Richard Lugar, Part 3

[Yes, this actually is Part 3 of my series on Richard Lugar – I mis-numbered last week’s essay. Thanks to those of you who pointed it out.]

I arrived at Mayor Richard Lugar’s office a bit early, announced myself and took a seat in the waiting room. I had only been there a minute or two when a lady came out, told me the Mayor would be with me soon, and asked me to fill out a form while I was waiting.

I looked at the form, and across the top of it the caption read:

City of Indianapolis

Application for Employment

Whaa?

The Mayor ushered me into his large and gorgeous office, one end of which was set up like a living room. We sat down and the Mayor began telling me about the meeting of the National League of Cities and his conversations with John Lindsay, the Mayor of New York, for whom I’d once worked.

While Lugar was talking I crossed my legs and almost gasped out loud. I hadn’t wanted to show up at the Mayor’s office in my IPD clodhoppers, so I’d gone to JC Penney and bought a very cheap pair of new shoes. All the way downtown those shoes had been hurting my feet and I was sure I’d have blisters.

But now, as I stared at the shoes I saw that they had cut through my socks and dug into my ankle and a crooked line of blood was dripping off the shoe onto Lugar’s beautiful, silver-blue carpet, forming a little puddle down there.

Fortunately, the Mayor didn’t notice and I didn’t want to ruin his day by cluing him in. I got hired.

My title was Commissioner of Youth Affairs, whatever that meant. It didn’t seem to have much to do with young people. What I mainly did was whatever anybody asked me to do, most of it gofer-ish.

But I did have a few interesting experiences, including:

Drinking the Kool-Aid

One day I returned to the Mayor’s office after a meeting and observed that there was an odd-looking fellow waiting in the lobby. The guy had hair so dark it looked like it had been dyed black, and he was wearing sunglasses even though he was indoors.

Thinking the guy was blind (blind people weren’t yet “visually impaired”), I walked over and asked if I could help him. The guy slowly raised his head to look at me and said, without any expression on his face at all, “I’m here to see the Mayor and I’m very tired of waiting.”

Well! I went back to the Mayor’s office to tell him some weird guy was in the waiting room and was getting steamed about the wait. But when I got to the office a loud argument was going on – about that very guy.

What was happening was that Lugar wanted to see the guy but his senior staff – to the last person – wasn’t having any part of it. I promptly sided with the Mayor. It seemed to me that if somebody wanted to see the Mayor and the Mayor wanted to see him, that was the end of the matter.

But Lugar and I lost the argument and the weird guy stormed off in a huff.

Jim Jones was born in a tiny Indiana village over near the Ohio line, but in his twenties he moved to Indianapolis and opened the Peoples Temple Christian Church Full Gospel. The Peoples Temple was a faith-healing enterprise, of which there were a great many in the American Midwest and South at that time.

But what set the Peoples Temple apart from other, similar churches was that the Peoples Temple was integrated. Many people have forgotten that as recently as the 1960s many northern cities were nearly as segregated as the Deep South.

Lugar told me that when he was beginning his political career (he served on the city school board) most restaurants in the city had discreet signs on the front door reading, “Negroes Not Served,” or sometimes, “Colored Entrance Around Back.”

The same was true of most public venues – schools, libraries, neighborhoods, even hospitals. But The Rev. Jim Jones hated segregation and he was determined to do something about it.

In the early evenings Jones and a handful of his parishioners – equally divided between African-American and white – would show up at a downtown restaurant and demand to be seated. The manager would tell Jones that the whites could come in, but not the others. Jones would refuse to leave and eventually the manager would call the cops.

But Jones had thoughtfully given the media a heads up, and the next day the restaurant in question would find itself uncomfortably featured on the front page of the newspaper. Jones repeated this stunt week after week until finally, unable to stand the bad publicity any longer, the restaurant industry caved and the no-Negroes signs came down.

Before Jones could identify his next target, he decided to move his ministry to California, where he could raise more money. Indeed, Jones quickly became something of a power broker in Northern California because of all the votes he controlled. People like Jerry Brown, Walter Mondale, and Dianne Feinstein sought Jones’ endorsement.

But it wasn’t long before disturbing reports began coming out of Jones’ commune in Uriah – people who didn’t toe the Jones line were being subjected to physical, mental, and sexual abuse. Jones, it was said, was also a Communist who had turned against religion, advising his congregation to “use the Bible as toilet paper.”

Thus the almost irreconcilable argument. To Lugar’s staff, Jones was a kook, a faith-healing fraud, and probably worse. To Lugar, Jones was a civil-rights hero.

Six years later, when I read the headlines about the ghastly events in Jonestown, Guyana, I had a few very bad moments. Suppose Lugar and I had won the argument that day back in Indianapolis and Lugar had seen Jones? Suppose Lugar had appeared in public with Jones and his name had become associated with that of the mass murderer?

