Ross Buettner: Running Government as a Cash Business
[Ross Buettner is a reporter with the NYT.]
...Official corruption is much in the news lately — including an upcoming House ethics trial against Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York and expected ethics charges against Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California. So it might be worth revisiting a few politicians who appear to have gotten away with their misdeeds, and some who nearly did.
The folksy Illinois secretary of state, Paul Powell, was under no suspicion of wrongdoing when, in 1970, he died in a hotel room he was sharing with his personal secretary....
William Hale Thompson served as mayor of Chicago for all but four years from 1915 through 1931, an era marked by Al Capone and Prohibition. He had been born wealthy, and upon his death in 1944, his lawyer valued the estate at $150,000. But when state agents opened two safe deposit boxes in his name, they found $1.5 million in cash, the equivalent of about $18.6 million today....
Others escaped justice quite literally....
...David Friedland, a state senator from New Jersey, who disappeared after staging a fatal scuba diving accident in 1985 as he was awaiting sentencing for fraud. In 1988, he was caught on the Maldives, a chain of islands in the Indian Ocean, where he had built a successful chain of dive shops, and served about nine years of a 15-year sentence.
“He was really too successful,” said one federal investigator. “If he had elected to become low profile, he might still be at large.”...
Read entire article at NYT
...Official corruption is much in the news lately — including an upcoming House ethics trial against Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York and expected ethics charges against Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California. So it might be worth revisiting a few politicians who appear to have gotten away with their misdeeds, and some who nearly did.
The folksy Illinois secretary of state, Paul Powell, was under no suspicion of wrongdoing when, in 1970, he died in a hotel room he was sharing with his personal secretary....
William Hale Thompson served as mayor of Chicago for all but four years from 1915 through 1931, an era marked by Al Capone and Prohibition. He had been born wealthy, and upon his death in 1944, his lawyer valued the estate at $150,000. But when state agents opened two safe deposit boxes in his name, they found $1.5 million in cash, the equivalent of about $18.6 million today....
Others escaped justice quite literally....
...David Friedland, a state senator from New Jersey, who disappeared after staging a fatal scuba diving accident in 1985 as he was awaiting sentencing for fraud. In 1988, he was caught on the Maldives, a chain of islands in the Indian Ocean, where he had built a successful chain of dive shops, and served about nine years of a 15-year sentence.
“He was really too successful,” said one federal investigator. “If he had elected to become low profile, he might still be at large.”...