The Mellons, the Mafia, and A Colonial County
Crile, George III
The Mellons, the Mafia, and A Colonial County by George Crile III In the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, farmers in four Western Pennsylvania counties took up arm rather than pay a federal tax on...
...his grandson, Paul Mellon, president of the gallery, has continued generous support and has devoted his life to carefully donating his fortune as a patron of the arts and letters...
...As the logic goes, these companies, known as mass appraisal firms, guarantee a combination of qualities rarely found in a local assessor, competance and honesty...
...The county records, previously open to the public, were then made confidential...
...Shope that he was prepared to sue her if the Mellons did leave...
...I can find no precedent for a judge to in effect freeze an investigation in mid-tracks like this...
...After mentioning her earlier meeting with Duggan, this former suburban innocent exclaimed: “NOW maybe you’ll understand what we’ve been fighting here...
...With this action the investigation was halted, but the public reaction to CLT’s home assessments was just beginning...
...Shope for having “fomented the tax contrcvers y . ” Mrs...
...When the local news media also failed to respond, the frustrated reformers assumed there was nothing left to do...
...Hell...
...That’s *Scaife remained loyal to Duggan despite rumors of his alleged underworld ties...
...Shope...
...They started when Commissioner Shirey did an about-face and joined Commissioner Kelley in voting to keep the CLT reappraisal...
...We completely start from scratch and re-do everything,” he explained...
...Maybe there are still some mistakes...
...They explained their intimidating presence by saying they were responding to reports that there was a disturbance of the peace...
...Several telephone calls came into the courthouse and to her home warning her that her children were going to be kidnapped...
...Attorney Thornburgh explained...
...Wolosyn, however, was able to study the tax records, and he concluded that the Mellons were receiving extraordinary tax treatment...
...On a second occasion, he smelled gas in his car and just managed to jump out before it ignited...
...I was the only one who had the guts to stand up and fight, but I didn’t have the backing...
...The sum was so low that Andrew Kritsky, chairman of the Assessment Board, insisted that no company could properly perform the work for so little money...
...Shope and the surviving reformers in ACT, the fight has just begun, “I’m not through with this yet...
...she rather felt she was being attacked from all sides...
...As owners of controlling interests in such companies as Alcoa, Gulf Oil, and the Koppers Company, the Mellons are linked with the county’s major employers...
...Mysterious threats and harassment , which have never been traced to a source, persistently dogged other ACT reformers, and soon cooled their ardor for further confrontation...
...Shope from executive sessions of the commission and they both failed to attend sessions she scheduled, even though she was its chairwoman...
...Shope gathered a group of her friends and helped form an organization known as the Association of Concerned Taxpayers (ACT) to investigate the sharply rising tax rate in the the county...
...Later he killed a story already in print reporting the drug arrest of the son of one of his friends...
...For a time Mrs...
...Throughout the reappraisal controversy the Mellons refused all requests for interviews...
...Shope’s appointees, as well as Wolosyn, the Assessment Board chairman who questioned the Mellon property values and later refused to accept CLT’s figures...
...Hundreds of others found they were being appraised for barns that had been torn down and for acreage sold off years before...
...Within a few weeks a young tax specialist with Nader’s Tax Reform Research Group, Jonathan Rowe, was in Westmoreland County...
...She refused...
...Mrs...
...They were “in effect franchising all the numbers rackets in the Pittsburgh area,” U.S...
...Ten other reporters resigned in support of Wertz’s position...
...from graft, but instead they chose to contract the job to an outside firm...
...But the victory turned out to be a sham, and what had begun as a heady fling at participatory democracy for Mrs...
...The actual records were carefully kept out of the public domain, locked in a desk drawer of the Assessment Board member assigned to handle the family’s properties...
...Mean while, the state of Tennessee initiated an investigation into the award of a major contract to CLT and subpoenaed Gunlock...
...When, as political newcomers, they asserted their demands for equitable taxation, they found themselves up against the carefully erected and deviously maintained walls of the local establishment, which in Westmoreland County ranges from an underworld syndicate to one of the nations’s richest families-the Mellons...
...We’re like the General Motors in our industry and we’re getting some political potshots thrown at us...
...The letters that poured into her office testified to the crushing impact the CLT a p praisals were having on a number of the county’s homeowners...
...He estimated that most homes were being increased from 25 to 75 per cent...
...The decision to hire CLT was a major departure from the county’s political traditions...
...Together with the support of the other newly elected commissioner, who had also been endorsed by ACT, she was suddenly in a position to dominate the politics of the county and thus to invalidate CLT’ s reap praisai...
...According to one local newspaper, over 15 per cent of the properties in the city of Monessen were not even included on the tax rolls...
...Attorney’s office...
...The ACT members, however, didn’t think these apparent tax inequities could be transformed into a campaign issue, for the commissioners had already moved to correct themor so at least everyone then believed...
