In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, a financially broken American businessman carousing across Europe after World War I is asked how he went bankrupt.
“Two ways,” he replies. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
The sudden end for Democratic state Sen. Gary George came after years of rumors about corrupt political dealings punctuated by occasional government investigations. Those investigations, though, had never resulted in charges against George. At worst, he paid a few thousand dollars in financial penalties. Indeed, he had dodged so many bullets over the years that he may have felt bullet-proof.
That made all the more shocking the breathtaking speed and depth of his fall.
George was a political figure once powerful enough to hold up governors and the leaders of his own party so he could insert personal items in the state budget that proved lucrative to himself and his friends. But last October, in a move that some say caught George totally by surprise, he was turned out of office in a recall election engineered by people who had once been his strongest supporters.
The day after the primary recall election in which then state Rep. Spencer Coggs ended George’s 20-year political career, the U.S. Attorney’s Office delivered an ill-boding subpoena to the offices of Opportunities Industrialization Center of Greater Milwaukee. Executives of OIC, an anti-poverty agency that receives hundreds of millions of dollars in state and federal funds, were longtime political supporters of George.
One month later, a federal grand jury indicted George, charging him with taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks through a politically prominent attorney paid by OIC and the Milwaukee Police Athletic League. George was also charged with soliciting and accepting $115,000 in payments from a construction company executive who received state contracts.
Two months later, George pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to accept illegal kickbacks of the fees paid by OIC. U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic recommended that George go to prison for as long as five years and be fined as much as $250,000. He will be sentenced May 14.
State Rep. Annette (Polly) Williams has known George since they both were elected to office in 1980. George, ironically, was a reform candidate who knocked off former state Sen. Monroe Swan, Williams’ cousin, in a primary after Swan was accused of misusing federal youth jobs funds to pay campaign workers.
George, whose political grudges are legend, didn’t speak to Williams for 10 years, even though he was her state senator. But she’s personally concerned about George now.
“If your whole life is built around your being in office where you can wheel and deal and you can deliver whatever, the minute you can no longer do those things, the people around you are not friends,” says Williams. “I don’t know if he cultivated any real, genuine friends that would be here now.”
Interviews with people who have known George throughout his life, including several involved in his fall who are speaking publicly for the first time, paint a picture of a remote, petulant man-child whose personal vindictiveness was feared as much as his legislative power and intellectual brilliance were admired.
George’s growing political power was always accompanied by a series of private money-making ventures run out of his public office – activities as wildly diverse as beauty pageants, a check-cashing business, a book capitalizing on Wisconsin’s reverence for Vince Lombardi, a film about Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and the hiring of a private investigator to track down missing heirs for a cut of their inheritances.
It’s never been reported just how central one such money-making scheme – a television station on the island of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands – was to George’s downfall. Not only did the federal government charge George with using the station for money-laundering, but some of George’s long-time supporters turned on him and helped organize his recall after feeling they’d been burned after investing in the station.
Some who knew Gary George growing up say the bright start of his political career was what they’d always expected of him, not the ending of that career as a convicted felon.
Circuit Court Judge Carl Ashley grew up a few blocks away from the George family in what he described as “the old Blackfish Bay,” the middle-class black neighborhood north of 15th Street and Capitol Drive. In the late ’60s, it was an area of two-parent black families who owned their own homes and sent their children to parochial schools. It is the same area where Marvin Pratt and other black professionals live today.
“I don’t want this to be his final legacy,” says Ashley. “He came from a strong family environment, as I did. We were just driven. It was not to acquire fancy clothes or things like that, but just to get your education and better yourself.”
Gary was the oldest child in a family that included a sister, Janice, and brothers Gregory, Michael and Mark. His siblings later would be involved in a number of George’s business ventures. Janice, Michael and Mark all helped run the St. Thomas television station at one time.
The patriarch of the George family, Horace Raymond George, was an attorney. At the time Gary was growing up, that set the family apart, according to Carl Ashley’s older brother, Terry, who was one of Gary’s best friends at Marquette University High School.
“With about eight of us in the Class of 1972, we represented the first large class of black kids to attend Marquette High School,” says Terry, who now works for the Internal Revenue Service. “We were a close-knit group. That was one of the evident things. We did cluster together for our support.”
