West Virginia: The Governor Tooketh
Walton, Mary
West Virginia: The Governor Tooketh My co-workers and I are possessed with boundless confidence that our goals will be reached and surpassed. -Governor William Wallace Barron Inaugural...
...In 1952, when Governor William C. Marland offered the unsteadily reformed alcoholic the job of alcoholic beverage commissioner, Barron accepted, despite the misgivings of a preacher’s son...
...Three hours later they returned a verdict...
...Only today are we beginning to see a resurgence of this kind of journalismbut at the federal level, where things are again distant enough to be entertaining...
...It is here that he would have seen the networks and systems that he tried to explain to the readers of 1900, instead of the occasional, free-lance rascal that we would all still like to believe in...
...The day after Barron pleaded guilty Perry held a press conference to deny the charge, terming himself a “sacrificial lamb...
...His attorney had pleaded that his client was “not a well man...
...Barron contended the two were discussing campaign contributions and filed a $300,000 slander suit which was later settled out of court on undisclosed terms...
...It was the first such conviction since 1913, when five state legislators were found guilty of selling their votes...
...Hepublican Governor Arch A. Moore, likely to seek reelection, can hardly conceal his glee at the Democratic scandals...
...Depressed and weary, the Kanawha County prosecuting attorney refused to try again...
...In the trial, witnesses testified that the former official had demanded payoffs to sell certain brands...
...The two of them split a $2,356 commission before he “realized this just wasn’t my line of work...
...A hint that Elmore was making the most of his position broke in 196 1, when his merchandising director accused him of stealing $10,000 worth of liquor from state warehouses, and billing it to distributors, who wouldn’t dare protest for fear of losing contracts with the state ABC monopoly...
...In a separate case, Barron’s welfare commissioner was charged with bribery...
...And a federal grand jury charged him with failing to report $57,000 in income accumulated from 1960 to 1963, thus dodging nearly $19,000 in taxes...
...Some have escaped indictment by turning state’s evidence, some by dying...
...Barron, nonetheless, made a quick comeback in 1956 as the elected state attorney general, the year Marland’s term ended...
...That inspiration came to him after a meeting with Schroath, and it proved entirely correct...
...the lowest meeting commissioner, and Truman Gore, specifications won...
...Barron’s former law associate and long-time adviser is under indictment for jury bribery in the same case as Barron...
...With the loan, they bought stock in Boca Raton Capital Corp...
...Those lapses often occurred as the time for his yearly cancer checkup approached, when he drank to calm his unbearable fear...
...Bumper stickers eagerly announced “By Golly, It’s Wally...
...Later the predictable Swiss bank story would materialize, with Gore in the role of courier...
...to get into the paint business...
...Schroath, when questioned, couldn’t remember the officers of Atlantic Management Corp., although he was vice president and treasurer...
...After the prosecution’s summation, the defense attorneys rose and declared, one by one, “The defense rests...
...Now that he is in jail, still receiving a $320-a-month pension from the state, Barron may have time to reflect on his mistakes and on the wisdom of Lincoln Steffens...
...The commissioner then went on to become a state senator...
...Judge J. Robert Martin, Jr., a salty Virginian, called in the jury and instructed them to reconsider...
...They also were probably aware that federal attorneys, limited in their presentation to crime that was interstate in nature, had a fat dossier of evidence on intrastate crime that could have surfaced in rebuttal...
...In 1961 he had had “consultation with a number of suppliers and the name of Bonn Brown was suggested to me to contact,” as he was to tell a jury seven years later...
...After his release, he was implicated in an interstate auto theft ring, but those charges were dropped...
...and transferred it to First Southeastern, in which each of the defendants held 100 shares...
...Elections in the Mountain State are won by “a swaller and a dollar...
...On the other hand, the signatories were well enough acquainted to distrust each other, The keystone of the Barron conspiracy was First Southeastern Capital Corp., to which the assets of the other corporations were transferred as they were dissolved...
...The corporate officers have founded companies which in some respects are respected additions to the communities where they were established...
...From the beginning, legal proceedings were plagued by an epidemic of illness...
...But the most damning pieces of evidence federal attorneys produced were two documents scrupulously signed by all six defendants, in which they agreed to share equally in the proceeds of their corporate undertakings...
