|
Banned
|
WARNING: If you do not have an inquisitive nature, please stop reading, now!
I'm predicting that the NY Times will discover, in it's own archive, that a McCain presidency would usher in, at the least, a new first lady, Cindy Lou Hensley McCain, who is chairperson of a $300 million business, Hensely & Co., that she inherited from her father, a reputed "mob" soldier.
How could McCain not be aware of his financial backer, father-in-law's background?
Quote:
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...porters&st=nyt
the New York Times
Feb 20, 1981
Five reporters who took part in a series of investigative articles on crime in Arizona were cleared today of libel charges filed by Kemper Marley Sr.
However, Mr. Marley was awarded punitive damages for intentional inflicting of emotional distress in a decision against one reporter, Bob Greene of Newsday, and the organization for which Mr. Greene and the four other reporters worked, Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc.
The case tried in the Maricopa Superior Court stemmed from the organization's reports after the 1976 car-bomb slaying of Don Bolles, a reporter for The Arizona Republic, who had been investigating corruption.
Mr. Marley, 74 years old, was awarded damages of $10,000 from the reporters' association on the emotional-distress charge and $5,000 from Mr. Greene..
..Mr. Marley declined to comment. The case went to the jury last Friday after a trial of five and a half months. The reporters came to Arizona in late 1976 and early 1977 to work on a series of 23 articles. It was distributed to more than a dozen newspapers and to the news agencies, which transmitted a large portion of the series.
John Harvey Adamson, the convicted killer of Mr. Bolles, told the police in January 1977 that he had been told by Max Dunlap, a Phoenix contractor, that Mr. Marley wanted Mr. Bolles to die...
...Mr. Adamson said in 1977 that Mr. Marley, in addition to wanting Mr. Bolles killed, wanted Mr. Babbitt killed because of his investigation of the liquor industry.
Jon Sellers, the chief investigator in the Bolles murder case, told the jurors that Mr. Marley, who has never been charged in the murder, was still a key suspect in the continuing investigation of the reporter's murder.
|
Quote:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...+Baron+&st=nyt
February 21, 2000
THE 2000 CAMPAIGN: THE ARIZONA TIES; A Beer Baron and a Powerful Publisher Put McCain on a Political Path
By DOUGLAS FRANTZ
When Senator John McCain of Arizona describes the people who shaped his life, he invariably dwells on the influence of his father and grandfather, both distinguished Navy admirals and larger-than-life figures. Less widely known are the roles played by two other powerful men in launching his political career.
Mr. McCain's father-in-law, a wealthy beer baron named James W. Hensley, gave Mr. McCain his first job out of the Navy and helped bankroll his crucial first race for Congress in 1982, enabling Mr. McCain, a political newcomer, to outspend and defeat better-known opponents.
Even today, Mr. McCain's position as one of the wealthiest members of Congress is derived from his wife's share of her family's Anheuser-Busch beer distributorship here and extensive real estate investments through the company, holdings worth more than $10 million.
In his rise to political influence, Mr. McCain, who had no ties to Arizona until he married Cindy Hensley and moved here in 1981, also won the critical blessing of the city's business establishment through his close friendship with another of the state's power brokers, Darrow Tully, the publisher then of the state's dominant newspaper, The Arizona Republic. ''Duke'' Tully led an ad hoc group of business executives and self-appointed political kingmakers known as the Phoenix 40, whose backing helped Mr. McCain in that first Congressional race and assured his Senate victory four years later.
Bruce Merrill, a professor at Arizona State University, who conducted polls for Mr. McCain's first Congressional race, said, ''In 1982, a lot of party leaders felt John was an outsider and he won a narrow victory largely because he had access to family resources and the support of The Arizona Republic.''....
..Many of those people have remained important benefactors. Hensley family members and employees have contributed more than $80,000 to Mr. McCain's campaigns since 1982, according to federal election records, and he has collected tens of thousands more from businesses in Phoenix.
Despite his family's financial ties to the beer business, Mr. McCain has not supported the liquor industry in Congress and has publicly excused himself from voting on measures affecting the business, according to antiliquor groups.
The Family Beer Business
Mr. McCain had thought of going into politics before moving to Arizona. In 1976, three years after his release from a North Vietnamese prison, he briefly considered running for Congress from Florida, where he was stationed with the Navy.
He was then transferred to Washington as the Navy's liaison to the Senate, and his appetite for politics grew. He was a charming war hero, and a skilled public speaker, and he also built up strong political connections in Washington. Still, as a third-generation Navy man, he had not lived in any one place for long, and he lacked a political base.
That changed after he met Cindy Hensley, his second wife. Mr. McCain went to work in public relations for Hensley & Company, his father-in-law's beer distributorship. It was his first job outside the Navy. People who knew Mr. McCain then said the job was merely a means for him to meet people in the state, and lay the groundwork for his political career.
''Hensley had the Budweiser distributorship for the entire state and he didn't need any PR,'' said William Shover, a retired executive at The Arizona Republic, who met Mr. McCain in those early days. ''They created a job for him.''
Acquaintances describe Mr. Hensley as an astute businessman who never sought the limelight even after he became one of Arizona's richest men. Still, while he could give his only child's husband a job, he could not give him entree into the political and business elite. The liquor industry was never part of the civic hierarchy, and Mr. Hensley's own past was not a ticket to the establishment.
