MARIE: A TRUE STORY by Peter Maas Random House; 420 pages; $16.95
After excursions into fiction (Made in America) and exotic subculture (King of the Gypsies), Author Peter Maas has returned to his most substantial theme: intractable loner vs. corrupt organization. In Serpico (1973), a singleminded narcotics agent challenged the authorities and won. The heroine of Maas' new nonfiction drama triumphs over a stained bureaucracy, headed by the Tennessee Governor's office, that sells pardons to murderers and rapists.
Marie Ragghianti did not set out to shake up statehouses. She was a Florida beach bunny who believed, Maas writes, that appearances were "what counted, for sure." She learned about skin-deep notions the hard way. Marie faked pregnancy to marry a handsome boxer; he turned out to be an alcoholic wife beater. Then her two-year-old son nearly died of a lung infection.
In 1971, sustained by an amalgam of pride and abiding Roman Catholic faith, Marie, then 29, began a private war against circumstance. She won a Vanderbilt University scholarship and became active in the Young Democrats Club.
When Good Ole Boy Ray Blanton swept "into the Governor's office in the 1974 election, Marie's appearance and efficiency caught the attention of Blanton's legal counsel, Eddie Sisk. She was soon appointed chairman of the Tennessee paroles and pardons board. From the beginning, writes Maas, Sisk "figured he'd swatted a lot of flies at once. Marie was a good-looking woman . . . her Vanderbilt degree was class. And she was a little naive."
When she learned that executive clemency had been offered by a shady pal of the Governor's to a criminal client for $20,000, Marie got a rapid course in political sophistication. Outraged, she began denying pardons to favored felons.
The counterattack was swift and vicious. She was twice set up for drunken-driving arrests. A state van followed her car while she collected evidence of pardon fixes. Blanton's aides found a girlfriend of a convicted murderer who was willing to say that Marie had stolen credit cards for shopping sprees. Before Marie was fired in 1977, she went to the FBI.
Maas builds his story cinematically, cutting swiftly from malefactor to investigator, from scandal to expose. Marie is destined for the camera, and parts of it already seem clipped from All the King's Men and The Godfather. Chapters over flow with whispered depositions, missing files and subterranean intrigue. Three key witnesses are professionally murdered; a fourth commits suicide under suspicious circumstances. The Justice Department declines to prosecute Blanton. Claims Maas: "It was already clear that in 1980 Jimmy Carter would need every electoral vote he could scrape up. The President might not like the Governor, but he was stuck with him."
After withdrawing from the 1978 gubernatorial race, ex-Governor Blanton was sentenced to three years and fined $ 11,000 for taking kickbacks on state liquor licenses to political favorites. The hard-drinking demagogue blames much of his trouble on Marie: "She's the only woman who ever screwed me before I had a chance to screw her."