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ST. LOUIS • He was a huckster. He was a visionary.

He drained public coffers. He created the catalyst that would fill them.

His secret land purchases had ravaged north St. Louis neighborhoods. His shrewd acquisitions had ushered in an era of transformation.

Paul McKee, one of the most polarizing figures in St. Louis, was at the center of a real estate transaction that held the fate of 3,000 jobs, a mayor’s legacy and the biggest investment ever in north St. Louis.

As always, divergent narratives dogged the real estate developer.

McKee had either stood in the path of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s new $1.75 billion urban St. Louis campus or handed the city its best shot at keeping the spy agency from fleeing to Illinois.

For the agency’s new home, the city needed to acquire 99 acres north of the former Pruitt-Igoe housing complex.

McKee owned 56 of those acres — land that McKee had acquired as part of his long-awaited 1,500-acre NorthSide Regeneration project.

The city was offering McKee his original purchase price: $1.4 million. McKee and his bank wanted $10 million.

In the summer of 2015, City Hall was split. Some aldermen suspected McKee was seeking to line his pockets, and a few mayoral advisers contemplated cutting him out of the deal entirely.

In the eyes of McKee’s critics, his broader NorthSide project was chronically stalled. He repeatedly asked for additional incentives despite having received $43 million in tax credits. He had defaulted on multimillion-dollar loans, and his real estate empire appeared to be faltering.

But to hear McKee tell it, he was on the verge of delivering the NGA campus to an area that desperately needed it, jump-starting one of the most ambitious urban renewal plans in the country.

The tension between the differing perspectives was mostly hidden from public view, until now.

Troves of public documents recently obtained by the Post-Dispatch, along with more than a dozen interviews, tell the story of negotiations that at key points teetered under the weight of political arm wrestling, litigation and the competing interests of those caught in McKee’s complex financial web.

Threats were made. Loyalties questioned. An intermediary summoned.

“Really what you had was a situation kind of like Russia and the United States,� said Larry Chapman, a developer who served as the go-between. “You had mutually assured destruction.�

The documents show how a variety of characters sought to take advantage of the conflict. A vulture fund scooped up McKee’s debt and turned a multimillion-dollar profit at taxpayers’ expense. The city discussed the possibility of handing off McKee’s project to an outside developer.

Meanwhile, one of McKee’s prime adversaries had the ear of key negotiators.

Ultimately none of the pressures proved powerful enough to end the city’s marriage to McKee — in part because taxpayers had provided such a large dowry.

Nearly a year ago, St. Louis Mayor Francis  — had selected the north St. Louis site over a rival location near Scott Air Force Base. The mayor thanked McKee for his role.

Instead of a divorce, the city and McKee renewed their vows.

An insulting snub

Perhaps the most significant display of brinkmanship occurred June 9, 2015.

McKee walked into City Hall for a sit-down with Slay, accompanied by his lawyer, Steve Stone, and his primary lender, the chief executive of the Bank of Washington, a 140-year-old bank in Washington, Mo.

Surprises were waiting. For starters, Slay was nowhere in sight.

Instead Slay’s then-chief of staff, Mary Ellen Ponder, informed the group that her boss would not be attending.

The snub stung. The men briefly discussed ending the meeting, but decided to stay.

Then-City Attorney Winston Calvert led with a play taken directly out of the hardball handbook. You have defaulted on the development agreement, he told McKee. The city, Calvert added, can repurchase the land at cost, and it’s an option we want to pursue.

To McKee, it was the worst betrayal — one that ignored his role in bringing both the NGA opportunity to the city and his entire NorthSide investment to its neighborhoods.

As early as 2003, McKee — after years of success in the suburbs — began acquiring properties in north St. Louis under an array of proxy companies.

Neighbors complained about neglect. Who was buying property that no one else wanted? That question was answered in 2007 when a local preservationist discovered Federal Reserve forms revealing McKee had a stake in companies purchasing land.

That same year, Slay supported a special state tax credit for assembling land in distressed areas — a mechanism that would ultimately provide nearly $40 million for McKee.

In 2009, the city’s Board of Aldermen approved a development agreement with McKee for 1,500 acres — or 2 square miles — of the city. Aldermen also provided .

The city agreed in 2012 to sell roughly 1,200 parcels to McKee, giving him a total of 2,000 parcels.

But fissures already were appearing in McKee’s empire — complications that would plague the NGA deal in coming years.

Chasing the NGA

For years, lawsuits by neighborhood opponents tied up NorthSide’s development rights in court. Then, in 2012, a bank obtained a $31 million against McKee when he defaulted on a loan to redevelop a site in Hazelwood — part of which had previously been a dump.

The Hazelwood project led to a falling-out between McKee and Stacy Hastie, owner of Environmental Operations Inc., who had a close business relationship with City Hall.

In a federal lawsuit, which has since been settled, Environmental Operations was alleged to have botched environmental work at the site. McKee has blamed Hastie for stalling the project.

Despite seemingly fatal setbacks, a faint light flickered on the horizon. It was widely assumed that the NGA, a major St. Louis employer, would at some point move from its circa 1827 facility just south of the Anheuser-Busch brewery.