In World War II, Mr. Hensley was a bombardier on a B-17 shot down over the English Channel. After the war, he went to work for Kemper Marley Sr., a rancher who had grown rich and powerful selling liquor after Prohibition.
<h3>In 1948, while working for the Marley operation in Tucson, Mr. Hensley and his brother, Eugene, were convicted of filing false liquor records and conspiracy in the illegal distribution of several hundred cases of whiskey. James Hensley received a suspended sentence and Eugene was sentenced to a year in a federal prison camp. Five years later, James Hensley and Mr. Marley were charged with violating federal liquor laws again, but they were acquitted.</h3>
In 1955, James Hensley acquired the Anheuser-Busch distributorship for Arizona, and fueled by the state's rapid growth and booming economy, he built it into Arizona's 12th-largest privately held business and one of the nation's largest Budweiser distributorships. The company sold nearly 20 million cases of beer last year and has 500 employees. It also has diversified into real estate holdings throughout Arizona.
The business remains in family hands, but Mr. Hensley, now 80 and in poor health, has gradually withdrawn from the day-to-day operations. He declined to be interviewed for this article.
Mrs. McCain draws an undisclosed salary as the company's vice chairman and a major shareholder, but she is not involved in the daily operations.
Along with contributions to Mr. McCain's campaigns, Hensley & Company employees have been generous contributors to state legislators. In 1992, a former lobbyist accused the company of making contributions to state legislators in the names of its employees, an illegal tactic known as bundling. Company officials denied the accusation, the former lobbyist withdrew it, and no one from the company was charged with any wrongdoing.
Last Domicile Hanoi
After his arrival in Phoenix, Mr. McCain did not have to wait long for his chance at politics. Representative John Rhodes, a veteran Republican from the Phoenix suburb of Mesa, decided not to seek re-election in 1982.
Mr. McCain defeated two longtime Mesa Republicans in the primary, including a state senator, and he went on to win the general election. He defused accusations that he was a carpetbagger by saying the place he had lived longest was Hanoi.
Records show that he outspent his opponents in part through access to his wife's family wealth. He received $11,000 in contributions from Mr. Hensley and company employees. More significantly, though he had little money of his own because he had been a career naval officer, his wife's fortune allowed him to lend $167,000 to the campaign, which was permissible under campaign laws then.
Additional money was raised by another powerful Phoenix businessman who served as a big benefactor, Charles H. Keating Jr., the corrupt savings and loan operator whose ties to Mr. McCain continue to haunt the senator. Years later, Mr. McCain intervened with federal regulators on behalf of Mr. Keating's savings and loan, an episode that has tarnished the senator's reputation as a reformer.
Mr. McCain's wife and father-in-law retained an 8 percent interest in a shopping center project put together by Mr. Keating in 1986 until the project was sold in 1998.
The senator's financial disclosure filing with the Senate indicated that the investment was sold for a profit of between $100,000 and $1 million. But Robert Delgado, president and chief executive of Hensley & Company, said that Mrs. McCain and her father had lost half of the $360,000 they invested and that the transaction was reported as a gain because of complexities in Congressional disclosure requirements.
Mr. Delgado also challenged published reports suggesting that Mr. Keating had set up the investment as a favor to the senator. Mr. Delgado said he himself had proposed the investment after a discussion with one of Mr. Keating's lawyers in 1986.
Still, thanks to her father's business, Mrs. McCain, 45, remains wealthy. She has a 37 percent share of the family business and holds a stake in its profit-sharing and pension plans worth $250,000 to $500,000, a share in the corporate jet valued at more than $1 million and Anheuser-Busch stock worth at least $1 million, according to Mr. McCain's financial disclosure forms. The couple's four children own 23 percent of the company through trusts.
The McCains live behind gates and security cameras in a sprawling house on Central Avenue in Phoenix that once belonged to her parents, who live nearby.
A Friend at the Paper
The Hensley money was not the only key to Mr. McCain's first victory. He gained much-needed credibility from the editorial pages of The Arizona Republic and The Gazette and their publisher, Duke Tully.
Mr. Tully was a far different patron from Mr. Hensley. A swaggering, fun-loving 6-foot-4, he was comfortable with business executives and politicians alike. Mr. Tully, an accomplished pilot, loved to regale people with tales of his exploits flying jet fighters in the Korean and Vietnam wars. His house and office were filled with photographs of him alongside all manner of military aircraft.
''He'd point to his teeth and say, 'See these? They're steel. I lost the others when I crashed,' '' recalled Pat Murphy, a former columnist and editor at The Republic...
...More important for Mr. McCain's career, Mr. Tully's position as publisher meant he was already a fixture among the city's movers and shakers, and he eagerly championed Mr. McCain with the Phoenix 40 as well as on the editorial pages of the newspapers.
''I was a very, very strong John McCain advocate,'' Mr. Tully said. ''He was basically picked by the power structure as the guy who could get it done, and I helped with that.''
The Phoenix 40 was an unofficial group made up of the city's leading businessmen -- bankers, partners from the largest law firms, chief executives and, of course, executives of newspapers. The group was created in the early 1970's by Eugene C. Pulliam, the conservative founder of Central Newspapers and grandfather of former Vice President Dan Quayle.
