Now it has been written that, at the dawning of the Third Millennium, there was joy in the Land of Sasquatch. For, after years of famine and disappointment, the sports gods did smile upon the people.
   Behold, the Huskies won 11 games, and were victorious at the Bowl of Roses. And Ichiro the Quick and Edgar the Ancient led the lowly Mariners to a hundred victories and more, and they overthrew even the evil Yankees. And the Seahawks, led by Shawn the Sure-Footed, won many victories and were elevated to the Bowl of Bowls. And the lowly Sonics won, owing to the many heroic deeds of Gary the Glove.
     And the people of the Land of Sasquatch were most pleased, praising the shooters of basketballs and hitters of baseballs and carriers of footballs. And they built great Palaces iin honor of  their champions, and paid for them by levying hotel taxes upon innocent visitors.
    Now it came to pass, in the reign of Gregory the XL, that there arose a new master of the Sonics, and his name was Clay the Philistine. And the Philistine desired that the players of basketball should journey from the Land of Sasquatch unto the Land Flowing with Milk and Honey, which he believed to be somewhere in Oklahoma.
   But, yea verily, the Sonics had rendered a solemn oath to play many more years at the Basketball Palace, in the center of the Land of Sasquatch.
    So Clay said unto Gregory XL: “The Basketball Palace is no longer satisfactory, for the wealthy Pharisees demandeth to sit on high upon the skyboxes, but the Basketball Palace hath too few skyboxes. Therefore we beseech thee to construct a greater Basketball Palace.
    At this, Gregory the XL was confused. And he went before the people and asked of them: “Shall we build a greater Basketball Palace for Clay the Philistine?”
     And they people said with a loud voice: “Nay! A thousand times Nay! For verily we hath not yet paid for the old palace.”
   And so Gregory XL said unto the Philistine: There shall be no new palace.
   Now Clay the Philistine was greatly troubled. And he said unto Gregory XL: “Thou hast spurned by request. So therefore I shall take my players of basketball and travel through the wilderness to the Land Flowing with Milk and Honey.”
    But Gregory XL said: “Thou canst not violate thine oath.”
And the Philistine said: “I will make sacrifices and burnt offerings to the people, and thus satisfy my oath to play in the Basketball Palace.”
    But Gregory’s heart was hardened. And he said: “Send us not thy burnt offerings, but only thy players of basketball.”
    So the Philistine said unto him: “Therefore we shall journey to the Land Flowing with Milk and Honey. Let my players go!”
    But Gregory’s heart remained hardened, so that he spurned the Philistine’s entreaties.
    And so the Philistine became angrier so that he fell upon the ground and swooned. And he summoned his magicians for advice. And lo the Philistine held forth his staff, and waved it, and said onto the people of Sasquatch: “Woe upon thee, and especially upon thine sports palaces!”
   And it came to pass that a great cloud descended upon the Land of Sasquatch. And while the rest of the world became warmer, there were only dark clouds and cold rain across the land of Sasquatch, even unto the month of June.
   And Clay said: “Let my players go!” But Gregory’s heart remained hardened.
   So the Philistine waved his rod and caused a Plague of Jocks. And, lo, the Husky football coach bore false witness, so that he was banished into the wilderness. And the Husky players flunked beginning basketweaving, or were arrested for sundry crimes, and were disqualified so that the Huskies could not defeat the Beavers, much less the Trojans.
And the Philistine caused Shawn the Sure-footed to be injured, so that the Seahawks no longer journeyed to the Bowl of Bowls.
    And Jamie, He of the Slow Pitch, was banished to the Land of the Phillies. And Edgar the Ancient and Jay of the Bones retired to green pastures, so that only Ichiro the Quick remained. And the Mariners were victorious no more, but instead humiliated the people of the Land of Sasquatch.
   And the Players of Basketball were scattered asunder unto far-off lands, and were replaced by lesser players. And the people were humiliated further.
   Trouble and discontent spread across the Land of Sasquatch. And the people descended into the streets of the city and fell down to rend their T-shirts. And they erected a great burning altar among the sports palaces, and brought their Ms caps and Ichiro bobblehead dolls and Gary the Glove hooded sweatshirts, and cast them upon the fire, crying aloud: “Woe upon us, for these are indeed the darkest days ever in the Land of Sasquatch.”
    And they went unto the High Priest, and beseeched her to prevent the lesser players of basketball from journeying into the wilderness. And amongst the plaintiffs was one Sherman, the Poet, who said unto the High Priest: “We beseech thee to prevent our players of basketball from journeying to foreign lands. For unto us, the players of basketball are as Greek gods.”
    At this, the clouds parted, and a bright light shone from the Heavens. And the bright light produced a Very Deep Voice which said: “Greek Gods! What hath been wrought upon the Land of Sasquatch?”
   And the Very Deep Voice became deeper still, and said: “Verily I say unto you, people of Sasquatch: Get thee a life.”

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

   Forty years ago today, I spent the day on a packed airliner over the Atlantic, bound from Glasgow to New York’s John F Kennedy Airport.
    The world was stumbling through a turbulent year. During my year’s study at Edinburgh University, I had glimpsed my society from abroad. I’d watched the news clips of Martin Luther King’s assassination, and of the rioting that followed. I’d watched the Johnson Administration drawn ever deeper into a war that made no sense. My British friends were astounded that America in the 20th century seemed determined to repeat each and every mistake that the British had made in the 19th.
    For these and other reasons, I had mixed feelings about coming home. When we landed at JFK and filed off the airplane, the airport was strangely silent, funereal. Passengers and airline employees wept openly. We soon learned the reason.
    While we were in flight, Robert F. Kennedy had been shot in Los Angeles.
    Less than five years after the death of John Kennedy, and just weeks after the shooting of Martin Luther King Jr., the nation had lost another young voice of promise and hope. And Bobby, with his tousled hair and weathered smile, had seemed the greatest promise of them all.
     Dazed by the news, I wandered into a coffee shop and stopped at the door to gawk at the back of a New York cop, sitting at the counter, his service revolver hanging in its holster. During my year in the UK, where handguns are banned and shootings are rare, my only experience with guns was in museums.
     But now I was home.
     At first, the murder felt like another shot fired by that same evil, rightwing conspiracy that killed King and JFK. But the conspiracy theories never worked. Like his brother, Bobby Kennedy was killed by a young wacko with a gun.
    So it became a commentary on guns. How can a society continue to operate while allowing crazy people to carry loaded weapons designed only to kill other people? Yet, even then, I was aware that we are not Olde England, that we are shaped by revolution and the mythology of the Wild West, and that you can’t blithely ban handguns unless you have a practical way to deal with the countless millions already in circulation; and nobody knows how to do that.
   So, if we’ll never know why Bobby Kennedy was killed, we can still ask: What if he had not been? What if Sirhan Sirhan had decided on that fateful day to watch the speech on TV, or to take a day at the beach?
    Given the tight margin in the fall of 1968,, Kennedy probably would have been nominated and elected in November. There would have been no President Nixon, no Spiro Agnew, no Watergate plumbers.
     We can never know what Kennedy would have done with the office. We assume he would have got the nation out of Southeast Asia; but we also know that Bobby had been a staunch cold warrior who worried about Communist China’s influence in the region. To some degree, he had helped get us into Vietnam, making it far more difficult to pull us out.
    I would like to believe he would have pursued racial segregation and women’s rights and universal health insurance. But Bobby’s politics had been shifting, so who knows?
      Perhaps the lesson to be drawn this remarkable week, as a transcendent Barack Obama emerges as the Democratic nominee for President, is that elections matter. Forty years ago, it mattered a great deal that Bobby Kennedy was not elected President, and that Richard Nixon was.
    This year, nobody knows what Obama or John McCain would do in the White House. But it still matters which of them is elected. In 2008, much like 1968, the nation yearns to extricate itself from an overseas war and focus on what’s happening at home. Wherever we sit on the ideological spectrum, we yearn for new vision and direction. For many, Obama seems to offer the same charisma and intelligence and eloquence that RFK promised in ’68.
   And, as a nation, we are quietly, desperately afraid we will squander the opportunity.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

