Louisiana Voice

There’s a STORY in today’s Washington Post that has an eerily familiar ring to me personally from my days as a reporter for the Baton Rouge-State Times.

For those of you who don’t remember, The State-Times was the sister publication of The Baton Rouge Morning Advocate (now just The Advocate) and which previously served as the official journal for the State of Louisiana. A victim of the general demise of afternoon newspapers, it ceased publication after 78 years of operation in 1991.

Both newspapers were under the Manship corporate umbrella, along with radio stations WFMF (I was told the inside joke was that it stood for the “Whole F*****g Manship Family), WJBO (an outstanding news station in the day) and television station WBRZ, and a couple of properties in other states.

I first came on board in 1973 as labor reporter for The State-Times, a publication that was decidedly anti-labor. I made a lot of mistakes along the way and pretty much refused to act my age (barely 30 at the time, but really more like a 19-year-old – an immature 19-year-old, at that). I was eventually allowed to do a little investigative reporting and wrote a couple of series on nursing home abuse and on questionable practices in the Baton Rouge building inspection department.

But two of my potentially more explosive stories never saw the light day. More about those later but first, back to The Washington Post story about Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.

DeJoy, according to at least five former employees at DeJoy’s old company, New Breed Logistics in North Carolina., have indicated that he may have violated federal campaign finance laws by establishing “straw donors” in an effort to funnel more than $1 million to Republican candidates.

This was accomplished, the five employees have asserted, by pressuring employees to make campaign contributions in their individual names and that they would be reimbursed by New Breed Logistics in the form of bonuses.

In 2014, New Breed was acquired by Connecticut-based XPO. In 2015 New Breed employees who had stayed on after the XPO acquisition were giving “significantly smaller” political contributions, with many ceasing making political contributions altogether, according to federal campaign finance records.

Plant managers for New Breed claimed that they received “strongly-worded admonitions from their superiors that they should give money whenever DeJoy was holding fundraisers – as he often did for Republican candidates. One manager said when he received his first company bonus, he was advised by a company vice-president that he should purchase a ticket to DeJoy’s next fundraiser. You can read that entire story, also published by The Washington Post on Sunday HERE. (The Washington Post has a paywall, so if you are not a subscriber, you will not be able to open either of these stories so, you may wish to read the Newsweek story by going HERE.

Which brings me to those two stories that got spiked.

One was the story about New Bethany Home for Girls in the north Louisiana town of Arcadia, in Bienville Parish, not far from where outlaws Bonnie and Clyde met their demise at the hands of Texas Ranger Frank Hamer.

I was assigned the story and had uncovered widespread abuse at the home, including some allegations of sexual abuse by its director, the late Rev. Mack Ford, as well as stories of beatings and of girls being handcuffed to their beds and not allowed bathroom breaks as punishment for various transgressions.

But just as I was completing the first story, the newsroom received a visit from Ford, his attorney (a Baton Rouge lawyer whose name I can’t recall for certain, though I know who I think it was) and three or four of the teenage female residents). We were all crammed into a tiny room just off the main newsroom. When the reverend launched into a full-blown, full-gospel prayer, Editor Jim Hughes, not a particularly religious man, to understate the case, shot me a look that indicated, without a shred of doubt in my mind, that he was not happy that I had this brought this miniature prayer meeting into his newsroom.

For whatever the reason, a few days later, I got the word that the story had been killed. I was never told why.

Earlier, while working on my nursing home series (sometime during 1974), I thought it might be a good idea to check campaign contributions to various politicians by nursing home owners to see which politicians were protecting them.

In checking the contributions to then-Sen. Russell Long, one of the most powerful men in Congress, I found no nursing home contributions but I did notice several contributions by individuals who each contributed $250. Each one gave his or her address as St. Louis and their employer as Monsanto Corp., also of St. Louis.

That caught my eye as I wondered why Monsanto employees from St. Louis would be interested in the campaign of a senator from Louisiana. I began flipping through the pages (there were no digital reports back then and no one in the newsroom had a word processor – we typed our stories on manual Royal typewriters. The pages began to mount up as I went deeper into Long’s campaign finance report. By the time I was finished, there were several hundred St. Louis residents, Monsanto employees one and all, who had given $250 each to Long.

realizing I had stumbled into a pretty good story, considering it was immediately after Watergate and the Nixon resignation, I had copies made of all the pages and set off to meet with Hughes.

As he looked at page after page, it quickly became obvious he agreed with me that this was a major story. “Let me show these to Doug,” he said, referring to then-publisher Doug Manship, Sr.

I wasn’t too concerned because Manship had also reviewed earlier stories in the nursing home series and had given his stamp of approval. I expected nothing less than that on this story.

But a couple of days later, Hughes walked up to my desk and said in a quiet voice, “Doug says forget you ever saw those reports.”

My jaw dropped as I looked at Hughes incredulously. “What?!!” I exclaimed.

“Doug says Russell is a friend of his he doesn’t want to embarrass him, so, forget about this story.”

“But Jim,” I protested, “this is a helluva story!”

Hughes stiffened visibly and said, “Aswell (well, actually, his pet name for me was a little less complimentary “A**h***”), do you like your job or not?

That was the end of it. Hughes kept the photocopies of the report I had given him and nothing else was ever said about the Russell Long-Monsanto story even though straw donors had been made illegal with passage of the FEDERAL ELECTIONS CAMPAIGN ACT in 1971, three years before the Monsanto employees’ contributions.

In 2014, political commentator, author and film-maker Dinesh D’Souza was convicted of reimbursing others $20,000 for donating to New York Republican Senate candidate Wendy Long and two years later, Jeffrey Thompson was convicted for funding the campaigns of several political candidates, including Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential nomination bid, through straw donors.

I suppose we will see if the William Barr justice department will pursue charges against DeJoy but I’m going with the smart money that says he won’t