The goal was to promote policies that its members felt were good for the city and state as Arizona expanded from a quiet rural state to a Sun Belt powerhouse.
It was also the closest thing to a political machine in Phoenix, and anointment by the Phoenix 40 almost invariably translated into victory at the polls.
Mr. Merrill, the Arizona State professor and political observer, said the power was exercised quietly and effectively.
''When you control the major newspaper, the TV stations and the people who make most of the political contributions,'' Mr. Merrill said, ''you have enormous influence''
Mr. Tully harnessed that influence to Mr. McCain's political career from the outset, leapfrogging him over Republicans who had waited patiently for a shot at Mr. Rhodes's seat in 1982.
''There was a lot of resentment among Mesa Republicans, none of whom had ever heard of John McCain until he was suddenly the designated hitter,'' said Terry Goddard, a Democrat and former mayor of Phoenix.
Mr. McCain won a close race for the vacant seat and retained it easily in 1984. When the opportunity arose for his next big step, Mr. Tully was ready again.
....Mr. Babbitt, however, already had his eye on a run for the presidency, and Mr. Tully and his colleagues threw their weight behind Mr. McCain. ...
As Mr. Tully explained it last week, the city's elite thought it would be better to have Mr. McCain in the Senate and Mr. Babbitt in the White House......
|
Background on McCain's father-in-law, James W. Hensley, his brother Eugene, and former employer and business associate and mentor Kemper Marley sr.:
Quote:
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2000-...y-spirits/full
Haunted By Spirits
John McCain derived his wealth from his marriage to Cindy Hensley McCain, whose father started his road to riches as a bootlegger. As a politician, the senator has remained beholden to the liquor industry and the family business.
By Amy Silverman and John Dougherty
Published: February 17, 2000
Would United States Senator John McCain be a presidential contender if it weren't for his marriage to Cindy Hensley McCain, heiress to the Hensley liquor fortune?
Like his father and grandfather before him, McCain was a career Navy officer. His earning power and his inheritance were modest. At its peak, his pay as a captain was about $45,000.
But he retired from the military in 1980, divorced his first wife, wed Arizona native Cindy Lou Hensley and moved here to plunge into the world of politics. His first job in Arizona was as a public affairs agent for Hensley & Company, one of the nation's largest beer distributors. He was paid $50,000 in 1982 to travel the state, touting the company's wares. But he was promoting himself as much as he was Budweiser beer. A better job description might have been "candidate."
In 1982, Cindy drew more than $700,000 in salary and bonuses from Hensley-related enterprises as her husband was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in his first political campaign.
Today, McCain is ranked the 26th wealthiest member of Congress by Roll Call magazine. There are 535 members in the House and Senate.
From Day 1, Hensley money has enabled McCain to be a full-time politician, free from financial concerns.
This story examines the roots of the Hensley fortune and John McCain's implacable bond to the liquor industry -- how it has enriched him personally and as a politician, and how those ties have dictated his actions on questions of public policy.
John McCain's political allegiances to liquor purveyors and his father-in-law's interests are subtle. That narrative is marked by a pattern of patronage.
The Hensley saga, meanwhile, swirls with bygone accounts of illicit booze, gambling, horse racing, deceit and crime. James Hensley embarked on his road to riches as a bootlegger.
It was December 6, 1945. World War II had ended a few months earlier.
Joseph F. Ratliff was just about to wrap up another day as office manager at United Distributors Company when two of his bosses, Eugene and James Hensley, paid a visit to Ratliff at the company's Tucson liquor distribution warehouse around 5 p.m.
The Hensley brothers were partners with a powerful Phoenix businessman named Kemper Marley, who had cornered a large share of Arizona's wholesale liquor business after Prohibition was lifted in 1933.
Ratliff had gone to work for United Distributors in September 1944. His job was to oversee shipments of whiskey into and out of the United Distributors' warehouse by keeping track of invoices, filing tax and sales reports with the federal government and monitoring cash flow.
During and after World War II, the sale of whiskey was tightly regulated by the federal government. Demand for whiskey was high, particularly on the black market, where prices were more than double the regulated market price.
"'Well,' Gene Hensley says, 'It is five o'clock, why don't you go home? It is time to close,'" Ratliff told Assistant United States Attorney E.R. Thurman in sworn testimony in March 1948.
Ratliff went home.
Upon his return to the warehouse the next morning, Ratliff found a disturbing sight.
"When the warehouse man came down and opened the warehouse, I started out through the warehouse to go to the men's room, and I noticed there was two rows of whiskey there the night before that wasn't on the floor that morning. So I went back to the office. I thought we had been robbed."
In his office, Ratliff found another surprise.
"There was a bunch of invoices in my desk that had been made out after I had left the office, apparently," Ratliff testified.
The invoices appeared to be related to the whiskey -- about 50 cases -- that had disappeared from the warehouse overnight.
Ratliff went outside to empty some trash and noticed "a pile of empty whiskey cases out there." Tangled up in the pile of boxes were federal tax serial labels that were supposed to remain with the liquor when sold to a retailer.