All of the black students sat together at one table in the cafeteria, separate from the white students. Terry remembers even then George expressed an interest in getting involved in politics one day, but he wasn’t involved in student government at Marquette. That was the province of the white students.
The province of black students was athletics. George played basketball and football, though he was never a star. The big stars on the basketball team were Felix Mantilla, son of a Milwaukee Braves baseball player, and Reggie Harris, both of whom later played at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where George and Ashley also went on to college.
“We all looked at ourselves as special because we were at Marquette and having to deal with that environment and having to compete to succeed,” says Ashley.
Ashley’s brother, Carl, says whites who complain about black leaders such as George acting arrogantly don’t understand the self-confidence blacks have to develop to push themselves to the top in a white world.
“If you’re going to make it, you’ve got to be able to think you can do it,” says Judge Ashley. “Nobody can tell you no. That helped us succeed. But there’s a line between being assertive and aggressive. Those are things I don’t think Gary handled well sometimes. He made more enemies than he needed to by far.”
Only a year after graduating from the prestigious University of Michigan law school, George was anointed as the establishment black candidate to run against Swan, who had embarrassed the Demo-cratic Party by using federal funds to pay workers in a party-defying run for lieutenant governor. Swan also had alienated women’s groups by opposing the Equal Rights Amendment.
George, who was not well known in the community, was recruited by a group of middle-class blacks headed by Walter Farrell, an urban affairs professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who now teaches at the University of North Carolina.
For years, Farrell acted as a Svengali behind George’s political career. Members of the media who wanted to talk with George would have to go through Farrell, who acted as his gatekeeper.
Farrell declined to be interviewed for this story, as did George.
“You don’t need to write a story about Gary George,” says Farrell. “You need to write a story about how black professionals who express any level of intelligence and independence are literally run out of town. When African Americans don’t accommodate the plantation politics of Milwaukee, they are targeted and expelled from the plantation.”
George did eventually become a media target. But that was only after he catapulted into real power in the Legislature with almost startling speed as the media tossed roses. The freshman Sen. George, just out of college, was immediately placed on the Legislature’s powerful Joint Finance Committee.
Four years later, George became co-chair of that committee, which sets the state budget and, consequently, has a hand in everything state government does.
Polly Williams speculates that white legislative leaders thought they had a young, inexperienced black attorney they could control.
“They thought, ‘This is somebody we can really manipulate,’ ” she says. “They didn’t know this man was smarter than they ever could imagine. For a black man, he was all up in the white man’s game. Whatever games they thought they were going to play, he played them better than they did.”
George’s “midnight amendments” to the state budget became legendary. One legislator serving on Joint Finance describes his reaction when George announced that every committee member could submit a favorite item to be included in an encyclopedic budget amendment. “It was like Christmas morning and ‘Make-a-Wish,’ ” he says.
Another committee member who served when George was co-chair describes the same process.
“Gary would ask for everybody to talk to him individually about what they wanted,” says the committee member. “They all had their peace, Republicans and Democrats. Then he would put together an amendment that he would bring out on the table to be voted on in the next 10 minutes. It would be like a 100-page amendment. In those 10 minutes, everybody’s flipping through to find their thing. Oh, I got my thing. I’m happy. I’m voting for it.”
Even those who cared enough to read more about what they were voting on would have difficulty recognizing the full impact of some of the other items introduced by George.
“Whatever else Gary would put in there for himself was worded in such a way that it looked innocuous,” says the legislator. “He was so bright he could slip things in. At his best, he would slip things in you would never realize were anything.”
That was where contracts and minority requirements for bidding were written into the budget – requirements that critics say often ensured that certain companies or agencies who were friendly to George would be the only qualified bidders.
There were always rumors that such business put money directly into George’s pocket. The exact process would later be described in federal charges detailing hundreds of thousands of dollars from OIC and a minority construction company that were funneled circuitously to George.
Polly Williams knows that white politicians also have financially benefited from bills that award contracts to their friends. The difference, she says, was the overwhelming needs of the black community and the limited resources going there.
