One morning, a federal prosecutor named John Davis was driving to his job at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in St. Louis when he looked in the rearview mirror of his Toyota Yaris and spotted a BMW flying up behind him on Interstate 64.

Davis eyed the luxury car as it grew larger and larger in the mirror. When it blazed past him, the driver was a blur, but he immediately noticed the name on the vanity license plate — TANCO.

“One of these days, I’m going to get that guy,” Davis said aloud.

For years, the career prosecutor had heard about Todd Beckman, the founder of a chain of tanning salons called TanCo. The perpetually bronzed CEO was a local success story, turning a tanning bed in the back of his father’s beauty parlor into a small empire that extended across more than a dozen states. He opened not just tanning salons but massage parlors and gyms. In the coming years, he would debut yet another concept — a line of hormone and supplement centers, offering aging men the promise of recapturing their youthful vigor.

It was a lifestyle Beckman not only sold but embodied. Then in his mid-40s, he was a notorious playboy with blond highlights in his hair and a smile worthy of a toothpaste ad. He had a reputation as a hard-partying daredevil with a fondness for beautiful women, gaudy automobiles and anything that could go fast. He was even for a time a professional powerboat racer on the Formula One circuit, blitzing across waterways from Creve Coeur to the Florida Keys.

All that was fine, but it was Beckman’s rumored side business, importing crates of marijuana, that interested Davis.

A month older than Beckman, the prosecutor had spent his federal career assigned to the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, which focuses on large-scale narcotics conspiracies. Part of the job was talking to defendants who hoped to trade information on the bad deeds of others in exchange for shorter prison sentences. In those conversations, Beckman’s name had come up often enough to make Davis suspect the tanning mogul was up to something more than peddling a year-round glow to strip-mall customers.

Agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration had also taken an interest in the flashy CEO, according to an agency official. So far, they did not have anything to present to prosecutors. Frankly, Beckman was a small fish compared to the major traffickers moving heroin, cocaine and mass quantities of marijuana through the metro area. And yet a supposedly legitimate businessman brazenly flouting the law had a way of annoying those responsible for enforcing it.

Davis watched the BMW and its TANCO plates speed out of sight. That was that.

But then, about four years later, in December 2016, the prosecutor was groggily watching the 4 a.m. news when the story of a vicious kidnapping caught his attention. A young Maplewood man had been abducted from his home, beaten and tortured for three days until his family paid a $27,000 ransom.

The names of four suspects — a pair of twenty-something brothers named Blake and Caleb Laubinger, 24-year-old Zachary Smith and 55-year-old Kerry Roades — meant nothing to Davis. But mention of the fifth made him sit up in bed.

“Did I just hear ‘Todd Beckman’?”

Todd Beckman’s marijuana arrived every month in shipments from California. An eighteen-wheeler would back up to the loading dock of his corporate headquarters at 11 Champion Drive in Fenton and offload crates of what appeared to be industrial toolboxes.

It was a good cover. The building, which included offices and a large warehouse, was the nerve center of Beckman’s wide-ranging interests. Over the years, more than two dozen corporations have been registered there under his watch. Some fizzled, but others, including MassageLuXe and LifeXist gyms, had grown into multi-state franchises. The warehouse teemed with motorcycles, sports cars, racing go-karts or whatever else happened to grab Beckman’s attention.

When a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter visited in 2010 for a profile of the successful entrepreneur, she noted walls covered with photos of him racing during his Formula One days, along with a “human-sized trophy” planted near his desk.

“You’ve got to be motivated,” Beckman told her. “That’s why I have all those pictures here. They’re not just because I like to see myself. It’s because it reminds me of winning.”

With everything going on, no one was going to notice a couple nondescript crates arriving every four weeks.

It was Kerry Roades’ job to handle the incoming cargo. A capable mechanic and generally handy when it came to building or fixing things, he had helped take care of the literal nuts and bolts of Beckman’s big ideas for two decades. Once the crates were in the warehouse, Roades cracked them open and retrieved the true payload — between 50 and 80 pounds of marijuana in airtight packaging.

From there, the weed went to Blake Laubinger, a dull-eyed young drug dealer who started as an investor in one of Beckman’s gyms and became an awestruck protégé. Laubinger stashed the pot at his house in the small town of Pacific, Missouri, parceling it out to a network of low-level dealers and then collecting the proceeds from their sales. He and Beckman split profits of about $800 per pound and sent the rest back to their supplier in California. On an 80-pound shipment, they could each clear $32,000, maybe more if the market was good.

The operation hummed along month after month until October 2016, when Laubinger returned home to find his house had been burglarized. The 24-year-old searched desperately, but it was just as he feared — his safe with $15,000 and 24 pounds of marijuana was gone.