...I thought we ought to accept it with its faults and try to perfect it...
...Compare the assessment of our lot with the Mellon holdings,” he wrote Mrs...
...Richard K. Mellon is credited with responsibility for organizing the clean-up of Pittsburgh’s air and the dramatic revitalization of its downtown center...
...When he arrived at the assessor’s office one day with a group of ACT members to photograph records, five deputy sheriffs appeared...
...But then the Nader people came in and arranged the news conference, and all of a sudden CLT started talking and people began to think that maybe there was something to all this after all...
...Just an hour before a federal grand jury returned an eightcount indictment against the Pittsburgh D. A. (U...
...It left unanswered the question as to whether the reference to the “Mellon Family’’ included Richard Mellon Scaife, who also had rejected all requests for an interview...
...May’s testimony was sought by the Internal Revenue Service in connection with an IRS investigation of the district attorney...
...But in Monessen, the city council declared that CLT’s appraisals in that city were totally unreliable and ordered the mayor to rescind them...
...Shirey was particularly disturbed by Wolosyn’s public charges that the Mellons were receiving tax breaks...
...Outside Agitators There is a depressing similarity to the life of most local reform movements: In the beginning there is much sound and fury and a few dramatic victories...
...The only reason their name is being used in this discussion is that it serves to publicize the efforts of the Tax Reform Research Group...
...He wanted to describe just how CLT approaches its work, and demonstrate technological developments that he maintains CLT has introduced into the assessment industry...
...For example, two Alcoa plants (the Mellons have controlling interest in Alcoa) were given a combined reduction of $4 million, a per cent decrease...
...She was no longer just a reformminded county commissionershe now had a powerful ally in Ralph Nader...
...Westmoreland County’s like the other places we work...
...George Crile III is a contributing editor to Harper's...
...After completing his study, Wolosyn presented his findings to the county commissioners (Mrs...
...This year alone CLT will determine how much tax the owners of more than a million properties across the country will have to pay, “CLT is doing more for tax reform than Ralph Nader ever dreamed of accomplishing...
...CLT wouldn’t even reply to our charges because we were shut out of the local papers,’’ observed Mrs., Shope...
...Frustrated, Mrs...
...It appeared to be a reenactment of .an old story in American politics, but in this instance a new twist to the ending gives ACT’s experience significance as a measure of the strength of political reform in America today...
...They evidently didn’t even use the county’s most up-to-date cards, which explained why many of the cards contained outdated information and also why many had been sent to the wrong address...
...He has never once asked me to do a favor for him,” Sliirey insisted...
...The editor refused, and he was fired also...
...Some of the appraisals were ludicrously low...
...Hundreds of other low-income homeowners faced similar choices...
...Instead, the work was so suspect that CLT was charged with outright fraud, and the resulting controversy triggered a furious taxpayers’ revolt in the county...
...Shirey then voted with Kelley to fire all of Mrs...
...Shope came into the D.A.’s office in Pittsburgh, she was surprised to find that Duggan wanted to discuss her political activities in Westmoreland County...
...owners unable to get a fair hearing with CLT or the county...
...What ensued can be viewed as a case study of the impact national reform organizations can have on local efforts...
...Politics had never played a part in her life...
...Clear streams, bridle paths, and post and rail fences wind up and down the rolling green hills where the family’s numerous mansions and privately owned country clubs lie nestled in groves of old trees...
...The D. A. became his political mentor and introduced him to the world of right-wing politics, where Scaife became a major backer of Ronald Reagan, Max Rafferty, Barry Goldwater, and Richard Nixon...
...Shortly after Wertz spoke these words, Scaife ordered his editors to destroy all unfavorable pictures of then-President Nixon in the paper’s files and henceforth run only photographs of Nixon smiling...
...Another Mellon finances and personally directs the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Haiti...
...Shope had second thoughts about her crusading, however, when whe learned of the fate of Robert Duggan...
...I’m not an assessor, but I’m sure they’d like to have them corrected...
...She wasn’t able to assign responsibility for these incidents to anyone in particular...
...For three generations, members of the Mellon family have been making major philanthropic and public service contributionsmuch of it through the Mellon Foundation, now the fourth largest charitable foundation in the country...
...In one township the pattern was so glaring that the local weekly newspaper, the Westmoreland Star, declared in its headlines: “New Assessments Give Tax Breaks To Business, Industry...
...He lost but his defeat failed to discourage her...
...Meanwhile, in Westmoreland County, something had happened to the ACT members who had worked with the Nader organizers...
...As to the specific charges of favoritism shown to certain property owners in Westmoreland County, Gunlock made use of a technicality to deny any responsibility whatsoever...
...By this time a major confrontation at the paper was brewing when a young reporter, Jude Dippold, was assigned to interview Commissioner Shirey...
...She had already been operating under enormous strain...
