THE CULTURE OF CORRUPTION

by H. N. Burdett

Early in my newspaper career, I witnessed the Speaker of the Maryland House of Delegates announce from the rostrum in the lower house chamber to some 140 colleagues that he was stepping down in the wake of a grand jury indictment. To my everlasting astonishment, Speaker A. Gordon Boone was given a standing ovation. Rather than accepting the news as a possibility that he might be serving jail time, the assemblage of lawmakers reacted as though Boone had hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth to win the World Series for the Baltimore Orioles.

That event remains among the more bizarre I can recall after years of covering statewide, county and city election campaigns and sessions of the state legislature, city and county councils, as well as the United States Congress.

Even had Boone been a beloved figure among his colleagues, a round of applause from elected members of the General Assembly, considering the circumstances under which he was leaving, would have been passing strange. But I cannot say that he was.

The only plausible explanation for the vote of confidence -- if that's what it was -- is that the House of Delegates was expressing the equivalent of a collective sigh of relief, thinking: There but for the grace of God. . .

That evening over dinner, I related my astonishment at what I'd witnessed to a reform-minded delegate who had regarded Boone as a member of the entrenched establishment, a burr in the saddle of progress. "Did you consider," he said, "that some of us were applauding as our way of saying goodbye and good riddance?"

Boone's apparent mistake was choosing to defend his legal clients -- savings and loan companies -- before a grand jury rather than in a courtroom.

He had earlier told friends and colleagues of his intention to voluntarily testify before the grand jury on behalf of his clients. He ignored the warnings of fellow lawyers to reconsider, that unnecessarily going before a grand jury is a high-risk proposition. And he paid the price for ignoring free legal advice when his indictment alleged that he had withheld information from the grand jury. Boone was subsequently convicted.

Until then, Maryland really did not have a reputation as a particularly corrupt state. It was not nearly in the same league with Louisiana and West Virginia, both of which a relative who happened to be working on an auditing project involving various state governments assured me had, at that time, left the remaining 48 states in their dust.

But the Old Line State seemed determined in succeeding years to catch up with the Bayou and Mountaineer states. The list of politicians convicted by a jury of their peers included: Governor Marvin Mandel, U.S. Senator Daniel Brewster, Rep. William O. Mills, Anne Arundel County Executive Joseph W. Alton, Jr., Baltimore County Executive Dale Anderson, Baltimore County State's Attorney Samuel Green, Jr., and Baltimore City Council President Walter S. Orlinsky.

Most of the humpty-dumpties who were pushed or fell off the wall followed the reeling in of the biggest fish of all, former Maryland governor and then U.S. Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. In an act of epochal audacity, Agnew continued to collect cash in white envelopes for favors rendered as Baltimore County Executive when he was a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Agnew spent the remainder of his life as the middle man in deals cut by Saudi King Faisal and living his dream as one of Frank Sinatra's fawning acolytes, but seething with bitter anti-Semitism, blaming Jews, rather than his own boundless greed, for his fall from grace. Clearly those "nattering nabobs of negativism" (a phrase dreamed up by his Jewish speechwriter, Bill Safire), against whom Agnew ranted as Richard Nixon's hatchet man, had the last word.

Those were embarrassing days for Marylanders, particularly when out-of-state colleagues, friends and relatives barraged them with jokes and wisecracks about the culture of corruption that was rampant in the state. I waged a short-lived campaign to have the U.S. Postal Service merge two neighboring southern Anne Arundel County communities, Deale and Shadyside, for the purpose of establishing a Shady Deale, Maryland, postmark. But the wagons of local pride circled to prevent such mischief, which I maintained would have saved tons of postal dollars and put those two sleepy villages on the map beyond the wildest expectations of their respective chambers of commerce. Some villages prefer not to be awakened from their slumber.

A stock defiant response to the endless insults suffered in the Free State back then was: Maryland has no more corrupt politicians than any other state, it's just that here we prosecute them. That rejoinder was somewhat disingenuous inasmuch as many if not most of the prosecutions were promulgated by federal rather than state grand juries.

Anne Arundel County Executive Joe Alton, who in 1974 pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to charges of conspiracy to commit extortion, was among those who blamed their troubles on their conviction that "the rules changed."

Alton never really explained what rules had undergone transformation between the time he had taken the oath of office and his receiving a subpoena to answer federal corruption charges. Perhaps the "rule" was that prosecutors were supposed to look the other way when a politician was into the cookie jar up to his elbow. It was a sad time indeed.

The late Dick Levine, a legendary Baltimore Sun investigative reporter who was almost single-handedly responsible for a dramatic shakeup of the corruption-ridden Baltimore City Police Deparment, once told me: "I've never been in favor of capital punishment with one exception. I'm for beheading anyone who takes an oath to protect the public trust, then violates it." Levine capsulized what a great many Marylanders felt when the roofs came crashing down on so many duly elected public officials.

It would be a stretch to characterize onetime Maryland House Speaker A. Gordon Boone as a folk hero. But in New York's Harlem, Charlie Rangel, could without the slightest exaggeration make such a claim -- as could any member of Congress who had represented his district for 40 successive years.

Rep. Charles B. Rangel faces a U.S. House of Representatives ethics committee hearing, expected to begin in September -- only two months before voters go to the polls to determine whether he will serve his 21st term in Congress.

