History Lesson 
Closing Down La Grange
In which the Long lens of the Law uncovers Sin and Corruption in Babylon-on-the-Brazos, and the Electric Bounty Hunter confronts the Nightmare Sheriff and the Banshee madam to unearth a Bizarre Tale.
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He had a fair penchant for attracting attention. Stories used to float around the city rooms of Houston newspapers about how Marvin would wait two and three days before serving a warrant until a TV crew was available to immortalize his crimebusting; about how Marvin would deluge courthouse reporters with Agatha Christie-style press releases extolling his exploits; about the time The Houston Post, on Marvin's "hot inside tip," bannered the four-inch headline HARRELSON IN MEXICO at the same moment the accused murderer was being arrested in Atlanta.
Back when he was the police reporter for a Houston radio station, Zindler would appear just before his on-air signal to relate action-packed on-the-scene accounts that he'd just read from the morning papers. Other reporters used to substitute dated papers and he'd dash in to announce, over the air, "This is Marvin Zindler, On The Scene. .." and launch into a breathless blow-by-blow of last month's liquor store holdups.
Zindler even looks the part, which is to say artificial. His nose and chin were metamorphosed long ago to meet superstar specifications, and his head is permanently hidden by a handsome Cary Grant toupee. And his clothes, equally handsome, are custom-tailored to conceal the pads he wears on his shoulders and buttocks to fill out his figure to superstar proportions.
It's always been easy, of course, to make fun of Marvin Zindler, as do most of his colleagues in journalism. But, strangely enough, it just won't wash. For one thing, he's so obsurdly up-front about those wigs and pads and nose-jobs of his, and he confesses instantly, cheerfully, to a raging egomania. It's hard to laugh at somebody's closet skeletons when they rattle them at you.
And then there're his eyes, as warmly blue and gentle (and genuine) as any superstar could hope to possess, the only external hint that within that ludicrously handmade body of his there's a soft nub of sincerity and compassion.
Danny, who's sort of a hustler, remembers being arrested by Marvin way back when he was just another deputy in the Warrants Division: "Most of the crooks I know have a lotta respect for Zindler. He was a straight-up cop. After he'd busted ya, he'd stick around till ya were mugged an' printed an' in the tank, an' he'd make sure ya had cigarettes before he'd leave."
He still shows that same concern in his role as Channel 13's consumer affairs reporter, staying long after work to answer a blizzard of phone calls from l2-year-olds with lost bicycles and dowdy matrons who don't like the gas company. He rationalizes his media-mongering by saying "Most corporations involved in, say, false advertising will just laugh at a $50 fine, but if you show up with a TV camera and give 'em bad publicity then they'll shape up."
There's a hard truth there. If Marvin's style, a zany blend of P.T. Barnum and Dudley Do-Right, has made him notorious, it's also made him effective; instead of being just another petty public ombudsman, he's become a kind of Electric Bounty Hunter, striking Media-Terror into the fast-talking hearts of consumer bilkers.
That's why it all seemed a little strange when Marvin set out after the Chicken Ranch: while there may well be lots of people who don't like the place, irate consumers aren't among them. But Marvin says his crusade against the Ranch wasn't based on any righteous shock at all the whoring going down out there. "I'm no moralist," he'll tell you. Marvin's targets were bigger than just sin: political corruption and Organized Crime.
Marvin's story is that he got his hands on a Department of Public Safety (DPS) intelligence report that had been made 1ast year. This report, according to Marvin, says that the Chicken Ranch—together with another, less reknowned, little whorehouse in Sealy—grosses "a conservative minimum" of $3 million a year, and that most of this money was going into numbered bank accounts in Mexico by way of lavish payoffs to all manner of corrupt state and local officials. It's these officials, the story goes, who really own the Chicken Ranch and whose power in Austin allows it to stay open.
Then there's the black specter of Organized Crime, whose ruthless involvement Marvin keeps invoking. Marvin's definition of Organized Crime, though, is not exactly what you'd first think. It has nothing to do with the Mafia. Or the Syndicate. Or Chicago or New York or even Houston. It maybe has something to do with a "circuit" of other country whorehouses through which girls are rotated, but it's hard to say. Marvin's definition of Organized Crime is pretty vague.
Nonetheless, Marvin bought this DPS report at face value, lock-stock-and-brothel. He has great faith in the Texas Rangers.
When he first saw the report last January, he says, he was asked by the Rangers not to do anything until they'd had the chance to "move in." Marvin agreed. Then, along about May, Marvin got word that the DPS-Ranger investigation had been canceled. "That's when I really got mad," remembers Marvin, "cause it proved to me that somebody from higher up was interfering with the enforcing of the law."
That's when Marvin went to work. He recruited as his collaborator Larry Conners, a young TV newsman who is a first-rate investigative reporter and the most hard-ass interviewer this side of Mike Wallace. The Zindler and Connors team went underground to begin their investigation.