...Had it not been for the discovery of more interesting events, he would probably be remembered as the more or less adequate governor who presided over those festivities...
...As Barron’s aide, Trent not only handled the numerous chores involved in dealing with the public: he also held the powerful, if unofficial, post of patronage chief...
...In January, 1963, a reporter discovered that the audacious Brown had acquired an office in the Capitol near the governor’s suite...
...In the three years that federal investigators spent unraveling the maze of intricate relationships on which Stafford had based his series, Barron’s term came to an innocuous end...
...And in November he signed an agreement to kick back 14 per cent of the price of the paint, or 45 cents a gallon, formalizing a verbal agreement which had already cost him $I 1,475...
...On March 30, the 26th governor of West Virginia, strangely pale under a Florida tan, stood between his two tall attorneys before federal judge John A. Field, Jr.-a man whom he’d once defeated for the post of attorney general-and pleaded guilty in a barely audible voice to bribing Ralph Buckalew, the foreman of the jury which had set him free in 1968...
...The intriguing episode didn’t faze jaundiced voters of the Mountain State, where campaign charges of corruption are de rigueur...
...Barron’s associates were willing to degree from the University of Pennsyl- take care of such details for a considvania, a master’s from the Wharton eration, generally five to 15 per cent School of Finance and Commerce, of the gross sale price...
...Moore, a former U. S. Congressman, pledged to restore “honesty and integrity in the governmental affairs of West Virginia, the likes of which this state has not seen or enjoyed for many decades...
...Barron had wanted very much to be governor again, and when that became impossible he yielded to ennui, losing interest in the affairs of state his last two years...
...Apparently Buckalew couldn’t deliver two notguilty verdicts...
...Brown’s explanation of one $3,000 bribe.] And why would a corporation be created by West Virginians in Ohio to provide business consultant services to West Virginia companies...
...and the third candidate, Hulett Smith, who succeeded Barron in 1964,140,079...
...That fall, with Barron still in office, the Charleston Gazette published a series called “Brown Means Business,” which uncovered a substantial portion of the corporate iceberg...
...bidding procedure with an emergency NO one questioned the merit of the order...
...He is still awaiting trial...
...The slogan: “Keep West Virginia Clean...
...Clarence C. Elmore had been the general field supervisor in the Alcoholic Beverage Commission when Barron was head of the agency...
...He thought Brown was simply doing him a favor in helping his client win a $100,000 order for 20 steam rollers...
...He was subsequently convicted of vote fraud...
...but this is not the time for this court to indulge in personal compassion...
...Buckalew, who had also entered a guilty plea, was given the same term...
...He claims that the ill-gotten gains total $100 million...
...1963 was West Virginia’s centennial year and Barron threw himself enthusiastically into the statewide celebration...
...But, the editorial added, “Our weighing of the merits and faults of each candidate leads us to cast our vote for Barron-since the choice is limited to either Barron or Neely...
...He was the son of a minister, grew up in Elkins, and attended West Virginia University Law School, the traditional prep school for state politicians...
...And super-sensitive West Virginians, already smarting from the state’s indelible image of destitution and poverty, are doubly bitter about the “Statehouse Gang” that “robbed the state blind...
...He was on familiar ground when he took over the Governor’s old job...
...The prosecution had been able to link Barron to only one transaction, a $107,000 land deal with a $7,000 payoff to American Brokerage...
...Barron’s chief executive aide spent five months in jail, also for income tax evasion...
...Gore has yet to face a jury on the federal charges...
...His director of finance and administration, charged in the same bribery-conspiracy case, was dropped from the proceedings when his lawyer became ill...
...When the story broke, Barron immediately had his friend evicted...
...For others, the net is tightening as a new state investigatory agency and the U. S. Internal Revenue Service reach through the cobweb of greed...
...During the trial, Opal crammed $25,000 into a brown paper bag and delivered it to Buckalew’s wife...
...The representative, who did nothing, received a percentage of the sales...
...Ironically, Judge Martin, who’d directed the 1968 jury to weigh carefully the somewhat flimsy evidence against the former governor, later privately indicated to colleagues that he had strongly considered setting aside a guilty verdict against him...
...Drawing on President Kennedy’s affection for the impoverished state, and on the federal funding channels it opened, Barron expanded a small public works program to provide jobs for 14,000 men -the locally famous “dollar-an-hour,’ workers...
