Fred Tausch is the son and namesake of a Massachusetts motorcyclist who became a legend in some circles for riding his BMW bike for three decades and 600,000 miles. He's the step-brother and business partner of a Nashua man who waged a million-dollar independent campaign for long-shot presidential candidate Mike Gravel. Tausch himself was the co-founder of a New York City dot-com-era business called Urban Fetch that went spectacularly kaput.


Even though he became the biggest-spending figure in New Hampshire politics this year, very few people in the state know any of this – or anything at all – about Tausch.


For the past month, Tausch has starred in television and radio advertisements that air in New Hampshire several times a day, and he has filled mailboxes statewide with political mailers that decry government waste in general and Rep. Paul Hodes in particular. Tausch has hired at least three staffers with political backgrounds and prominent consultant Mike Dennehy; he's visited Republican gatherings, and he has told others that he's looking to run as a Republican for U.S. Senate from New Hampshire. Hodes, of Concord, is the only Democrat in that race so far.


Tausch, who turns 38 this month and who recently moved from Nashua to Merrimack, first made headlines in the state this winter, when he told reporters that he was a disappointed former Barack Obama donor who planned to spend $100,000 of his own money on a campaign opposing the $787 billion federal stimulus package. He's dubbed his effort STEWARD, for Stimulate the Economy Without Accumulating Record Debt.


“I think we (as a nation) risk economic collapse and ruin and I don't want to let that happen without doing something,” Tausch said at an April press conference, according to a video posted online. “As a businessperson, as a citizen, I don't want to watch that happen without feeling like I've at least tried to do something. And I think the thing that seems most useful to me is to try and provide information.”


So far, Tausch has filled that initial $100,000 pledge and then some, spending nearly $400,000 of his own money on broadcast advertising.


The ads show Tausch, looking like a short-haired Michael Keaton in a tie, asking people to join him in his anti-waste campaign and concluding: “It's time taxpayers came first.” Tausch has also spent untold sums on mailers, ad production, a poll, an economist's report, staffers, a website and a recent free barbecue in Manchester.


Tausch has been reluctant to talk about much beyond his thoughts on government. He has not responded to multiple interview requests from the Monitor in recent weeks; his staffers didn't even respond to requests to confirm information about him. Tausch reportedly also avoided talking to a reporter from Union Leader this month.


According to those who've known him and public records about him, Tausch is a Tufts graduate, a computer whiz and unconventional thinker, a former hedge-fund principal and veteran of the dot-com boom with Massachusetts roots and a New York City business background. Tausch, who was formerly married, appears to have moved to New Hampshire within the last two years.


Tausch also appears to be hardly orthodox politically: Tausch donated $2,300 to Obama last fall, created his “STEWARD” campaign this winter and gave $10,000 to the state Republican Party this spring. Online postings indicate that before backing Obama, Tausch appears to have at least defended upstart Democratic candidate Mike Gravel.


A few who've known Tausch over the years, contacted by the Monitor last week, were notably unsurprised to hear what he's doing now.


Alva Couch, a professor who taught Tausch computer science at Tufts University, remembers the 1994 graduate fondly, as someone who threw his efforts into problems he saw, including pitching a new way to use technology to assign students to dorms and writing an innovative program to search computer logs.


“I'm not at all surprised that Fred would tackle an anti-waste campaign,” Couch wrote in an e-mail. “Fred was the kind of student who would ‘like to *make* things go well' as opposed to the kind of student who would ‘like to *see* things go well.' ” College classmate and former business partner Mike Prindle said he, too, was not shocked to hear that Tausch was jumping into politics with both feet.


“Fred has always been one, he does it his own way. He says, ‘No one's really tried it like this, let's do this,' ” Prindle said. “I'm not surprised in the least that he's new, just all of a sudden on the radar, because he's probably coming from a different place. . . . I suspect that he's going to be relatively unorthodox.”


Where he's from
Frederick W. Tausch III has roots in Boston's suburbs, graduated with a degree in engineering and computer science from Tufts University outside Boston, and lived and worked for several years in business in New York City, according to publicly available records.


As recently as June 2007, a charitable fund Tausch started listed his address in tax filings as on Madison Avenue in New York City. Tausch first voted in Nashua in the 2008 presidential primary, casting his vote as a Democrat, according to voting records maintained by the state Democratic Party. Tausch's website describes him as a “small businessman” who moved to New Hampshire, drawn by low taxes.



This winter, Tausch started attending Republican fundraisers, according to several state senators.


