2. Ronnie Earle
His name is on everyone’s lips in Austin and Washington. RONNIE EARLE finds that amusing. The politicians and corporations he’s investigating most certainly do not.
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Whatever his gifts and eccentricities, Ronnie would be little known outside Austin if not for his Travis County jurisdiction (which covers most activities of the state government) and the Public Integrity Unit, a small staff of prosecutors he founded in 1978 to specialize in cases of official misconduct in state government. But the law that has vaulted him to national prominence was enacted in 1905 by populists and progressives who feared the power of labor unions and corporations. The statute provides that only individuals can contribute to campaigns in Texas (unlike federal law, which has added to the confusion over the indictments). Following the Republican sweep in 2002, Earle read boasts in the press by a prominent GOP fund-raiser and business lobbyist that donations and other campaign help from his group “blew the doors off” the election; the prosecutor learned that those contributions, and also those of TRMPAC, had come from corporate donors, and a two-year investigation began. As things now stand, Tom DeLay’s top political aide, Jim Ellis, is charged with money laundering, which carries a potential prison term of 5 to 99 years or life. TRMPAC executive director John Colyandro is charged with money laundering and accepting corporate contributions; Warren RoBold, a fund-raiser for DeLay in Washington, is also accused of making and accepting corporate contributions. The latter offense carries a maximum punishment of 2 to 10 years. Indicted for making contributions that totaled more than $320,000 were Sears, Roebuck & Company, Westar Energy, Bacardi USA, Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, and four other corporations. If convicted, the companies could be fined up to $20,000 or assessed double damages.
The indicted parties’ lawyers contend that the contributions were legal because they financed administrative expenses, but TRMPAC’s own IRS return described more than a million dollars in expenditures as “campaign expenses” and “activities related to support of Republicans for legislature and statewide offices.” Craddick’s possible exposure in the case centers on a law that prohibits outside interests from using money to try to influence the selection of the Speaker and Craddick’s delivery of $152,000 in corporate donations to selected House candidates in 2002. DeLay has claimed that he only lent his name to the fund-raising, yet Ellis reported to the majority leader throughout the push for redistricting. “Corporate checks are acceptable,” read the invitation to a Houston Petroleum Club event where DeLay was the guest speaker. In May 2001 he asked Enron chairman Ken Lay for $100,000 “in combination of corporate and personal contributions from Enron executives” and indicated that some of it would be spent on “the redistricting effort in Texas.” At best, the Republicans caught up in the prosecution were extraordinarily careless.
Last February, at a Washington press briefing, DeLay lashed out: “The district attorney has a history of being partisan and vindictive. He did it to Kay Bailey Hutchison and lost that case. He’s done it to other people so that he can get press, but he doesn’t follow through and file charges. This is so typical.” Ronnie replied, “Being called vindictive and partisan by Tom DeLay is like being called ugly by a frog. My job is to prosecute felonies. Texas law makes it a felony for corporations and labor unions to contribute to campaigns.”
DeLay has frequently maintained that he won’t be charged, but the majority leader’s backers have raised more than $932,000 for his defense fund. Following last fall’s elections, the House Republican Caucus reversed a longstanding rule that would have required DeLay to step down from his leadership position if indicted. In a measure of the heat that the Texas prosecution has brought on the GOP, the caucus reversed itself again in January, saying that the majority leader wanted to defuse the issue and reinstate the old rule. Republican congressman Henry Bonilla, of San Antonio, said they acted because Ronnie is a “partisan crackpot,” and Fox News Channel analysts have raised a hostile chorus, calling him “a sort of renegade prosecutor . . . intensely partisan . . . a rotten prosecutor.” Ronnie shrugged it off to Newsweek: “This investigation is a little like clowns coming out of a Volkswagen in the circus. There’s always another clown coming out.”
Should he fail, the prosecution targeting some of the biggest names in the Texas GOP could turn out to be Ronnie’s worst mistake. But Terry Keel, a Republican legislator from Austin, cautions that the GOP advantage is not absolute. “After the governor,” Keel says, “the Travis County district attorney may well be the most powerful official in the state.” Beaten to a pulp for years, Texas Democrats have read the headlines and discovered a champion. Now Ronnie is being boosted as the most credible candidate the Democrats could field for governor in 2006.