Sometimes, it’s better to be lucky than smart.

On my honor, I will never betray my integrity, my character, or the public trust. IPD Oath

Only a day or two after the episode of Drinking the Kool-Aid, there was the episode I’ll call:

See No Evil

Late one afternoon a guy strode into my office unannounced. He was short, wiry, very intense and he had a disconcerting habit of talking to you while staring off to one side, then suddenly stabbing you with those dark beady eyes of his.

Without looking at me, the guy told me his name was Jim Calloway (not his real name) and that he was “counsel” to something. The city? The Mayor’s office? I didn’t catch it.

He sat down, pulled out a yellow legal pad and said, “Before the Mayor hired you, you were a cop with IPD, right?”

“What’s this about?”

The guy stabbed me with those eyes. “I’m here because the Mayor asked me to be here. You got a complaint, make it.” He nodded to the telephone on my desk.

I looked at the phone, thought better of it, and said, “Yeah, sure, IPD. So?”

“And before that you were an MP for a couple years.”

“So?”

“My point is, you’ve been around the block as a cop, you’re not a newbie.”

I agreed I wasn’t a newbie and then the guy began firing questions at me about my brief stint at IPD, questions like these:

“Did you ever take anything of value – money, sex, anything – from a suspect who wanted you to look the other way?”

“When you were at a crime scene, did you ever take anything of value that wasn’t yours? Money, drugs, anything?”

“Did you ever demand money or services from a business or individual in return for providing police protection they were already entitled to?”

There were ten or twelve questions like this and I could feel my face turning red, though whether out of guilt or anger I wasn’t sure.

Had I been a dirty cop? Maybe so. When my partner and I stopped at a Dunkin Donuts, the clerk handed over the donuts and coffee and moved on to the next customer. No bill was ever presented.

But I consoled myself by reflecting that there probably never was a police unit where there wasn’t at least some sort of corruption going on. The opportunities for graft in law enforcement are large, the pay is low, and the people you deal with have no scruples about trying to buy their way out of whatever trouble they’ve gotten themselves into.

When I arrived at the 226th MP Company a few years earlier, for example, the place was a veritable viper’s nest of corruption. On my first day in the unit my patrol partner told me that roughly every fourth motorist we pulled over would try to bribe us out of getting written up.

“If it’s a guy,” he said, “it’ll be money. If it’s a lady, it’ll be money or sex. It’s up to you whether you take it or not.”

It was sometimes hard to avoid being corrupted. Once I busted a supply sergeant for DUI and it turned out to be his third strike – the guy was going to jail and would lose his license for a year. After he sobered up he called me and suggested we talk about it, “You know, NCO-to-NCO.”

I told him he was wasting his breath, but a few days later my wife called and said a guy had stopped by and dropped off 25 frozen steaks. “What am I supposed to do with these things?” she asked.

I called the supply sergeant but he claimed not to know what I was talking about. “We ain’t missin’ no steaks over here,” he said.

“Well, you better send somebody around to pick them up,” I said. “That little freezer in my Coolerator won’t hold more than three steaks. The rest will just go bad.”

“Throw a party,” he said and hung up. (I did, in fact, throw a party.)

Later, the Provost Marshal (the “police chief” of the MP company) got busted down two ranks and forced into retirement – for corruption – and the MP company got cleaned up. I’m not saying we were Boy Scouts, but it was a lot better. The new PM, Major Callan, ran a tight ship and was obviously a smart cookie, having promoted me to traffic sergeant.

But back to Attorney Calloway and his obnoxious questions. I answered “no” to all of them, to his obvious disbelief. Then he said, “Did you ever observe other officers engaging in any of the behaviors I just described?”

“Never,” I said. A flat-out lie, but who was Calloway to interrogate me about my fellow officers?

Calloway gave me a disgusted look, then said, “I’ll pass this on to the Mayor and he’ll take it from there.” He got up and left. As I watched him go I realized I was wrung out and sweat was trickling down my back.

The next morning I decided to take the bull by the horns. I headed straight to the Mayor’s office and demanded to know what the hell was going on.

“Shut the door,” Lugar said.

Lugar told me that almost as soon as I’d been hired he’d received a call from a senior editor of a local newspaper. The guy told Lugar, very confidentially, that the paper was investigating police corruption in the city, and he wanted to give the Mayor a heads up. It might be embarrassing if the Mayor’s new hire, straight from IPD, was dirty up to his eyeballs.

I assured the Mayor I was clean and he said, “That’s good enough for me.” I never heard any more about the interview with Attorney Calloway.

But two years later the Indianapolis Star won a Pulitzer Prize for its series of hair-raising articles about police corruption in the city, including inside the county prosecutor’s office. And those articles had ramifications far beyond the Pulitzer.

The police chief was fired, along with other top officers. A grand jury was impaneled and cops I knew went to jail. Most amazing of all, IPD itself was eventually disbanded and replaced by the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department – IMPD. My old police force no longer existed.