   Last week it was the Seattle Times’ turn to crank out the obligatory series on the ecological demise of Puget Sound. Several of their finest reporters and artists donned their rubber boots and waded into the challenge, delivering new tales of woe from the shores of Washington’s inland sea.
   It was good, smart, important journalism. Alas, each year it gets more difficult to find new ways to say: Gee folks, Puget Sound ain’t getting any better. I know, because I’ve been there. Over my 30 years at the Times, I worked on several Save-the-Sound series, most recently with some of the same reporters who delivered last week. I continue to write about it because the sound remains the primary reason I choose to live here.
   Still, one gets discouraged. Consider the comments of selected experts in the concluding installment in the Times series. David Dicks, director the Puget Sound Partnership: “We have a lot of studies, a lot of information… but we have to knit it together into a strategy….” Or Kathy Fletcher, director of People for Puget Sound: “We are in a race against time…We need to grab the urgency of the problem and deal with the fact that there is a lot of disbelief that we are going to make a difference…”
   These are genuine expressions of concern that also underscore the problem -- a complete lack of specifics, with utterly no agreement about what’s wrong and what we need to do about it. What is it about Puget Sound that seems to defy solutions?
   The list of suspects begins with us, the people who live here and lack the political will to fix it -- or so goes the argument. But wait a second! Public opinion surveys suggest that people understand that the sound is in trouble, that it will cost money to fix it, and they are willing to pay. And we have payed. Over the past three decades or more, state and local taxpayers have coughed up billions of dollars for salmon restoration, pollution controls, sewage treatment plants, research, and more. 
    A precedent was set in the 1960s, when government cleaned up Lake Washington, which had been turned into a cesspool by countless sewage outfalls around its perimeter. The solution was Metro, which started as a regional sewer agency empowered to build a sewer system around the lake and ship the crap elsewhere – to Puget Sound.
   In the mid-1980s, when I worked on my first Puget Sound crusade, local government decided to spend a billion dollars to build a modern sewage treatment plant at West Point, on the Magnolia waterfront. The feds had said we didn’t have to, because the sound is so deep and its currents so powerful that sewage is efficiently diluted. But local pols decided to build it anyway, and homeowners paid for it. Now the merged King County Metro plans to build another treatment plant – at roughly three times the cost. And ratepayers are going along with the program.
   We can always blame the other guys, the cigar-chomping special interests who call the shots in Olympia. But that doesn’t seem to be the problem, either. The state has cut back commercial and sports fishing, despite the lobbyists’ protests. Pulp mills and other waterfront industries have been shut down, and those that remain are under tougher scrutiny.
   So maybe the problem is, as Fletcher puts it, the “fragmentation of decision making.” While Puget Sound is governed mostly by the state, it’s also affected by at least eight counties, scores of cities, hundreds of special utility districts and more. And we’ve learned that it is part of a larger “Salish Sea” that includes the San Juan Islands, the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Canadian waters.

  The greatest obstacle is not political,  but rather the biological complexity of the sound, and the scientific uncertainty that comes with it. It is not just an ecosystem, but a web of overlapping ecosystems that invite oversimplification and defy understanding. For all our best efforts, Puget Sound remains something of a black box. We assess its health by taking water samples and counting fish pulled up on hooks or nets. Sparkling blue at the surface, it turns pitch dark less than 100 feet down. And just offshore from downtown Seattle, the depths reach 900 feet. We have very little understanding of what lives there, or how the ecosystem works.
   A generation ago, people were energized in part by accounts of gray whales washing up dead on Northwest beaches. Those images helped fuel the efforts to upgrade sewage treatment plants. Only later did we learn that the whales’ deaths probably had nothing to do with pollution, and that gray whale populations were healthy and increasing.
    More recently, scientists have paid more attention to what’s happening on and near the shores of the sound – shopping malls and suburban developments that pave over wetlands believed to be crucial to the saltwater ecology. But those linkages are not well understood.
All these uncertainties contribute to a breakdown between science and politics. Marine biologists and oceanographers are comfortable with uncertainty; they understand that the scientific process is endless, that whatever they learn merely becomes a hypothesis for the next round of investigation.
   This does not work well for governors or legislators who need to decide how to spend the next billion dollars on Puget Sound restoration.
    And it drives the rest of us nuts. We yearn for understandable causes and effects, heroes and villains. We want science to provide us the evidence we need to ban that next shopping mall, to shut down fishing altogether, to build better sewage treatment plants, or preserve wetlands.
And the darned scientists simply won’t provide that convenient road map. On the contrary, with each new breakthrough, each new level of understanding, Puget Sound appears more complex and the solutions less obvious.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

