I protected my daughters while they were growing up. I never told them about the corrupt world they faced. I didn’t protect my son. I believe this is common in the Anglo world. Women are far less likely to know about and understand the corruption around them.
Corruption is the disproportionate favoritism for some people or groups.
The following is what I never told them about, based on my personal experience.
While very active in San Francisco politics I never went after the police because they didn’t hesitate to punish their opponents with violence. My close friend and renowned activist, Ruth K, agreed with me completely.
I did help out in integrating women and minorities into the police force, but that was an issue that the police union was resigned to accept. I dated a member of the Police Commission, but she knew her job and never voted against the rank and file. The night before Mayor Moscone was murdered he agreed to accept the terms of a court- ordered integration directive. My friend Robert Gnaizda got his agreement at an in- person meeting. That was a big negative issue for the police.
Margo St. James, another close friend, who met with her informant, a police sergeant, the day after the murder, was told that the murderer, Dan White, a former S.F. police officer, had met with his two police officer friends at a coffee shop near Eddy and Van Ness who encouraged him to kill the Mayor and two supervisors. After the murder he returned to the coffee shop to ask what to do next. His friends told him to go to the new Catholic cathedral nearby, confess his sins, and turn himself in. He did.
When the Dan White trial was scheduled and the public expected a capital murder conviction, my uncle Dick Guggenheim, with many friends deep in the police department, told me the District Attorney had promised his police department friends a ‘light sentence.’ White got a sentence to serve only five years out of seven for ‘manslaughter.’ Which caused riots.
At the time I was dating Carol Ruth Silver, one of the two supervisors Dan White searched for in his murdering rampage. She hid under her desk. I told her that no witnesses were being called to testify against White. She promptly demanded and got to testify. She was the only person to testify against White.
A good friend of mine, Gary Warne, joined the S.F. Police force with plans to expose it. We discussed it and I strongly advised him not to. He went ahead. In the last week of Police Academy training he was pressured into a boxing match with the most ferocious young Latino fighter, who demolished him. Gary suffered a fatal concussion.
A new police chief from outside the force, appointed by Mayor Moscone, was threatened with an in-house gun fight. Police are expected to protect themselves. Chief Charlie Gain responded by having all photos of him with the flags of the U.S. and San Francisco behind him and publicly announced that he never carried a gun.
The new mayor, Dianne Feinstein, who replaced Moscone, fired him and promoted from within the department.
Building permits in San Francisco have always been corrupt. More than half a dozen times naive friends told me about problems getting permits. I always asked whether they had an appropriately-connected lawyer and architect. The answer was, ‘No.’ When they got the right person their permit was immediately approved.
I always hire Chinese-Americans do my electrical work, Irish-Americans to do carpentry and construction and Latinos to do roofing. Members of these groups get instant permit approval. Sometimes delivered to the worksite. Their lobbyist was ‘Donahoe’ (known only by his last name) who was always at City Hall. He frightened everyone. He always went to the head of the line of speakers at committee and commission hearings. He got favoritism for the ethnic and union groups he represented.
In the early 1960s I managed Milton Marks’ campaign for Assemblyman. I was shocked at the amount of money we wasted. So I started a group called Research in Politics which met monthly in a motel on the corner of Presidio and California. In September 1964 one of the first guest speakers was a visiting Chicago political science professor at San Francisco State College. I told him that I thought corruption in San Francisco was minimal compared to Chicago. He said, “Nonsense.” He would use his students to prove me wrong. I had him back as a speaker the following April. He said his students found wide discrepancies in the property tax rates in San Francisco. Big donors like Ben Swig had his Fairmont Hotel valued at $1.5 million while the much smaller Mark Hopkins across the street was valued at $3.0 million. The powerful newspaper at the time and it’s TV station, KRON, were grossly undervalued at a few hundred thousand dollars. The Assessor was Russ Wolden, who got his cash payments via fourteen hat check women in the leading restaurants. When a state scandal later that year caught Wolden, there was never a local press or TV mention of his trial. And his final conviction only warranted three column inches in the press.
For seven years, I went to Washington, DC each quarter. I served on the board of Appropriate Technology, an agency that worked in Third World development. We lobbied for money, annually, for our funds which were channeled through USAID. I learned why former members of Congress were welcomed at DC lobbying firms. By Congressional rules, alumni could walk unto the floor of Congress and eat in the cafeteria the rest of their lives.
I was on the team to select our next agency president. My two fellow committee members were much more politically connected than I; they ignored the most qualified candidate for a lesser choice who was a recent member of Congress.
As a consequence, a few days later I talked to a high- ranking senior officer in USAID who told me she “was going to replace the old one and be the liaison officer from here on, now that you guys understand politics.”
How extensive is corruption? When I was a legislative aide in Sacramento one man, Assemblyman Bill Bagley, was disparagingly known as the ‘one honest guy.’ In San Francisco politics former Supervisor, Senator and Judge Quentin Kopp was known as the ‘one honest politician.’ Both were acquaintances of mine, both were very unusual guys.
One day when I was the ex-banker, finance officer for Glide (a prominent activist church), I was asked by Cecil (the church’s black minister) to help Assembly leader, Willie Brown, launder some large contributions. I did. He used the money to buy a McDonald’s partnership in his Texas home town, for far below book value, and held it for later clean capital gains tax. My scheme was widely copied in the political world.
Willie was often open about his legislative shenanigans. For five years he kept bringing up two bills, one to tax California corporations for their worldwide income. To prevent passage of that bill he got large contributions. Another bill was to tax soft drink bottles at the time of sale (with a seldom used return provision). He finally let the second bill pass at a low few cent per bottle tax rate.
One last clue to political corruption. I was having coffee at the Peet’s across from the California Public Utilities Commission Building and a recent former member of the Commission joined me. We were friends and I asked him, clearly off the record, how the utility companies had their influence other than the parties and vacations that I knew about. He said, “My wife was given a company credit card, taken to Rodeo Drive and told to buy all she wanted.”
I have many other stories.
In summary, we are surrounded by corruption, that is not visible, that allows us the naive fiction that we don’t live in a corrupt society.
We do. We may have less corruption than many other countries.
I also believe the low level corruption we have in the U.S. may be necessary for folks to escape the onerous burdens of government. As my friends did, who got the permits they wanted. Commerce generally has thrived in America for the same reason.
I also add that corruption is not limited to one party. Most recently the Democrat Party has become the most corrupt due to the incredible rise in union power in government unions and in union- controlled cities. Over many recent decades, the old line corporate power brokers that supported the Republicans now overwhelmingly support Democrats.