Ratliff recognized the handwriting on the invoices as belonging to then-25-year-old James Hensley, who had become general manager of the Tucson operation in June 1945 after a three-year stint in the military. James Hensley had served as a bombardier on a B-17 and was shot down over the English Channel on his 13th mission.
Ratliff wasn't sure what was going on until later that day, when James Hensley returned to his office.
"He came in and paid me for those invoices," Ratliff testified. "Cash sales."
Ratliff dutifully marked the invoices as paid.
The seven invoices prepared by James Hensley -- after the warehouse was closed -- indicated the liquor had been sold and delivered to seven establishments in southern Arizona. The Manhattan Club in Tucson supposedly got eight cases of Seagram's and Walker Imperial. Nu-Way Grocery in the Lowell district of Bisbee was credited with receiving 10 cases, while James Hensley showed the Merchants Cafe in Douglas to have received eight cases. The Blue Room in Douglas was credited with buying 10 cases; Lee Hop Grocery in Tucson got two. The Ar-Jay Store in Tucson, six cases. The Old Tumacacori Bar in Nogales, seven.
In fact, none of the liquor went to the retailers named in the invoices prepared by James Hensley. Nobody but James Hensley knows where it really went, and he never told authorities. He declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this story.
What is certain is that what occurred that December day was standard operating procedure for the Hensley brothers between April 1945 and January 1947. During this period, a 1948 federal criminal indictment charged, the Hensleys made approximately 1,284 false entries related to the sale of thousands of cases of liquor by their two companies -- United Sales Company in Phoenix and United Distributors in Tucson.
Ratliff's testimony eventually led to James and Eugene Hensley's conviction on federal conspiracy charges "with the intent and design to hide and conceal from the United States of America, the names and addresses of the person or persons to whom the said distilled spirits were sent, and the prices obtained from the sale thereof."
A federal jury in U.S. District Court of Arizona in March 1948 convicted James Hensley on seven counts of filing false liquor records in addition to the conspiracy charge. Eugene was convicted on 23 counts of filing false statements and the conspiracy count. Eugene was sentenced to one year in prison, and James to six months. Neither brother testified during the trial, relying instead on their lawyers, who included Louis B. Whitney, a prominent attorney who served as mayor of Phoenix from 1923 through 1925.
After a two-week stint in the Maricopa County jail, the men were released on bond on May 17, 1948, pending an appeal to the U.S. 9th Circuit. The appeals court affirmed the conviction on February 8, 1949.
Two weeks later, a judge sentenced Eugene to one year in a federal prison camp near Tucson, but suspended James' sentence, placing him on probation instead. Both men were fined $2,000. United Sales and United Distributors were also convicted and fined $2,000.
The criminal convictions had little immediate impact on the brothers' fortunes.
James Hensley profited handsomely from his association with liquor magnate Kemper Marley, a man police suspect ordered the 1976 murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles, who had written about Marley's business and political dealings. The man convicted of placing a bomb beneath Bolles' car testified that Marley also wanted former Arizona governor and then-attorney general Bruce Babbitt murdered because Babbitt had filed an antitrust lawsuit against the liquor industry in 1975. (Marley, who died in 1990, was never charged in the Bolles case. Babbitt is now U.S. Secretary of the Interior.)
By 1955, James Hensley had launched a Budweiser distributorship in Phoenix, a franchise reportedly bestowed upon him by Marley, who was never indicted in the 1948 federal liquor-law-violation case -- or a subsequent one -- despite his controlling financial role in the liquor distribution businesses.
James Hensley's conviction didn't deter the State of Arizona from granting him a wholesale liquor license in the mid-1950s. The Arizona Department of Liquor Licenses and Control turned a blind eye to repeated liquor-law violations at the company. State liquor regulators did nothing when James Hensley failed to disclose his federal felony conviction on a sworn 1988 disclosure statement to the department and the City of Phoenix.
Today, Phoenix-based Hensley & Company is the nation's fifth-largest beer wholesaler -- a privately held business that 80-year-old James Hensley still controls. He built the Budweiser distributorship into at least a $200 million-a-year business, with annual sales of more than 20 million cases of beer.
James Hensley owns nearly all of the voting stock, and most of the rest of the closely held securities are in trusts for his grandchildren or owned by his daughter, 45-year-old Cindy Hensley McCain -- wife of U.S. Senator and presidential hopeful John McCain.
By now, many Americans know John McCain's family story. His best-selling memoir, Faith of My Fathers, chronicles the lives of the senator's father and grandfather, distinguished admirals. The book takes readers up through John McCain's own military service, including his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. But Faith of My Fathers ends there, a few years short of John McCain's marriage to Cindy Hensley and the advent of his political career.
That's only half the family story.
The rest could be called "Cash of My Father-in-Law," a tale of how beer baron James W. Hensley's money and influence provided a complement to McCain's charisma and compelling personal story and launched him to a seat in Congress -- and perhaps to the White House.
Although Hensley wealth has helped propel McCain's political career, the senator will never get his hands directly on the Hensley fortune because of an antenuptial agreement he signed before his 1980 marriage.
A centerpiece in McCain's remarkable and sudden rise to national prominence is his promise of campaign-finance reform.