      We have seen the future of Seattle mass transit, and it looks suspiciously like the past. It is shiny and red and goes clackity-clack between South Lake Union and Westlake. It travels at a maximum speed of 20 mph and costs about $40 million per mile to build.
      Seattle, it seems, has gone downright gah-gah over choo-choos. Whatever the price in dollars and aggravation, the city is determined to take the A-Train. We haven’t yet completed that $2.7 billion-dollar rail line to Sea-Tac, but Sound Transit is desperately seeking more billions to extend that line to Northgate. We have the new South Lake Union Streetcar. And this week, planners unveiled their sketchy visions for streetcar lines in neighborhoods like Capitol Hill and the University District.  If the rail buffs have their way, we’ll soon be looking at and living in a cityscape reminiscent of another century -- the 19th.
    The operative map for Seattle’s transit vision is about a century old. You can go back to 1910, when Gramma and Grampa got around town just fine on a system of about 70 miles of streetcar tracks, including the legendary Interurban trolley that rumbled all the way to Everett and Tacoma. It was a fine system, and we probably should have kept it.
     But we didn’t. The tide turned in about 1911, when the city hired a smart fellow (read “consultant”) named Virgil Bogue to come out and draw up a bold new plan for Seattle. Bogue looked around, hired a crew of draftsmen, and produced an inch-thick document calling for an elaborate, New York-style transit system, with subways and elevated trains and a tunnel under Lake Washington.
     Put to a popular vote, the Bogue Plan lost by nearly 2-1. That was the beginning of the end. By the 1930s, the city was ripping up tracks and replacing streetcars with buses. The Interurban made its last run in 1939, just as engineers were completing the first floating bridge across the lake. By the beginning of the War, the transition was complete; Seattle had banked its future on the automobile.
    Rail buffs blame a nationwide conspiracy by General Motors to sell more buses. But rail transit was always geographically challenged in Seattle. All those picturesque hills and lakes serve as significant obstacles to streetcars that don’t climb hills, and don’t float.
    In any event, things haven’t worked out well. In the late 60s and early 70s, voters rejected plans for new freeways and for a proposed rapid transit system. So the city had to grow and prosper without any major expansion of its transportation system. For some time, the preferred strategy was buses, or more precisely “bus rapid transit,” which uses express buses in exclusive transit-only lanes, including the downtown bus tunnel.
      By the 1990s, the city was gridlocked. Drivers rolled down their car windows, shook their collective fists and bellowed something like “Do something. Do anything. But fix this mess!”
      And that’s more or less what’s happening. Government is doing something and anything -- digging holes, pouring concrete, laying rails, buying railcars – in a desperate attempt to rebuild what it dismantled 70 years ago. It’s system development by committee, or by many committees. Sound Transit builds light rail and operates those commuter trains to Tacoma and Everett. King County Metro builds and runs the new streetcar, along with the existing bus system. The state is adding HOV and transit lanes to the freeways. For a while, we had yet another agency building a monorail, until it collapsed on itself.
       Which is what skeptics expect to happen with some or all of those other railroad-builders. Critics of rail trail transit scored a huge victory last fall when voters rejected Sound Transit’s bid for billions more tax dollars. Yet the streetcar fad suggests that somebody out there is still determined to ride those rails.
      Rail critics point to a different conspiracy.. Randal O’Toole is an Oregon economist and self-styled libertarian who argues that Seattle is about to join dozens of cities that have got little or no benefits from the billions spent on light rail. Trolleys and streetcars are 19th century technology that is too slow, too dangerous and too expensive, he says. “Light rail is simply one more way to take money from the pockets of ordinary taxpayers and put it in the pockets of wealthy businesses.”
     Coalition for Effective Transportation Alternatives, a citizen group opposed to light rail, argues that Seattle had built one of the world’s best bus systems, and could adapt HOV lanes and traffic lights to move express buses more efficiently than light rail.
     But for every O’Toole there is a Todd Litman, a Victoria, BC, consultant who travels the world advising cities from Dubai to Valparaiso to San Jose how to build rail transit systems. And Litman is pro-streetcar. “Seattle originally developed around streetcars and railways,” Litman says. “It doesn’t make sense to argue that it can’t work again.”
     Litman learned his way around transportation issues as a volunteer bicycle advocate in Olympia, and eventually studied transit issues at Evergreen State College. He frequently finds himself at odds with the likes of O’Toole.
     Ultimately, the choice between rail transit and bus transit is made by passengers, he says. “There is a bias out there. People will pay more for a Mercedes than for a Chevy. There is nothing wrong with people wanting something more prestigious, and they view light rail and streetcars as more comfortable and more prestigious.”
    But is a little prestige really worth $40 million per mile?
     John Niles, a transportation consultant and critic of light rail, is a little kinder toward streetcars. They're not cost effective, he says, “but the scale of the error is so much smaller than with light rail.”
    Streetcars have a few things going for them, he says. South Lake Union businesses are picking up part of the costs of the new line, and hopefully that would be the case with other lines, he says. They may attract some tourists.    “As transportation, they don’t make much sense,” he says. “But they’re nice. They’re an amenity. They’re street candy.”

