition, she gave him her personal number.

Gladney and the young woman — he knew her by her middle name, Rachelle — got together three times in St. Louis. What enticed her, she'd later say, were his promises of cocaine and cash. "I was desperate for money," she stated in her deposition.

Rachelle said she and Gladney consumed copious amounts of cocaine on all three visits. They fooled around in the former MAX Broadcasting office and engaged in sexual acts with a male friend of Gladney. Rachelle testified that Gladney claimed he "really liked men" and "was really into" watching gay couples have sex. She didn't resist when Gladney and his friend tied her legs behind her head during the sex acts, she said under oath.

"I really did enjoy this last weekend," she wrote to Gladney in an e-mail, according to the court file, "you have brought out Rachelle, the part of me that I love most."

But Rachelle's view of the relationship changed after their third "date," on April 11, 2001. It began on a Friday afternoon at the MAX office, she stated in her deposition, and continued with a visit to a strip club before another romp through the office for more cocaine and foreplay with one of Gladney's female friends.

In the evening, Rachelle and Gladney checked into room 1415 at the Ritz-Carlton in Clayton. There, Rachelle stated, Gladney asked her to put makeup on him. He invited the resident in the room next door to engage in sex with the couple, she testified, and he invited two bellboys into the room, separately, and she performed sex acts on each while Gladney watched.

After a shower, Rachelle testified, Gladney tied her up. He "proceeded to bite my legs," she stated. When she attempted to pull away, she alleged, "[h]e slapped my face and slapped my clitoris and he told me that he would only ease up if he wanted to...." Rachelle testified that Gladney bit her on numerous other parts of her body and wrapped the tie from a terrycloth robe around her neck until she cried.

Eventually Gladney left. Court papers indicate that Rachelle woke up the next morning and ordered room service for breakfast, then departed as well. Sometime later she went to police.

In May 2001 the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney's Office charged Gladney with two felony counts of sodomy and one count of first-degree assault.

Gladney's girlfriend Jeanie Haines, who was pregnant with his child, left him. His ex-wife, Cindy, requested that his custody rights to their son be rescinded, alleging that the boy was in his care at the time of his arrest.

Gladney, still out of work, strenuously fought the charges. He was prepared to go to trial, according to attorney Rosenblum, who says he intended to prove that the alleged victim was sexually active with other men at the time, and to argue that the relations between his client and Rachelle were entirely consensual.

On October 4, 2001, Gladney's second son was born. Haines had taken him back, and by Halloween Gladney had further cause to celebrate: County prosecutors had reviewed the case and decided to drop all charges against the new dad.

Joe Taylor was working late on a summer evening in 2004 when he heard the click-clack of the door to his office suite unlocking. The attorney peered into the lobby and beheld a muscular man, shirtless and wearing a pair of camouflage cut-offs, stumbling in. "He's holding a stepladder and a light bulb, and he's clearly drunk, and I say, 'Can I help you?'" recounts Taylor, a local attorney. "He says, 'I bought the building. I'm your new owner. I came to change a light bulb.'"

The landlord — Andrew Gladney — proceeded to "jaw" at breakneck pace, Taylor says, about the million-dollar professional and residential condos he envisioned for the building. Gladney suggested Taylor should stick around as a tenant.

"You play Ping-Pong?" Taylor says Gladney suddenly blurted. "Come with me!"