...The county’s property valuation records were, at that time, open to public inspection, but in the files where the Mellon property values should have been recorded there were only plain yellow file cards bearing the cryptic reference: “Special Set Up...
...Former Assessment Board Chairman Wolosyn, after being barred from his office, went to work with ACT...
...The day after his firing, Wolosyn was met at his office by a deputy sheriff who threatened to arrest him if he insisted on entering...
...For example, they restored the historic center of the town of Ligonier, built a new town hall and post office, and contributed to one of the area’s major hospitals in Latrobe.* All in all, the county shares many characteristics of a company town, including the classic symbol of its domination-the imposing house, or in this case, houses, on the hill...
...Tom Aikens, the paper’s managing editor, said that Scaife had been slowly bringing in a group of his political lieutenants to run the paper...
...Judge Weiss, who speaks of the whole incident with the pained tones of a disapproving father, says that he suspected Gongaware and Scales of political motives...
...When the company held public hearings, more than 15,000 property owners appeared to protest the values the company had placed on their properties...
...Shope, as the new chairman of the commission, would succeed in throwing it out, since the only dissenting vote would come from hold-over Commissioner Kelley...
...Kelley regards the whole controversy with the good-natured detachment of a professional politician...
...CLT’s reappraisal in Westmoreland county was scheduled to be completed in 1970, well before the election the following year, and had the company’s work lived up to the county’s expectations, ACT and Dorothy Shope would, in all likelihood, have retired into the suburban obscurity from whence they came...
...This decision had been hailed as a reform because the company’s expert appraisers were thought to be free of the corruption that so frequently accompanies the work of local assessment officials...
...The indignant ACT‘ members decided to challenge the commissioners at the polls, and they drafted Dorothy Shope as one of their candidates for {County Commissioner in the 1971 election...
...Lawrence Walsh, who covered the Nader intervention for the Pittsburgh Press, observed that Rowe and Greever seemed to breathe life back into ACT...
...Stretching out over 20,000 acres of valleys and mountains in and around Ligonier Township, the members of the Mellon family and certain of their corporate executives maintain homes in a state of baronial splendor rarely seen in modern times...
...Soon Rowe and Greever were working with reporters, tax groups and county officials throughout the country, feeding them information about CLT and encouraging local investigations...
...The significant finding, however, was that much of their land had been valued at less than $100 an acre...
...Shope, he concluded, by trying to block acceptance of the reappraisal, was “in effect saying that she intends to maintain and support the existing inequities in assessments...
...The effect of the Nader presence on ACT and particularly on Mrs...
...The controller felt there was other “hanky-panky’’ going on as well, particularly with regard to the appraisals of large industrial properties, and he asked the county’s District Attorney, John Scales, to join him in an investigation...
...To make matters worse, he claimed that CLT was disregarding the work the students did perform: “They had their employees take the county’s [assessment] books across the street [to CLT’s office] at night where their clerks erased the student’s penciled-in-writing and replaced it with the county’s figures from its property tax cards...
...An aggressive blonde, used to getting her way, Mrs...
...but he’s stopped trying to interfere and control the hard news,” the reporter asserted...
...Greever was confident that these revelations would attract some attention, but he knew that the information guaranteed to unleash the controversy before a national audience was the disclosure that tax breaks might be going to the Mellons...
...Soon hundreds, and then thousands, of cars across the county were carrying bumper stickers with the message “Reduce Taxes, Join ACT...
...One letter, from Charles K. Thomas, a disabled pensioner, explained that because of CLT’s appraisal increase, he and his wife would be forced to “leave the only home we have known since our marriage...
...In, West Virginia, state tax officials were so disturbed by the company’s work-p articularly with regard to an attempt to lower Consolidated Coal Company’s assessment by $12 million just after the company had built a major new plant-that they decided not to give any further state contracts to CLT...
...Senate Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations, headed by Senator Edmund S. Muskie, which was investigating the administration of local property taxes, to hold hearings on CLT...
...The commissioner then leaned back in his chair and smiled: “This controversy is all a bunch of bullshoes” he began...
...Shope called me to relate this latest Westmoreland County development...
...The rebels were on the verge of seizing the federal garrison in Pittsburgh when President George Washington sent out a force of 15,000 militiamen to crush the insurrection...
...He found major, sometimes devastating, appraisal increases for farmers, small businessmen and homeowners...
...Now, I’m not trying to say there was nothing wrong with the reappraisal...
...Shirey stressed that he had no obligations to the Mellon family or to his major contributor, Richard Mellon Scaife...
...The new wife of the D. A. was thus protected by law from having to testify against her husband...
...I think there’s almost a conspiracy forming against our company,” he confided...
...One of his most valuable assets was an intimate relationship with Richard Mellon Scaife as well as with Scaife’s sister, Cordelia Scaife May...
...CLT may have recommended that a county change values but [by law] we can only recommend the change...
...The harrassment ceased...
...Oh...
...When asked if he had represented Mrs...
