AFFLICTING THE COMFORTABLE: JOURNALISM AND POLITICS IN WEST VIRGINIA

15. Striking Gold

Chapter 15 STRIKING GOLD WHY, I WOULD ASK IN ASERIES OF ARTICLES, would a company in Elkins with half the state's tire recapping business pay money through a Florida corporation to the West Virginia State Democratic Executive Committee? Why would a corporation created by West Virginians in the state of Ohio provide business consulting services to suppliers of goods and services to the State of West Virginia? And why would other Florida corporations, whose officers were West Virginia officials or friends of the governor, be used as conduits for monies flowing out of and back into West Virginia? For reasons never explained, except in the vaguest ofterms, by the legislative committee investigating state purchasing irregularities, pages 58 through 61 of the committee report- pages relating to Invest Right- were deleted from the published version and quietly filed in the legislative auditor's office. These pages had been mimeographed for inclusion but were pulled from the report, and the remaining pages were renumbered. The reference to Invest Right in these censored pages was not in itself incriminating. But some months after the report was released, a committee member with more conscience than his peers admitted to me that there had been speculation within the committee that the corporation had been brought into existence, in part, to offer its services for a fee to "assist" firms doing business with the state. By their failure to publish a complete record oftheir findings, let alone act on the results of their investigation, the members of the legislative committee helped give official sanction to bribery and kickbacks, and the resolute silence STRIKING GOLD of officials in both the legislative and executive branches gave graft and corruption a license to operate freely in every area of state purchasing. This was an unconscionable condition, which seemed to bother no one at the Statehouse. So I began an inquiry that took me from that first encounter at the Charleston Press Club through three state capitols, to Florida's richest beach resorts, to the offices of corporate attorneys in two states, into a vast array of file cabinets, and to interviews with some of the most unsavory characters I have ever encountered. It was a long, lonely, frustrating search, but it finally paid off. THE DISTANCE FROM CHARLESTON, West Virginia, to Boca Raton, Florida, was a safe 975 miles. There were probably other reasons why Governor Barron and his jolly band of buccaneers chose Boca Raton as the headquarters for their organized looting of West Virginia. But their very choice of location was a classic Freudian slip. Sun-kissed little Boca was as rich in history as it was in business potential when I arrived there in the early 1960s. Located on Florida's Gold Coast between West Palm Beach and Miami, it was one ofthe few communities in south Florida to retain its original Spanish name, which translates as "rat bay." It came into existence as the stronghold of pirates such as Blackbeard who needed a handy refuge after their attacks on Atlantic and Caribbean shipping. Pirates had founded the town; a new gang of twentieth-century pirates had chosen it as the staging area for their own illicit enterprises. The link between the conscious and the subconscious mind is strong and these men, confident that no one would be able to untangle their web of corporations , left the proverbial trail of breadcrumbs that would lead to their ultimate exposure. "Invest Right," the mystery woman who lived in Boca, a former West Virginia auditor with a packet of inactive corporate papers in his files, a former Army officer and retired CIA agent, and Boca Raton's early history were all clues that even a mystery writer would have found intriguing. Who, for instance, was Eve Miller? All I knew was that her name was listed as a corporate officer of Invest Right in the files of the Ohio Franchise Tax 170 CHAPTER FIFTEEN Department. Was she a housewife or career woman? Was she a link between the West Virginia Statehouse and Florida's Gold Coast? Was she an integral part of an expanding corporate empire? As I later learned in an interview with her, Miller was a competent, charming woman in her early fifties who divided her time and energies between home and children and a real estate agency in Boca Raton known as Gold Coast Homes. The office where she worked was also an...