...He channeled them into his cleanup campaign, and the roadside parks they built now dot the state...
...With it came the dollars and half pints of whiskey that encouraged voters to ask for assistance from poll-watchers in marking their ballots, and elections officials to look the other way at “irregularities...
...Traffic paint was a very big item with the road commission in those years...
...His signature was attached .to the deed because the governor’s personal approval was required by law on any land acquisition costing more than $25 an acre...
...The 15-day conspiracy trial opened August 12, with a parade of witnesses who testified to the involvement of 17 companies with the sham corporations for payoffs totaling $166,590...
...On the second day judge a note: “We have a juror that stated: ‘The judge will get all over those that vote not guilty.’ This juror cursed, made slanderous remarks along with another juror throwing chewing gum...
...It was an electric moment...
...They were dated March 12, 1962...
...By July, 1963, Smith had contributed more than $29,000...
...He discovered the same things everywhere, and wrote that throwing the rascals out would inevitably mean bringing more rascals in...
...In in motion, and West Virginia and August of that year, they formed a out-of-state company representatives fifth, the First Southeastern Capital began to find it much easier to secure Corporation, which later swallowed state highway contracts after a prethe others...
...Like many others, the charges were dropped when key evidence was ruled inadmissible...
...He won a week’s delay, but the change wasn’t granted...
...Billboards and bumpers early boosted “Wally,” the nickname he’d chosen...
...It’s apparent that Barron’s stolen verdict in 1968 cost him far more than conviction would have...
...A vapid campaign was livened by State Treasurer Ore1 J. Skeen, who produced a tape, recorded secretly in his home by a former FBI agent, on which a $65,000 bribe was discussed with Barron...
...The judge delayed final sentencing while Barron underwent a medical examination...
...The State Supreme Court, however, dealt the PPPC a sharp blow with a decision invalidating nearly all the indictments because of inadequacies in the state’s bribery statute, since remedied with new legislation...
...Further, in charges also denied and yet destined for trial, Bonn Brown was accused of supplying $10,000 of the bribe...
...But Republicans were mortified to find the Moore administration’s new purchasing director among them...
...In one maneuver, Brown, Schroath, and Gore, it developed, had borrowed $70,000 from Mellon National Bank in Pittsburgh, then used the bribe money from American, Atlantic, and Interstate to pay off the debt...
...In West Virginia, the politician is a man who comes around every four years, promises to fix your road, and never does...
...Even the Barron administration’s one career success story, former Public Service Commissioner Virginia Mae Brown, who went on to become chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission, was linked to the scandals through her husband...
...They gave Barron 187,501 votes...
...The jury’s verdict absolving the former governor was understandable...
...Brown had to be reminded that Invest Right records bore his name as president, and then he observed lamely, “Somebody else must have put it there...
...Smith did stand trial for bribery, but it ended with a hung jury...
...After two hung juries, the prosecuting attorney threw up his hands and declared that another trial would amount to “persecution rather than stern prosecution...
...I know that he was a desperate man...
...The prosecu tion maintained Georgetown’s mortgage was paid off in the same painless fashion by the three Florida dummy corporations...
...During his administration, West Virginia became the first state to distribute food stamps...
...Followers of the case were prepared for a lengthy presentation that would dramatically assert the defendants’ innocence and provide a good show...
...so is the ex-governor’s attorney...
...Skeen said he was being bribed to stay out of the primary race...
...During his term, unemployment dropped from 105,000 to 4 1,000...
...The vote is 10 guilty and two not guilty...
...But in 196 1 , only months after the inauguration, Bonn Brown and an Oldsmobile dealer from Clarksburg, W. Va., A1 Schroath, had quietly established four dummy corporations, one in Ohio and three in Florida...
...Voters never had a chance to find out...
...And scores of minor officials and acquaintances have been charged with an awe-inspiring variety of schemes, as challenging to follow as a mountain road map...
...But as he pushes a broom through the corridors of the Federal Corrections Institute in Texarkana, waiting out the remaining three years before he’s eligible for parole, Barron may be nagged by the thought that the theft was unnecessary...
...He did do business with the state, and also $24,370 worth with Interstate and American Brokerage in payoffs...