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

    Before the storm, there is that familiar, electronic "brrrrrring" that musically alerts me to e-mail.
I click on "Inbox," and find the top of a message from North Carolina. Subject: "Your paper is a liberal rag."
     Hmmmm. What's that about? I'll find out later. Back to the task at hand.
      Another musical "brrrring." Click. Subject: "Disgusting!"
      And another, this one from somebody who calls himself "Rightwinger." Subject: "You Commie Bastard!"
       Who could resist that one? Click on the icon. Full message: "You Commie Bastard!"
      Huh?
     Within minutes, my trusty computer is ringing like an old-time coffee percolator. I watch the messages pop up on my Inbox screen until I spot one from a familiar e-mail address - my older sister in Texas.
       "Gosh, little brother. I am soooooo impressed," she writes. "You made the Rush Limbaugh Show!"
      Wow! Your mild-mannered reporter makes the big time. Rush Limbaugh, King of Talk Radio, conservative "Doctor of Democracy," nationally syndicated Voice of Right-Thinking People.
I've listened to this guy, and he's very good at what he does. But how can I be on national radio and not know it?
     I tune to KVI radio. Rats. He's talking about something else. I've missed my own moment. But at least I'm figuring out what it's all about. Two days earlier, The Seattle Times published my story on Seattle's top-10 electricity-users - including the residential users. Based on information obtained from Seattle City Light, the top-10 residential consumers use up to 50 times the city's average household consumption. We named names.
      And Limbaugh didn't like it. His Web site calls it "probably one of the most outrageous articles I've seen on any subject in a long, long time."
     The wealthy homeowners in the "Soviet of Seattle" are portrayed "as though they're guilty of something for buying power," he says. "These people pay for every kilowatt they use. It's as though they're scofflaws who haven't paid their parking tickets for the past 10 years. We're told to blame the eeeeevil rich owners of big houses for this fix. We've got to string them up or send them to sensitivity seminars and make them feel guilty.
     "There's a real Soviet feel to this piece," he goes on. "And what really bothers me is that these people apologized for using electricity, as if they've committed some crime, for crying out loud. This illustrates just how successful the left's hate-the-rich propaganda has been."
    California's energy crisis, he says, was caused by "environmentalist wackos" who "have insisted that not a single new power plant be built."
     Then comes a link to The Times story and my e-mail address - the marvels of the Internet.
Speaking of which, the messages continue to crackle onto my computer screen. They come from across the nation, from California and Maine, Florida and Minnesota. A few actually come from Seattle.
      "Heard Rush talking about your rag today and your slanted/stupid/liberal (one and the same) article," writes my North Carolina correspondent. "Thank God for the Internet. Hopefully it will allow people more access to the truth and eventually we can eliminate papers like yours."
     They come in waves, apparently responding as the radio show is rebroadcast on different stations at different times.
      "These 10 people are also probably 10 of the biggest philanthropists in Seattle," writes another. "More power to them, and I could care less about their electric bill."
       Caleb, an 18-year-old college student from Texas, has just finished reading Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," and sizes me up as one of those "weak-minded people who are always supporting the actions of the weak minds in power, blaming the industrialists for everything."
    "What are you, a Nazi?" asks another e-mailer. "It is vermin-spewing socialists like you that will bring back the Vigilantes of the old West. May you choke on your Latte. ... Too bad your mom did not believe or have access to abortions. She would have done us all a favor."
    The response is impressive. By the end of the following day, my computer counts more than 300 e-mails, most of them unprintable in a family newspaper. Despite slight variations in the vulgarities, each reflects the guru's tone: These people paid for their power, and printing their names is a vicious, socialistic, left-wing device.
    I try responding to a few of my new friends.
    "The issue of privacy is legitimate, and we debated the issue before going to press," I write. "But we decided that the right to privacy was outweighed by the nature of our regional electricity shortage."
      Seattle owns its own electric utility, which provides clean hydro-power at the lowest rates in the nation. Alas, we are experiencing a drought. The reservoirs are dry, and there isn't enough hydro to run the generators. So City Light has to buy replacement power on the open market at 20, 40, sometimes 100 times the cost of our own hydro. So, when our neighbors waste electricity, we all share the costs of that replacement power. ... And so forth.
     "Anderson," responds Jerry from Texas. "Spoken like a true fascist.... I just love to see you socialist liberals foam at the mouth about private industry and individuals being in control of their lives. ... I know what side you are on and I am your enemy, buddy. You Left Coast intellectuals are going to get what you asked for."
      Huh? 
      Sean, of Palo Alto, Calif., stands his ground. "I still think you should take issue with your elected officials," he says. "I have a difficult time believing this empty-reservoir problem came out of nowhere. Even a city the size of Seattle can't run through that much water overnight, can it?"
     Still, Sean says he's "frankly amazed" that I responded. "I also respect your point of view," he says.
     Caleb, the young Texan, is even more generous. "Thanks for a humbling lesson," he writes. "I guess a kid like me shouldn't be writing such vehement letters to people when we have heard only one side of the story."
     Thus emboldened, I fire off a one-pager to Limbaugh. Dear Rush: We have never met, but I am a now-and-then listener and, more to the point, the object of your wrath on March 20. ... The response was truly impressive.
      I walk through the argument - the Northwest energy crisis, the city-owned utility, the empty reservoirs, the costly replacement power, rights of the individual vs. rights of the community.... Nobody proposes to outlaw wasting electricity. But if people know that wasting electricity may lead to some embarrassing publicity, perhaps they'll look for ways to conserve. ...
     I urge him to visit our little "soviet." You'll find we walk and talk, love our kids, pay the mortgage, drink our beer from the bottle and see the world much the same way you do - except from the opposite coast.
    No response yet. But that's OK. As I told my new buddy Rush, I might have chosen another way to spend my 15 minutes of fame. But I'll take it as it comes.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

by Ross Anderson

    Once upon a time in Seattle, on a day when rushhour traffic had ground to a halt, thousands of irate commuters rolled down their windows, stuck their heads out into a cloud of automobile exhaust, and issued a collective howl that

sounded something like: “Aaarrrgh! Somebody do something! Do anything!”

     Fifteen years, several elections and a few billion dollars later, it's about to happen. Seattle is building something.  Something that runs on rails and taxes and that promises to lure a few commuters off the roads and onto trains.

     But don't bet the family car on anything. Not yet, anyhow. No trains will run for a few more years. And Seattle has a long, dubious history of hand-wringing, public squabbling and collective changes of mind over transit. In this soggy corner of the continent, nothing stays on track for very long.

     Witness light rail, the ever-so-fashionable update of old-time streetcars. In 1996 voters approved a new light-rail route between Northgate and

Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, but what Sound Transit is building hasn't reached either point. Instead, work has begun on a route from downtown to someplace in suburban Tukwila, where it is expected to run out of gas.

And then there's the ever-popular monorail, which promised to whisk commuters from Ballard to West Seattle via downtown, but instead became the Little Billion Dollar Train That Couldn't, God rest its ever-hopeful soul.

      Whatever does or doesn't get built, the outlook is grim for long-suffering Seattle motorists—years of heavy construction along major thoroughfares

in downtown, up 15th Avenue Northwest to Ballard, in West Seattle and down the Rainier Valley. At least for now, expect far more buses on downtown streets, as light rail displaces them in the downtown tunnel.

     But never mind the obstacles. Local voters are determined—this time, really, truly. A new survey, sponsored by the Regional Transportation

Investment District, shows the following:

  • Most voters consider traffic the region's biggest problem.

  • A majority would vote for a regional tax package that includes money for both transit and oads.

  • Building light rail to the airport is the highest priority—higher than expanding I-405 or the SR 520 bridge or replacing the decrepit Alaskan Way Viaduct.

     Ask and ye shall receive. If construction proceeds as planned (don't laugh—it's just hypothetical), then sometime in the next few years, it will be theoretically possible for a Ballard resident to ride public transit all the way to Sea-Tac Airport.  Without taking the express Metro bus. To accomplish this, Ms. Ballard will catch her local Metro bus downtown. Somewhere along Second Avenue, she will climb off the bus and find her way downstairs into the transit tunnel to climb aboard a southbound streetcar, which will clatter south

into the Duwamish flats, then turn east into a new tunnel under Beacon Hill to Rainier Valley, then turn south again, eventually wending its way to Tukwila. There she will disembark and step aboard another bus, which will take her to the airport.

