Texas Confidential. Michael Varhola
Attorney General John Hill. Hill, who was reportedly concerned that the ranch was part of a ring being run by mobsters, had asked Fayette County District Attorney Oliver Kitzman to shut it down. Knowing that his constituency wanted the brothel to stay open, however, Kitzman declined to take action. James then contacted Zindler in the hopes that the high-profile reporter could bring to bear enough public attention to get the ranch shut down.
Zindler interviewed Kitzman in the course of his exposé, and the county attorney admitted to knowing about the brothel but gave as his reason for declining to shut it down that “we have never had any indication by anyone that these places are a problem to law enforcement.” The journalist also spoke with Flournoy, who had served the county as sheriff for twenty-seven years, and he asserted that he had never received bribes to keep the ranch open and that it was in no way affiliated with organized crime.
Zindler then approached Texas Governor Dolph Briscoe, who was prompted to launch his own brief investigation of the brothel. It revealed no evidence of mob links, but he and Attorney General Hill nonetheless ordered that the Chicken Ranch be shut down for good.
Sheriff Flournoy stepped up to do his part for the cathouse and, carrying a petition signed by three thousand people opposed to its closure, went to Austin to speak with Governor Briscoe. The politician refused to meet with the sheriff and, on August 1, 1973, the Chicken Ranch closed its doors for the last time and a Texas tradition came to an end.
6
Going Down to Get Ahead
IN 1976, JOHN ANDREW YOUNG (1916–2002) had been a career politician for three decades and was on his eleventh term in the U.S. House of Representatives when a woman who had worked for him accused him of pressuring her to have sex with him. Even worse, she said, the married father of five had compensated her at taxpayers’ expense by giving her substantial pay raises.
Colleen Gardner, a young woman who had, as it were, worked on the Democratic congressman’s staff since 1970, said she had reluctantly had sex with her boss on numerous occasions after giving in to his relentless advances.
Gardner was, in fact, suspiciously well paid for someone who had admitted that “maybe four days out of the week I had nothing to do.” When she began working in Young’s office, Gardner received an annual salary of $8,500, good for a novice staffer, but before long had it increased to $25,800. To put that in perspective, only 27 of the 464 staff members of the Texas congressional delegation earned more, and most of them were senior personnel like chiefs of staff.
Woefully underemployed, Gardner asked for more work, and Young cheerfully obliged, making her primary duty sitting with him in his private office and chatting “about sex for hours and hours.”
Talk is cheap and Young decided to kick it up a notch, and the two reportedly met at nearby motels—where Young registered under the assumed name of “George Denton”—at least thirty-two times over a sixteen-month period.
“I’d deny it if it were true, but the fact is, I didn’t,” Young said in response to the pay-for-play allegations. But, unable to refute a messy paper trail that led straight from Capitol Hill to multiple sleazy motel rooms, the senior congressman had no choice but to admit both that he had rented them and used a false name to do so. He claimed he had done so, however, in pursuit of his official duties—namely, for purposes of meeting with Department of Defense employees who wanted to give him confidential information about illicit activities at the Pentagon.
A Department of Justice investigation concluded before the end of 1976 failed to prove a connection between Young’s affair with Gardner and her exorbitant pay.
Young’s wife, Jane, however, was not quite as concerned with the technicalities of the case as were the federal government investigators and, on July 13, 1977, fatally shot herself in the head.
Ever the trooper, Young worked through his grief and ran for reelection in the June 1978 primary but was defeated and left the office he had held for twenty-two years in 1979. He thereafter worked as a consultant until his death in early 2002, upon which he was buried with honors at Arlington National Cemetery, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., in Arlington, Virginia.
7
Paying for It, Lying About It—And Getting Away With It
NOBODY LIKES TO ADMIT THEY HAVE paid too much for something, and it is certainly the kind of thing people fib about every day without fear of dire consequences. But when the FBI is conducting a background investigation on someone being appointed to public office and asks him how much money he gave to his mistress, it is a bad idea to lowball the amount. That is what the honorable Henry Cisneros did, and it caused him untold problems, tarnished a presidential administration, and cost the American taxpayers a lot of money.
Cisneros was one of the shining stars of the Democratic Party, having served four successful terms as the mayor of San Antonio and as a key advisor to Bill Clinton during his 1992 presidential campaign. Clinton rewarded Cisneros for his efforts by appointing him U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and he was confirmed in this position on January 22, 1993. He was, by all accounts, as passionate and competent in his new post as he had been in his previous ones.
U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, however, learned that Cisneros—labeled, along with Clinton, a “skirt chaser” during the campaign—had lied to the FBI about the amount of money he had paid to his mistress, a woman named Linda Medlar (aka Linda Jones). In March 1995, Reno secured the appointment of Independent Counsel David Barrett to investigate these allegations. Although he was married, the fact that Cisneros had a mistress was not that much of an issue, as this had been fairly widely known for some time.
Cisneros had been involved with Medlar since 1987, when she was a volunteer staffer for his mayoral campaign, and soon thereafter he began to support her. According to subsequent court records, from 1988 to 1992 Cisneros gave her a total of $250,000, and then continued to pay her even after becoming the chief of HUD, a whopping $79,500 in 1993. After a point, this money was intended to keep Medlar quiet and keep her from making any embarrassing public revelations.
While Cisneros was certainly guilty of poor judgment, his girlfriend was, by all accounts, an emotionally disturbed gold digger. In 1994, Medlar sued the mayor for breach of contract, fraud, and failing to support her, eventually screwing him out of another $49,000 (although she had been shooting for $250,000). She also sold secret recordings she had made of conversations with Cisneros to the Fox television program Inside Edition, which it subsequently aired, leading Attorney General Reno to unleash Barrett.
The independent counsel’s investigation of Cisneros went on until December 1997, when—eleven months after his term as the head of HUD ended—he was indicted on eighteen charges, including conspiracy, making false statements, and obstruction of justice. In September 1999, he negotiated a plea agreement under which he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of lying to the FBI and was fined $10,000 but did not receive prison time or even probation. And some sixteen months later, in January 2001, Clinton pardoned his buddy as one of his last official acts in the Oval Office.
Former mayor of San Antonio Henry Cisneros had something to smile about after the six-year, $22 million investigation into his activities was brought to a close with a judicial order that kept its findings secret.
Prosecutors had granted Medlar immunity in exchange for testifying against her former sugar daddy. Being a dumb, greedy whore, however, she lied to them and ended up getting charged with multiple counts of bank fraud, conspiracy to commit bank fraud, and obstruction of justice as a result of a bank fraud scheme she had entered into with her sister and brother-in-law in an attempt to conceal the source of the money she had received. She pleaded guilty to twenty-eight charges and was sentenced to time in prison.
His girlfriend was an emotionally disturbed gold digger.
Independent Counsel Barrett was by no means pleased with the outcome for Cisneros and persisted in his inquiries, broadening them to include a look into