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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The grand jury indicted Mattox on an obscure felony called commercial bribery, but Austin defense attorney Roy Minton shredded Earle’s case. The jury never understood the charge, and they acquitted Mattox. An Austin trial lawyer who generally admires the work and purpose of the Public Integrity Unit told me, “I looked closely at that trial and the statutes. There was another charge that fit what Mattox was accused of doing. But it was a misdemeanor, and Ronnie wanted a felony. He overreached.”
IN 1993 ANN RICHARDS was governor, Bill Clinton had just been elected president, and Lloyd Bentsen was leaving his U.S. Senate seat in Texas to join Clinton’s Cabinet. Richards’ stunning inability to persuade former San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros, Comptroller John Sharp, or other Democrats of that stature to accept the Senate appointment foreshadowed the party’s downfall and led to Ronnie’s next debacle. At their home in western Travis County, Twila Earle was reading the paper about the impasse one morning and told Ronnie that he was as qualified and as formidable a candidate as any of those being considered.
“By the time I got out of the shower,” Ronnie told me, “I was feeling positively senatorial.” He called in his chips and made a run for it. Recollections vary on how close he came to being appointed to the Senate; Richards evaded the question when I asked her, making a joke about old age and failing memory. But for a few days in 1993 there was a buzz about Ronnie going to the Senate. Instead, Richards appointed conservative Democrat Bob Krueger, who proved a sitting duck for a GOP up-and-comer like state treasurer Kay Bailey Hutchison.
That same year, after hearing evidence from Ronnie and the Public Integrity Unit, a grand jury indicted Hutchison on allegations of using state employees for personal and campaign tasks and then destroying state files that documented the abuse. Hutchison was outraged by the indictments, as were two political advisers named Karl Rove and Karen Hughes. In seeking the Senate appointment from Richards, Ronnie had left himself open for an effective counterspin: The guy didn’t get to be the senator, so he went after Hutchison in a fit of jealousy and spite.
The newly elected senator’s team was led by Texas’s hottest defense lawyer, Dick DeGuerin. Ronnie assigned his first assistant to argue the case, but he broke his customary rule and went to court himself. John Onion, a respected judge, voiced doubts during pretrial hearings about the admissibility of evidence the prosecution had built its case on. To the astonishment of courtroom observers, Ronnie abruptly announced that the state was not going to go forward with its prosecution. Thunderstruck, Onion barked some exasperated remarks and declined to let the matter go with the charges merely being dropped—he ordered the jury to acquit her.
Ronnie says that the revelations about the innocent men his office and Travis County juries had sent to prison were by far the lowest point of his career. But politically, the Hutchison fiasco is the albatross he hung around his own neck. “The greenest lawyer from Podunk knows not to do what Ronnie did,” said the lawyer who had observed the Mattox case. “You don’t go into any trial, certainly not one of that magnitude, without a plan B. The judge hadn’t said he was going to bar the evidence Ronnie’s team had accumulated; he said he was going to examine it piece by piece, and he might disallow it. What you do is play it out and see. Maybe you can bring the judge around. Develop a plan B. But an able courtroom prosecutor would never just call it down.”
Lawyers are habitual Monday-morning quarterbacks, and even Ronnie’s Democratic allies in the Travis County courthouse are not inclined to let him forget that episode. One wisecrack has it: “The bad news for Tom DeLay is that he might get indicted. The good news is that he would be prosecuted by Ronnie Earle.”
TERRY KEEL IS A VOLUBLE MAN who stalks about the Capitol in suit and boots with agile flair. One wall of his office is filled with photos of prominent Texas Republicans. Hutchison inscribed hers, “You deserve combat pay!” Keel is a moderate with a law-enforcement background and agenda and is a leader of Speaker Craddick’s team. Keel is also a defense lawyer, and he’s been working closely with Roy Minton to keep the grand jury’s hounds away from the Speaker. The greatest obstacle to Keel’s rise in GOP politics is his loyalty to Ronnie Earle.
“Ronnie was an institution in Austin when he gave me a job, in 1984,” Keel said. “I worked for him for eight and a half years, and he handed me plum assignments. It was a great opportunity. In 1992 I told him I wanted to run for sheriff as a Republican. He said, ‘Terry, running for sheriff in Travis County as a Republican is going to be like swimming up Niagara Falls.’ But he gave me a leave to do it, and he said that if I lost, he wanted me to come back to the DA’s office. That meant a lot to me.