Few involved in Republican politics seem to know Tausch well.



The Republican mayor of Nashua, Donnalee Lozeau, says simply: “I've never met him.” Merrimack's state senator, Sheila Roberge, says she did meet Tausch about a month ago at a Republican get-together in Bedford, “but I don't really know him . . . and I can't think of who to direct you to.” Sen. Judd Gregg, the retiring Republican senior senator whose seat appears to be Tausch's goal, says he has talked a little with Tausch about his issues – and, he adds, “I've read his fliers.”



Few know exactly how Tausch made the fortune he is now spending on New Hampshire advertising, though rumors are rife about the number of figures in his fortune and the millions he's willing to spend.


State Sen. Ted Gatsas, who has made Tausch a finance co-chairman of his race for the mayorship of Manchester, said he's struck up a friendship in recent months with Tausch, although he doesn't know a lot about him. As for how Tausch makes his living, Gatsas said: “I think it was probably through the stock market somehow. I think he's probably a trader. I think he buys and sells foreign currencies.”


In the 1990s, Tausch was a principal at a small hedge-fund and co-founded an online business during the dot-com boom, according to media reports from the time. Now, he manages a company called Chase Capital Management, LLC according to recent business filings at the New Hampshire Secretary of State's Office. According to those filings, the company was formed in April 2006 as a financial services outfit, and the papers were signed by Gregory V. Chase, a man others identified as Tausch's step-brother.


Family ties
Chase gained political fame of his own in the fall of 2007, bankrolling an independent campaign in support of Mike Gravel's longshot presidential campaign in the Democratic primary.


Chase, then identified as a 27-year-old hedge fund manager, told the Monitor after the primary that he'd spent about $1 million on the campaign, buying pro-Gravel advertisements in New Hampshire and national newspapers and plunking down $270,000 on WMUR ads. One of the newspaper ads linked the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Iraq to oil imports and proclaimed: “They don't hate us because we're free. They hate us because we're killing them.”


Chase told the Monitor back then he supported Gravel because he had “guts and principle,” in part because Gravel advocated a sharp increase in the gas tax in an effort to help the nation kick its dependence on oil.


Around the same time, in the fall of 2007, someone who signed off as as “Fred Tausch, Cambridge, MA” posted on the Union Leader's website defending Gravel's candidacy and criticizing an editorial that dubbed Gravel “the mad uncle of the Democratic Party.” Someone identifying himself as “Fred Tausch” touted Chase's blog in the comment section of the New York Times.


“Greg Chase's offer is genuine. The political machines are so transparent. How is it that there are so few people who are brave enough or insightful enough to see the alternative is standing right in front of them,” the Times “Tausch” wrote. “One debate can mean 5% in the polls, instantly. $1M can win New Hampshire, and with that the nation can follow. Don't give money, if you don't want to. Vote for Hillary or whatever, if you want to. But at an absolute minimum, imagine an alternative.”


Gravel himself thanked a “Jeff Tausch” along with Chase – calling them “two of the most unusual supporters of my political career – in the introduction to the 2008 re-release of his book, Citizen Power. Gravel did not return a call for comment for this story.


Chase did not respond to a request for an interview about Tausch. Tausch was once married, records indicate, but recent deed documents list him as unmarried.


Tausch's sister, Karen Tausch of Massachusetts, also declined to comment on her brother, “but I'm going to add: I think he will make a good candidate for office, if he's running.”


Tausch's father, Fred Tausch Jr., a Massachusetts engineer and motorcycling enthusiast who rode his bike 600,000 miles and became a legend among “Yankee Beemers” – a group of New Englanders who drive BMW bikes – died in 2005. The senior Tausch even appeared in a BMW motorcycling ad in the 1980s.


In some ways, Tausch may be following in his father's lead in campaigning against government waste. The senior Tausch had his own, more modest anti-waste effort: He penned a series of letters to the editor of the Boston Globe in which he decried what he called “fraud on a gigantic scale” involved in the efforts to clean Boston Harbor.


Jeff Stein, the dean of the Boston Architectural College and a fellow Yankee Beemer who spoke at the senior Tausch's funeral, recounted that the elder Tausch read voraciously, took courses on world affairs and regularly attended lectures at Harvard. On Sunday afternoons, the elder Tausch would hash over the issues at Moto Market in Acton, Mass.


“Fred would sort of hold court there, like a salon of the highest order,” Stein recalled.