Fortunately, most of my experiences in Dick Lugar’s office weren’t as creepy as the episode of “Drinking the Kool-Aid” or as alarming as “See No Evil.” There was, for example, the one I’ll call:

Hello, Dolly!

When Lugar was first elected Mayor of Indianapolis he adopted the practice of throwing a free concert for the citizens of the city every summer. People loved it. But this year he was running for the Senate and planning for the concert had gotten lost in the shuffle.

I found this out one day when the Mayor called me into his office and told me I needed to find a band that would be available to perform in Indianapolis on short notice. The free concert had traditionally been held on the last day of the Marion County Fair, a Sunday afternoon, and that date was only three months away.

I pointed out to Lugar that most bands with any following tended to be booked many months or even years in advance. “Just do your best,” he said, and went back to his paperwork.

Naturally, I figured I’d start with, say, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan and work my way down. But I quickly learned that if you are going to give a concert in Indiana and you want anyone to come to it, it had better feature country music.

Okay, I thought, I’ll start with George Jones and Emmylou Harris and work my way down. But on the very first call I made, Jones’ manager laughed in my face. “Kid,” he said, “you ain’t gonna get nobody on three months’ notice, least of all George.”

“What should I do?” I asked. “I can’t tell the Mayor the concert is off.”

The guy thought for a minute and then said, “What about Porter?” He meant Porter Wagoner, then a famous country-western star.

“You mean,” I said, “the guy with the TV show?” The Porter Wagoner Show had been a well-rated country western show on television for many years, but it hadn’t occurred to me that Wagoner also toured.

So I called Wagoner’s manager and it turned out that Porter was a big fan of Mayor Lugar and he was happy to squeeze in the concert, even on short notice. Nashville, where Wagoner taped his show, was less than 300 miles from Indianapolis. I headed to Lugar’s office to give him the good news.

Lugar rolled his eyes.

I said, “You’re not a big Porter Wagoner fan?”

“It’s just that everybody sees him every week on TV. It’s not like they have to sit out in the hot sun to hear Porter sing.”

“Should I cancel him? He’s a big fan of yours.”

“No, no, no, it’ll be fine. I don’t watch him, but I’ve heard he puts on a good show.”

I told the Mayor that, as Wagoner had outlined it for me, he didn’t just show up and sing. Instead, he put on a kind of country-western variety show similar to his TV gig. He would sing personally, of course, but he also had with him several young, not-yet-very-well-known performers who also sang. He also had a comedy segment.

“So,” I continued, looking at my notes, “let’s see. He’s got Curly Harris, Mel Tillis, Dolly Parton, Don …”

Lugar practically erupted out of his chair. “Dolly Parton?” he said. “I love Dolly Parton!”

Personally, I’d never heard of Dolly Parton, who’d been more or less discovered by Wagoner a few years earlier. In fact, while most people assume Dolly’s later hit, “I Will Always Love You,” was written about some guy she’d been in love with, the song was actually about Dolly’s professional breakup with Porter Wagoner.

In any event, if the Mayor liked Dolly, I was happy to take the credit for bringing her to town. I headed back to my office to call Wagoner’s manager and confirm everything, but before I could even reach for the phone the Mayor stuck his head in my office – a remote venue he’d never visited before.

“Uh,” he began shyly, “if Miss Parton is coming to town, do you suppose I might, you know, meet her while she’s here?”

A few weeks later, on the Sunday afternoon, Mayor Lugar and I were sitting in the front row, enjoying Porter Wagoner’s show. Porter sang, then another guy sang, then a guy told some jokes, then Dolly Parton sang.

When Dolly finished her routine Porter returned to center stage, but Dolly shoved him playfully aside and waved her hands for the band to stop. Then Dolly turned to the audience.

“Folks,” she said, “I been singin’ in a lot of towns around this great country of ours, but this is the first time I ever hearda anybody givin’ a free concert. Let’s all thank that wonderful mayor of yours for bringin’ us here today!”

The audience roared and Lugar, blushing profusely, stood up and waved to the crowd, then sat back down.

“Don’t you go an’ sit down, Mr. Mayor!” Dolly said. “You come on up here so I can meet you!”

Still blushing madly, but also grinning like a kid who’s just managed to sneak into the burlesque house, Lugar walked shyly up to the stage, the crowd loving every minute of it. Dolly came down to the front of the stage and Lugar stuck out his hand to shake hers.

But Dolly slapped Lugar’s hand aside and instead leaned way down from the stage to give the Mayor a big hug. As she did so a flashbulb popped. The next morning, on the front page of the old Indianapolis News, there was America’s most straight-arrow Mayor, his eyes practically bulging out of his head as he stared at country western’s most famous, and certainly largest, cleavage.

Next week: Richard Lugar, Part 4