Unindicted Co-Conspirator? with Millions to Burn and Suspicion to Match, Richard Scaife Feeds the Right's Fires

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"The death of Vincent Foster: I think that's the Rosetta Stone to the whole Clinton Administration," ultraconservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife told a New York Times reporter in 1995. "There are just too many questions that have no answers." Scaife thrives on conspiracy. Lacking close friends, and fascinated throughout his life by tales of media plots and C.I.A. intrigue, he is ready to believe the worst of just about anybody To those who have observed him through the years, there is an amusing irony in seeing Scaife now cast as a central figure in the "right-wing conspiracy" referred to by Hillary Clinton.

"He's the kind of person who looks under his bed every night before he goes to sleep," a longtime family acquaintance and prominent Republican remarked a year or so ago in trying to explain his personality. Some years ago, he hinted to a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter that a favorite dog had recently died "under mysterious circumstances." In the same interview, he reported that the most influential book he had read was The Spike (1980), Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss's paranoid fantasy in which a young reporter finds himself cast as a pawn in the Soviet Union's master plot to take over the world.

But unlike conspiracy buffs who have to depend on the Internet for daily updates on such matters as the Trilateral Commission's relationship to the Queen of England, Scaife, 65, can put his millions where his mind is. With effective control of three foundations whose assets total somewhere on the order of $300 million, as well as a private fortune that Forbes estimates at $1 …