...Duggan served as her personal lawyer, a position which reportedly netted him a small fortune for handling her mother’s estate...
...It’s just astounding what went on,” Controller Gongaware reflected later...
...While the conversation was taking place, her attorney, who had arrived late for the meeting, was not permitted to enter the room...
...Crusading Journalism Despite the alarming nature of such incidents, the local press in Westmoreland County played down the threats and intimidation of ACT’S members...
...Mrs...
...The former coach talked of the work of his company’s appraisers much like a bishop might speak of the labors of his missionaries sent off to bring religion to the darkest regions of Africa...
...Among other things, Rowe found that courts in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Atlanta, Georgia, and Quincy, Massachusetts, had declared invalid CLT’s mass appraisals in those cities...
...We don’t get a chance to see you city slickers often,” he said jovially, as he spread a white linen cloth over a table in his office and offered coffee and doughnuts...
...There was once a time when I could pick up a phone and get a grant for a library from the Mellon Foundation, but now it’s dried up...
...Pointing to a computer spewing out magnetic tapes, he explained that the average local assessor is so unreliable-he then used the word “corrupt”-that “CLT assumes no information from any county can be used...
...Dorothy Shope, a middleaged mother of five, received her property tax assessment in the mail...
...CLT iS One Of the oldest Child Labor and largest firms in the business-: in recent fears it had come, like General Motors, to dominate its industry...
...The judge then proceeded to impound Scales’ petition, along with all tapes and documents that had been assembled in the course of their investigation...
...The National Gallery of Art in Washington was a gift of Andrew Mellon...
...There are-fewjobs - in local politics so potentially lucrative, or so easily corrupted, as the job of the local tax assessor...
...The Plot Thickens It was at this point, when ACT’S victory seemed certain, that Mrs...
...but if there have been mistakes, they could have been corrected very quietly without all of the commotion...
...Similar charges were heard in Wilmington, Delaware, where CLT had given $33-million worth of appraisal reductions to various industrial properties...
...Finally, the judge ordered both Scales and Gongaware not to discuss any of their findings and concluded by impounding his own order that had impounded the petition...
...They even persuaded the U.S...
...The company’s appraisers had valued his three-fourth’s-acre plot of land at $6,375...
...Even Mrs...
...Seated at h s roll-top desk, wearing a high stiff collar, he seems to have stepped right out of the 1930s...
...Aside from concern over rising taxes, they were incensed to discover what they considered blatant tax breaks being given to certain officeholders and owners of large industrial and commercial properties...
...Although one of the final acts of the out-going commissioners was to adopt Cole-Layer-Trumble’s reappraisal, it appeared certain that Mrs...
...Most of them had been on Scaife’s personal or family foundation payrolls, Aikens said, and some had worked as Scaife’s personal representatives in campaigns of extreme right-wing candidates...
...According to Thornburgh, the people doing the bribing in these cases were organized crime figures...
...right,” he replied...
...Scales and Gongaware did take up their petition with a new judge, but he also refused to send the matter before a grand jury...
...But he admitted that certain recent developments have worried him...
...1 Surprise came when CLT began to send out its first notices of new values to the county’s property owners in 197 1, three years after the reappraisal had begun...
...About this time, as the issue became emotional, Mrs...
...Shope was guilty of “wearing two hats,” he explained...
...According to Pennsylvania’s Deputy Attorney General, Peter Brown, “It’s unheard of for a judge to turn down a district attorney’s request for a special grand jury...
...Furthermore, the Controller found that the students often didn’t even go into the houses...
...But for many, the reappraisal did not accomplish its promised reform...
...In fact, he admitted that he wasn’t “certain that that matter properly rests within the confines of the grand jury...
...it was so political,” he said shaking his head...
...In recent years Duggan’s reputation plummeted to the point where local reporters and law enforcement officials began to accuse him of having ties to the rackets...
...Later it was discovered that Shirey, who rents a farm from the Mellons, received at least $9,000 of his $12,000 in listed campaign contributions from the Mellon family...
...Shope had not yet been elected) with the recommendation that the county sue CLT or at least force the company to redo its work...
...I don’t think you’ll get a situation like this in too many places...
...We had no problems with the job until the politicians conspired to attack the program...
...Through the familycontrolled Mellon National Bank and First Boston Corporation, the Mellons hold part of the debt of the county government, along with mortgages on many of the county’s homes, and serve as one of the depositories for the county’s funds...
...When she sought information on the CLT appraisal, the new Assessment Board chairman refused, explaining that he wasn’t authorized to release any information unless he received an order signed by two of the commissioners...
...they always cause controversies...
...Once a year, this official would meet the Mellon land expert, usually at the Mellon’s Rolling Rock Farm, where he would be informed of any recent Mellon acquisitions or demolitions...
...You’d have to be crazy to think I’d give up the fight now...
...For example, one CLT valuation of a 312-acre Mellon property led to an assessed value of 64 cents an acre...