ON ANOTHER VISIT with Ronnie, we talked about Birdville, though he informed me that I mispronounced the name of his hometown. “We called it ‘Bird-vull,’” he said, like his mouth was full of oats. “Call it ‘Bird- ville’ and you’d get your ass whipped.” He was born and grew up on a cattle ranch that his great-grandfather founded in 1850, when the prairie and post oak groves north of Fort Worth were the far reach of frontier settlement. Ronnie’s dad kept the ranch going by working in town at a General Dynamics plant. “Like a lot of people,” he said, “I always had a bunch of aunts and uncles around, and they were important people in our lives. If you got too far out of line, there was an old uncle or aunt who grabbed you by the collar and set you straight.”
Ronnie’s nose cartilage was rearranged in sparring bouts with football teammates that were orchestrated by his coaches, and his fingers are gnarled from playing tackle and linebacker; his right ring finger wags loosely on his hand. He told me he played his last game for the Birdville Buffaloes—against storied rival Wichita Falls—with a broken ankle: “I went to that game on crutches and came home on crutches. They beat us fifty to nothing.”
At the University of Texas, Ronnie lived in a dorm and made a name for himself as an intramural football player. He wrote for the Daily Texan and was sent to the Governor’s Mansion the night of the 1962 Democratic primary; the incumbent Price Daniel was losing his reelection bid that night to John Connally, but to Ronnie’s amazement, the governor gave him a cup of coffee and talked to him as though he were a grown-up. He went on to the UT law school, where he wrote a paper on civil rights and violence that won him a job in Governor Connally’s office. Earlier, he had married a young woman from Fort Worth named Barbara Leach; they had their first child, Elisabeth, in 1968, and two years later a son, Jason. Ronnie next worked as a municipal court judge in Austin. It was a time when anti-war marches and riots and tear gas and marijuana were dividing the community. “He helped reform what had been a lousy system,” said David Richards, a labor and civil rights lawyer who, with his wife, former governor Ann Richards, and children, settled in Austin in 1969. “He would hold examining trials for people busted with small amounts of pot and would actually suppress evidence that was improperly seized.” Ronnie ran for and won a seat in the Legislature in 1973. Richards was less enthralled by his performance in the House, writing him off as a backbench moderate conservative. He didn’t expect their paths to cross again in another courtroom venue.
During Ronnie’s time in the House, his first marriage ended, and he married a bright young former aide named Twila Hugley. In 1976 the Travis County DA decided not to seek another term, and Ronnie jumped in the race just before the filing deadline. “I said at the press conference, ‘I’ve got a virgin mind and a keen sense of justice.’ Probably wouldn’t be the best slogan to run on now,” he said. Ronnie was hardly the favorite, but he won without a runoff. In addition to the usual DA duties, he has prosecuted fifteen public officials in 28 years; twelve of them have been Democrats. He has won convictions or guilty pleas from a state treasurer, a Supreme Court justice, and a Speaker of the House. But there have been two major embarrassments, and the first involved a firebrand liberal.
In 1983 Democratic attorney general Jim Mattox was suing Mobil, accusing the energy giant of cutting the state out of oil and gas royalties. Mobil hired Fulbright & Jaworski, whose attorneys played just as rough as Mattox. In retaliation, he allegedly threatened to cut the Houston megafirm out of bond business with the state. Ronnie and his staff believed that such a threat would constitute a crime, and they launched an investigation. Mattox had hired Richards to serve as first assistant. Richards had admired Ronnie when he was a municipal court judge, but he was offended by the pursuit of Mattox and furious about his own treatment by the DA and the grand jury: “I got a subpoena that said, ‘You will be here on this date at this hour,’ and they let me know right off this was not going to be gentle. I was asked if I remembered ever being asked to retrieve a list of this law firm’s bond business from our bond division. I said, ‘No, I don’t recall that,’ which was the truth; I had so damn much on my mind. Later, in the course of my testimony, that came back to me, and on reflection I told them I may well have picked up such a list. At some point soon thereafter, I was asked if I was aware of any lawyer employed by the attorney general’s office committing a felony. We had some two hundred lawyers, and some of them I knew to be pot smokers. I told them I would take the Fifth on that one. Then Ronnie himself, as I recall, read me a section in the Canon of Ethics that provides that a lawyer who knows of a bar member committing a crime must report it or have his own law license placed in jeopardy. I told them at that point I was not answering any more questions.”
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