“But I disagree strongly with the way he’s handled these cases. I can’t see how any crime has been committed. Ronnie’s stance in all this has not been constructive. If we have problems with campaign finance, then he needs to come to the table and work with the Legislature. He’s not going to get anything but resentment from holding a gun to the leadership’s head.”
There again was that metaphor of power.
“Republicans are really angry about this,” Keel went on. “They see an unscrupulous DA abusing his office to pick on Republicans. I can tell you that Ronnie Earle would never prosecute someone he believed was innocent. He sees his role as reweaving the fabric of society. He sees his role as prosecutor like that of the proverbial Dutch uncle. He really believes all that. But sometimes he gets bad advice, such as in the Kay Bailey Hutchison case. His enthusiasms get him in serious trouble.” Keel nodded at the photograph of the senator on his wall. “This is going to end up just like the Hutchison debacle.”
I asked Keel if the Republican majority was going to try to take vengeance on Ronnie. He stretched his mouth and said that would be futile: “Let’s say they take away the financing of the Public Integrity Unit. He had eighty-five lawyers on his staff; now he’ll have seventy-five. It would require a constitutional amendment to take away his powers as a district attorney, and putting that on the ballot would require a two-thirds-majority vote in the House and the Senate. Do Republicans think Democrats are going to go along with that?”
RONNIE’S RHETORIC about fascism commenced around 2000. In a paper, he wrote that both the criminal justice community and politicians err in seeing crime as a problem that can be solved only by government: “Such a perspective serves to exacerbate public fear, which enshrouds itself in the powerlessness of fascism.” In 2002 he read a quote from history in a Molly Ivins column. The quote was from Benito Mussolini and read “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of the state and corporate power.”
In the context of the ongoing prosecution, Ronnie sought to clarify his drift: “I’m not saying these cases constitute fascism. I am saying this is how the founder of fascism defined the term. Those laws exist because people recognized the danger of concentrated power.” After the House Republican Caucus changed the rule in order to allow DeLay to continue as majority leader if indicted, Ronnie wrote a controversial op-ed column for the New York Times. “There is no limit to what you can do if you have the power to change the rules,” he wrote. It was a short essay, just 350 words. Ronnie used the word “moral” seven times.
At the end of December, another defendant flipped. The prosecutors agreed to drop charges against Sears. The Chicago-based retailer promised to cooperate in “the prosecution and investigation of any other person for any offense related to the contribution made by the defendant.” The agreement maintained that Sears had been misled by a fund-raiser, a reference to DeLay’s Washington associate Warren RoBold. When RoBold was indicted, his lawyer remarked that his client was devastated by the indictments and that his consulting business was in ruin. Meanwhile, the majority leader appeared to distance himself from the defendants; noting that he had not been questioned, nor had any of his records been subpoenaed, he said, “This is not about Tom DeLay.” That’s the one thing he and Ronnie Earle will agree on. “This is not about Tom DeLay,” Ronnie insisted. “There will always be another Tom DeLay. They can always find somebody to do what he does. The issue here is, Are we going to be the United States of America Inc.? Or are we going to have a government of, by, and for the people?”
Spoken like the politician he is. “So are you going to run for governor?” I asked.
“I was going to retire in 2004,” he said. “I talked to a couple of persons who would have been strong candidates and tried to get them to run for DA. I was going to use my retirement as an occasion to travel the state and talk about the things I believe in. And I thought I might run for governor. I thought it would be fun, whether I won or not. But I saw these investigations and cases developing and thought it was important to see them through. I’ll be sixty-six when I finish this term. In the meantime, if I were to announce that I’m a candidate for another office, that would automatically be my resignation. Governor Perry would then appoint someone of his choosing and philosophy to be Travis County DA. So to answer your question, it’s a political impossibility. The cards aren’t lined up right, even if I wanted them to be. All the rhetoric that I’m doing this to run for governor or anything else—it’s bullshit.”
“But it’s a dream race,” I teased him. “The Rematch in Texas: Ronnie Earle versus Kay Bailey Hutchison.”
“Somebody’s dream,” he grunted. “My nightmare.”
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