Revenue Sharing With the Rich and the Crooked

...At the state house level, we find former governor Otto Kerner of Illinois indicted for bribery, mail fraud, tax evasion, perjury, and conspiracy, and accused of taking some cut-rate race track stock in return for viewing state racing matters through the wrong end of the binoculars...

...The advantages available to governors of Illinois are not lost, for instance, on legislators in Louisiana...

...In Jersey City, the mayor, former mayor, and 10 other public officials were nabbed on similar charges...

...Notwithstanding the entertainment that a continuous monitoring of local extortionists, bribers, and defrauders might provide, the public has also been spared the rather tedious job of keeping up with the unending flow of Pfingsts at every level of state and local government...

...The instincts of such entrepreneurship seem unchanged as one moves among the various stages of political development...

...The above are just a few selected items from a federal list that fills press release books at the Justice Department and could keep courts busy merely protecting people from their own elected representatives...

...This figure includes only those offenses connected with organized crime, or those charges that appear to link the defendant with organized crime...

...When the figures are projected under the table, the whole picture is disturbing to anybody who believes that revenue sharing will return American politics to a state of responsive innocence...

...In Florida, state legislator C. Carey Mathews and three Dallas men were indicted for applying similar techniques to a Miami insurance company and diverting its assets for their own use...

...as the money moves back down the ladder, it cannot hope to avoid all the meaty hands along the rungs...

...In any case, there is now general agreement with the theory of revenue sharing-the qualms are qualms of detail...

...In Newark, ex-mayor Hugh Addonizio was jailed-and city councilmen, former city councilmen, the director of public works, and electrical contractor Tony Boy Boiardo were indicted-for raising revenue by extortion...

...Politics is as much a regular business as the grocery or the dry-goods or the drug business...

...Up and down the ladder a politician has an equal chance, and may even outdo his counterparts at the higher levels...

...political evolution, involving an instinctive and over-developed digital grasp...

...Mary Walton, a reporter for the Charleston Gazette, points up how this game works in West Virginia, a state where votes should not be controlled by the polling regulators, but by the Small Business Administration and the Price Control Board...

...These traditions have survived despite the efforts of reformers to take over what was left of the dying city machines in the 1960s, as Thomas Edsall points out in his article...

...There we see state Representative Christian Fraser hooking up with then-state Senator Ezekiel Gravolet and the auditor of the highway department, now charged with receiving “monies and bribes” for depositing state highway funds in a Gretna, Louisiana, bank...

...At the municipal level, there have been even more indictments...

...Thus, John Dowdy can command public attention over a simple $25,000 airport hand-off because he happens to be a congressman, while far fewer people were aware of how New York Supreme Court Justice Joseph P. Pfingst was indicted for taking a trip to Europe to pull $50,000 out of a Swiss bank account under the code name “Egypt” to pay off Republican leader Frederick Fellman in return for the nomination to the court...

...But those who expect to get in on the gold rush have not taken a close look lately at who their competitors will be on the local levels...

...For anyone who needs proof of this, Attorney General John Mitchell reminded a group of managing editors of the resiliency of the tradition in a speech on October 20, 1971, entitled “The War on Organized Crime and Corruption...

...But the voter hasn’t even seemed to catch on yet to the older kind of graft that Mary Walton describes...

...Last year, the mayor and police chief of Jeanette, Pennsylvania, were accused of encouraging payoffs to protect gambling, while New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was charged with taking bribes to protect the $15-million-a-year illegal pinball machine wagering businesswhere a free play can be cashed in like a poker chip...

...But after he was successful in a couple of big cases, he persuaded the state’s attorney general and two other officials to remove the ceiling without advising the state...

...For this favor, Alioto agreed to split 50 per cent of the fee with the other men...

...instead of dealing with the city boss, he deals solely and directly with the political investor...

...Furthermore, this new arrangement does to graft what Playboy did to smut-by putting it all into the airbrushed and businesslike context where bribkry becomes contribution, where fraud becomes miscalculation...

...they (the officials charged) range from positions of judgeships to state elective offices, from mayors to councilmen, from law enforcement officers to purchasing agents...

...When he was a lawyer on retainer for the state of Washington, a recent indictment charges, Joseph Alioto was to receive 15 per cent of the damages recovered from antitrust cases he won, with a ceiling of $1 million...

...Revenue Sharing With the Rich and the Crooked An Introduction by John Rothchild Washington awaits the great migration...

...In Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a city councilman, a former city councilman, and the president of Teleprompter were taken to court on charges of bribery to...

...This is not to say, in any case, that all states and localities are corrupt-far from it...

...As a country, we have gone to the moon of politics, with elevated musings on public accountability and structural favoritism, while the rather simple and worn tradition of the under-the-table hand-off goes almost unchanged...