     By the time our intrepid traveler reaches the airport, she will have traveled some 20-plus miles on three different transit vehicles operated by three different agencies. After all this, airport security will look like a model of people-moving efficiency.

     Which means Ms. Ballard will probably do this only once. Next time, she'll take a cab, a shuttle, or the express Metro bus.

    Puget Sound is about to get a transit system designed and operated not by a committee, but by a multitude of committees. Sound Transit is doing light rail and commuter rail. The Seattle Monorail Project is no longer building you-know-what. The folks at Metro Transit continue to run the buses, no doubt rolling their eyeballs at the newcomers and their newfangled choo-choos. Pierce and Snohomish and Kitsap counties still operate their own overlapping transit systems. Washington State Ferries, which delivers thousands of commuters to the city every day, hopes somebody will remember to connect with its Seattle boats. There's the state Department of Transportation, Amtrak, the feds ... and on and on.

    The PR folks and Web sites assure us that these projects are proceeding nicely. But, in keeping with Seattle tradition, there are skeptics out there, a growing school of well informed detractors who argue that Seattle's

construction binge has all the makings of an enormous train wreck. After taxing itself several times over for rail transit, greater Seattle, they warn, is on track for a major case of buyer's remorse. These are not your typical not-in-my-back-yard reactionaries. They are credible urban progressives to whom rail transit is supposed to be an article of faith, right up there with gun control and abortion rights.

    Prominent among them are people such as Emory Bundy, whose environmental credentials include time at the helm of the Bullitt Foundation. There is Maggie Fimia, a smart and earnest Democrat and former King County Council member, MIT educated transportation consultant John Niles,

former Democratic State Rep. Will Knedlik, former Democratic Gov. Booth Gardner and many more.

     At some point, the editorial board at Seattle Times, the state's largest newspaper and a longtime booster of rapid transit, flipped its position and now advocates abandoning those rail projects.

     What's their beef? Light rail is obsolete, they argue. It's 19th-century technology. It's slow. It runs mostly on the surface, obstructs traffic, collides with cars, knocks down pedestrians. Running it through the downtown tunnel will displace scores of buses, putting them back on downtown streets.

    And it won't ease congestion, Niles emphasizes. For all those billions, he claims light rail will reduce rush-hour traffic by less than 1 percent. "It’s like tearing one page out of the Seattle phone book and trying to see a difference."

    The monorail was a slightly better idea, Niles says. But heavy rail makes fewer stops and thus requires dense populations—lots of high-rise apartments and clustered business. Seattle doesn't have that kind of density and doesn't want it.

     Rail won't work in Seattle, these detractors say. And Seattle can't afford to launch multibilliondollar rail projects—not in the midst of a continuing tax revolt and a Republican administration unfriendly to urban transit. Sound Transit, they argue, can't afford to build even its scaled-back project, thanks to Initiative 776, the voter-approved measure that rolled back the vastly unpopular car tax. ST continues to collect and spend that money while lawyers try to figure out how to rationalize two contradictory laws. 

     What happened to Seattle's dreams of a rapid transit system zipping through its downtown core? Why is it that our sister cities, Portland and Vancouver, British Columbia, with similar economics and demographics, have been able to build nifty little rail systems while Seattle squabbles over rival technologies and scarce tax revenues? Where did Seattle's train veer off

track? And, most important, whom can we blame? Local leadership? Well, they are apparently doing precisely what voters told them to do, aren’t

they?

    Or how about taxpayers themselves, the regional body politic, who passed ballot measures to build rail transit, then passed more measures to repeal

the taxes that were supposed to pay for the projects, and then changed its mind and dumped the monorail idea?

    Or we can blame it all on geography, which has always been the city's greatest asset as well as aggravation. All those glacial-carved hills and lakes and waterways may be easy on the eyes, but they pose major problems for anybody trying to get from Point A to Point B. This is particularly true of rail transit. Portland and Vancouver built their systems largely on river flats, which lend themselves to rail. Seattle's hills, which run north to south, do not.

     And we can wag fingers at our predecessors, all those nice people who repeatedly voted down earlier transit projects when it could have been done on the cheap. As far back as 1911, voters had a chance to approve a grand city makeover designed by a New York engineer named Virgil Bogue, who proposed a regional system of subways, elevated trains and streetcars  stretching around Lake Washington. Voters rejected the plan by a 2-1 ratio.

     But even then, the city had built up a 70-mile network of cable-car and streetcar lines, including the "interurban" car that rattled back and forth to Everett.

    Then came Henry Ford, and the jig was up for rail. As Americans fell in love with their cars, the streetcars were hauled off to the scrap yards, replaced by diesel buses courtesy of General Motors. The last interurban streetcar left Seattle in 1939. That was the same year a new Lake Washington bridge opened the way for an Eastside population boom.

     And in the early 1950s, Seattle built the Alaskan Way Viaduct, one of the nation's first "freeways," designed to move commuters past the downtown bottleneck to and from jobs at Boeing and the industrial area. A decade later,

bulldozers were clearing the way for Interstate 5, which was to be the backbone of a grid of freeways slicing across the citys, much as they have in Los Angeles.

    That was too much for laidback Seattle. In the 1970s, the city rebelled against concrete, killing the RH Thompson Freeway, which would have run up the east side of the city and another across South Lake Union.

     But the same voters rejected rail transit proposals n 1968 and 1970. It didn't seem necessary. The Boeing Bust of that period had resulted in a

decline in population, real estate values and traffic. Seattle's only traffic problem was a lack of traffic. In 1972, just 31 million riders boarded Seattle buses, less than a quarter of the 1944 ridership.

     Then Seattle got hot and stayed hot, fueled by some combination of Boeing and Microsoft and grunge rock. Thousands of people were moving to the region—more people, more cars, all crammed into a network of roads and buses dating as far back as the 1950s. Something had to give.

    Metro, which began as a regional sewer authority in the 1960s, took on transit long before voters in 1994 approved merging it with King County. It had pushed for such innovations as high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) commuter lanes, the free-ride bus zone downtown and the bus tunnel. Ridership grew gradually, reaching 75 million in 1992—a big improvement.

    As traffic got worse, voters started having some second thoughts about rail transit. But it was too late, says former mayor Charles Royer. “By the time we were poised to do it, the federal government was backing off. Our transit system got built in Atlanta. That money was supposed to be ours.”

     By the mid-’90s, the situation was becoming desperate. Long touted as the nation's most livable city, Seattle was fast becoming one of its most gridlocked. In the Texas Transportation Institute's most recent ratings of 75 U.S. cities, Seattle's traffic ranked fourth-worst in the nation. Seattle's gridlock ranks closely behind Chicago and San Francisco–Oakland and not so far behind the perennial champion—Los Angeles.

