“Look at the date on this article,” I said, pointing to it. “Bryant was nominated to his first court position only a week after he paid off all the money he owed. I’ve dealt with crooks and politicians far too long to think that’s a complete coincidence. It has to mean something.”
“How were county judges picked in Florida then?”
“Same as now. They run for election. Or, as in Henry Bryant’s case, they’re appointed to fill an unexpired term if a judge dies in office or steps down for some other reason.”
“Appointed by whom?”
I looked at the article again to double-check my memory.
“By the governor.”
“You think Bryant could have been involved in something shady with the governor?”
“Anything is possible, but I doubt it. For one thing, that was Governor James Baker. He’s still considered to be probably the most honest governor Florida ever had. You know my take on an honest politician being an oxymoron, but from everything I’ve ever read or heard, in Baker’s case, the reputation might have been genuine. Genuine enough that he left politics in disgust after his term was over and said he never wanted to touch it again with a ten-foot pole. They still talk about him down there, even though he’s been dead for six or seven years now.”
“So then what does all this mean?” Cooper wanted to know.
“Beats the hell out of me,” I said, looking back at the newspaper article on Bryant’s court appointment. “But I guess I’m just going to have to make some more phone calls and see if I can figure it out.”
* * * *
The first person I decided to call, once Cooper took his leave with a request to keep him posted on anything I found, was a man named Steven Franks. He was quoted in the article on Bryant’s appointment, in which Franks was identified as Governor Baker’s chief of staff.
I called Tallahassee information and got a telephone listing for the man I hoped was the right Steven Franks, but when I called the number, I got an answering machine with a man’s voice on the recording.
“This is Sutton McPhee,” I told the machine, after it beeped at me. “I’m a reporter with the Washington News, and I’m working on a story that I’m hoping you might be able to help me with. It involves someone I think you knew a number of years ago in Tallahassee, when you worked for Governor Baker. If you could take a few minutes to call me, I’d really appreciate it.”
I left my number and hung up, wondering if I had found Baker’s former aide and whether I would hear from him.
In the meantime, however, I couldn’t just sit around twiddling my thumbs, waiting for a phone that might or might not ring. Nor was I ready to head back out to Virginia and Noah Lansing. I decided the only thing left to do was to call Henry Bryant and ask him where he got the money.
Twenty-two
Henry Bryant was, to put it mildly, quite offended by my question.
“My life is an open book,” he shouted at me over the telephone when I reached him in his Mayflower Hotel room. “How many times do you think I’ve been investigated already for judgeships I’ve held? And don’t you think the White House has gone through my background with a fine-tooth comb for this Supreme Court nomination? Who are you to question my affairs? No one else has ever even asked me about the loan.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time the White House has missed something in a background check, especially this White House,” I pointed out in an extravagance of understatement.
“Well, they certainly didn’t miss anything this time,” Bryant said huffily.
“Look, Judge Bryant,” I went on, “it’s a simple question with a simple answer. But it was a lot of money, and your situation back then was very precarious. You were a hair’s breadth from being thrown out of your house with your two children. I just want to know whether the money was a loan or a gift, and who it was from. I don’t see why it requires secrecy.”
“It was a private loan from someone who cared about me and my children,” Bryant answered, sounding angrier by the minute. “It was repaid. I’ve kept the details to myself at the request of the person who helped me out, out of respect for them, and I’ll thank you to show me the same respect as well. Not everything is fodder for the press, even now.”
“Why does it matter after all this time who loaned you the money? Do you really think they care, after twenty years, that anyone knows?”
Bryant hung up on me.
Well, I thought, hanging up my own phone, so much for that bridge, which I suspected was smoking a lot, if not in flames. So now what?
The telephone rang.
“Sutton McPhee,” I answered, my mind still on my conversation with Bryant.
“This is Steven Franks in Tallahassee. I’m calling in response to a message you left on my answering machine.”
“Oh, Mr. Franks,” I said, paying attention now. “Thanks for calling me back. Are you the Steven Franks who was the chief of staff for Governor Baker?”
“That’s right,” Franks said. “What is it you think I can do for you?”
“I’m sure you know about Judge Henry Bryant being nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court, and I’m hoping you can give me some information from when he was a county judge in Tallahassee.”
“Oh?”
“In the research I’ve been doing, I saw that it was Governor Baker who nominated Judge Bryant to his first court position, back when the judge was an assistant state attorney.”
“That was a long time and a lot of gubernatorial appointments ago,” Franks said, “but yes, my memory is that the governor did make that appointment.”
“What kind of process would Governor Baker have used to make an appointment like that?” I asked. “Where did he get the names of people who might be qualified when he needed to fill some position such as a county judgeship?”
Franks took a couple of seconds to answer. I assumed he was searching his memory from two decades before.
“From a number of places, actually,” he said finally. “The people we consulted for possible nominees varied, depending on the position that was open, of course. But for a judge, we would have talked to people at the local and state bar associations, to other judges, perhaps even to the governor’s long-time political and financial supporters, who frequently had all sorts of connections throughout the business and legal communities.”