Yet McCain has relied heavily on the financial contributions from big corporate donors -- with the liquor and beer industry near the top of the list. McCain won -- one could say bought -- his first election to the House of Representatives in 1982 with lavish sums of Hensley beer money.
In a rare 1988 interview, James Hensley gave a glimpse of his political savvy.
"The neo-prohibitionists are real active about trying to dry us up all the time," he told the Phoenix Business Journal. "They're a constant battle. They're going after us in different ways now than they did in those days, trying to ban advertising, things like that.... We're legislatively involved very heavily... It's a way of life to protect our industry."
Since 1982, Hensley & Company employees have donated almost $200,000 to federal political candidates and campaigns. Since 1996, they've given Arizona state-level candidates more than $18,755.
McCain himself has received more than $60,000 from James Hensley and his employees -- and tens of thousands more from other beer-related interests.
John McCain benefits from James Hensley's money.
James Hensley benefits from John McCain's political power.
While McCain blasts his colleagues for falling prey to the influences of campaign contributions, the senator's record reveals his quiet support for the business that launched and has helped maintain his career. McCain declined to be interviewed for this story.
Liquor spirited from the Hensley brothers' warehouses helped fuel a lively nightlife at some of the Valley's most exclusive clubs in the mid-1940s. The Green Gables, the Silver Spur and the Cowman's Club were recipients of black-market shipments, according to testimony presented at the 1948 federal trial of the Hensleys and their two companies, United Sales Company in Phoenix and United Distributors in Tucson.
Jack Baldwin, a salesman and supervisor at United Sales, testified at the 1948 federal trial that Eugene Hensley regularly instructed him to draw up false invoices, transfer scores of cases of liquor offsite and deliver premium whiskeys to selected black-market clients.
Baldwin testified he was ordered by Eugene Hensley in September 1946 to kick in a door at the United Sales' warehouse on North 19th Avenue and take five cases of scotch for a black-market sale to the Green Gables.
In other instances, Baldwin testified that he took as many as 50 cases of whiskey from the United Sales warehouse and stashed them on the back porch of his central Phoenix home for later delivery to black-market buyers.
"I can name you 20 deals like that," Baldwin testified.
When an order came in for black-market whiskey, Baldwin would fill the bill.
"Well, the Green Gables wanted 10 cases of Canadian Club and the only thing I would do is just send down and get it, that is all there was to it," Baldwin testified.
To cover the illegal black-market sales, Baldwin testified that false invoices were prepared showing the liquor sold in small quantities to retailers throughout Arizona.
"It would be scattered over the state for two and a half and three cases at a time," Baldwin stated.
"Why would you make invoices that did not show the true fact situation?" Assistant U.S. Attorney Thurman asked.
"The liquor went someplace else," Baldwin stated.
"Under whose direction did you make these invoices?"
"Gene Hensley," Baldwin replied.
"After these were made out, these particular invoices, what did you do with them?"
"I took them home, burned them usually," Baldwin stated.
Information from the false invoices prepared by the Hensleys' employees was provided to federal liquor regulators with the Alcohol Tax Unit at the U.S. Treasury Department. When investigators compared the information reported by the Hensleys and what was actually delivered to retailers, they discovered a huge discrepancy.
Sometimes the Hensleys sold liquor to unlicensed individuals who would transport up to 55 cases at a time to states including Oklahoma and Utah. Carl "Kid" Carter from Ogden, Utah, purchased dozens of cases of whiskey at a time, loaded them into a late-1930s sedan, covering the illicit cargo with a blanket before heading home, 600 miles north.
"Sometimes he [Carter] would give me the money, and sometimes he would give Gene the money," Baldwin testified.
Before the liquor was loaded in Carter's car, Baldwin stated the federal serial numbers would be cut off the cases. Carter didn't have a liquor license in Arizona or Utah.
"Do you know what prices were paid, say, by Kid Carter?" Thurman asked Baldwin. "... Would they pay more than the ceiling price?"
"Oh, yes," Baldwin testified.
Carter must have been a prodigious drinker. He testified that he did make black-market purchases but wasn't trying to make a financial killing.
"I drank a lot of it and gave a lot of it to my friends," he told the court.
"Didn't you sell some of it?" Thurman asked.
"No, sir."
Another United Sales employee, Howard Wesson, worked as a warehouseman and truck driver from 1942 through 1945.
Wesson testified that he occasionally loaded whiskey on the warehouse docks and removed the federal tax serial numbers at Gene Hensley's instructions.
"He just had it come off so there would be no trace of it, or something to that sort," Wesson stated. Wesson recalled loading 25 to 30 cases of liquor into Kid Carter's car and testified that Carter told him he had "doubled his money."
It wasn't unusual, Wesson testified, to leave cases of whiskey on the warehouse floor in the evening and return to work the next day to find the cases broken apart and the whiskey gone.
The heavy black-market sales made it difficult for employees to keep track of the liquor.
Richard Eckert, a United Sales warehouse foreman, told the jury, "I had some trouble keeping my records straight on it. I couldn't make my books balance on it sometimes."
Eckert, who worked at the warehouse from 1941 through 1945, testified that he told his bosses about the problem.