Idle chatter turned serious in late 2012 when an anonymous entity — later shown to be representing the NGA — sent a request for information about potential sites for a large office campus.

The city offered the Carondelet Coke site next to the River Des Peres in south St. Louis, Slay said.

McKee the Pruitt-Igoe site, once home to a notorious public housing complex near Jefferson and Cass avenues. McKee previously had obtained an option on it from the city. He also offered up NorthPark, a 550-acre industrial development in north St. Louis County that he and partners had built.

In time, . Pruitt-Igoe and NorthPark were among them, as was land owned by St. Clair County next to Scott Air Force Base.

Many people viewed the site near the Air Force base as the front-runner. It was in a secure location next to another military operation. And it was already assembled and clear.

Who would want to build a $1.75 billion campus on ?

Yet, McKee said he believed the NGA was the city’s to lose. President Barack Obama had refocused federal investments in crumbling urban areas. Pruitt-Igoe was in a federal Promise Zone — a designation that prioritizes federal dollars to the area. In follow-up submissions to the government, McKee touted the project’s ability to break “the chain of poverty� and help address racial division.

But in September 2014, McKee learned of a wrinkle: The initial request for potential NGA sites failed to account for a 500-foot buffer needed to satisfy a security requirement.

The NGA needed more than 100 acres. Pruitt-Igoe was now too small.

The focus shifted north across Cass Avenue to a patch of mostly vacant land. McKee owned more than half of it.

At that point, a deal with the city became integral. The government had specified it would acquire the land only from a single source. The city had one tool to get the project done that McKee lacked: the power of eminent domain to obtain privately owned property.

But awkward questions emerged. Would the city have to buy land it had sold to McKee at a discount? What would be his asking price? And should taxpayers bail out a private developer and a bank that made risky loans?

Rising debt

McKee and his bank offered a simple justification for demanding the city pay nearly 10 times what he initially paid for the NGA land.

The acquisition cost, they said, is just a small part of assembling and maintaining large tracts of land in north St. Louis.

Those additional expenses had McKee swimming in debt and gave his primary lender a seat at the negotiating table with the city.

McKee had borrowed roughly $40 million from the Bank of Washington for the bulk of his property within NorthSide. McKee had offered to sell Pruitt-Igoe to the federal government at $4.36 a square foot, according to documents he provided to the Post-Dispatch. He and his bank expected to receive the same price from the city for the parcels within the NGA site. The figure equaled roughly $10 million.

But the city wanted to pay McKee only $1.4 million — the price he had paid for the land minus the value of any tax credits issued to reimburse McKee for the purchases. McKee had purchased some of the properties from the city.

For a bank that had made a considerable and controversial investment in an area virtually annihilated by white flight and neglect, the city’s price presented problems.

Documents obtained by the newspaper show that, on average, an acre of McKee’s NorthSide land was encumbered by at least $260,000 worth of debt — in essence making it as costly as vacant land in Chesterfield.

At the time, the Bank of Washington was under a with Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the federal agency that regulates banks. As part of that agreement, the bank was supposed to reduce high-risk assets and correct “violations of law,� among other things.

Another of McKee’s lenders, Corn Belt Bank and Trust of Pittsfield, Ill., had already gone under. McKee initially $4 million from Corn Belt in 2003. Over the next few years, he kept getting renewals and advances with loans totaling more than $17.5 million.

from top Corn Belt executives reveals they were waiting to be repaid from McKee’s state tax credits. In November 2008, the bank denied a request from McKee for an additional $1.6 million to cover interest and property taxes.

“We have already advanced much more than property costs — most likely for similar reasons — interest carry & (real estate) taxes,� wrote Roger H. Tepen, a senior vice president at Corn Belt, in an email.

Four months later, the FDIC took over the bank. McKee wouldn’t receive proceeds from selling state tax credits until the next year.

Outside interests

In March 2015, the NGA deal became more clouded when an outsider saw opportunity in McKee’s troubles.

That’s when a vulture capital fund called Titan Fish Two purchased the distressed Corn Belt notes, with an outstanding balance of $15 million.

Titan Fish then filed a lawsuit seeking to have NorthSide’s assets placed in receivership to identify all of the collateral tied to the debt and also foreclosed on 48 of NorthSide’s parcels, 42 of which were in the NGA footprint.

McKee never appeared more weak.

Around that time, Hastie, a close associate of Slay’s who had been embroiled in a lawsuit with McKee over the Hazelwood project, brought two men from Kansas City — Nathaniel Hagedorn, of NorthPoint Development Inc., and Joe Campbell, who had organized Titan Fish — to Slay’s office for a meeting.

NorthPoint also had purchased some of McKee’s debt and was taking over McKee’s Hazelwood project.

“We were asked to attend simply to say, 'Hey, the city has alternatives,’� Hagedorn said.

The city did not seriously entertain NorthPoint as an alternative, Hagedorn said. Otis Williams, director of St. Louis Development Corporation, agreed.

“The discussion was very vague and preliminary,� Williams said in an email.