The 80-year-old congressman's flair for the poetic is a throwback to bygone days under the dome of the nation's capitol. His response to the announcement of his pending public trial reveals that his love of language remains very much intact: "I am pleased that, at long last, sunshine will pierce the cloud of serious allegations that have been raised against me in the media."

Counter charges of headline-hunting media are commonplace among politicians following court indictments or announcement of ethic probes. After all, someone has to be responsible for the mess in which they have waded hip deep and it certainly could not be these innocent-as-lambs-pure-as-the-driven-snow pols. Their plea harkens all the way back to the call for killing the messenger.

On the other hand, where there's smoke, there's often fire. In Rangel's case, for years there has been enough smoke to choke half the population of Harlem, and the time to separate the wheat from the chaff will be soon enough upon us.

Rangel reluctantly relinquished his chairmanship of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee in March, only days after the ethics panel decreed that in an unrelated case he had breached congressional gift rules by accepting trips in 2007 and 2008 to conferences in the Caribbean financed by corporate interests.

The ethics submcommittee has reportedly found evidence that the Harlem congressman misused his office to preserve a tax loophole worth half a billion dollars for a corporate executive who agreed to contribute $1 million to the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College of New York; that he neither reported nor paid taxes on rental income from a beachfront villa he owns in the Dominican Republic, and that he wrongfully accepted four rent-stabilized apartments in Manhattan including one he used as a campaign office.

There is speculation that Rangel, at this late date in his political career, will resign his seat in Congress rather than submit himself to the humiliation of a public trial. But this is contradicted by his "sunshine will pierce the cloud" statement followed by his recent feisty comment that this is "not the time to be hanging up the gloves." Despite his advanced age, not many have questioned the pride or the courage of Charlie Rangel, who as a soldier during the Korean war nearly froze to death while U.S. forces were under attack by the Chinese.

As horrific and nauseating as the charges against Maryland politicians and Charlie Rangel have been, they pale in comparison to those leveled against Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich who is currently on trial. The litany of allegations against Blago curdle the blood, including:

Plotting to auction off then President-elect Obama's U.S. Senate seat for personal gain; signing a bill in exchange for a campaign contribution from the horse-racing industry; awarding a toll road contract in exchange for a campaign contribution; engaging in pay-to-play in making appointments and plotting to award a state job with the Illinois Finance Authority in exchange for campaign contributions; attempting to exchange state permits for cash.

It seems that federal prosecutors have thrown everything against the wall in the hope that one or more might stick.

Perhaps the most damaging evidence uncovered during the prosecution's case was a suggestion caught on tape to Blagojevich by his brother, a soft-spoken former army officer described as the polar opposite of the foul-mouthed, chip-on-the-shoulder governor.

Blago's sibling, confidant and co-defendant, is caught telling the governor: "If you can get Obama to get (U.S. Attorney Patrick) Fitzgerald to close the investigation on you, it completely provides you with total clarity."

Robert Blagojevich's advice to his brother is interpreted as quid pro quo for the governor naming the Obamas' longtime friend and inner circle adviser, Valerie Jarrett, to the president's former Senate seat. Robert has argued that his suggestion had nothing to do with Jarrett's possible appointment, but was meant "in the context of what politicians do." Interesting construction.

The governor has been treading boiling water staunchly and unsurprisingly proclaiming his innocence in his typical brash, in-your-face style that has characterized his public career and apparently has some cache in certain precincts within the City of Big Shoulders.

When the prosecution rested and before his defense commenced, the embattled Governor Blagojevich went before the television cameras to announce to Illinois and the world: "The government proved I never took a corrupt dollar. I never took a corrupt dime, not a corrupt nickel, not a corrupt penny."

Blago continued: "In the tapes the government played, they didn't prove. . .I did (anything) illegal. In fact, they proved I sought the advice of my lawyers and my advisors. They proved I was on the phone talking with them, brainstorming about ideas. Yes, they proved some of the ideas were stupid. But they also proved some of the ideas were good. The government, in their case, proved my innocence."

"I've learned a lot of lessons from this whole experience," he told the press. "And probably the biggest. . .is that I talk too much."

Whatever the outcome of Blago's trial, it would be beyond comprehension for anyone who has paid even the slightest attention to the proceedings or the governor's colorful career that he has "learned" any such lesson. He is first and foremost a shoot-from-the-lip politician, whose vocabulary might be severely limited absent four-letter invective.

When politicians are hauled into the dock to answer corruption charges, whether in Maryland, Illinois, New York or anywhere else, they instinctively and almost invariably go on the offensive by insinuating if not outright counter-charging that some hot-shot prosecutor is trumping up spurious charges to make a name for himself, perhaps as a springboard for political office. There have been instances when such allegations have been justified. But at least credit Blago with a little more imagination than that: his tactic of claiming that the prosecution has not only failed to prove its charges but has actually cleared his name is one calculated to resonate with a jury of his peers.

It will be ultimately up to that jury to determine whether the Illinois governor is guilty of anything more than having the foulest mouth in politics. Yet the United States v. Blagojevich, involving an elected official in a state that has had its share of paragons of political virtue and integrity is disquieting. Enough so that Abraham Lincoln, Adlai Stevenson and Senator Paul Douglas must be pinwheeling in their respective graves.