“There’s more of a tendency for resources to go to white folks anyway,” says Williams. “So we only have a certain percentage that’s going to go to people of color, and if Gary is gonna get a benefit, ain’t nothin’ left.”
Williams does acknowledge that George helped her achieve her biggest legislative victory, the voucher program that uses state funds to send low-income Milwaukee children to private and parochial schools. She says it happened when she decided to break their icy relationship after watching George for 10 years use his power in the Senate to kill anything she managed to get passed in the Assembly.
“The first time I ever walked in his office, his staff all looked like, ‘Wow, what’s gonna happen? Has she got a gun?’ I said, ‘Gary, we need this program. This is bigger than you and I. It’s about low-income families that need some help. And I need your help.’ He told me, ‘Okay, I’m gonna help you on this,’ but said, ‘This has to be our little secret. You can’t tell nobody that I’m gonna help you.’ ”
The voucher program was included in a budget amendment.
George’s remoteness from the community and his habit of operating in secret, even on legitimate legislation there was no reason to hide, were traits that frustrated even his supporters during the recall.
Lauri Wynn, former president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, who worked in the administration of former Gov. Tony Earl, was one of those who thought George should be retained because of the power he had built up that could benefit the black community.
“But Gary almost didn’t want people to know what he did,” says Wynn. “He was that sure of his district. It was like, ‘Why am I telling these little people what I’m doing? They’re coming out all right.’ ”
Some say George went toxic after state Sen. Chuck Chvala, his political nemesis, defeated him by two votes to become Democratic leader in the mid-’90s. Chvala then removed George from his power base on the Joint Finance Committee. That’s when George began publicly toying with the idea of voting with the Republicans to deny the Democrats power under Chvala.
But another Democratic leader says George had always worked private deals with the Republicans.
“Gary was always operating on the dark side, but he would do it quietly behind the scenes with master politician Tommy Thompson, who always made sure there were no fingerprints on anything,” says the Democrat. “He would work through George Lightbourn or Jim Klauser [two of Thompson’s top political operatives who served at different times as secretary of administration]. They gave him things all the time that were putting money in his pocket.
“Remember this,” the legislator adds. “When Gary would do a few of these deals with them, at that point he’d have power against them, too. What if he were to blow the whistle on Jim Klauser or somebody else? How could anybody go after Gary George if they’ve just cut a sleazy deal that put money in Gary’s pocket?”
A source within the Thompson administration told a legislator about one demand made by George that could have changed George’s career and opened up vast new areas for wheeling and dealing with public funds. According to the legislator, George went to Thompson, who was desperately trying to round up votes in the Legislature to approve the public construction of Miller Park for the Milwaukee Brewers. Although other black Milwaukee legislators were opposing the stadium unless it was built Downtown, George was said to have promised to vote for Miller Park if Thompson would appoint him chairman of the stadium district, overseeing the $400 million project and controlling enormous public contracts.
Instead, Thompson appointed Robert Trunzo, a former commercial real estate executive who had worked in his administration. George voted against the project.
In a final irony, Thompson, still needing one vote to approve Miller Park, persuaded Republican state Sen. George Petak from Racine to switch his vote. That vote precipitated Petak’s recall, giving Democrats the Senate majority and elevating George’s bitter rival, Chvala, to majority leader, one of the most powerful jobs in state government.
When Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle ended 16 years of Republican control of the governor’s office, George suddenly lost another of his backdoor routes to power.
Doyle called in Senate Democrats before the vote on whether to override Doyle’s veto of a Republican attempt to void the expanded gambling compacts Doyle had reached with Indian tribes to help close the state’s budget deficit. It was a frank, sometimes contentious discussion about how the governor and Democratic legislators could work together.
One legislator who attended says he heard from “an absolute Doyle inside source” that George returned to the governor’s office five minutes after the meeting adjourned to speak privately with Doyle.
“They go behind closed doors for 10 minutes and then Gary walks out,” says the legislator. “The next day, Gary votes against Jim Doyle on the gambling veto. The person who told me doesn’t know what was said in there, but clearly Gary asked for something and Doyle said no. I give Doyle credit for that. Gary wanted to play the same old game he’d played with Tommy.”