...Brown was contacted, and as I recall he stated that he was a representative of Atlantic Management Corp., and that this bill was due and should be paid...
...And Barron won by a comfortable 56,000-vote margin, 10,000 more than John F. Kennedy’s statewide edge over Richard Nixon that year...
...The chief of his promotions was Bonn Brown...
...Traffic Paint Across the Palm Initially, the new governor displayed a surprising ability to get what he wanted from the capricious state legislature...
...He said it was a crime “that strikes at the very heart of the administration of justice . . . . “I know that there were many things that would ameliorate the conduct of the governor,” the judge continued...
...On occasion, they contended the process didn’t cost the state anything extra, and sometimes saved the public money...
...He avoided controversial opinions, made no enemies, and quietly built up the indispensable network of political connections and obligations upon which he would draw in 1960...
...MuckMary Walton is a reporter for The Charleston Gazette...
...raking went into hibernation, and men like Steffens had to turn in their rakes...
...Smith met Brown that April in the foyer of the Governor’s office, and “we came to an understanding...
...Well ,” Arcure answered, “I thought I could do some business with the state...
...What induced you...
...In 1970, he was implicated in a nine-state auto theft ring, but the charges were dropped...
...And the prosecutor attacked the time-honored practice, long considered the liquor commissioner’s prerogative, of pressuring companies into employing his political friends as their “representatives.,’ Only then could their wares be listed...
...After he landed on the jury and was elected its foreman, Mrs...
...I Should Have Stayed in ElkinF By 1963, Barron’s romance with the legislature was on the wane...
...The contracting the men needed to operate his future agency was required by law to secure schemes: Burl A. Sawyers, state road three sealed bids...
...Playing to West Virginians’ naivete, they maintained the corporations were performing legitimate consultant services for private businesses...
...He lobbied desperately for a gubernatorial succession amendment to the state constitution, but the legislature refused to offer it to the voters...
...This brought corruption too close to home to be readily perceived by anybody but Steffens, and the eager readers began to lose interest...
...the federal attorney asked him later...
...The Chewing Gum Trial As Barron’s own hour approached, his liquor commissioner was nabbed, also for income tax evasion...
...On February 13, 1968, the former governor, three top members of his administration, and two respected associates were indicted by a federal grand jury on 27 counts of conspiracy...
...Prophetically, he concluded, “I would have been better off if I had stayed in Elkins...
...Barron’s state road commissioner and deputy state road commissioner are seeking new trials because the former governor fixed the jury that convicted them, but exonerated him, of federal charges of conspiracy to commit bribery...
...Did they ever...
...Democratic Party officials can do little but stiffen their jaws for the next blow...
...Trent didn’t contest the charges and wound up serving only five months in jail...
...The Charleston Gazette editorialized: “This newspaper, after troubled consideration, has decided that it cannot give its endorsement to either candidate in the 1960 gubernatorial election...
...The old muckraker and the new hoodwinker might have something to give each other-Steffens would find in the Barron years the confirmation of his wildest suspicions about the pervasiveness of corruption, and Barron could learn from the resulting dilemma...
...With less under Governor Marland, with John- finesse, one firm might submit bids koski as his executive assistant...
...Brown ran a poor second to Hulett Smith, who went on to win the general election...
...Although it was established too late to save the election, the Purchasing, Practices and Procedures Commission (PPPC) became a permanent fixture at the Capitol, tucked in a corner behind an unmarked door...
...Barron and his partner, meanwhile, were maintaining a lucrative private law practice, drawing heavily on the former governor’s considerable influence in the new administration...
...Gore, under its own and two illegally fabrithe son of a Clarksburg physician, had cated names, cornering the lowest impressive credentials: a bachelor’s bid...
...The lawyer for former Governor William Barron, turning on his client, recently called reports of $7 million in theft during the Barron term a “conservative estimate...
...Still the indictments flow, with no end in sight...
...Johnkoski, two years and $10,000...
...Barron is barely remembered as a two-term member of the House of Delegates from his native Randolph County...
...As usual, nothing ever came of it...
...But when the results were in, Field came down hard...
...Fatalistic voters expect little of their elected representatives...
...His investigation took him from the West Virginia secretary of state’s office to its counterparts in Ohio and Florida, where he nailed down three of the dummy corporations...
