Going After a Governor

In the law's eyes, every man is officially the same, except of course when he is an official nothing is quite the same. Consider the case of U.S. v. Marvin Mandel et al., which a six-woman, six-man jury began hearing last week.

The unique problems involved in prosecuting a sitting public official began almost immediately after the Maryland Governor was indicted last November on charges involving bribery. The federal judge on the case was disqualified by an appeals court because a former law partner had a peripheral relationship to the case. Thereupon all eight other federal judges in Maryland also disqualified themselves. Finally, John H. Pratt, 65, had to be imported from Washington, D.C. Though virtually every Marylander knew about the charges, Pratt refused to move the trial to Virginia and began working his way through 240 jury candidates, mindful of the added complication that the defendant's state government and the prosecution's Federal Government are Maryland's two largest employers.

As if that were not enough, the tangles reached even to U.S. Attorney Jervis Finney, who is nominally in charge of the prosecution. When the Government started presenting its case last week, Republican Finney was making himself scarce, apparently because as a former Maryland state senator he might be called as a witness for Democrat Mandel's defense.

The prosecution aims to prove that W. Dale Hess, former Democratic leader of the House of Delegates, his business partners, Harry and Bill Rodgers, and Lawyer Ernest N. Cory Jr. "bought" Mandel. While their racing, real estate, insurance and other enterprises fattened on favorable state decisions and contracts, the prosecution claims, they were giving Mandel nearly $200,000 worth of clothes, jewelry, insurance and business opportunities.

Despite the charges (and his messy divorce and 1974 remarriage), Mandel, 56, retains his popularity. Defense lawyers are counting on that to further bedevil the prosecution. Mandel, says the defense, could hardly have granted favors since one of his accomplishments has been to separate his office from the awarding of state contracts.

The only federal statutes the prosecutors found usable in the case were an anti-racketeering law--originally aimed at organized crime--and the mail fraud law. The result is somewhat tortured--most evidently in a charge that Mandel sent a lie through the mails. The alleged lie was contained in a press-conference transcript that was mailed to a library. The use of statutes against officials has nonetheless been upheld, particularly in New Jersey and in Chicago.

Friends' Fruit. The Justice Department boasts that since 1970 its prosecutors have convicted more than 1,000 public officials--including one Vice President, two U.S. Senators, six Congressmen and one Governor. There may be more. Earlier this year, Assistant Attorney General Richard L. Thornburgh, chief of Justice's criminal division, set up a new Public Integrity Section. Drawing on the expertise of Securities and Exchange Commission lawyers, antitrust experts and Internal Revenue Service investigators, the Public Integrity Section is ready to help federal prosecutors anywhere in the country with the complexities of nailing corrupt public officials.

Perhaps the most difficult problem results from the investigators' new interest In the more subtle fix. Rarely do they encounter the straightforward sleazy payoff. Instead, as in the Mandel case, the suspected bribery is billed as merely the legitimate fruit of friendship. As one of Mandel's prosecutors told the jury last week: "The question is: When does it go too far? When does friendship become a euphemism and a code word for something corrupt and illegal?"

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