In a panic, he called both Beckman and his older brother, 26-year-old Caleb Laubinger, and told them what happened. He even called Pacific police and reported the burglary, although he wisely omitted the bit about the missing marijuana and drug money.

Both were problems. Not only had Blake Laubinger fronted his network of dealers — putting up the weed on the promise of being paid after they sold it — but Beckman had fronted him. Forget about profits; he was now in debt tens of thousands of dollars to the tanning mogul, and he worried about the consequences.

“I mean, it wasn’t a good situation,” Blake later told prosecutors. “There was a lot of money lost, and I had no way of paying it.”

In the short term, he says, his brother loaned him $75,000 to buy time. (Caleb Laubinger claims it was only $3,000.) But the only real solution was to find the burglar and get their money back.

Luckily for Blake, he knew exactly who had ripped him off. A fellow drug dealer, Ellis Athanas III, knew where Blake kept the marijuana and had easy access to the house, because the two 24-year-olds had been literal partners in crime ever since meeting in 2010 at St. Louis Community College. Both were student drug dealers at the time and decided to team up.

Athanas had long, light brown hair that hung past his shoulders, contributing to his surfer-bro vibe. He had met Beckman just once (when the middle-aged entrepreneur complained of an aching back, Athanas suggested they go to hot yoga together), but he knew when the shipments were incoming. After all, he was one of the people who had helped sell them.

Athanas had been peddling marijuana since he was about sixteen years old but recently had grown more interested in daring drug ripoffs. “Seizing dealers’ assets,” is the way he described it.

Blake Laubinger had teamed up with him on a few such escapades. Athanas would arrange to meet another seller in an out-of-the way location, snatch the drugs and speed off in his car. Blake, parked just out of sight, would wait until his partner passed and then pull his truck across the road, cutting off any pursuers.

Now, he discovered, he was the one whose assets had been seized. And his former accomplice was on the run.

By reputation, the Proud Boys are fighters.

This past August, the far-right group gathered on the streets of Portland with its fellow travelers for a rally all but guaranteed to start a brawl. On one side were young men in MAGA hats wearing distinctive black polo shirts with yellow piping on the collars and sleeves. On the other, an assortment of avowed anti-fascist groups commonly lumped together as Antifa. The two sides circled, cat-called and then, inevitably, tried to knock the crap out of each other.

Sticks, shields, bricks, bottles and mace were deployed, as small groups and individual brawlers clashed amid the sound of police flash bangs and homemade mortars. Both sides came prepared with helmets and homemade body armor.

For the Proud Boys, fights like these are good for their image — a powerful advertisement to their ideal recruits. On the flip side of that empowerment is bitterness. The group thrives on painting itself as a victim of left-wing persecution.

The Proud Boys organization is less than two years old, and has spent its entire existence fending off accusations that its members are part of a violent gang of white supremacists. In 2017, the Southern Poverty Law Center classified it as a “general hate group,” a title the Proud Boys fiercely contest.

What is undeniable, though, is that some members of the Proud Boys have appeared uncomfortably close, figuratively and literally, to modern-day Nazis and white supremacists. Jason Kessler, a Proud Boy who was since excommunicated, organized the infamous 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Other Proud Boys attended.

While the most active Proud Boy chapters operate on the coasts, smaller ones have opened in cities across the country, including two in Missouri: in Kansas City and St. Louis. One estimate places total membership across the U.S. at 6,000. Numbers are growing. But the attention has its costs.

This has been a generally terrible summer for the St. Louis Proud Boys. They’ve been hounded by local Antifa groups. On lampposts, signs appeared blaring the members’ names and photos beneath a warning: FASCIST ALERT. A placard in a storefront window proclaimed “Proud Boys Not Welcome.” And while in Portland the Proud Boys met street fighters, in St. Louis they were confronted with something much trickier: a social media onslaught directed at both them and any venue unfortunate enough to host them. They’ve been run out of two bars — and had their private Facebook groups infiltrated.

In July, Riverfront Times received an email from a Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based “anti-fash collective” calling itself Right Wing Leaks. Posing as a recruit via a fabricated Facebook account, the collective managed to pass the Proud Boy vetting process and gain access to a closed Facebook group for Missouri Proud Boys. Right Wing Leaks then captured screenshots of members’ Facebook profiles and about two dozen videos of the St. Louis chapter’s initiation rites.

In one video, the president of the St. Louis chapter, a white guy with windblown black hair and aviator sunglasses, records himself taking the Proud Boy pledge.

“My name is Mike Lasater,” he says in the video. “I’m a Western chauvinist, and I refuse to apologize for creating the modern world.”

Lasater flashes an “OK” gesture, his index-finger and thumb joined to make an O along with three raised fingers.

He finishes the pledge. “The West is the best,” he says.

On the first Friday in August, Mike Lasater and two other Proud Boys settle on stools in a south-city bar. They’re drinking the group’s preferred beverage combination: Budweiser and straight shots of Maker’s Mark.

