Mavericks' Maury

Mavericks are plentiful in Texas' Bexar County. They may--and do--fight among themselves. They may--and do--lambaste one another's politics. But when a Maverick gets in trouble, the Mavericks gather.

Two weeks ago, the Mavericks gathered in a San Antonio court. Albert Maverick's boy Maury was in trouble. Dr. George Maverick came all the way from New York, smoked his pipe with an air of "I'm here if needed." Pretty Maverick girls flashed hot glances at anti-Mavericks.

No one, least of all himself, need have been surprised that Maury was in trouble. Politics is a tough business, and Bexar County is no Sunday school. When Maury Maverick got licked for re-election to Congress, he started to come back by getting himself elected Mayor of San Antonio. In his campaign he promised a general clean-up of the city. When he was elected, he started to make good his promise. Result: obvious to any freshman in political chemistry.

One political chemist, but no freshman, was District Attorney John R. Shook, boyhood friend of Maury, now one of the leaders of the opposition which kept Maury out of Congress in 1938, tried to keep him out of the Mayor's office. In his political laboratory, Mr. Shook got to work. He uncovered one Maxwell Burkett, San Antonio lawyer who had been an attorney for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. Mr. Burkett, it was alleged in court later, had been prevented, as part of Maury's cleanup, from signing bonds for vice case defendants. Mr. Shook having shaken up some other interesting combinations, emerged from his laboratory with several indictments, on charges of paying and conspiring to pay the poll taxes of others (a prison offense in Texas). Most interesting name on the list was Mayor Maverick's.

The State tried to show that Maverick and his co-defendants conspired to spend Maverick money in 50-c- pieces to pay the $1.50 poll tax for an I. L. G. W. U. member so he could help elect him. (By Texas law, no one can vote without paying a poll tax.) Defense maintained that the money was spent legally for campaign purposes.

While Patriarch Albert Maverick alternately glared and dozed, while the charges against Maury's co-defendants were dismissed, leaving Maury to stand alone, his trial raged in a superheated courtroom. A defense witness accused Burkett of once saying he wanted to get rid of Maury. A feminine witness for the prosecution admitted having called Maury "a crumb." Maury's 14-year-old daughter drew a picture of a devil with a forked tail, labeled it "Gittinger" ("Buck" Gittinger, Shock's assistant). Judge Bryce Ferguson, "Ma" Ferguson's nephew, slumped down in his chair almost out of sight, looked up occasionally to quote from memory long passages of law. Defense Counsel Carl Wright Johnson, one of Texas' most eloquent bull-roarers, snorted that conspiracy testimony was stronger against Shook and Burkett, bellowed: "I don't think there is a man on the jury who would send a burr-headed nigger through a cracked gate or fine him a five-cent piece on the evidence they have in this case."

He was right. Last week the jury acquitted Albert Maverick's boy Maury. Mavericks cheered, wept, stamped, went home. Maury Maverick went back to the Mayor's office. The Maverick clan, and many another Texan, thought he would probably weather worse political trials.

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