...We have to recognize there will be mistakes in any program where human beings are involved,” Shirey explained...
...One of the family’s richest members, Richard Mellon Scaife, owns and publishes the county’s major daily newspaper, the Greensburg Tribune Review...
...Also, the chief of Duggans’s “Racket Squad,” Sam Ferrarro, was convicted on seven counts stemming from his acceptance of nearly $300,000-worth of protection payoffs...
...For some reason Shirey considered this a breach of confidence and complained to Scaife, who ordered the night managing editor to fire Dippold...
...But Judge David H. Weiss did just that...
...Riding this wave of ‘resentment, both she and ACT candidate Robert Shirey, a Republican farmer and motel owner, both of whom were campaigning against the reappraisal program, were swept into office...
...Most of the early civil rights legislation passed in the 1960s was written by members of the Taconic Foundation which was funded by a member of the family...
...Thousands of notices were sent to the wrong addresses, while many that did reach their proper destinations had mat he ma tical errors and property descriptions that had The County . Controller, Wayne Gongaware, was the first official to find out what had happened...
...These suspicious reductions, in addition to an estimated one million clerical errors found in CLT’s original computer print-out, prompted the city’s assessment officials to hire another appraisal firm to appraise CLT’s appraisal...
...By this time, however, both Gongaware and Scales, who was then running for the state senate, felt they were waging a losing battle, and they became reluctant to pursue their cause against the formidable political front forming against them...
...Shope says that he then asked her to join him at dinner with Shirey “in a place where we won’t be recognized...
...It’s the nature of the business...
...The homeowners were only given two or three minutes apiece to appeal their appraisals and, according to Gongaware, they were often intimidated by suggestions that their complaints might result in further increases in their taxes...
...Instead, he suggested they undertake a new investigation...
...Shope’s claim that she was being unfairly taxed, but he pointed out that an all-county reappraisal was under way and ruled that the assessment should stand until an equalization could be made...
...They did not examine assessments on factories, businesses, or large real estate holdings such as those of the Mellon family...
...Wertz later acknowledged that Scaife, for a time, had tried to have his reporters shade stories: for example, to “downplay ‘liberals’ like Hugh Scott...
...As she continued to criticize the actions of the two county commissioners who were excluding her from their meetings, Judge Weiss reentered the controversy with an unprecedented proposal...
...It’s all been quite an education for me,” Mrs...
...Commissioner Kelley called it a “mob reaction” and singled out Dorothy Shope for irresponsible rabble-rousing...
...but Wolosyn found the Mellon properties had gone up only two per cent...
...Shope was not alone in her troubles...
...On the other hand, he maintained that there were no reductions or increases for many industrial and commercial properties and land held by real estate developers, despite state tax laws calling for uniform assessments for all properties...
...When approached for an interview he said he was actually eager to answer any charges made against his company, no matter how long it might take...
...But even the up-dated figures hardly reflected the thousands of dollars per acre value that real estate agents say the exquisitely cultivated and valuable land is worth...
...Shortly afterward, he resigned as CLT’s President...
...Shope says...
...George Crib IZI is Q contributing editor to Harper’s...
...Law suits have continued to plague Cole-Layer-Trumble and the value of its stock has plummeted drastically...
...They [the Mellonsl have always contributed to my campaigns because their business interests are here,” Duggan stated...
...But to Mrs...
...Dottie, what will it take for you to work with Bob Shirey,” she remembers Duggan asking her...
...U. S . Attorney 1 hornburgh, who spends much of his time investigating the extensive activities of organized criminals in Westmoreland County, points out the irony in the Mellon syndicate coexistence: “Here you have the veneer of verdant hills and valleys peopled by the wealthy families of Pittsburgh, yet within a stone’s throw of them you find the underworld, the syndicate guys.* There are some very venal people there-very evil...
...According to the U. S. Attorney for Western Pennsylvania, Richard L. Thornburgh, the mob’s presence and influence on Westmoreland County politics continues to this day-standing in curious contrast to the genteel, yet all-pervasive role of the extended Mellon family and its multitude of financial interests in the county’s economic life...
...Bursting with renewed indignation, she called a press conference to condemn her two fellow commissioners and set to work to elect an ACT member District Attorney...
...The first was the information Rowe was sending in from Washington, establishing CLTs involvement in remarkably similar controversies elsewhere throughout the country...
...A bullishly fit man of about 45, Gunlock got into the assessing business direct from a career as a football coach at Ohio State and earlier at West Point where he is credited with having developed the famed lonesome end offensive strategy...
...Weiss, who had refused to call a special grand jury to investigate the CLT reappraisal because he said the District Attorney was being “political,” announced that he was considering asking the grand jury to investigate Mrs...
...But CLT’s reassuring salesmen and impressive brochures promised the most thorough job available: trained appraisers would inspect every property and as the company’s president claimed, “Once we turn the values over to the counties they’re 100 per cent accurate...
