AFFLICTING THE COMFORTABLE: JOURNALISM AND POLITICS IN WEST VIRGINIA

23. Judicial Remedy

Chapter 23 JUDICIAL REMEDY WEST VIRGINIA'S LAWMAKERS sat up and took notice after Barron and his friends were indicted on Valentine's Day 1968. At the Statehouse, the legislature, and the governor's office, both went to work on corrective measures. Governor Smith, unhappy to find the image of his "Administration of Excellence" soiled by the indictment of three of his top officials, appointed a Citizens Advisory Group to undertake a comprehensive study of purchasing procedures. The legislature, agreeing that substantive changes were needed, made several recommendations to the governor by joint action of its interim study committees during a special session in September 1968. This was followed by a resolution that authorized the formation of the PurchaSing Practices and Procedures Commission. In a meeting at the South Hills home of House Finance Committee Chairman Ivor Bioarsky, the framework for the PPPC was worked out by Bioarsky, House Speaker H. Laban White, and Delegate Carmine Cann, the latter two from Clarksburg. House Minority Leader George Seibert, of Wheeling, was the strongest Republican supporter of the effort, while William T. Brotherton, of Charleston, served as the Senate's point man on behalf of ailing Senate President Howard Carson, who was from Fayetteville. The PPPC was a unique creation, the first of its kind in the country. Its mission was to end purchaSing improprieties and irregularities, and to make skimming operations so offensive a practice that to even be tempted would be akin to mugging your crippled grandmother. Supporters said the new commission , when fully in place, would center its work initially on those businessmen JUDICIAL REMEDY 235 who had made payments to Invest Right and its sister corporations, and would branch out into other areas as time and appropriated funds would permit. "If there was testimony a businessman bribed somebody to do business with the state, why shouldn't his record be examined?" Brotherton asked in pushing for passage of the new act. "Business people are entitled to know it's not the way of life to buy your way into contracts or by kicking back. The honest businessman should be protected." The new commission consisted of five members each from the Senate and the House, with Brotherton and BOiarsky serving as cochairmen. Headquarters for the new body were set up in the Statehouse, and a special team of seasoned investigators was recruited. White's choice for top gun was John P. Duiguid. The commission's determination to ferret out crooked practices and thievery was poetically illustrated by the very choice of Duiguid, whose name was pronounced"do good" when spelled either forward or backward. He had served in the Rackets Division at the U.S. Justice Department before joining a prestigious Washington law firm. According to BOiarsky, sometime after the Duiguid team began its work, the PPPC adopted a "hands-off" policy. Oversight became its only purpose. "We felt we shouldn't even know what was going on," he explained. 'That way, nobody could say it was a political whitewash or a political vendetta." The commission's charter called for it not only to look into the purchasing mess at the Statehouse but to spread out across the state and determine whether conditions were as bad in the provinces as they were in Charleston. This included federal and local as well as state agencies. Eventually it was determined that the commission was in need of more exacting authority, so on March 11, 1971- coincidentally, my fifty-seventh birthday- the PPPC was made a statutory body. Among those endorsing the legislation was Smith's successor, Governor Moore. The Justice Department's Law Enforcement Assistance Administration was so impressed with the commission's work that during its first two years of existence, $423,122 in federal money was poured into the commission's operations. This additional funding helped it to expand its investigatory work CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE across the state, improve its intelligence filing system to make it compatible with the system maintained by the Criminal Identification Bureau of the Department of Public Safety, and to begin gathering data on narcotics and organized crime. One of the commission's stopover points on crime tracking forays around the state was the u.S. District Court for Northern West Virginia. After making arrangements for the meeting, Duiguid and his staff members came to Wheeling where a session of court was in progress. While Duiguid spoke with Judge Maxwell about the court...