    And here we are. So we turn to the critics. If not light rail, if not monorail, then what should we build?

    How about something that doesn't ride on rails—like buses?

     The money now being spent on light rail and monorail could be diverted to something called “Bus Rapid Transit (BRT),” they say, which has all the advantages of rail transit but with the added flexibility of a vehicle that is not confined to rails.

     “We already have a mass transit system that is established but unfinished,” argues Maggie Fimia, a New York City native who grew up riding rail transit. “When the region rejected rail 20 years ago, there was a conscious decision to go with express buses. We spent $1 billion on the nation's best system of express buses, with 200 miles of HOV lanes that operate around the clock.”

     A bus system will never be as sexy as a gleaming, stainless-steel monorail, says transportation consultant Niles. But it's infinitely more flexible. Build a railroad, and it’s there to stay, while bus routes can be shifted to suit changing needs. “Our alternative is not an icon," says Niles, "but we think the region could make the bus work better.”

    That means using the latest technology, such as hybrid engines fueled by a combination of oil and electricity. Or dedicated lanes, much like the bus tunnel, that can whisk buses past freeway traffic jams.

     But don't bet on BRT either. Seattle has had it with buses. They conjure up images of groaning diesels, clouds of exhaust, and oddball seatmates.

They're small-town transit. The Emerald City wants transit befitting a major-

league metropolis, a system akin to what Virgil Bogue proposed nearly a century ago.

    So hold onto your Ms hats and your wallet. Never mind that buses are cheaper and more flexible. After a century of indecision, frustrated commuters now say they want trains—even if they have no intention of riding them. So, for

better or worse, for richer or poorer, for good times or bad times, it appears that Seattle shall have its choo-choos.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

Seattle’s legacy of crooked cops

   It’s a soggy September afternoon on Seattle’s First Avenue. The drizzle seems to wick the Skid Road stench out of the gutters, suspending it like a chlorine cloud. About 20 young Seattle cops in raincoats huddle on a side street, wondering just what they’re about to do. Assistant Chief Tony Gustin, the operation’s instigator and commander, briefs them, then leads the way. Tall, lanky, and prematurely gray, Gustin cuts a stern figureas he strides along the cracked sidewalks, past the honky-tonk bars and peep shows. He and his squad turn into Pike Place, file up the stairway behind DeLaurenti Foods, and march through the double doors of the Lifeline Club.

   Scattered around the smoke-filled hall is an unlikely crew of criminal accessories:some 80 bingo players, housewives and silver-haired ladies with Frederick & Nelson shopping bags propped against their folding chairs. They are studying rows of 10-cent bingo cards, waiting for their numbers to be called.

One of the policemen steps to the front of the hall, displays a warrant, and announces that everybody is under arrest. The baffled patronsreceive written citationsfor illegal gambling and are sent on their way, shopping bags in hand. The cops arrest about 10 of the club’s employees and investigators sift through its file cabinets, scooping manila folders into cardboard boxes and hauling them to waiting cars. Tony Gustin’s raid goes off smoothly and quietly. No sirens, no guns, no flashbulbs. The city barely notices.

The charges against the bingo players were quickly dropped. But that raid on September 24, 1969, marked a turning point in Seattle’s evolution. What Gustin was after was not the ladies with their dime bingo cards but those cardboard boxes, jammed with names and financial records ¾a window on an intricate web of illegal gambling operators, crooked cops, and venialofficials. The raid and its aftermath would send several people to jail¾not for playing bingo, but for bribery and racketeering. And they would help bring down a corrupt system that had reigned in Seattle since the 1920s or earlier. Over the next few years, Seattle would learn things about itself that it did not want to hear. And those revelations would trigger a profound transformation.

     Four decades later, Tony Gustin is 78, white-haired and long-retired, living quietly with his wife in rural Grays Harbor County in Southwest Washington. He is recovering from a recent stroke. Wearing gray sweatpants and T-shirt, he shuffles around his doublewide, filled with stacks of books and current issues of Mother Jones and The Progressive. He rarely discusses his 25 years as a Seattle cop, but when he does it is with a grim sense of irony, savoring the fact that a gaggle of middle-class housewives playing bingo at the Pike Place Market proved the undoing of a citywide reign of vice and corruption.

   Seattle in the sixties was a middling-sized, middle-class city with nice neighborhoods and plenty of well-paying jobs down at the Boeing plants. But it suffered from a sort of civic schizophrenia; it was at once Sunbelt and Rust Belt, a New West mecca striding toward a hip, high-tech future and an aging industrial town anchored in the politics and culture of the Great Depression. It had built the world’s first jetliners and staged a futuristic world’s fair celebrating the next century’s technological promise. But it remained conservative and inward-looking, run by balding businessmen from leather chairs in the paneled salon at the Rainier Club. The average age of its City Council members was 66, and most had been in office for 12 years or more. Other than the Space Needle, only two buildings had gone up downtown since World War II.

    The city was also split by race and class. Real estate agents knew where black families could buy (the Central Area) and where they couldn’t (almost everywhere else). Asian immigrants crowded into what was then known as Chinatown. Gays were tolerated as long as they didn’t stray from their bars around Pioneer Square. Civilization ended abruptly west of Second Avenue and south of Yesler, leaving Skid Road, the Market, waterfront and Chinatown to seedy bars and cardrooms, catering to gamblers, sailors and other less savory visitors. City Hall clung to an odd set of blue laws designed to keep a lid on booze, gambling and sex. Bars were closed on Sundays, and gambling was ostensibly limited to charity bingo and nickel-ante card rooms. Even pinball games and pool tables were deemed offensive and required city licenses.

    At the same time, Grandma was allowed to have her gambling, under cover of charity.“There was bingo all over town, and it was legal if they were benefitting a church or charity,” says Doug McBroom, a federal prosecutor then and a Superior Court judge now. “They were frequented by retirees, a major social thing. The Lifeline Club was the biggest, and they had to have that charitable hook, so they passed along 10 bucks a week to a church.”

    A cadre of young Turks, lawyers and other professionals, many of them with Ivy League degrees, had begun agitating for change.  They were oblivious to any problems with the cops; they thought the city had outgrown its blue laws, but didn’t realize whose interests those laws served. They didn’t understand how Seattle’s Establishment managed things, or how tenaciously it would cling to power.