...Bingo and the Sacrificial Lamb In the aftermath of the trial, while the convicted men appealed their sentences, the Barrons moved to a plush condominium in Pompano Beach, Florida, even though, shortly after the indictment, Barron had told newsmen that they were “not going to leave West Virginia, nor do we ever intend to leave...
...in Fairmont, W. Va., added it to a sales line that previously had included produce and canned goods...
...The Capitol still stands, but much of its dignity is gone...
...Earlier that fall, the Democratic legislature had attempted to set the party’s house in order by establishing a watchdog agency to monitor state purchases...
...There were subsequent whisperings of payoffs and favoritism in the state-run liquor dispensaries...
...He was a member of a construction company charged with rigging the bidding on flood relief work for the state in 1962...
...Another enterprise was a real estate development, Georgetown Homes...
...liminary conversation with either Barron simultaneously appointed Brown or Schroath...
...The federal involvement hinged on their use of interstate commerce facilities-telephones and the mail-to set up and maintain dummy corporations for an unlawful activity, bribery...
...Or job specifications could be appointees...
...A Swaller and a Dollar Although Wally Barron was personally charming, nothing in his mediocre career suggested he would be an effective governor...
...Harold Neely was the Republican contender...
...If Steffens returned, he would feel right at home in almost any state, where the familiar landmarks of bribery, extortion, and fraud are apparent enough for any old investigator to feel comfortable...
...Barron’s attorney had argued, apparently convincingly, that the signature was only a formality...
...Until outlawed by new legislation, this practice was so acceptable that, at one time, two Charleston Gazette editors were liquor representatives on the side...
...Not that things have changed much...
...But, he wondered, “. . . why wauld a company with a state recapping contract pay money through a Florida corporation into the West Virginia state Democratic executive committee...
...But, with the director of finance and administra- approval of the purchasing director, tion...
...In June, the first contract for traffic paint came through...
...But Smith’s conviction was anticlimactic...
...Despite an effort by the Republican candidate to revive the Skeen tape, Barron sailed through the general campaign, touring the state with a broom to illustrate plans for sweeping away litter and restoring natural beauty...
...In February, 1966, Barron’s motor vehicles commissioner, Jack Nuckols, was sentenced to oneto1 0 years for payroll padding...
...Defense attorneys insisted that no pact so carefully consigned to paper could be dishonest...
...Sawyers, Johnkoski, and Gore retained their same positions in the new Democratic administration...
...Shortly after the Nuckols case, charges of income tax evasion were filed against Curtis Trent, the former governor’s administrative asssistant...
...Barron had the party’s backing...
...But if ‘Punchy’ Neely’s the governor and the Captiol’s gone, we won’t know where to look for it, and Punchy Neely won’t have the slightest idea where it went...
...Barron, only 55, had begun to sound very much like a gubernatorial candidate again...
...Buckalew appears to have approached Barron before the trial...
...But the defense attorneys had concluded, first of all, that the prosecution hadn’t presented enough evidence to persuade a jury...
...Well, we of course met and wondered who Atlantic was and thereupon Mr...
...The attorneys didn’t deny the payoffs...
...They are seldom disappointed...
...In 1967, a federal grand jury accused Elmore of failing to report nearly $20,000 of income in 1962 and 1963...
...It caused barely a ripple in 1970 when Barron, in a tacit admission of guilt, sent the U. S. Treasury $15,000 as a settlement on a $33,000 claim for taxes on income the IRS said he received from “certain sham corporations (created) to receive money from persons seeking to do business with the State of West Virginia...
...In a remarkRble First 100 Days, Barron pushed through a penny increase in the sales tax, the first pay raise for teachers in six years, liberalization of unemployment and workmen’s compensation benefits, and a state Human Rights Commission...
...Licking his electoral wounds, Brown retreated to a busy private practice in Elkins...
...Smith had been generally unsuccessful for several years in getting state business...
...Brown and Schroath were sentenced to four years in prison and fined $10,000...
...But one by one, the scandals were finally laid bare...
...The principals were understandably reluctant to explain...
...The jury retired for a stormy session that deteriorated into namecalling and tears...
...No major legislation bears his name.In the early days of his career, Barron’s drinking was a major liability...