George’s vote on the gambling veto was significant in another way. It became the public justification for the recall campaign that ended George’s political career.
Jerrel Jones, the owner of Courier Communications, should be played by a black John Huston in a movie about a millionaire tycoon who secretly manipulates politicians to boost his own corporate profits.
But there’s really no secret in how Jones wields his influence. He is disarmingly candid about his own financial motives and how he uses his black community newspaper, The Milwaukee Courier, and radio station WNOV to support politicians he expects to do his bidding.
Neither does Jones deny enjoying the power of sitting on the board of the Potawatomi Foundation, passing out patronage to friends and community organizations.
“Nobody turns down power,” says Jones. “I got a lot of people dancing to the nice music that I play. People come to me asking me for things. Anytime you can give away money, whether it’s yours or somebody else’s, there’s power involved.”
So when Jones wanted to deliver George’s vote to uphold Doyle’s veto and support expanded gambling for the Potawatomi, Jones thought it should be a no-brainer.
“That’s what I’m supposed to be able to do after kissing his ass all these years,” says Jones. “In the 20 years I’ve supported him, I’ve never asked Gary to do anything. Everything I did was for him. I’ve reached in my pocket and handed Gary a thousand dollars and never asked him for one thing.”
As it turned out, a Democrat from northern Wisconsin who originally voted with the Republicans switched to give Doyle the one vote he needed to uphold his gambling compacts. But Jones still thinks about the benefits that might have flowed to him if he’d been able to deliver the one crucial vote.
“If I’d saved the f—ing day, let’s face it, who knows what good fortune there would have been for me,” says Jones. “The governor would have been happy. The Potawatomi would have been happy. And I would have been very happy.”
Instead, Jones was furious. He knew George’s vote had nothing to do with the gambling issue itself. Jones had called George to his Second Street home office after he heard George bad-mouthing the Potawatomi on Jones’ own radio station.
“He said he was gonna stick it to Doyle. He said, ‘I got that son-of-a-bitch elected, and he should have helped me become the Senate leader.’ ”
Jones himself had supported Doyle for governor after publicly accusing Tom Barrett of covertly encouraging the challenge to fraudulent signatures on George’s nomination papers for governor that knocked George off the ballot.
Now Jones began financing the circulation of recall petitions against George. He personally recruited state Rep. Coggs to run against him. Jones says the entire recall ultimately cost him $50,000 to $60,000, after hiring lawyers to fight George’s challenge to the recall petitions all the way to the state Supreme Court.
“White people had been wanting Gary’s ass out for years,” says Jones. “They just didn’t know how to get him out because whenever they tried, I would raise so much hell around here everybody thought Gary was the champion of the black folks. Anytime anybody touched Gary, the papers would holler out ‘Racist!’ That’s all you needed to do. Punch the race word and everybody would run away from it.
“Let’s just be very clear about it,” says Jones: “I was his base. I was the one protecting him. There is only one way to say it. I had the means to put him in or take him out. Nobody has the power that I have in the city. Nobody.”
That may sound like an egotistical boast, but Polly Williams uses almost the exact same words to describe Jones’ power, adding, “You have to respect your base.
“As much as anything, the recall was about the disrespect,” says Williams. “You know when you’re always there for someone no matter what they done. You helped them out through all kinds of scrapes. You know he’s not perfect, but you stood by him. But you’re not gonna let your child sass you. You gotta teach people a lesson, and Sen. George was way overdue to be taught.”
One of the people who went to work for Jones to help with the recall was Roemel Brown. This is one of the points where the recall ending George’s political career intersects with the federal charges ending his freedom.
Brown was just 22 when he began working at First Currency Exchange for George, whom he’d known as a friend of his father’s since he’d been in junior high school. Doing the monthly books, Brown uncovered various scams that his father, LaMonte Brown, and George, partners in the business, were using to take cash directly out of the safe without accounting for it.
Some checks would be cashed twice and the money pocketed. Bank deposits would routinely come up $1,500 to $2,500 short. Checks would be missing, and Brown’s father and George accused the bank of losing them.
“The bank said if we took pictures of all our checks, they would credit our account,” says Brown. “So I went out and purchased a thousand-dollar check camera. They made me take it back.”