     Gustin learned that civics lesson early. He grew up in rough-and-tumble Aberdeen, where his father managed a sawmill. He studied psychology and the classics at the University of Washington, and in 1952 joined the Seattle Police Department, where he thought he could put the psychology he’d learned to use on the street. He may have been the city’s best-read cop, a college kids who could quote Cicero or issue a string of profanities, often in the same sentence.

     He was on the streets a few months before he realized that many of his pals were on the take. “I was down at Precinct 3, the South End,” he recalls. “There wasn’t a lot of money down there. That’s where guys got sent if they didn’t want to be part of the system, or if they were being penalized for not splitting their take properly.”

    At first it was just idle talk around the precinct house, then the occasional envelope, stuffed with cash, passed discreetly up the chain of command. Bit by bit, Gustin became acquainted with what was called the Tolerance Policy. The city’s prudish laws ran counter to a street culture that thrived on vice: booze, gambling, sex, drugsand various combinations thereof. Bars could play by the rules, or break the law and pay the cops to look the other way. Most paid. Citizens got their entertainment, the cops saw their meager paychecks enhanced by steady gratuities, and nobody got hurt. The old guard genuinely believed the Tolerance Policy was good for business and good for the city, that it kept the Eastern Mafia out of Seattle.

     To keep things orderly, Gustin explains, the ringleaders maintained an unorthodox system of double accounting. Most businesses had to make payoffs twice, to the beat cops and the vice squad, and these payments were recorded separately. Any collector who failed to split the proceeds could be detected by the other set of accounts. This also ensured that the vice detectives were the best-paid cops in town.

     The vice dicks tracked their business on pink index cards, with coded lists of who owed what. “Rudy 3" reminded them that an operator named Rudy paid $300 a month for his Chinatown club. If Rudy didn’t pay, he didn’t get stuffed into a car trunk Chicago-style. He would simply get frequent visits from the local beat cops, driving off customers with nightly ID checks and jaywalking tickets. Businesses paid the money or paid the consequences. ”Tolerance” had devolved into shamelessshakedowns. The system had persisted so long—at least 40 years, through the Great Depression, world war, and Boeing boom—that nobody involvedcould remember a time when the cops weren’t on the take.

     The beat cops usually collected the cash just after the first of the month. The rules of distribution were simple and clear: The beatman would pocket half and pass the rest to his sergeant, who would split it again and pass half to the lieutenant. By the time the remainder got funnelled to the top commanders, it was real money. Gustin recalls one SPD major who routinely stashed at least $35,000 cash in the ceiling of his home. Local cops had all heard the story, perhaps apocryphal, of several hundred thousand dollars that got stolen from a downtown safe but could not be reported because it was payoff cash.

     The system had persisted so long— at least 40 years, through the Great Depression, world war, Boeing boom, and world’s fair—that nobody could remember a time when the cops weren’t on the take. Nobody ever talked about it, least of all the press.  The payoffs flowed in from throughout the city, but the big money was downtown, at the Chinatown gambling joints, Pioneer Square clubs, First Avenue cardrooms, and Central Area speakeasies. Guys like Gustin who didn’t take bribes got sent to Siberia—the South Precinct station in Georgetown.

     “I suppose I should’ve turned to the other side,” he says, surveying his modest retirement digs. “I would’ve made a lot more money.  But hell, I was never really motivated by money. I remember one kid who wanted to start running games on top of his tavern, and wanted to know how much it would cost to take care of the cops. A million bucks, I told him. They all thought I was nuts.”       

    Nevertheless, Gustin’s scruples didn’t impede his career, at least at first; herose quickly to sergeant, and in 1956 was assigned downtown. “That didn’t last,” he chuckles. “They told me: ‘If you’re gonna work here, you have to play with the big boys.’ And I didn’t fit in.”

     Gustin considered blowing the whistle. He met secretly with like-minded friends, discussing what it would take to bust the system. But they had no solid evidence, and the Blue Line seemed unbreakable; cops don’t rat on cops. Even if they wanted to, whom could they talk to? Who wasn’t on the take?  “Everybody knew what was going on,” Gustin insists. “The chief knew it. The mayor knew it. The newspapers knew it, or they were brain-dead.”

    Not everyone. Much of the city knew nothing of bribes. To get in on the secret, you had to cross the line, into one of the urban subcultures that had been so carefully set apart from respectable society. Now and then, somebody would. In 1962, a young UW criminology professor named William Chambliss began hanging out in Skid Road bars in the name of sociological fieldwork. “I thought I’d get a different view of crime if I looked at it from the other side,” says Chambliss. “And people talked to me.”

     Seattle, the Skid Roaders told him, was crooked as a dog’s hind leg. Cops were on the take. Prosecutors were on the take. Everybody was on the take. Chambliss was dubious, but he persisted. Sitting in a Pioneer Square bar, he asked about the card game in the back room, and was invited to sit in at $5 a bet. Later, he watched the local beat cop walk into the manager’s office and leave with an envelope. Chambliss had witnessed his first payoff.

    When he tried to report what he had seen, nobody wanted to listen. Even Chris Bayleyand his reform-minded friends were focusing their efforts on the blue laws, not corruption. The press was looking the other way. And it was all happening on the other side of the line.

    In January 1967, the silence broke. Not even the reporters involved remember why The Seattle Times, the establishment paper, finally decided to pursue the story. It ran a series of front page stories laying out complaints by gay clubs around Pioneer Square: “Tavern Operators Describe Payoffs.” One owner claimed he was coughing up $370 a month, essentially for protection. Another reported that when he refused to pay, the police harassed his customers.

    The stories spurred a brief flurry of activity downtown. Chief Frank Ramon shuffled some beat cops and suspended a few more¾not for payoffs, but for drinking and gambling on duty. And Mayor Floyd Miller appointed a distinguished panel/commission? to investigate. One member was Assistant Chief M.E. “Buzz” Cook¾who later turned out to be a ringleader in the payoffs. The panel set up a post office box, published the address, and waited for citizens to tender complaints.

    Nothing happened. City Hall and the press got distracted by other things¾anti-war protests around the University and civil rights unrest in the Central Area. But uptown, things were stirring. The reformers had organized as CHECC (Choose an Effective City Council) to press for turnover and reforms at City Hall. CHECC managed to get two younger progressive candidates, Tim Hill and Phyllis Lamphere, elected¾hardly a revolution, but a beginning.

     The next volley came more than a year later, in mid-1968, when the Post-Intelligencer published its own report, including a grainy photograph that purported to show Ben Cichy, whose company held the licenses for some 1,500 local pinball machines and pool tables, delivering money to the home of King County Prosecutor Charles O. Carroll.