...On the repeat list were Barron and Gore, along with some interesting newcomers-Barron’s law partner, John E. Davis, as well as former Welfare Commissioner Bernard Smith...
...There were too many other politically prominent “Bills...
...They just got caught...
...James J. Arcure, owner of Valley Distributing Co...
...The only such state agency in the country, the PPPC began in early 1969 a full-scale probe into financial records, both past and current...
...Newsmen sought out Gore, whose department was in charge of the building, only to find that he was in Europe-but not, an aide took care to point out, at state expense...
...In September of last year, however, Smith, who’d been elected a state senator, and four others-“The Logan County Five”-were found guilty on federal charges of vote fraud...
...Then Gore’s attorney became seriously ill midway through the proceedings and the case was ruled a mistrial...
...Governor William Wallace Barron Inaugural Address January 16, 1961 by Mary Walton In the days of American innocence, as Lincoln Steffens tells it in his autobiography, writing about corruption was a popular and easy job...
...One had no trouble telling the people of San Francisco how the mayor of St...
...It is a solid vote and no one will give...
...But there were some with foresight who half-believed one of his primary opponent’s charges of an earlier attempted bribery, and distrusted the off-beat coterie forming around the candidate, himself less than the ideal statesman...
...West Virginia: The Governor Tooketh My co-workers and I are possessed with boundless confidence that our goals will be reached and surpassed...
...But Brown, in 1964, picked up the gauntlet, and the promise of a bottomless money bag, with the brazen campaign pledge, “There will be no dealing under the table while I am governor of West Virginia...
...Most of the companies, howeverassured of contracts-inflated their prices to cover the amount of the bribe, at the taxpayer’s expense...
...A lobbyist of that period describes him as “quiet, demure, fit-that’s an appropriate word-competent...
...Ske‘en, only 39,906...
...When William Wallace Barron, West Virginia’s 26th governor, delivered his 1961 inaugural address, few West Virginians anticipated that he would soon be in a Texas prison serving a 12-year sentence for jury bribery...
...Hardly anybody has looked closely at the states since...
...He went into a law partnership in Charleston with a young man named John Davies...
...Last year their confidential secretary defected to the press with their file of cancelled checks for that period, documenting a voluminous clientele among companies heavily into state contracts...
...But then Steffens, and others, began to conclude that the roots of crookery were not to be found in curious local quirks (always outside one’s own particular region) or in the warped characters of a few politicians...
...As attorney general, he was known more for what he didn’t do than for what he did...
...Others, more cynical, believe, “They weren’t any different from anybody else...
...Bonn Brown tried to avoid the trial, claiming hypertension, but the judge, after reviewing medical evidence, declared him sufficiently fit...
...Ruckman was not so stunned that he turned down a sales job for Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Co., also arranged by Brown...
...There were several immediate results of the conspiracy case, the most depressing of which, from a Democratic point of view, was the election in November, 1968, of a Republican governor, Arch A. Moore, Jr...
...These two jurors are sisters-in-law and want to go home...
...Sawyers, two years and $5,000...
...Barron’s attorney, Robert G. Perry, an accomplished criminal lawyer with a flair for theatrics, was accused of acting as the courier...
...There, he would have found a kind of muckraker’s utopia, where palms were crossed and recrossed at every level, up and down the state, a laboratory of corruption that turned fixing and bribing into one of the s ta te’s biggest industries- touching everybody from governors down to county agents in the multiplier effect of the total haul...
...They paid...
...Buckalew held out loyally during deliberations for Barron’s acquittal...
...When the state’s former attorney general, elected on the Barron ticket, was indicted in August for participating in the bribery of the state’s federal housing administrator, the state Democratic chairman aptly called it just a “little grain of sand on another pile of sand...
...Sobered in more ways than one by an “operation for cancer of the colon in 1952, Barron stopped drinking, with rare lapses...
...Those whom grand juries didn’t indict for their illicit earnings, the IRS snared for failure to pay taxes on them...
...When last heard from, he was a foreman for a highway contractor in southern West Virginia...
...Field sentenced Barron to 12 years in federal prison and a $50,000 fine...
...His motor vehicles commissioner is on parole after serving 13 months of a one-to-1 0-year sentence for putting his own girlfriend’s father and two personal pilots on the state payroll...