The bar, Tuckers, is a rarity for St. Louis. Not to be confused with Tucker’s Place, the well-loved trio of local steakhouses, this Tuckers is located so far south in the Patch neighborhood, it’s practically St. Louis County. It has a dive bar’s classic grungy charm — at 8:30 on this Friday night, karaoke night, the regulars are already blasted and teetering on their feet. But not many establishments in this deep-blue city hang a sign above their front door stating, in giant red letters, “TRUMP.” Below that, the sign, a veritable jumble of messages, shouts “St. Louis needs jobs and I need customers!!!” and “Support Your Police.”

Tuckers is the closest thing to a safe space that the Proud Boys have in St. Louis.

On the TV above the bar, the Cardinals are playing the Pirates. The Pittsburgh players’ black-and-yellow jerseys bear an uncanny resemblance to the tightly fit, black-and-yellow Fred Perry polo shirts worn by the three Proud Boys huddled at the bar’s least crowded end.

These three identically-clad young men, all in their late twenties, are talking about Portland.

“It actually proved one thing, and it’s that Antifa are the aggressors,” says Luke Rohlfing, a St. Louis native who travels the U.S. while writing for the right-wing news site Big League Politics. Rohlfing spent his morning tracking livestreams and Twitter feeds of the August 3 Portland action, which he then used to opine about how the leftists were to blame for the confrontation.

Next to Rohlfing, Lasater tips his beer in agreement. The Proud Boy chapter president wears two matching gold-leaf collar pins on his polo. His belt buckle spells out “candy,” and a gold medallion rests in a thicket of exposed chest hair. By Proud Boy standards, he’s as flamboyantly proud as they come.

“Left to our devices, we’re not a violent organization,” he says.

In conversation, Lasater tends to downplay the role of violence in the group’s DNA, focusing instead on similarities to traditional fraternal organizations, men’s clubs, the Freemasons and Knights of Columbus.

“We’re a drinking club,” he says, gesturing at the bar around him. “I mean, as the St. Louis Proud Boys, what have we done since we started? We’ve gone out for beers, and we’ve made friends.”

Perhaps. But they’ve made enemies, too. Lasater founded the local chapter in spring, not long after (as he tells it) a business partner at the bar he co-owned, the Livery Company, decided to out him on Facebook as a Trump voter. The partnership broke down from there, and he says he was forced to abandon his role.

The bar’s co-owner, Emily Ebeling, says Lasater’s departure had nothing to do with his political views, but admits that she was the one who publicized his vote for Trump.

“I did call him out for voting for Trump,” she says. “I considered him a friend, a close friend, and he had lots of friends who Trump wouldn’t protect. As a woman and a gay woman, I felt betrayed that he could vote for what Trump stands for.”

For the past five years, Cynthia Wren, 66, has applied to get her ten-year-old granddaughter, Ariel Gibson, into St. Louis’ student desegregation program.

The Voluntary Interdistrict Choice Corporation, or VICC, oversees the student transfer program. It is a race-based transfer that allows black city children to attend county schools, even as white students in the county can attend city magnet ones.

Ariel is black and lives in the Shaw neighborhood of St. Louis city. Part of her application includes ranking her interest in much more highly rated suburban districts. If she’s chosen, it could be a ticket to a top-tier public school district: Brentwood, Kirkwood, Clayton.

But she hasn’t gotten in. So the ten-year old attends Tower Grove Christian Academy. In lieu of sending her granddaughter to an elementary school run by the St. Louis Public Schools, or SLPS, Wren pays Ariel’s private school tuition. A former teacher’s assistant and current substitute for St. Louis County Special School District, Wren says that paying Ariel’s tuition is a hardship for her family.

“It’s not always easy,” she says. “But we do what we have to do.”

Wren plans to continue applying to VICC for her granddaughter in the years to come. But it’s a lottery situation, and with a 17 percent acceptance rate, the odds are against her.

“I just don’t understand the situation,” Wren says. “[Ariel’s] being skipped over and it breaks my heart to know she hasn’t gotten in.”

Ariel isn’t alone. In 1999, VICC reached its peak enrollment of 14,626 students. Since then, though, the program has been on steady decline. Last school year, 4,392 students were enrolled.

It’s not a case of lessening demand. A total of 2,488 black students living in the city applied to VICC for the 2017-2018 school year. Just 413 were accepted. (Of the 148 white students from the county who applied to attend St. Louis magnet schools through VICC, 85 were accepted.)

And the clock is ticking for Wren and her granddaughter. This month marks the official beginning of the end for the desegregation program, beginning the five-year extension that provides one final reprieve before the education leaders running VICC plan to shut it down entirely.