"I complained that I couldn't keep the records with the salesmen and owners and one thing and another coming in there and taking whiskey away and giving it away and one thing and another and not billing it out," Eckert stated.
While the bootlegging operation was in full swing, the Hensleys and Marley dissolved their partnerships and created two corporations in September 1946 -- United Sales Incorporated in Phoenix, and United Distributors Incorporated in Tucson. At the time of incorporation, Eugene Hensley, 32, was president of the companies, while James Hensley, 25, served as secretary. Kemper Marley, 39, was listed as vice president of both companies.
Despite Marley's title, federal prosecutors stated that Marley had purchased control of the companies in January 1946.
Over the years, Marley built the companies, which became United Liquors, into Arizona's largest wholesale liquor distributorship. Along with his vast land holdings, political, gambling and prostitution ties, Marley built a fortune worth more than $39.2 million by 1980.
On February 26, 1953, James Hensley once again found himself charged with federal liquor crimes. This time, the government alleged that James Hensley and other officers of United Liquor Company and United Liquor Supply Company falsified records to reduce the company's tax bill.
On the opening day of the trial in federal court in Tucson, Judge James A. Walsh granted a motion by Hensley's attorney -- former Maricopa County Attorney Lynn Laney -- to dismiss all charges against Hensley and other individuals. The case continued against the two companies.
The government alleged the companies falsely stated that about 400 cases of whiskey were transferred from Tucson to Phoenix on December 30, 1950, and December 30, 1951, to avoid paying higher liquor taxes levied in Pima County, where Tucson is located. The government charged that the liquor never left the Tucson warehouses.
On the third day of the four-day trial, Kemper Marley -- owner of United Liquor and United Liquor Supply -- unexpectedly took the stand as a defense witness. Prosecutors successfully halted his testimony, claiming it was immaterial and irrelevant.
Defense attorneys argued that although the liquor was never transferred to Maricopa County, all taxes were nevertheless paid to Maricopa County, therefore nothing further was owed. Defense attorney Joseph Jenckes said the companies were simply trying to meet their tax obligations in the most practical way, according to an October 17, 1953, story in the Arizona Daily Star.
The next day, a jury acquitted the two companies on all 11 counts.
In December 1952, James Hensley joined his brother Eugene in the purchase of Ruidoso Racing Association in south central New Mexico. Prior to the purchase, Eugene Hensley operated a couple of nightclubs in Phoenix, including Hensley's Horseshoe Bar on Van Buren Street, with his first wife, Billy.
The New Mexico venture proved to be more trouble for the Hensley brothers, who became embroiled in a controversy with the New Mexico Racing Commission over hidden ownership.
The commission was concerned about the Hensley brothers' ties to Phoenix gambler Clarence E. "Teak" Baldwin (no relation to Jack Baldwin). The commission asked the New Mexico State Police to investigate in 1953.
According to a March 26, 1977, article in the Albuquerque Journal, the 1953 New Mexico State Police report stated that Teak Baldwin was a "bookmaker for leading tracks." According to the Journal article, the police report stated that the Hensleys' Arizona liquor business partner, Kemper Marley, "is reputed to be the financial backer for the bookies..."
The Journal story appeared shortly after a group known as Investigative Reporters & Editors -- spurred to action by the murder of Don Bolles -- unleashed a series of 23 stories on organized crime, land fraud and political corruption in Arizona.
The Journal reported that the 1953 New Mexico State Police investigation stated that Marley "owned a wire service formerly operated in connection with bookmaking of the Al Capone gang."
The Journal also reported that the state police report included a transcript of a phone conversation between an officer in Santa Fe and a Phoenix police officer who said, "... Our confidential files built up on Baldwin (and others) was loaned to some officials and never returned. We've never been able to locate them."
With the police report in hand, the New Mexico Racing Commission grilled the Hensley brothers in May 1953 about their ties to Baldwin. While the brothers were forthright in disclosing their liquor business ties with Marley and their subsequent federal felony convictions, they told the commission that Teak Baldwin had nothing to do with the track.
Eugene Hensley told the commission in May 1953 that Baldwin steered him to look at the track as a possible investment. Former commission chairman Tom Closson told the Hensleys "the commission would not have Baldwin connected in any way, shape or form down there [Ruidoso Downs]," the Journal reported.
The Hensleys denied that Baldwin had any interest in the track, the Journal reported.
But two years later, according to the Journal, records indicated that Baldwin actually had a one-third stock interest in the track with the Hensleys.
In November 1955, trustees for Baldwin filed a federal lawsuit against Eugene Hensley to recover 362 shares of Ruidoso Racing Association stock. The suit was settled for $40,000 and the stock was released to the Hensleys, the Journal reported.
Eugene Hensley told the Racing Commission that Baldwin operated a restaurant at the track and spent some of his own money for equipment. Baldwin filed suit in federal court in Albuquerque in 1955 over a concession contract he claimed to hold at the track. The suit was dismissed. A year later, Baldwin was convicted of income tax evasion.
In April 1955, James Hensley sold his interest in Ruidoso Downs, for which he was listed as secretary-treasurer, and had no apparent connection to the track thereafter.