...This may be a matter of ignorance, or perhaps the voting public is in something of an agreement with the politician-who thinks of himself as harassed by nit-picking prosecutors and wonders why the barter of votes is any more illegal than the trade in razor blades or hamburgers...

...In New Jersey, that northern West Virginia, where being indicted is as much a part of a political resume as military service, Michael Rappeport describes a poll of state residents of which only 12 per cent believe that New Jersey government is “very corrupt...

...The state’s director of revenue and chairman of the racing board were indicted along with him...

...You’ve got to be trained up to it or you’re sure to fail...

...The bribe and the fix are federal products, too, but there is a certain polish at the edges and top of government, where civil servants don’t take personal risks either for or against conscience...

...But like Brazil, our interior is still a jungle-of extortion, fraud, bribery, and other hard-edged maneuvers-and the rules have not changed at all since George Washington Plunkitt, esteemed Socrates of Tammany Hall, gave his advice at the turn of the century to the young man about to enter the business of politics: The fact is that a reformer can’t last in politics...

...At this stage, revenue sharing seems more of a temptation than a promise...

...But, if Maryland is anything like the rest of the country, the reformers and the bosses have left behind them a new kind of state politics in which money is even more important than it was before...

...By the time he was indicted, Alioto was mayor of San Francisco...

...President Nixon promises a kickback to the states, and many of the legions of federally-funded consider packing the files and moving westward or southward in time to pick up a hint of the local accent and greet the incoming money from an office near the state capitol...

...It remains to be seen whether more federal money flowing across the state lines will bring increased legal controls, or just encourage more unemployed businessmen into Plunkitt’s and Addonizio’s line of work...

...Emalfarb, the indictment said, made sure that these out-of-state firms would have a reason not to take the highways for granted by threatening to arrest their drivers and halt the movement of their trucks through Illinois if they didn’t make periodic gifts of money...

...The successes of bribery, extortion, and fraud seem to be a much surer thing than the indictments themselves, which depend on the sporadic and happy coincidence of diligent reporters, willing informers, and the opposite political party being in control...

...Even the people who have more impersonal hopes for revenue sharing could not be aware of how widespread is the Addonizio Reflex-a trait found most commonly at the lower strata of John Rothchild is an editor of The Washington Monthly...

...A generous projection of Mitchell’s statistics is further suggested because the returns of what Plunkitt calls “honest graft” are still apparently worth the risks...

...Where candidates once had to at least buy votes from the bosses, and therefore retain some tenuous connection with the will of the electorate, the death of the machine has left a clear field for a new shopping-center brand of electropolitics, where instead of buying votes, the candidate merely buys TV time...

...There is still time, also, for a more important change in philosophy, to edit policy proposals away from the traditional “larger, overall perspective of Washington,” to the “direct grass roots involvement with real problems...

...But the evidence that follows ought to be proof enough that nobody is paying much attention to this problem, and revenue sharing, without different people than are currently being elected, may turn out to be the most exciting fiscal adventure since the Comstock Lode...

...He can make a show for a while, but he always comes down like a rocket...

...State and local governments are still the undisputed turf of the mefi who make politics their business-a business which has come to be one of the few endeavors left where a man of high spirit and humble origins can parlay it all into a quick fprtune...

...These newfangled maneuvers are hard to understand and hard to disclose, which makes them even more invisible to the voter...

...In less than 32 months, Mitchell said, his department had obtained indictments or convictions of more than 170 state and local officials or former officials on federal charges or on state charges based on federal information...

...while another state legislator and four friends sold bonds for a Louisiana loan association in which they owned stock after putting out false official information on the association’s financial health...

...The continuing limelight of indictments does not seem to stun local leaders into any moral pause...

...While many such schemes, especially those that seem to generate spontaneously in New Jersey, are not dependent on subtlety, some of them are devious enough that the officeholder can keep several steps ahead of the law...

...West Virginia is particularly notable because, as one Internal Revenue inspector said, “I’ve seen it all before, but never in one place,” and one doesn’t have to look very hard to find bits of West Virginia in the state houses or city halls of almost any state in the nation...

...And Mitchell’s figures are no reflection of the real magnitude of indictments, because they do not include charges brought only at the state level...

...Before Kerner took their minds off it, people in the same state were wondering why Secretary of State Paul Powell, who died in October, 1970, kept shoeboxes full of money in his closet...

...Some of the grass roots genius behind these indictments was never recorded by the editors, who tend to emphasize the importance of the defendant over the cunning of the exploit or the size of the take...

...A few months later, a grand jury charged Seymour Emalfarb, an executive of two tire companies owned by Powell and some associates, with asking out-of-state trucking companies to express their gratitude for the cordial use of Illinois highways...

...secure the exclusive local cable TV franchise for Teleprompter...

...The money was paid...