“By any chance, do you remember who suggested Judge Bryant’s name? Was he someone the governor knew well?”
“Frankly,” Franks answered, “I just don’t remember. As I say, it’s been a long time, and you have to understand that, in a four-year term, a governor could be required to make a lot of appointments to all kinds of judgeships, task forces, commissions. I just don’t know, now, who recommended Henry Bryant. I’m sorry.”
I could see there was no point in pushing further at the moment. Franks was trying to be helpful. I didn’t want to piss him off in case he had a brainstorm later and remembered what I wanted to know.
“I understand,” I told him, “and I know I’m asking a lot after all these years. I appreciate what you have been able to tell me. May I ask you to call me if you do remember at some point where his name came from?”
“Certainly,” Franks said.
I let him go.
Damn it, I thought, hanging up. Another dead end. Clearly there was no point in calling Henry Bryant again and asking him who recommended him to Governor Baker. He would just hang up on me a second time. Who else could I call? I couldn’t think of a soul who might be able to tell me anything helpful.
In frustration, I got up and paced around my desk, trying to think of what I could do now to find out what I needed to know, to find something that would begin to make sense of the bits and pieces I had. When I realized my pacing had reached the point that it was eliciting irritated looks from the two other reporters in the newsroom at the moment, I snatched the desk chair back out and sat down in it, sulkily. Then I picked up the pages Cooper had brought me and started reading
back through all of them again, hoping for an epiphany. I just didn’t know what else to do.
* * * *
When enlightenment didn’t strike, however, my frustration reached the point that even the coffee in the first-floor cafeteria sounded like an appealing distraction, so I went to get some. As I opened the stairwell door on my way back into the newsroom, coffee cup in hand, I heard a telephone ringing in the general vicinity of my desk, and I broke into a jog to answer it before the caller hung up. It was Steven Franks again.
“I find I’m able to answer your question after all,” he explained when I expressed surprise at hearing from him again so soon.
“Did you remember something?” I asked, putting the cup of coffee down on my desk and sitting down.
“No, my memory hasn’t improved that much since we spoke earlier,” he replied, laughing. “But I have this stack of daily journals that I kept all through the governor’s administration, thinking that one day I could use them to write a book of some kind. I’m ashamed to say I’ve never done anything with them, but they did tell me what you wanted to know.”
“Yes?”
“According to my notes from that time, Judge Bryant was strongly recommended for the county court seat by Gerald Tharpe.” The name sounded familiar to me, but at the moment, I couldn’t place it.
“Gerry was an attorney in Tallahassee at the time,” Franks went on, “although he left the area several years ago and went out to Oregon or Washington State or one of those places out west. He also was one of Governor Baker’s strongest supporters. He was particularly good at bringing in influential people with money to give to the election effort, so later, we certainly would have looked closely at anyone he recommended for an appointive position.”
“And you’re certain that Judge Bryant’s name came from him for consideration?”
“Pretty sure. I generally tried to make notes in my journals every night while things were still fresh in my memory, so I would say yes, it was Gerry who passed along Henry Bryant’s name.”
“And how much weight would the suggestion have carried coming from Gerald Tharpe?”
“If you’re suggesting that anything underhanded would have gone on, I can assure you that wasn’t the case,” Franks said. “James Baker wouldn’t have considered Judge Bryant unless Bryant was qualified for the position. But realistically, if he were qualified, the fact that Gerry suggested him certainly would have weighed in his favor in the governor’s final selection.”
“Well, that is the way the world works, isn’t it?” I asked rhetorically. It certainly was the way the political world worked, even when the players had scruples.
“The world that I know does,” Franks agreed.
I thanked him for going to the trouble of checking his journals and calling me with Tharpe’s name, and we hung up.
So the impetus for Bryant’s county judgeship had come not from Governor Baker but from a local attorney named Gerald Tharpe, I thought as I sat back in my chair. Which meant that Baker probably had no connection with Bryant’s mysterious $200,000 loan, either. But who was Gerald Tharpe, and why did I know his name? I didn’t think he was anyone I remembered from my years in Tallahassee, certainly not anyone I covered in connection with the education beat. Was it something more recent? I again picked up the stack of paper Cooper had given me. My memory was nagging at me that I had heard or read the name recently, but there was no mention of him in Cooper’s material.
I put the stack back down and opened the file drawer on my desk, from which I pulled out the folder that held the newspaper articles I had copied in the library in Tallahassee. As I reached the article about Arthur Williams’ suicide, Gerald Tharpe’s name jumped out at me from the columns of newsprint.
I sat forward and read the paragraph in which his name appeared:
When contacted, Coleman’s Washington office staff referred a Democrat reporter to Tallahassee attorney Gerald Tharpe, who is acting as Coleman’s spokesman.
“Mr. Coleman has no knowledge of any wrongdoing at Three Rivers Development, which he left more than a year ago,” said Tharpe, “but he considered Art Williams a friend as well as a former business associate. Art’s death is a real tragedy for all his family and friends.”
“Holy shit!” I said, unable to take my eyes from the page on which Tharpe’s name appeared.
“Holy shit what?”