...Sawyers, in turn, made Vincent then an employee of Gore, the conJohnkoski his deputy state road tracting agency could by-pass the commissioner...
...Trent’s operation was uncovered by Internal Revenue Service special agents in 1967...
...But then, Ruckman explained to the jury, “Some time later, and by later I think it was a month or two, we received . . . an invoice from Atlantic Management Inc., a corporation from Florida, for $9,000...
...With Gore’s case severed, all but Barron were found guilty...
...After exhausting his appeals against an 1 8-month sentence, Elmore went to jail last July...
...A measure of that was acceptable, but things got out of hand and Marland fired him...
...A few months earlier, Barron had stolen the show for a long time to come...
...He didn’t participate too avidly in any of the debates...
...The defense limited itself, for the most part, to vociferous objections on procedural grounds, designed to build the appeal record...
...Elmore remained in his post under Barron’s successor, when he was again accused of taking $10,000, this time from a liquor salesman anxious to see his brands listed in state stores...
...It is nonsensical, of course, to suggest that in a West Virginia election, vote-getting ability had much to do with winning...
...Barron’s liquor commissioner is serving an 18-month term for income tax evasion...
...The under-the-table business came as a rude shock to John Ruckman, a Wheeling lawyer and chairman of the Ohio County Democratic Party...
...Governor Moore had better luck, and it was ratified in 1970...
...But he surely would have felt most at home in West Virginia during the recent Barron administration...
...State house reporter Thomas F. Stafford spent nearly three years in research after a high state official slipped him the words “Invest Right...
...The Ohio front was called Invest Right Corporation...
...The Rogues at the TroughState and federal grand juries in West Virginia have so far generated well over 100 indictments of state officials, their business contacts and hangers-on during the two Democratic administrations of the 1960s...
...Louis was always on the take, and the audiences in New York would never tire of reading about “The Shame of Pittsburgh...
...The ruggedly handsome tailored so that only a single company Sawyers had held the same office was qualified to meet them...
...Almost certainly he would have run, had it not been for what the Democrats called their “Valentine’s Day Massacre...
...The other three, in Boca Raton, Florida, bore equally brisk titles: Atlantic Management Corporation, Interstate Services Inc., and In the spring of 1961 the play was American Brokerage Company...
...Harry Hoffmann, the Gazette’s editor, remembers remarking in the decisive editorial board meeting: “If Wally Barron’s elected governor, and we drive down the boulevard one morning and the Capitol’s not there, we’ll know exactly where to look for it...
...Between frequent trips to Boca Raton, Barron payoff men were often in Charleston at meetings, or socializing where salesmen could find them easily...
...It surprised no one that year when he became the first candidate to announce he was seeking the gubernatorial nomination...
...The following January, there was more trauma for the Democrats, as the Kanawha County grand jury returned 107 indictments against 11 corporations and 32 individuals, including 13 state officials...
...More surprising yet, the legislature gave him a state income tax and revenue for his programs...
...Arguing for a change of venue from Kanawha County, where Charleston is located, Barron’s young attorney, a consummate showman, keeled over like a tree...
...In 1941, after law school, Barron returned to Elkins and moved into law offices with Bonn Brown, a son of another well-respected family, who many credit with masterminding the convoluted scheme that would land them both in front of the same jury 27 years later...
...After all, as Steffens said, there are so many guilty hands under the table it is misleading to single out one pair, and Barron might survey the number of guilty companions and conclude that the roots of corruption did not come from his rascally nature but rather from the humble and normal desire to conform to his culture...
...In the ‘40s it was not uncommon for Elkins residents to see their new mayor stumbling through the streets with several days’ growth of beard, his clothes disheveled...
...When Barron made his political debut as mayor of Elkins in 1948, Brown was his city attorney...
...There is no evidence of wrongdoing,” he wrote...
...The most desirable accounts were the high-volume cheap wines...
...Unlike Brown, who was an astute lawyer, Barron’s forays into the legal arena were half-hearted and limited...
...Buckalew put the cash proposition to Barron’s wife, Opal, at a church bingo game...
...and additional graduate work at Cor- One illustration of how the scheme ne11 . worked is the case of William A. Smith, an Atlanta, Georgia, paint manufacturer...
Vol. 3 • February 1972 • No. 12