They sat in the woods outside the Ranch counting and photographing the patrons. Conners, together with a cameraman (but, sadly, no TV camera) handled the "inside work," discovering first-hand that there really was prostitution going on in there.
After three months of this sort of thing they were able to prove that, sure enough, there's a whorehouse in La Grange. That's when they broke the story and ran up against, or into, County Sheriff T.J. "Jim" Flournoy.
Old Jim Flournoy looks like he leapt full-bodied from one of Bobby Seale's nightmare visions of a county sheriff, a pot-bellied, gun-totin', hulking incarnation of Frontier Justice. Slow-talking, in keeping with his thought patterns, Big Jim's style of dealing with the world is based largely on Threat, and is generally successful. His brother Mike, who is the sheriff over in Wharton County, has a reputation for carrying out his threats, but big Jim's never gone overboard with that sort of thing.
Like his predecessors, Big Jim was easily accommodated to the existence of the Chicken Ranch. Back in 1958 he'd even had a Hot Line installed to connect the Ranch and the Sheriff's Office, and he's one of the biggest defenders of its operations. "It's nevrah caused no trouble round here," he says, "no fights or dope or nothin. I ain't nevrah got no complaints."
It's been a positive boon to law enforcement, if you listen to the sheriff. Because of the Ranch, "Thar's nevrah been no rapes while I been Shurff," he relates. "O course thet don't count no nigger rapes," he adds, which is probably fair enough since blacks weren't admitted to the Ranch anyway.
He goes on to tell you about the $10,000 that Edna contributed to the Hospital Building Fund, her other munificences, the economic benefits to the community, the low rate of venereal disease afforded by having county-inspected hookers on hand. As Larry Conners puts it, "He makes that whorehouse sound like a damn non-profit county recreational facility."
Most of Big Jim's arguments are pretty specious as well. His figures on rapes, VD, pregnancies and dope (all of which he says there are none of, excepting for niggers) are all bogus, and the $10,000 bequest about equals the annual take on the jukebox. As for the local impact, one local shopkeeper easily dismissed that: "They only got a payroll of a dozen out thar. Now how much money you figure a dozen whores're gonna spend in this town?"
All sad but true. For all Big Jim's efforts at rationalizing, the Ranch's longevity was built on sentiment rather than cash, and sentiment is a poor defense against either the law or a zealous camera. Once Channel 13 weighed in against the "bawdy houses," as they called them, there was no contest.
That doesn't mean, however, that Zindler ever proved his vague assertions about "corruption and Organized Crime." He never even proved his contention that the two whorehouses grossed over $3 million a year; most local Ranch-watchers think that ludicrously high and the most commonly accepted figure was about $300,000. The IRS, who never failed to collect the government's portion, never questioned Edna's returns.
All that Marvin had to do, really, was haul his cameras out to La Grange and put on the tube what every local farmboy for a hundred miles already knew.
Big Jim, who'd probably never before seen the business end of a TV camera, was mercilessly pinned in one of those Conners interviews. He erupted against those goddam DPS fellers who'd been pokin around last fall, and allowed as how he'd called DPS Chief Col. Wilson Speir to get them off his back. The Colonel, said Big Jim, told him to close down the Ranch until the elections were over with, so Big Jim obliged. It was the kind of interview that could make you wonder whose side he was really on.
After a week of nightly exposes, during which the Ranch kept whoring along with all flags flying, Marvin went up to Austin to interview the Governor, the Attorney General, and Col. Speir. Confronted simultaneously with prima faecie sin and TV cameras, they all professed outrage that this could be going on and promised to get to the bottom of things.
On Wednesday, the day before he was to go to Austin to answer a summons from the Governor, Big Jim capitulated. He just called Edna and told her to shut it down. Marvin promptly left for Jamaica on vacation.
Within a week of its shuttering, the Ranch is deserted, with only Lilly still hanging around to shoo off curious interlopers. Edna is hiding out with her old man in East Texas, and the girls are in Dallas, Houston, Austin, streetwalking. Big Jim is being especially suspicious of strangers, hinting bluntly to the writer from Playboy that he's seen about all the snoopy journalists he cares to.
At Berkelbach's Cafe in Round Top, the hangers-on discuss what to do with Marvin Zindler should he ever chance to pass through town. A petition circulates in La Grange to save the ranch, and bumperstickers make their appearance, proclaiming the same thing. Local opinion, as figured by the owner of the local radio station, breaks about even. A few local tycoons begin making plans to buy the Ranch and turn it into a restaurant, with private dining rooms in each of the bedrooms.
There is, indeed, little evidence of any sort that the ranch had ended its days. It had always existed, really, as a pleasant irrelevance, kind of a collective daydream by a rural people that believed in dreams remnant from a simpler era that had a tolerant niche for such things, along with eccentric uncles and town drunks. Like all the excess baggage from that era, realized daydreams have been burrowed under by the plow of progress. X-rated movies and celluloid sex are alright in the modern age-as is everything that is malleable into legalisms and electricity-but that additional dimension of humanity that the ranch possessed is out of scene, not immoral, just obsolete.
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