Massachusetts: Corruption Is Commonplace

"It has been quite a sighed Massachusetts Attorney General Edward Brooke. And that was an understatement. For even the Massachusetts Statehouse, where corruption is commonplace, had not seen anything like this in a long while.

A grand jury last week indicted 26 individuals and nine corporations on 217 counts involving bribery and conspiracy. The charges were the result of work by a seven-man crime commission set up in 1962 by Republican Governor John Volpe. The biggest name involved was that of Democrat John Thompson, 43, hard-drinking speaker of the Massachusetts house, whose tight-fisted control of the legislature earned him the nickname, the "Iron Duke."

Thompson was charged with conspiring to thwart state control of the profitable small-loan industry through bribery and legislative manipulation. Indicted with him was Republican Charles Gibbons, 62, a former house speaker appointed by Volpe to head a special commission supervising construction of a $60 million state-government center in Boston. Frank S. Giles, 48, state police chief appointed by Volpe and recently suspended, was charged with perjury before the crime commission.

The apparent hero of the massive dust-up was Attorney General Brooke, the nation's highest Negro elective-officeholder, who ramrodded commission findings through to the grand jury. But Brooke too had problems. As the indictments emerged, he admitted that he had been under income tax investigation by the Internal Revenue Service for the last 16 months. The IRS has made no charges, but nonetheless took trouble to interview Brooke's father on his deathbed last November in its quest for information. Brooke's lawyers insist that the IRS efforts add up to a flagrant case of harassment.