Gordon T. Cleveland, the sales assistant at StarQuest Shooters in Wilmington, Del., who sold Hunter a Colt Cobra .38 Special in October 2018, was as good a prosecution witness as could be in the third day of Hunter Biden’s gun trial in Wilmington federal court Wednesday.
Cleveland, a father of three with diabetes who drives a trash truck for the city, had a second job at the gun shop to make ends meet when the fresh prince of Delaware strolled in late one Friday evening.
Hunter told Cleveland to keep the $13.19 change from the $900 cash he paid for his purchases.
But the salesman was so honest that he thought it would be wrong to keep it.
The store owner told the employee the money was his, but Cleveland sets himself high ethical standards, so he put the money in an envelope and left it by the cash register.
“I don’t keep tips,” he told the Wilmington jury.
“It’s not what you do in sales.”
Hunter’s attorney Abbe Lowell tried to portray Cleveland as nothing but a pushy salesman who coerced Hunter into buying the gun, the ammo, the speed loader, the BB gun and the multitool gadget.
But Cleveland points out he got the same salary whether he sold anything or not.
He was just good at his job and loves guns, which is why his colleagues called him “the whale-hunter.”
Like a ‘Real Housewife’
It was Hunter who behaved like a Real Housewife in Louis Vuitton, grabbing accessories off the shelf to add to his haul and driving off in his father’s black Cadillac CTS.
Cleveland’s appearance capped off a week of testimony and jury selection that highlighted the aristocratic status of the Biden family in the small state of Delaware where Hunter’s father has wielded power for 50 years.
As senator, VP and president, Joe Biden has outstripped even the Du Ponts he grew up envying.
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The Biden family’s power and privilege strikes fear into the little people of Delaware, like John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the now-defunct computer-repair store where Hunter abandoned his infamous laptop five years ago.
Mac Isaac was so frightened of the Bidens that when he saw the incriminating evidence on the laptop, he made a hard-drive copy with a note and gave it to a friend with instructions not to open it unless something happened to him.
Mac Isaac remains a recluse.
Ron Palimere, the owner of StarQuest Shooters, told the FBI that he and his employees were “all scared to death” when Hunter’s gun purchase blew up into a “big scandal” after Hunter’s then-lover Hallie Biden threw the revolver in an open trash can and it went missing.
Palimere “felt they were going to get in trouble just for going up against Biden.”
The class divide is evident in the courtroom each day, when First Lady Jill Biden and Hunter’s wife, Melissa Cohen, sit in the front row dressed to the nines alongside Secret Service bodyguards while jurors of various shapes and sizes shiver in the ultra-air-conditioned courtroom a few feet away.
It was evident in the witness box Wednesday, where Hunter’s low-key ex-wife Kathleen Buhle testified for less than 30 minutes.
She was a working-class Catholic girl from Chicago when she met Hunter fresh out of school and was blown away by the grandeur of the Du Pont mansion where Hunter had grown up.
“A kid from a middle-class family does not have a ballroom,” she told him, according to her memoir.
She was always made to feel unworthy to be a Biden.
Joe made sure everyone knew that Hunter had once dated a Du Pont heir.
Striking resemblance
Slim and petite, with a dark blond bob, brown pantsuit and a small gold cross around her neck, Kathleen bore a striking resemblance to Judge Maryellen Noreika.
She told the jury in world-weary tones how her 22-year marriage to Hunter ended.
One day in 2015, she found a crack pipe in an ashtray on the porch of their Washington home and Hunter matter-of-factly told her it was crack.
She didn’t realize the marriage was over until she discovered the “adultery.”
Hunter’s affair with brother Beau’s widow Hallie Biden was the last straw.
Hallie is expected to testify Thursday.
In contrast to Kathleen, Hunter’s young ex-lover Zoe Kestan was a bubbly presence in the witness box.
She had recently graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and was a dancer at a “gentleman’s club” in Manhattan in late 2017 when Hunter asked for a private dance in an upstairs room.
He immediately lit up a crack pipe, she testified.
She found him “charming,” gave him her number and spent most of 2018 bouncing around luxury hotel rooms with him in New York and LA.
She spent five weeks with him holed up in a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont when he learned to cook crack on a four-burner stove in the kitchenette.
She was 24 and he was “twice my age, so 48.”
She didn’t smoke crack and always tried to get him to go into rehab.
He promised he would but kept smoking crack every 20 minutes that he was awake.
The power imbalance between them was not just age, but money.
She had none and he had thousands of dollars in cash that he would lavish on her.
In return, she seemed to be content to be his abject slave, at his beck and call whenever he said he was lonely even though he lied to her and let her down, promised to be there for her birthday but went AWOL.
Just another disposable person of no consequence in his life.
Always a soft landing
You wonder what the jury makes of Hunter’s $3.4 million bank balance flashing up on the courtroom video screen, his $50,000 a month in ATM withdrawals, his frenetic crack purchases, the luxury hotels, the repeated stints in expensive rehab, the yoga retreats, the glittering résumé studded with privilege — Archmere Academy, Georgetown, Yale, MBNA.
He hit rock bottom, but there is always a soft landing for a Biden.
On his way out of court, carrying folders for his lawyers and ostentatiously displaying a copy of his memoir “Beautiful Things,” he joked “I’m taking the case myself.”
The book has experienced a surge in sales on Amazon since the trial began.