I jumped a foot and a half, almost knocking over my cup of coffee.
“Damn it, Sy,” I yelled, turning around to look at him where he had walked up behind me. “You scared the crap out me!”
“Only a small part of it, I’m sure,” Sy replied snottily. “So what are you exclaiming over? Anything to do with our story about little Bobby Coleman?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. I think I may have just put a big part of the story together. And as much as it pains me to do it, you’d better sit down and let me tell you about it, so you can tell me if you come to the same conclusions I have.”
Sy’s glare looked a little less hateful and a little more interested. He took the chair Cooper had vacated earlier and looked at me expectantly.
“So shoot,” he said.
Oh, I thought, if only I could.
Twenty-three
“Okay, you’re going to have to bear with me here for a little bit,” I told Sy, “because the beginnings of this go back at least twenty years, and even though you already have heard some of it from Rob and me, it will make more sense if I tell it to you in chronological order. So just keep your mouth shut until I’m done, okay?”
“Would you just get on with it?” Sy asked sarcastically.
“Okay,” I said, “back in the seventies, Robert Coleman was in Tallahassee, as the number-two guy in a land development company called Three Rivers Development. The owner was a man named Arthur Williams. Coleman left the company in 1977 to come to Washington; a year or so later, Williams committed suicide. His death was followed by the company’s collapse and a huge scandal over how it had been run and how much money its investors lost.”
“I already know all that, McPhee,” Sy said, throwing his hands up in the air in a gesture of frustration. “When are you gonna get to something I don’t know?”
“How about this? Not long before he left Tallahassee, Robert Coleman had been under investigation by the state attorney’s office there, based on a complaint they had gotten from a former investor in Three Rivers. But the investigation was quashed, practically before it got started, and no charges were ever filed against Coleman.”
“Oh yeah?” Sy asked. Apparently, I finally had said something he found interesting.
“Yeah. The assistant state attorney who was handling the investigation was a man named Henry Bryant.”
“You mean the—”
“Sh-h-h!” I said forcefully. “Just listen. One day shortly into the investigation, Bryant got called into the office of Ford Truesdale, the state attorney for that part of Florida and Bryant’s boss. When he came back out, he looked upset, and he told one of his colleagues that Truesdale had just ordered him to close the Coleman investigation for lack of evidence. So Bryant closed the case and got on with his other work, and a few weeks later, he left the state attorney’s office when the governor named him to fill a vacancy on the Leon County Court bench.
“The colleague he told about Truesdale’s orders to close the case was a man named Lawson Thomas, who also left the job not much later to get involved in politics and who now is a Florida state senator. Thomas told the story to me, and he also told me that when he tried to check on the information in the files from the Coleman investigation down there, it turns out the file has disappeared.”
“Here we go,” Sy said, rubbing his hands together in gleeful anticipation. “I love disappearing files!”
“Okay, at the same time all this was going on, Henry Bryant’s wife was in the process of dying from cancer, leaving him with two little kids and $200,000 in debt. By the time she was buried, he owed everyb
ody and his brother money and was about to lose his house. As far as I can tell, the only real asset he had was his salary from the state attorney, and you can imagine what that would have amounted to. But all of a sudden, the money appears from out of the blue, and Bryant pays everyone back, all within a few days. When I asked him about it directly, Bryant just about took my head off and told me the money was a private loan from someone trying to help him out. He said he eventually repaid it, but he refused to say who loaned it to him, and there’s no record I can find of where the money came from. And just coincidentally, this loan’ showed up right in the same time period as the Coleman investigation was being killed and Bryant was being given a judgeship.”
The clownish grin Sy had been wearing dropped off his face.
“Goddamn!” he said. “You think the Florida governor gave him the money and a judge’s seat? But for what? I thought it was Bryant’s boss who stopped the. Coleman investigation.”
“Yeah, but whose word do we have for that? Only Bryant’s himself. No one else was in that meeting between him and Truesdale. It was Bryant who told Lawson Thomas that Truesdale ordered him to close the case. But just suppose it was the other way around. Suppose it was Bryant who convinced Truesdale that there wasn’t enough evidence there to go after Coleman. If Truesdale trusted Bryant, he would have had no reason to believe otherwise, and as the lead investigator, Bryant could have manipulated the information he showed Truesdale. Now, I’m thinking maybe it was really Bryant who called the investigation of Coleman off. I think Robert Coleman bought him off for $200,000 and a judgeship, at a time when Bryant was under the ultimate stress. The quid pro quo was that Bryant saw to it that Coleman’s case was closed and the file deep-sixed.”
“So then you do think the governor was involved. He’s the one who put Bryant on the bench, right?”
“Right, but I don’t think he realized what was really going on. If Florida has ever had a more honest governor than Baker, I don’t know who it was. And I talked to Governor Baker’s former chief of staff, a man named Steven Franks. Franks told me that, according to notes he kept at the time, Bryant was suggested to them by a Tallahassee attorney named Gerald Tharpe, who had been influential in getting big donors to support Baker for governor. So Franks said they probably would have given Tharpe’s candidate preference, all other things being equal.”
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