Smiling, joking, occasionally backslapping, Louis Turco presided genially over a Newark city council meeting one afternoon last week. Then an aide approached and whispered something into his ear. The Democratic council president paled. He bowed his head and hurried from the room. Turco had just learned that he had been indicted on ten charges of mail fraud and four counts of income-tax evasion.
The scene has become depressingly familiar in U.S. state and municipal politics. Over the past three years in New Jersey alone, 67 officials have been indicted and 35 convicted. U.S. Attorney Herbert Stern has snared mayors, legislators, judges, highway officials, postmasters and a Congressman.
Last week scandal nipped at the Governor's mansion. Newspapers reported that state Republicans had devised an illegal scheme for soliciting funds for Governor William Cahill's 1969 campaign. Fatcat contributors had been advised by leading Republicans to write off their donations on their tax returns as business expenses. This disclosure came on top of the conviction six months ago of the Governor's closest political confidant, Secretary of State Paul Sherwin, who had sought a kickback from a highway contractor. Cahill, who had seemed a shoo-in for reelection this year, is now in trouble.
While New Jersey leads the nation in discovered political corruption, scandal after scandal is emerging in many other areas as the nation conducts what appears to be an unprecedented political housecleaning. Corruption is not necessarily on the rise in the U.S., but the prosecution of it is.
MIAMI. Democratic Mayor David Kennedy was indicted two weeks ago for conspiracy to bribe; he was charged with attempting to free a convicted drug offender. Also indicted was Circuit Judge Jack Turner, who had first sentenced the dealer to three years, then dismissed the case. At the same time, Circuit Judge Murray Goodman was indicted for conspiracy to accept a bribe after he reversed his own sentence and put a child molester on probation.
PHILADELPHIA. Maurice Osser, former city commission chairman, was sentenced to six years in prison last December for demanding kickbacks from city printing contracts. This month Sander Field, onetime chairman of the city-planning board, was sentenced to pay a $25,000 fine for violating the state security act by selling stock in his bank below its market value to political officials. In the past three years in Philadelphia, a judge has been sent to jail for nine months for check fraud, the chairman of the housing authority advisory board has been convicted of bribery and conspiracy, the stadium construction coordinator has been convicted of extortion, and the former chief court clerk has received a two-to ten-year prison sentence for robbery and fixing cases.
NEW ORLEANS. District Attorney Jim Garrison, famed for his conspiracy theory about the Kennedy assassination, will go to trial in May on charges of receiving bribes from pinball-machine companies. Former Louisiana Attorney General Jack Gremillion was sentenced last year to 15 years in prison for perjury; he was convicted of lying about stock that he owned in a savings-and-loan corporation that was under investigation by a grand jury.