May 17, 2014 03:03 PM UTC

Colorado's own Bill Koch of the Famous Kochs - new book shows a Helluva Guy in a Freak Family

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• by: Zappatero

(Lifestyles of the rich and creepy? – Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Some of the World Famous, Colorado-centric, Billionaire Koch Brothers family history is about to come out. And their anti-social, radical, reactionary, and anti-government attitudes will make a lot more sense to a lot more people.

Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty aims to change that. Written by Mother Jones senior editor Daniel Schulman, the biography, set to be released Tuesday, draws on hundreds of interviews with Koch family and friends, as well as thousands of pages of legal documents. The Huffington Post received a copy of the book on Friday.

Father Fred Koch started Koch Industries and led the family with an iron first. Purely by coincidence, he also liked the reigning Fascists of the day:

At the center of the saga is patriarch Fred Koch, a staunch anti-communist who drilled his political ideology into his sons from a young age. In 1938, then sympathetic to the fascist regimes ruling Germany, Italy and Japan, Fred wrote that he hoped one day the United States would resemble these nations, which had "overcome" the vices of "idleness, feeding at the public trough, [and] dependence on government."

Elsewhere, Fred warned of a future "vicious race war" in which communists would pit black Americans against white. "The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America," he wrote.

Wow, it couldn't be more clear where the Right-wing's hatred of Obama and its ridiculous fear of him being a "communist" or "socialist" or "Kenyan anti-colonialist" came from. It came from long-held views of the kind of Reactionary Republicans and Conservatives that are evident in the Koch brothers' family history.

Those views fill the void left by a lack of ideas on how to govern within today's modern conservative movement.

In private, Fred Koch "ruled the house with an iron fist” and faith in social Darwinism. Schulman recounts how the former boxer encouraged his sons to fight each other, sometimes with horrifying results. "During one bout, Bill bashed his twin over the head with a polo mallet," Schulman writes. And "David still bears a scar from the time Bill pierced him in the back with a ceremonial sword." Those early lessons left a deep imprint on the brothers.

Bill lives in Colorado now. Wayyyyyyyyy up in the mountains where no one can bother him. He sounds vicious. Wonder how he treats the "help"?

More on Billy Boy:

In 2000, Bill's then-wife Angela, the mother of two of his children, called the police to accuse Bill of punching her in the stomach and threatening "to beat his whole family to death with his belt." Bill was charged with domestic assault and threatening to commit murder. Angela later recanted parts of her account, shortly before receiving a divorce settlement worth $16 million.

Nonetheless, Bill spent decades waging vicious legal battles against Charles and David, which cost the family tens of millions of dollars. Much of the book revolves around Bill's failed attempts to gain control of Koch Industries.

As Schulman recounts, Bill hired private investigators to bug his brothers' offices and pick through the garbage cans at their homes. He planted false memos aimed at rooting out spies in his own company, Oxbow Mining (my brother worked there for a bit-Z), who he suspected were secretly working for his brothers.

While Bill's anger may have been rooted in childhood rivalries, according to Schulman, it was exacerbated by Charles' ultra-libertarian business philosophy, which Bill considered bad for business. Schulman describes how Charles, and by extension Koch Industries, regularly ignored environmental regulations on principle, believing them to be a hallmark of "Big Brother" government.

There's more where this came from, folks. Stay tuned for the exciting and whacky history of America's most famous Oligarchs: Charles and David and Bill and Fred Koch.