...Thus the commissioners’ decision was hailed as a major step toward political reform...
...As questions were asked, Gunlock called for his secretary to produce brochures and fact sheets and before the day was out a stack of papers and books a foot high stood ready to defend the company’s integrity...
...They were elected to two of the three county commissioner posts...
...His recommendations were rejected...
...do the job...
...He had two angles that he was certain would attract national coverage at a press conference scheduled in Pittsburgh...
...Until then Mrs...
...Wolosyn also checked the reap praisal of the Mellon properties...
...But the force that fueled ACT was not the poor and disadvantaged so much as it was the substantial middle-class homeowners unwilling to accept major tax increases after discovering they were paying the taxes that they thought others were avoiding...
...The largest of the Mellon contributions to Shirey’s campaign came from Richard Mellon Scaife (who was soon to attain national prominence when it was disclosed that he had contributed $990,000 in 330 $3,000 checks to President Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign...
...at the same time Nader’s field organizer, Barry Greever, set off for Pennsylvania to help revitalize ACT...
...They gave them a scent of blood and the belief that for the first time someone cared about them and was going to give them a hand...
...In one instance, a woman who had recently moved from Pittsburgh received a CLT appraisal valuing her house at $1.4 billion, up from $750...
...U. S. Steel $1 million...
...They treated our people like dogs,” the controller observed...
...Shope had led the conventional life of a doctor’s wife in Wes tmoreland County , Pennsylvania...
...Meanwhile, Controller Gongaware declared that he would not pay CLT the final $121,000 of its contract...
...One ACT member, who on six different occasions was denied access to her own property tax card, finally resorted to hiring a lawyer to force the county to show it to her...
...S. Attorney Thornberg alleges he took at least a quarter of a million dollars in racket payoffs) Duggan was found dead on the lawn of his country estate in Westmoreland County, the victim of a self-inflicted shotgun blast to the chest...
...After confirming preliminarily ACT’s allegations, he returned to Washington to begin a full-scale investigation of CLT’s work in other communities across the country...
...We revealed it all to the county commissioners and they just laughed at us...
...Shortly thereafter Mrs...
...In the 1950s the county achieved brief national notoriety as the center of a racketeering empire in which the county’s public officials were said to be openly allied with underworld figures...
...It’s normal to receive charges that we hdn’t do our work properly, ” he explains...
...Gunlock thinks he knows who is behind the plot: “It’s the Raider group,” he said referring ___ - - . to Ralph Nader, whose lawyers recently have been investigating CLT in relationship to their work on property tax reform...
...One of the things Shirey did was join with Commissioner Kelley to exclude Mrs...
...and so on...
...Almost 200 years later, in one of those same Western Pennsylvania counties, a new collection of outraged taxpayers organized to rebel against a method of taxation they felt to be unjust...
...Politics” had been the motivating force in the attacks made against the county officials who were defending CLT’s program The reappraisal, Wertz declared, was actually an “amazing feat” that had largely corrected the “fantastic inequities that had existed before...
...It only remained for their champion, Mrs...
...In fact, it was largely because of the local press and, in particular, Scaife’s Greensburg Tribune Review, that the criticism of CLT’s reappraisal was temporarily silenced...
...From that day on my life has become a living hell,’’ Mrs...
...On the day the tax bill arrived at homes throughout the county, a mass of furious taxpayers in the town of Arnold swarmed into the city’s municipal building, forcing the officiais in this small rural town, who had never before dealt with citizen dissent, to close the building down...
...For ACT, the victory appeared to have been won...
...It’s a bad situation,” the editor said, “and it’s bound to get worse...
...her latest preoccupation had been moving her family into a new house on a sizeable tract of land in the country near Greensburg...
...May in any property tax matters in Westmoreland County, he said he could not answer the question because of his attorney-client relationship with Mrs...
...But the main concern of most homeowners was the staggering increase in their realty appraisals...
...Shope said as she reflected on what she has faced in the politics of Westmoreland County...
...Who ever heard of such a thing...
...Shope was bolstered by the support of most of the country’s homeowners, but this was of little help once Shirey turned against her...
...I’m free, I really can do anything I want...
...I don’t know...
...The Mellons, the Mafia, and A Colonial County by George Crile III In the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, farmers in four Western Pennsylvania counties took up arm rather than pay a federal tax on the whiskey they produced...
...Here she is acting both as chairman of the commissioners and as a private citizen fighting the will of the commission...
...Scaife reciprocated by becoming Duggan’s political patron...
...Scaife re torte d , “Your dismissal’s accepted...
...Greever, however, had encountered similar obstacles as a civil rights organizer in the South, and he sensed an opportunity to force CLT’s hand by exposing the reappraisal scandal on a national rather than a local level...