Brown still believes that if his father and George hadn’t used the currency exchange as their personal cookie jar for short-term gain, the business would have been a long-term success for everybody involved.
“If they weren’t greedy, Gary’s brothers and myself, we all could have had our own stores in Milwaukee and around the state by now,” he says. “We could have been close to millionaires. It was a wasted opportunity.”
In the early ’90s, Brown supplied information to federal agents who were investigating First Currency Exchange. No charges, however, were filed in that investigation.
George knew Brown had co-operated with the feds, but he hired Brown again in 1999 to work on his legislative staff. Before hiring him, George made Brown sign a legal document, with a copy sent to the U.S. Marshal’s Office, claiming that Brown had given false testimony in the First Currency Exchange investigation.
“It said the information that I gave them was not true, that it was a fabrication,” says Brown. “But that’s not true. I’d told them the truth.”
In his job as legislative aide, Brown often carried out some of George’s most confidential personal business. Among Brown’s tasks: Each month. he would pick up checks from OIC, deliver them to the law firm of attorney Mark Sostarich (former chairman of the state Democratic Party) and then return the next day to pick up a personal check from Sostarich made out to George for 80 percent of the amount.
It was Brown’s co-operation in a new federal investigation documenting $270,000 funneled from OIC to George through Sos-tarich that became the basis for the federal charge that is about to send George to prison.
Brown estimates that working on George’s legislative staff involved only about 20 percent legitimate legislative work. It also included working on his political campaign for governor.
Some considered George’s statewide campaigns, twice for governor and once for the U.S. Senate, as just personal ego trips. Politicians in Madison saw them differently. They knew statewide campaigns automatically increased the size of the political contributions a candidate could collect. Limits of $1,000 from an individual or political action committee were raised to $10,000 from an individual and $43,000 from a PAC.
By far the bulk of Brown’s work for George was personal, including errands as menial as cleaning out the basement of the $800,000 home George purchased in the Town of Grafton – outside his legislative district – in 1990 on three acres overlooking Lake Michigan. On state time, Brown cut grass, shoveled snow, chauffeured members of George’s family and did their income taxes.
Brown says George was volatile and abusive to everyone who worked in his office but especially to black female staff members. “Gary has a problem with African-American women, he really does,” he says.
George mentally abused his chief of staff, Dan Rossmiller, until “Dan was like a little whipped puppy,” says Brown.
DeJustice Coleman, who also worked for George, is a former Secret Service agent whose résumé includes protecting President Richard Nixon in the White House from 1970 to ’74 and occasionally after Nixon resigned the presidency.
George would sometimes blow up emotionally and treat everyone who worked for him as if they were children, says Coleman. That included Coleman, a hard-nosed private investigator in his 60s.
Coleman was made a part-time state employee, but his primary job for George was as a private investigator searching public records to find missing heirs. George would give Coleman a list of estates in probate ranging from $50,000 to $250,000 for which no heirs had been located.
Coleman’s job was to track down any living heirs so George could offer to file a legal claim on their behalf for a percentage of the inheritance. Coleman says George was never willing to provide him travel expenses and other necessary resources. Over two years, Coleman says he never made “a big score.”
Coleman thought George just wanted to gloat about having a Secret Service agent on his payroll.
“Gary kept trying to pimp me out,” says Coleman. “He kept pushing me to buy a Lincoln Town Car. I’d hear he was telling people he was being driven around by a Secret Service agent. What he really wanted was to upstage Tommy Thompson,” emulating the perks the former governor was receiving as a cabinet secretary under President George W. Bush.
In separate moments of anger, George fired both Brown and Coleman about seven months apart in 2002. That was a dangerous thing to do, given all they would be able to tell investigators.
One thing both knew a lot about would become especially important to George’s demise. While they were being paid to do legislative work, both had been dispatched to St. Thomas at different times to help run George’s television station there. They knew how much it really amounted to, or more accurately, how little.
WVXF, Channel 17, is a one-room office on the upper floor of a two-story frame building on a mountain on St. Thomas. The station is a CBS network affiliate. That may sound impressive until you realize that designation doesn’t translate into revenue unless you can attract local advertising. And WVXF had no advertising sales staff.