‘Go big or go home'
The younger Tausch's biggest brush with fame before this year came circa 1999, when he co-founded a New York City-based company called UrbanFetch.com. The website made many fans and media waves with its promise of one-hour, free delivery of anything from ice cream to electronics in several cities, often with warm cookies as an added bonus.


The business had a bumpy launch: The founders of a rival site, Kozmo.com, took UrbanFetch's leaders to court, claiming they'd been ripped off.
According to media reports at the time, Kozmo's founders, Yong Kang and Joseph Park, said they'd pitched their business model – speedy delivery of many products at the click of a mouse – to a hedge fund Tausch co-ran called Integrity Capital Management.


Rather than invest in Kozmo, Tausch and partners shut down their own outfit and set up UrbanFetch. UrbanFetch countersued, claiming that Kozmo's aim to “wreak havoc” and that the two outfits were distinct, in part because UrbanFetch's offerings didn't include “ ‘hardcore,' ‘adult,' X-rated videos,” according to New York Magazine.


The parties settled out of court, but UrbanFetch fared poorly at the time in the court of pundit opinion. “This has to be the slimiest thing I've ever heard of,” said Karen Kerr, a venture capitalist quoted in Investment News.


After the settlement, UrbanFetch and Kozmo went on to have a high-flying year or two, amid media scrutiny so intense that when UrbanFetch snagged the contract to deliver sandwiches from Cosi, the Daily News wrote it up.


There was just one problem: There was no profit on free, fast delivery of ice-cream pints. Between them, Kozmo and UrbanFetch “blew through more than $300 million in venture capital,” Forbes reported in 2001.


“It was like young kids playing business,” Mike Fiorito, a veteran of the courier-service business who worked at UrbanFetch and took over the smaller outfit that emerged from the ashes, told Forbes.


Former college friend Prindle worked side-by-side with Tausch through hundred-hour weeks at UrbanFetch, both of them working to keep the operations running. It was a frenetic time: “Sunday, I'd take time off. I'd only work 12 hours on Sundays.”


Tausch, who was juggling a young family at the time, was responsible for 300 bike messengers, Prindle said, and sometimes had employees coming to his door late at night. Chase took time off from Harvard to work for the company, Prindle remembered.


To Prindle's thinking, the company was ultimately “a victim of the times.”


“I don't know if you're familiar with the motto ‘go big or go home.' That was literally what you had to do to raise money at the time,” Prindle said.


Investors, he said, had little interest in funding operations that started small and grew organically. “Venture capitalists were telling us to do these crazy things, like ‘Don't worry about making money.' ”


Then, as Prindle tells the story, the NASDAQ crashed and funding dried up. Go big or go home went out the window. The firm went from three employees to 300 to zero in 18 months, Prindle said.


A charitable fund Tausch established in 1999 with $479,704 worth of UrbanFetch stock had lost almost all of its value within a year; by 2000, that stock was worth about $4,000.


Afterward, Prindle moved West for his wife; Tausch stayed in New York City.


Where is this going
Tausch appears to have trimmed his original plan for STEWARD in only one area: economics reporting, which had been a major priority early on. Meanwhile, he has taken his message far beyond the stimulus.


In the spring, Tausch hired economist Brian Gottlob and pledged to have Gottlob provide monthly updates on stimulus impacts in New Hampshire.


Gottlob's April report concluded that New Hampshire is near the bottom of states in terms of stimulus dollars we're expected to receive and that only about a third of the state's projected $1.5 billion dollar haul would have the potential to create new jobs.


For now, the April report stands alone on the STEWARD site.


Tausch has criticized other projects he considers a poor use of resources – like Democratic health-care reform or cap-and trade – and even, last week, criticizing Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor.


So far, Tausch's campaign hasn't resulted in much recognition among New Hampshire voters.


A recent University of New Hampshire poll found that about 85 percent of respondents didn't know who Tausch was. The poll had Hodes leading Tausch 45-25. That poll had Hodes losing 39 to 35 to another potential Republican Senate candidate, former attorney general Kelly Ayotte.


“Close to 90 percent really have no idea about (Tausch) as a candidate or as a person,” said Andy Smith, the pollster.


Smith's colleague, associate professor of political science Dante Scala, said that Tausch would have to do much more if he expects to get wide name recognition among New Hampshire voters.


“I think there's going to have to be a lot more where this is coming from in order for this to make a dent,” Scala said.



Lauren R. Dorgan can be reached at ldorgan@cmonitor.com or 369-3306.