...Racket Club Although it is often thought of as the lushly manicured retreat of philanthropic Pittsburgh millionaires, Westmoreland County is no stranger to a miasmic political atmosphere of fear and corruption...
...When Mrs...
...Quite frankly,” he confided, “what she’s doing-well, it’s just not kosher...
...The drama began a few years ago when Mrs...
...Since neighboring farm land was being taxed at only a fraction of her $700-an-acre valuation, she took the matter to court...
...She freely admits that ACT hasn’t accomplished much of anything tangiblemost of the tax inequities still stand...
...The homeowners in ACT, for all their suburban affluence, were modern-day immigrants, counterparts of the Irish in Boston or the dirt farmers confronting cattle barons on the high plains...
...Later Aikens was presented with a typed sheet of paper to sign-his own resignation...
...Throughout her troubles this former housewife increasingly became the court of last appeal for property...
...Muzak fills the air as attractive secretaries and clean-cut young men in business suits move briskly about Cole-Layer-Trumble’s modern office building in Dayton, Ohio...
...Ten years before, Duggan had been the fairhaired boy of Pittsburgh politics and frequently mentioned as a likely candidate for offices on a national level...
...Controversy is simply an unavoidable consequence of CLT’s work, Gunlock concluded cheerfully...
...The Taxman Slumbers ~~ In 1967, when Cole-Layer-Trumble was hired to reappraise Westmoreland County’s properties for a fee of $959,000, there had been no reassessment of properties in the county for nearly 40 years and no consistency marked the valuation placed on homes or industries...
...The judge did not dispute Mrs...
...Up until that time all of ACT’s charges had been met mostly with simple denials or with no response whatsoever...
...Finally, in response to repeated demands for an explanation, the family’s public relations official sent an unsigned statement stating that “the Mellon Family has done everything possible to assure that they are paying their fair share of real estate taxes in Westmoreland County...
...When you deliberately erase records and put in our old records and then sell them back to the county for $ 1 million, that’s fraud...
...They have the final decision to make on this...
...Shope, the standard bearer in the rebellion, was elected chairman of the Westmoreland County Commissioners...
...The problem, of course, is that counties hire mass appraisal firms to do their assessment work and invariably they do accept their valuations without question...
...American Chain & Cable, $400,000...
...The D. A. was not satisfied with her noncommittal reply...
...The paper accomplished this with a six-part series of articles evaluating “all sides of the tax controversy...
...Although Scaife and the Mellon family could keep silent and wait for the controversy to subside, reports of the charges made at the Nader press conference, appearing in The New York Times and other newspapers in variaus parts of the country, forced Cole-Layer-Tmmble to rush to its own defense...
...no one likes taxes...
...There’s no perfection in human life, and not in county government...
...With each succeeding incident, ACT’S power grew, until by election day it had become the major political force in the county...
...Later the brakes on her new car failed and the resulting accident demolished it...
...You’ve got to be careful, the family could leave the county...
...Later, after this figure was published, the county claimed a mathematical error and brought the figure into conformity with other Mellon valuations...
...All novices in the ways of Pennsylvania county politics, they wrote a resolution calling for a freeze on the local tax rate, gathered several thousand signatures, and watched in horror as the county commissioners threw the petition into a wastebasket and promptly raised the tax rate again...
...Domesticated deer roam unafraid, protected, as are their owners, by an internal police force...
...Scales, an ambitious politician fond of pointing out that he was a classmate of Ralph Nader at Harvard Law School as well as a classmate of U. S. Attorney Richard Thornburgh and Richard Mellon Scaife at Yale, was initally enthusiastic...
...Instead they were paying high school and college students $1.50 an hour to do the initial inspections...
...Duggan had an enormous influence on Scaife, as well...
...Seated in his panelled office, drinking coffee out of a jade green mug with CLT’s gold monogram on the side, the company’s president, William Gunlock, discusses the Westmoreland County controversy with philosophical detachment...
...Shope’s troubles began...
...Afterwards, Dippold interviewed Shirey’s foe, Commissioner Shope, on the same subject...
...Shope received an invitation from Robert Duggan the District Attorney of Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), to visit him in his office...
...The crime the judge had in mind was “conflict of interest or nonfeasance...
...Shortly after CLT started work, he discovered that, outside of a few supervisors, the company wasn’t hiring experienced appraisers to inspect the county’s properties...
...subsequently he was fired for his efforts...
...Shope was infuriated at the assessment the county assessor had placed on her land...
...But according to Thornburgh, Scaife “cut Duggan off” in September 1971 when the D. A.’s employees started to be indicted by the U.S...
...There are great dangers involved in pushing the Mellons too hard on the assessment question,” he explained...
...Wertz, who had just been designated the paper’s “investigative reporter,” felt that Scaife’s action signaled an end to whatever limited autonomy Wertz once possessed, and he demanded an explanation...
...If there had been any truth to the assessment charges he would have published it...
...The articles, however , at tempted to explain only why homes and farms had experienced increases...