Eugene Hensley's problems at Ruidoso Downs were just beginning. In 1963, Eugene Hensley was sued by minority partners for $415,000. The partners alleged Eugene Hensley used track money to make improvements to his Scottsdale home, used the track's airplane for personal pleasure and built and operated a guest house for his personal use. The lawsuit was settled the same year after Eugene Hensley agreed to return 1,000 shares of Ruidoso Racing Association stock that was by then worth $350,000.
The civil suit was prelude to an eight-count federal criminal indictment filed against Eugene Hensley in 1966, alleging income tax evasion. Eugene Hensley was convicted on all counts in a scandalous trial that revealed he had purchased several automobiles using track money and given them to his wife and a girlfriend.
Despite his 1966 conviction and subsequent five-year prison sentence, Eugene Hensley remained free on bond and continued to control operations at Ruidoso Downs until the New Mexico Racing Commission banned him from the track in 1968. After his criminal appeals were denied, Eugene Hensley entered a federal prison in La Tuna, Texas, in 1969.
That same year, Eugene Hensley sold his remaining interest in the track to NewCo Industries Incorporated, which immediately signed a 20-year concession contract with Emprise Corporation of Buffalo, New York.
Emprise had documented ties to organized crime, and was the concessionaire at Arizona dog tracks. One of the company's strongest Arizona supporters reportedly was the Hensleys' old business partner -- Kemper Marley.
In the early 1970s, Arizona racing officials began to clamp down on Emprise after the company was convicted and fined $10,000 in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles for its hidden ownership in the Frontier Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The IRE series reported that as a defendant in that case, Emprise was linked to several prominent organized crime figures.
Emprise reorganized in Arizona as Ramcorp and was allowed to keep its lucrative concession contracts while its Los Angeles conviction was appealed. But all the company's proceeds from dog tracks were funneled through a trustee, former Mesa rancher and farmer Dwight Patterson.
Patterson, according to the IRE, urged then-Arizona governor Raul Castro to appoint Kemper Marley to the three-member Arizona Racing Commission, a position Marley reportedly was eager to get. Marley would replace Robert Kieckhefer, who had been an opponent of Emprise.
Castro received more than $19,000 during his 1974 gubernatorial campaign from Marley, and another $5,000 from Marley's daughter -- colossal sums at the time for an Arizona political campaign. Castro appointed Marley to the racing commission in 1976.
Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles wrote a series of stories documenting Marley's questionable performance in appointive posts he'd previously held. Bolles' stories doomed Marley's appointment, forcing him to resign soon after being named to the Racing Commission.
On June 2, 1976, Bolles was mortally wounded by a car bomb. Before lapsing into unconsciousness, Bolles uttered the words, "Adamson, Emprise, Mafia." He died 11 days later...
..After selling his interest in Ruidoso Racing Association, James Hensley turned his attention to a wholesale beer distributorship he reportedly founded in 1955 in Phoenix with 12 employees.
Details about the inception and remarkable growth of James Hensley's company are sketchy. Hensley and his wife, Marguerite, have kept a low profile. While the couple is listed in the Phoenix society's "Red Book," there is a dearth of news stories, photographs or even references to the family in the Phoenix media.
Some liquor industry observers say Hensley was given the Budweiser distributorship by his old business associate Kemper Marley, but a search of public records has not confirmed this theory. What the records do show is five decades of steady growth for Hensley's enterprise under the lax supervision of the Arizona Department of Liquor Licenses and Control.
James Hensley has given conflicting information to the department concerning the early days of his business. Efforts to search liquor department files are hampered because the agency destroyed all records more than 30 years old -- and many more recent. The lack of historical state documents on the state's largest beer wholesaler makes it impossible to determine when and under what circumstances James Hensley was granted his first wholesale liquor license.
One can only speculate how a convicted felon who falsified federal liquor records managed to obtain a state and federal wholesale liquor license within a few years of his 1949 conviction and 1953 indictment. But apparently, Hensley did...
..The confusing maze of companies continued for more than four decades as James Hensley created a series of wholesale beer companies -- operating as many as three different entities in the Phoenix area at one time. He consolidated the operations in 1993 under the present banner Hensley & Company. The company reported $48 million in assets in December 1996, the last year the Corporation Commission required detailed financial disclosure.
Hensley & Company is reported to be the 12th largest privately owned company in Arizona, with nearly 500 employees and a sales and delivery fleet of more than 300 vehicles, according to a September 1999 article in the trade journal Beverage World.
The company controls more than 60 percent of the beer market in Arizona, selling more than 20 million cases of Anheuser-Busch and other brands each year.
The privately held company remains controlled by chairman James Hensley, although he's relinquished day-to-day operations to Robert M. Delgado, who serves as president and chief operating officer.
Company records show that as of January 1996 James Hensley controlled through a trust 2,110 shares of stock, of which at least 1,655 shares were voting stock. Cindy McCain owned the largest block of stock with 7,436 shares, but only 177 shares were voting...
..In 1982, John and Cindy McCain reported an income of $801,056. Of that, the only amount unrelated to Hensley was McCain's $31,038 Navy pension.
McCain lent $167,000 to his campaign -- a huge chunk of the $569,545 it took to get him elected that year. (Another major contributor that year was Charles H Keating, a former Navy fighter pilot who later ensnarled McCain in the biggest scandal of his political career.)