Brown went to St. Thomas in 1999 to get the station up and running after George had held the license for years without putting anything at all on the air.
The station began showing CBS nighttime programming, but there was no local advertising. The only locally inserted spots were free public service announcements.
“Other businesses down there wouldn’t invest any advertising dollars because the signal was so weak,” says Brown. “They were not on the island cable network. The television station was just a front to attract investment dollars. All the investment Gary got, he was putting very little into the station.”
About a year later, Coleman was sent to St. Thomas for several weeks to run the station. He says he was looking forward to basking in the tropics and acting the television executive. Instead, he found himself sitting alone in a 10-by-12 room operating a switching machine for hours on end every day. He was the television station.
This was the private business opportunity the Wisconsin Ethics Board says attracted a $170,000 investment from OIC and $127,500 from John Bowles, president of Central City Construction. Bowles won large state contracts with George’s help over the years, as well as the contract for the $7.2 million Police Athletic League recreation facility – built when George was PAL’s chairman of the board – a facility with a gymnasium that bears the names of George’s parents.
“People get sucked in by TV,” says a business associate who saw OIC’s chief executive, Carl Gee, become increasingly upset that he couldn’t get straight answers from George about the agency’s investment.
“Frankly, I could have told them that any island TV station is a stupid investment given the reach and frequency and low population densities,” says the business associate. “Stations make money off of advertising, not off of programming. Who the hell’s advertising to the residents of St. Thomas?”
Returning calls on behalf of Gee, OIC’s board chairman Richard Porter says the agency had a sizable investment in the St. Thomas station but quickly came to believe it was not receiving full and accurate financial reports.
“That was a sore point for quite awhile,” says Porter. “In fact, the agency threatened litigation about it.”
Asked why George would play financial games with his friends and longtime political supporters, Porter says: “I’ve been practicing law long enough to have seen people and how they behave when they get into money trouble. They do all kinds of things that strike people as bizarre. It’s not always criminal, but this fits the pattern.”
When asked the same question about why George would jeopardize his long association with OIC with some kind of short-term scam, Gee’s business associate replied: “Because I don’t think he’s as bright as people say he is. And I think he’s even greedier than people recognize.”
Brown, as George’s driver, recalls the senator giving instructions over the telephone to another staff member who was at the Downtown Milwaukee Kinko’s on how to put together a false document about the earnings of the television station to be delivered to Gee.
Not only had Gee been one of the financial angels behind George’s political career over the years, he also was a good friend of Jerrel Jones.
Jones pinpoints when he first started thinking about the possibility of George’s recall.
“It was when he started screwing Carl Gee with that TV station in the Virgin Islands,” says Jones. “In fact, I was going to invest in it myself. But then they couldn’t get any books. They couldn’t get any read on what was really going on with the station. That’s when they started demanding it and he started ducking them.”
John Bowles was identified only as “Businessman A” in the original indictment of George. He was described as the owner of several Milwaukee businesses from whom cash payments were solicited by George in exchange for state contracts.
Ultimately, Bowles paid more than $125,000 to the St. Thomas television station. Unlike Gee and OIC, Bowles still defends those payments as part of a legitimate attempt to extend his construction business to the Virgin Islands.
Bowles says he was never technically an investor in the station. He says he loaned the station money to try to establish a connection to do business on the island.
“We were looking for a construction role down there when we were flying high three or four years ago,” he says. “We actually bid on some work down there. But it didn’t happen. The economy went bad. We didn’t have the dollars anymore and realized we weren’t going to be able to set up an office down there.”
Bowles said his involvement with the U.S. attorney came when investigators followed the money.
“My understanding is they tracked dollars,” says Bowles. “I always thought the dollars were going to the television station. I had no control over that. I wasn’t part of the organization. I don’t know where the money went. That’s the issue they were looking at. The dollars didn’t go toward the television station, so they must have gone toward something else.”
Asked if black businesses were expected to pay a price for George’s help in obtaining state contracts, Bowles broadens the question to cover working with politicians in general.