‘Playing hardball’

At the June 2015 meeting between city negotiators and the Bank of Washington, the collaborative spirit disappeared when Calvert outlined a strategy to take back McKee’s NGA parcels by force.

“We were negotiating and playing hardball here and there,� Slay said. “We were ensuring that we didn’t pay him any more than he paid for the land.�

But Slay also had another big project distracting him at the time: a stadium deal to try to keep the Rams from bolting to Los Angeles.

Bob Clark, chairman and chief executive of Clayco, asked Larry Chapman, a partner in Clayco’s real estate firm, to facilitate talks between McKee, McKee’s bank and the city. Clayco and McKee’s firm are partners in the NorthPark development in north St. Louis County and in a housing development near the NGA.

In August, however, detente remained far off.

show a city staff divided. Calvert was drafting a notice of default to McKee and working on a Plan B in case McKee and his partners “look a gift horse in the mouth and don’t do this deal.� Williams wanted to “stop rattling the cages and figure out how to get this deal done.’’

Meanwhile, Bank of Washington’s Chief Executive L.B. Eckelkamp Jr. fired off his own to Slay, saying the NorthSide team was achieving what many in the mayor’s office “thought was impossible� by attracting the NGA.

“The City’s negotiating team, however, appears motivated less by a desire to bring NGA to fruition than a desire to make sure that the NGA opportunity created by Paul McKee serves as his undoing,� Eckelkamp wrote in his August 2015 letter.

Then came the threat. If the city yanked McKee’s development rights, a lawsuit would be filed.

“I can assure you that the case will explore the origins of the advice that the City’s team seems to be getting, from individuals likely motivated both by animus toward Paul McKee and a desire to profit from the opportunity he has created,� Eckelkamp wrote.

Gaining leverage

The same day that Eckelkamp chastised the mayor, city officials signed an that would become a key step in moving the NGA deal forward.

That agreement gave the city title to the NGA property McKee had lost in foreclosure. And it meant that the city, and not Titan Fish, would hold McKee’s Corn Belt debt.

With McKee’s debt, the city had a tool it could use to threaten or entice.

To obtain that tool the city paid nearly $7 million to Titan Fish for debt it had acquired at a deep discount. The city had to mortgage city buildings for the purchase.

show that before the purchase was complete, the city had offered the debt to the Bank of Washington as part of its deal with McKee and the bank.

Under the terms of his agreement with the city, Titan Fish’s Campbell served as an adviser to the city to help drive a hard bargain with McKee — one that would have cut McKee out of the NGA deal and ended his NorthSide redevelopment rights.

But then Campbell said the city abandoned its hard line.

“Everybody was rowing this boat this way, plenty of pressure on Paul McKee,� Campbell said. “Somebody said stop. I swear to you I don’t know who that person is … If we would have gone through with it, the city could have made a very good deal. It would have benefited the taxpayers.�

As the city took a more accommodating approach to McKee, Campbell said officials even discussed helping McKee settle a in St. Charles County.

Closing the deal

An Aug. 14, 2015, email shows that the state and city had found ways to fund a roughly $131 million package largely through tax credits and bond sales. Once the funding source was in place, retaining the NGA became a real possibility, Clark said. Issues began to get resolved.

Political clout may have helped. Darryl Piggee, one of McKee’s attorneys, was once chief of staff for U.S. Rep. William Lacy Clay, D-St. Louis, a longtime McKee supporter. Clay subtly rebuked the city for haggling with McKee in a commentary published on July 16, 2015, in the Post-Dispatch.

In an interview with the Post-Dispatch, Slay said that Clay never contacted him directly about negotiations with McKee.

But Clay had a different recollection.

“The mayor and I had numerous conversations about McKee’s involvement and role in NorthSide regeneration,� Clay told the Post-Dispatch. “The point I made to the mayor was that without McKee, then the NGA would not be possible. It’s all connected. … Yeah, I weighed in with the mayor. Sure did.�

By October 2015, show that the city, NorthSide and the Bank of Washington had nearly come to .

In the end, the city agreed to pay McKee's $10 million asking price – plus $2 million more. But no money went to McKee.

The Bank of Washington would receive the $1.4 million original purchase price for the land; an additional $4 million, partly to satisfy its books; and the former Titan Fish bank notes that the city paid $7 million to acquire. 

The bank, which still holds at least $50 million of McKee's debt, has since come out from under its consent order from the FDIC.

The city, meanwhile, would receive the land it needed, plus future earnings taxes to be generated at the NGA campus.

The deal would give McKee six nearby properties he had once lost to foreclosure, along with the promise that the city would strengthen its agreement with him across the north side.

More fundamentally,  for north St. Louis .

Last March, NGA head Robert Cardillo announced the agency would remain in St. Louis.

Slay called a press conference at City Hall the next day. Politicians surrounded the mayor at the podium, including Clay and Nixon.

A few feet away stood another man. He was buried in debt and faced a pending lawsuit. But in that moment, he was smiling and clapping.

Despite years of litigation, loan defaults and threats, Paul McKee had survived.

At least for now.

Walker Moskop and Adam Aton of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.