In addition, James and Marguerite Hensley and their employees donated $11,000 to McCain's first campaign; Anheuser-Busch's PAC gave him $1,000.
McCain easily won reelection in 1984. Fortune -- or McCain's foresight -- smiled again when Senator Barry Goldwater announced his retirement in 1986. McCain was the perfect candidate to succeed the straight-talking Goldwater, who was also a retired military pilot.
McCain jumped for -- and won -- the Senate seat.
Every election season, contributions from Hensley & Company and other liquor interests continued to fuel McCain's electoral triumphs -- victories McCain was beginning to take for granted.
In October 1986, just days before McCain was elected to the Senate, the Associated Press broke a story that the McCains had been quietly remodeling Cindy's childhood home -- a $500,000 spread still owned by Jim Hensley and located in north central Phoenix, outside of Congressional District 1 -- so they could relocate after the election...
|
Quote:
http://www.azcentral.com/specials/sp...es-dunlap.html
Dunlap supporters maintain innocence after 2 convictions
Megan Irwin
Special to The Republic
May. 28, 2006 08:18 AM
If you stay behind bars long enough, the other prisoners are likely to start calling you “Pops.”
That’s the case with Max Dunlap, who turned 76 last May, marking a year not much different from the past 13 years he has spent inside his cell at the Arizona State Prison Complex at Lewis.
“Pops,” as he’s known to fellow prisoners, is serving a life sentence for his role in the murder of Don Bolles, an investigative reporter for The Arizona Republic who was killed when a bomb exploded under his car on June 2, 1976. Dunlap is the only person implicated in the Bolles’ murder who is still serving time in prison, although he insists to this day that he shouldn’t be there at all....
...The family interest in horses brought the Dunlaps even closer to the Marleys. The families developed a social relationship in addition to the working relationship Dunlap and Marley already had. Barbara said they went to the races together and one year, Marley took the whole family to the Kentucky Derby.
“If we hadn’t shown horses, we wouldn’t have been so close [to Kemper],” said Mike Dunlap, one of Dunlap’s sons. “My Dad loved him, but it wasn’t a father-son kind of love. It was just that if he [Dunlap] had a problem or a question about something, he had someone to ask.”
Indeed, Dunlap went to Marley for help many times over the years -- for loans to buy more land or advice on horse racing. Between the horse races, land development, family vacations and sporting events, Barbara said she and her husband settled comfortably into the rhythm of family life.
“We were just parents. We went to everything our kids did,” she said. “The whole family was very outgoing. The kids were all sports minded, we were happy, got along fine and were all very busy. Isn’t that normal?”
The arrest
Any sense of normalcy ended on a Sunday morning in January 1977, the day Max Dunlap was arrested in connection with the murder of Don Bolles. Barbara said police surrounded her house with guns drawn as they took Dunlap away.
“There was no need for that except it made the Sunday edition” of the newspaper, she said. “They could have called Max and he would have met them.” Barbara said the family went into shock after his arrest but never expected that Dunlap would actually be convicted.
“We’d never even heard of this guy [Bolles],” she said. “We were innocent and we knew we were innocent.”
Phoenix police and the state attorney general disagreed. And indeed, the evidence against Dunlap was strong. Among the facts of the case: On June 2, 1976, Bolles an investigative reporter for The Arizona Republic who had written a series of reputation-damaging articles on Kemper Marley’s involvement in land fraud, got a call from a source asking for a meeting at the Hotel Clarendon in downtown Phoenix. The source never showed, and when Bolles returned to his car a bomb went off, destroying the car and landing Bolles in the hospital where he died 11 days later. Evidence quickly led to Dunlap.
According to George Weisz, a special investigator for the attorney general the second time Dunlap was convicted, the case against Dunlap hinged on two important things: the testimony of a local, small-time criminal named John Harvey Adamson and a mysterious money exchange between Dunlap, Adamson and Phoenix attorney Neal Roberts a few days after the murder.
The first clue that led authorities to Adamson came from Bolles himself when he said, “John Adamson set me. They finally got me … the Mafia … Emprise” as he was being placed on a stretcher.
Adamson was arrested quickly and, as part of a plea bargain, told a story that implicated both Dunlap and Chandler plumber James Robison in masterminding the murder. Adamson’s story had Dunlap hiring him to kill three people, including then-Arizona Attorney General Bruce Babbitt.
“All of a sudden Don Bolles became more important and had to be done right away,” Weisz said. “So Adamson went ahead and did it.”
As damning as Adamson’s story was, it was another piece of evidence that ultimately put Dunlap away: On June 10 around 6 a.m., a stranger showed up at the Dunlap residence asking to speak to Dunlap. The stranger handed Dunlap a sack filled with $100 bills, amounting to $25,000, and told him Roberts wanted the money changed into small bills and delivered to attorney Tom C. Foster by that afternoon. Dunlap took the money to his bank, changed it into small bills and delivered it to Foster’s office that afternoon, where he found Adamson waiting to accept the money, presumably to help him escape the Valley to cool off after the murder.
Weisz said the fact that Dunlap followed orders so unquestioningly speaks to his guilt....
|
Sit tight....it's going to be a "bumpy" campaign. |
02-07-2008, 12:02 PM