“What is a price? How did [former Mayor] John Norquist operate for so many years? The people who did things in this town, were they giving him political contributions on a steady basis? Were they regularly giving Tommy Thompson political contributions? Yeah. The top people, were they playing key roles in those politicians’ reelection campaigns? Sure, they were.”
Bowles still bristles when recalling a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story that suggested he had no-bid contracts handed to him by the state – one to build the $5.8 million Felmers Chaney Correction Center on North 30th Street that opened in 2001, another to build the $5.1 million Milwaukee Women’s Correctional Center opening on West Keefe Avenue this spring, with OIC as a leading candidate to operate the facility.
“I’ve never been an advocate of incarcerating African Americans in Two Rivers or Waupun,” he says. “Community corrections is the way to go when these guys are getting close to getting released. The recidivism rate is much lower if they have an opportunity to go through a decent training program to get them ready to get back out on the street. There weren’t white developers trying to do anything like that in the black neighborhoods.”
Bowles is concerned that minority businesses such as his own and an agency such as OIC will continue to feel the fallout from George’s conviction.
“A lot of people have been impacted in a negative way,” says Bowles. “A lot of businesses like ours have been challenged to survive. A lot of lives have been hurt. I feel for Gary’s family and other people. I don’t see how the African-American community gains anything out of this.”
For sheer audacity, it would be hard to top the federal charge that George used his position on the board of the Milwaukee Police Athletic League to set up an illegal kickback scheme.
It takes supreme self-confidence to put in motion a conspiracy to defraud an organization crawling with cops. PAL is an organization through which off-duty police officers participate in sports programs for at-risk young people.
George used his position on the board to push the hiring of his attorney, Sostarich. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Sostarich kicked back to George $50,000 of the $140,000 in legal fees he was paid by PAL. Other companies George had helped in the past – Bowles’ construction company and the Chicago accounting firm of Coleman & Williams – received lucrative PAL contracts, with George personally overseeing all of the payments when he became board chair.
George helped secure $1.7 million in state funds for the construction of the Police Athletic League’s new recreational center that opened in 2002 in his district. The league, however, had trouble raising additional funds for the $7.2 million center and went $3.5 million into debt because of the project while George was chairman.
“That whole project was weird,” says a source involved behind the scenes. “The building was going up before the financing was in place. It’s the only construction proj-ect I’ve ever been involved in where the thing that was moving ahead of everything else was the building. It’s usually the other way around. You can’t get the financing. You can’t get the permits. The architect’s behind. But that sucker’s walls were going up when we were still negotiating the architect’s contract for work that was already done.”
On October 21, 2003, voters in Wis-consin’s 6th Senate District recalled Sen. Gary George, casting 65 percent of the vote to his challenger, state Rep. Spencer Coggs.
According to several who talked to George shortly before the election, his overwhelming defeat came as a complete and utter shock. George appeared stricken, as if no one had ever suggested that possibility to him before, says a political adviser who told George days before the election that he was going to lose. “He was completely oblivious to how much trouble he was in.”
In the week leading up to the recall, Jerrel Jones was so confident of a Coggs victory that he told Coggs not to show up for two live radio debates scheduled with George – one on WMCS and the other on WTMJ. Coggs’ supporters felt the election was already won. There was no reason to give George any opportunity to score rhetorical points.
On WMCS – the only appearance likely to have any impact in the district – George, appearing alone, was so upset by tough questions aimed at him by “Morning Magazine” host Keith Murphy that he went ballistic, slamming a door and throwing papers on air.
As smart as George was, says Polly Williams, he had a naiveté that came from never having to face major consequences for his actions. “He was so out of touch with reality,” says Williams. “He was so out of touch with humanness and people – just plain, everyday, ordinary people – that he had no idea something like this could happen to him. He’s never had to pay the price for things he’s done before.”
In an interview two weeks before last fall’s recall vote, Jones foresaw much of what was about to happen.
“They’ve got enough shit to put Gary in jail,” Jones predicted then. “In fact, they’re gonna have to build a whole new prison around him. Taking that senator label off of him, that’s going to put him out there nekkid.” m
Joel McNally’s last article for Milwaukee Magazine was “Mr. Clout,” a feature about high-profile local attorney Franklyn Gimbel.