VICC oversees the longest-running race-based student transfer program in the nation, and even as it’s brought a dose of color to many affluent county districts, it’s also been a real boon to thousands of lucky city kids. State Representative Bruce Franks (D-St. Louis), who graduated from Lindbergh High School in 2002, is just one prominent alumnus.

Yet if you ask the people in charge of the program — the superintendents of the twelve schools that make up VICC’s governing board — what comes next, and what they’ll be doing to increase diversity in districts that would be largely monolithic absent the transfer students, they’ll acknowledge they don’t know just yet.

“We want to roll into this new five-year extension,” says Eric Knost, Rockwood superintendent and VICC chairman for the 2017-2018 school year. “Once things start to settle a little bit, we will start talking about what’s beyond the five-year extension.”

He acknowledges, “We really haven’t even scratched the surface yet on what’s to come.”

Since 1981, more than 70,000 black students from St. Louis city have attended schools in St. Louis County through the VICC program. Under its auspices, white students from the county have also been attending magnet schools in the city since 1982, albeit in much smaller numbers (9,000).

Those students have added much-needed diversity to some county districts. In 1999, the year of VICC’s peak enrollment, participating county districts notched an average of 20 percent black students. Had VICC not existed, the projected black enrollment would have averaged a mere 4 percent.

Nearly two decades later, not much has changed, demographically. In 2017, black enrollment within participating districts averaged around 15 percent. Without VICC it would’ve been just under 7 percent.

But as the years have gone by, some of VICC’s original participants have pulled out. Hazelwood, which was steadily growing more diverse even without transfer students, left in 1988. Ladue and Ritenour both exited in 1999, Pattonville in 2005 and Lindbergh in 2011. (Students in the program were allowed to graduate from the districts they’d been placed in, making the districts’ withdrawal a gradual one.)

According to VICC, the districts left the program after finding other ways to enable diversity in their schools. Ladue, for example, consolidated its ten neighborhood elementary schools to four in the 1970s. At that same time, Ladue also redrew its school boundaries. In doing so, the district, which is made up of nine municipalities (Creve Coeur, Crystal Lake Park, Frontenac, Huntleigh Village, Ladue, Olivette, Richmond Heights, Town and Country and Westwood) plus some parts of unincorporated St. Louis County, created more racial diversity in its schools.

Lindbergh, though, hasn’t quite done that. The district saw black enrollment as high as 20.56 percent in 1999 thanks to its participation in VICC. By the time it pulled out, that had dropped to 6.11 percent. Lindbergh’s last VICC student graduated in 2017, and at that point, its black enrollment had sunk to just 2.69 percent — around ten times smaller than it was in 1999.

In the coming years, absent some sort of replacement transfer program, what’s happening at Lindbergh could happen to districts across the county.

VICC’s board approved that final five-year extension in November 2016. It’s set to run from the school year that just began through 2023-2024 and will accept around 1,000 students into the twelve participating school districts during these five years. Priority for acceptance into VICC during its final extension will be given to siblings of students already in the program.

It’s a long goodbye, by any measure. If a kindergartner is chosen for the program during its last year, 2023, he or she wouldn’t be on track to graduate until 2036 — walking an increasingly lonely road as other minority students graduate and move on.

From its inception, VICC’s model was built on continual phase-out. The program was set up in 1999 to dwindle at a rate of 5 percent over a twenty-year period. And that’s exactly the outline its remaining districts are following.

VICC leaders say that their long-held plan to phase out the program dovetails nicely with the growing ambitions of the St. Louis Public Schools. After all, VICC takes black students to county schools who would have otherwise been zoned to attend city schools.

“Clearly, county schools benefit [from VICC] by creating a more real and diverse student environment,” Knost says. “At the same time, we have got to keep the interest of the SLPS.”

In 2012, the St. Louis district regained provisional accreditation after five years of operating as non accredited. In 2017, the district became fully accredited.

“We are trying to be competitive as we can for families to look at us as a real option,” SLPS superintendent Kelvin Adams says.

But while Adams says he believes the desegregation program has fulfilled its purpose, he agrees the ending of this iteration of VICC may not mean the end of transfer programs between the city and county school districts.

“I’m not saying it can’t continue in some way, shape or form in the future,” Adams says.

Maalik Shakoor, 22, graduated from Clayton High School in 2014. He was bussed from his neighborhood of Baden in north St. Louis for the twelve years he was in VICC: first to Bierbaum Elementary School in south county, then to Clayton for middle and high school.

Shakoor graduated from Webster University in May with a degree in film production. He’s spent the summer as a teacher at the Freedom School in St. Louis.

Though Shakoor wishes he could have gotten a strong education in his own neighborhood, he sees the value in VICC.

“If [black children in the city] can’t get a good, quality education where they’re at, then the next best solution is to bus them out,” he says. “Until the city schools can be up to par with the county schools, I see no other option.”