...Shope was immense...
...It was sort of a conference to get Jim Kelley [the third county commissioner] right before the election...
...Property values in Ligonier Townshp, where the Mellons own about 15,000 acres, had been increased about 40 per cent by CLT’s appraisers...
...This massive reappraisal offered local officials an unprecedented opportunity to profit *According to Thornburgh, the syndicate’s activities in the county are dominated by the Gabriel Kelly Mannerino family, with ties into the Pittsburgh underworld ruled by John S. LaRocca...
...52 In reviewing the case, Pennsylvania Deputy Attorney General Brown was puzzled by the actions of both Judge Weiss and District Attorney Scales...
...Shope, to institute the necessary reforms and clean up the county’s politics...
...As was the case with their spiritual ancestors in the Whiskey Rebellion, these modern day rebels had no way of anticipating the awesome battle they had undertaken...
...Some months earlier they had hired the nation’s leading property tax appraisal firm, the Cole-LayerTrumble Company (CLT), to reappraise each of the county’s 147,000 properties...
...He doesn’t believe the firebombings were related to his property tax research, but he observes that “anything can happen in Westmoreland County...
...Coincidentally, Duggan was a lifelong friend of Westmoreland County Commissioner Shirey, and telephone company records show that Shirey was in almost daily telephone conversation with Duggan...
...The arrival of an outside organizer, such as Greever or Rowe, provides a protective counterbalance...
...Shope soon led this unsuspecting housewife into a series of confrontations that seemed to threaten the safety of her children and to menace her own life...
...After confirming Gongaware’s findings, the D. A. petitioned the county judge to convene aspecial grand jury to investigate CLT’s appraisal...
...In Nashville, a judge, after striking down CLT’s farmland assessments, commented that the company’s appraisals had been so excessive that their adoption would have effectively halted all bona fide farming operations in the county.’’ Nashville’s assessor, Clifford Allen, a former president of the International Association of Assessing Officials, added his own charge that CLT had systematically provided low appraisals to large industrial and commercial property owners...
...This issue so concerned Shirey that lie warned Mrs...
...Entangled in this discouraging episode is a political morality play as old as the nation, only recast in modern dress...
...but,” he concluded with a shrug of his shoulders, “you do the best you can...
...my, goodness, a few tax dollars to the Mellons wouldn’t mean anything...
...Then, when the wire services started to report accounts of tortures and killings attributed to the military junta in Chile, the publisher decreed that there would be no more unfavorable accounts of the junta carried in his paper...
...But then he said he was not certain what specific crime to cite...
...And so Gongaware reversed his position and authorized the final payment to CLT...
...Do you mean they were trying to make sure there is good govern men t in Pittsburgh because that is where they do business...
...The major limitation on the effectiveness of local reformers is their isolation and hence their vulnerability to the local power structure...
...This conclusion was reinforced by the choice of Cole-Layer-Trumble to long since changed...
...There was some consternation when CLT submitted its bid of only $6 for each parcel of property to be appraised...
...The change in ACT’s fortunes resulted from appeals for help sent by one of ACTS members in a letter addressed to “Ralph Nader, Washington, D.C...
...It’s a special case,” he explained...
...What CLT did was cheating by fraud,” he explained...
...William W olosyn , Krit sky’s successor as chairman of the Assessment Board, shared Gongaware’s suspicion and started to check CLT’s work...
...The articles, written by the Tribune-Review’s county courthouse reporter, Tom Wertz, concluded that the controversy “was largely a contrived tax revolt...
...In fact, according to Scales, Weiss merely glanced at the petition and then read his denial from a previously prepared statement...
...The Mellons dominate the county’s charities and are its unrivaled doers of good works...
...Shope into office was beginning to crest...
...Now I know that there have been things carried out in this community that have been a little bit beneficial to them [the Mellons...
...A big, balding Irishman, he is said to run Westmoreland County’s politics...
...What nobody knew at that time was that the CLT had acquired a reputation of doubtful probity, complete with a recent history of invalidated reappraisals, repeated legal challenges, and charges of bribery and conflicts of interest...
...The wave of protest that would carry Mrs...
...In 1957 two of the county’s prominent residents were arrested at the Appalachian Meeting where national mafia leaders were conferring...
...At the height of the controversy in late 1971, Robert Elston, the chairman of ACT and a research technician at the Koppers Co., was investigating the financing of a public housing project when his car was fire-bombed...
...She then flew to Nevada and married Duggan...
...and lost...
...This is how ACT-like its spiritual ancestors in the Whiskey Rebellion-was about to be destroyed as a political force...
...And frankly, I was quite surprised that Scales took it without any objection...
...Such allegations are “ridiculous,” he maintained, just after three of his key lieutenants were convicted by federal court juries...
...but then the powers challenged by the reformers organize, and the rebellion is crushed...
Vol. 7 • June 1975 • No. 4