The P-I had picked a big target. Charles O. Carroll, a former UW All-American halfback, was the titular head of the local Republican Party, perhaps the most powerful politician in Seattle. He drove a big Pontiac with flashers behind the grill so he could rush to the scene of a crime. Handsome and barrel-chested, physically imposing even in his 60s, he reigned from his spacious, paneled office in the county courthouse. And, the P-I suggested, he was a player in the rackets. Whether or not he was on the take, Carroll was clearly in control. “His modus operandi was to have something on everybody,” says Bayley—just like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had the dirt to make everyone from mobsters to U.S. presidents do as he said.

    Still, nothing changed. A cop who joined the force in 1969 recalls walking First Avenue with his veteran partner. The old bull found two shots of whiskey waiting for him at each bar and tossed both down both. Rounding the corner onto Pike Street, he collected a couple cigars and an envelope full of cash. The young rookie had no choice but to tag along.

    In the summer of 1969, the system began to show cracks. CHECC was pushing more council candidates, and the newspapers were beginning to focus on the cops, Carroll, and the Tolerance Policy. Emboldened, Tony Gustin teamed up with two like-minded assistant chiefs, Gene Corr and George Fuller. They took their story to Seattle’s genial old mayor, Floyd Miller: The department is laced with corruption, and Chief Ramon has to go.

     Gustin figured City Hall would not act until it was forced to. So he concocted the plan to raid the Lifeline Club. At the club, he recounts, “they had this nice Christian woman who was their accountant, and she told us where to find the records.” Gustin assembled a squad of young cops handpicked to avoid those on the take. He assumed he was being watched, his desk searched each night by crooked cops. So he and his co-conspirators planted memos indicating they were planning a raid up in the Central Area rather than at the Market. He didn’t reveal the actual target to his chief, nor even to his own squad.

     When the raid went down, “it was fun.” Gustin smiles. “We finally got what we needed. We didn’t want to hurt anyone, least of all those nice ladies who were just playing a little bingo. We wanted those records.”   So did a lot of other people. Federal prosecutors combed through the seized boxes, and the Internal Revenue Service photographed them. The records were loadedwith names and numbers, concise accounts of who paid what to whom going back to the 1920s. Those named included prosecutors and city councilmen. The club payroll included the wife of Tim McCullough, the former county sheriff, though she rarely actually worked. And McCullough himself, who served on the state Parole Board, was allegedto be the bag man.

    It turned out that Charlie Berger, the squat little man who ran the Lifeline Club, was grossing more than $1 million a year on bingo. “The money was unbelievable, thousands of dollars a night,” says then-prosecutor McBroom. “And the vice squad was being paid off bigtime to keep it going.” Berger paid $3,000 a month to one Frank Colacurcio, who ran nightclubs and strip joints from Alaska to Tacoma, and who knew how to work with the cops.

     Chief Ramon threw a fit. He chewed Gustin out for failing to alert him in advance and for ticketing the bingo players. But the damage was done; two weeks later, Mayor Miller fired Ramon and hired the first of a series of interim chiefs who would parade through over the next few years.

    The feds meanwhile were busily harvesting the fruits of the Lifeline raid. Since they couldn’t count on Carroll, Gustin and his alliesneeded to make it a federal case. The club records provided that leverageas well. The Lifeline operators had used beans to cover the numbers on the bingo cards¾“a game worth thousands a night, and they’re using beans,” marvels McBroom¾but decided to upgrade. “Charlie Berger had found this company in Colorado that makes bingo cards with little shutters. So they mailed off and ordered up a bunch of those cards.”

    Bingo. The Lifeline Club was doing interstate commerce. The new U.S. attorney, Stan Pitkin, launched a full-scale investigation, calling witnesses to testify before a grand jury. For weeks, newspaper and TV reporters haunted the courthouse hallways, trying to track the comings and goings of police commanders, beat cops, nightclub operators, and city officials, some of whom were snuck in through the basement in a rusty, nondescript van. “I think the city was surprised by what they were seeing,” says McBroom. “Police corruption was supposed to happen in Chicago and New York, not Seattle.”

     In February 1970, the first federal indictments came down, charging Colacurcio, Berger and several cops with conspiracy to run an interstate gambling business. Berger eventually cooperated with the feds, testifying that he believed Colacurcio’s police contacts had the power to close down his operation. Colacurcio was convicted and sent to prison. Buzz Cook, the assistant chief who had served on the mayor’s blue-ribbon panel two years earlier, was indicted for perjury; he had testified under oath that he knew nothing about the payoff system. That summer, Cook went on trial at the old federal courthouse¾the first public exposure of the Tolerance Policy. Within days, more than 100 past and present Seattle cops were implicated in open court.

    Still, Charles O. Carroll maintained his grip on the courthouse, amid rising doubts as to whether he would or could investigate the system he presided over. One by one, local civic groups and newspapers called for a county grand-jury inquiry. Early in 1970, a group of young Republicans began talking about challenging Carroll in the fall primary. They tapped Chris Bayley as their candidate; he had good party connections, deep Seattle roots, a Harvard Law degree, and a cadre of supporters. And he promised to convene a grand jury.

     In June, Bayley decided to pay a courtesy call on the incumbent. “I was ushered into his enormous conference room with the big, leather couch that had supposedly been [U.S. Senator] Warren Magnuson’s,” Bayley recalls. “Carroll was sitting at one end of that long conference table, flanked by the chairman of the party and Bill Boeing [the founder of the aerospace company], sort of like the Holy Trinity.”

    Bayley, an elfin figure with none of Gustin’s swagger or physical presence, mustered the deepest voice he could to explain why he was challenging the prosecutor: Well, some of us think it’s time for new blood. “Carroll huffed, ‘Do you understand how tough this job is?’ And the power guys nodded. There was just a disbelief that anybody could take him out.”

    Bayley ran anyway, and won. When he took office, he found that Carroll’s files had been cleaned out. Loose wires dangled under the desk¾remnants, Bayley believes, of a recording system similar to the one Richard Nixon maintained at the White House. His first task was clear: He began preparing for the grand jury inquiry he had promised. He recruited a team of young lawyers, who moved across the street to the 29th floor of the Smith Tower to get away from the cops and spies in the courthouse.There they began trying to locate and sway witnesses¾cops, tavern operators, gamblers, anyone who could help them penetrate the network.

    Convincing witnesses to cooperate was tough. Even honest cops were reluctant to testify against fellow cops, or downright terrified. Tavern owners feared testifying against cops who had the power to close them down. Prosecutors drove the streets with witnesses in the back seat, coats pulled over their heads, nervously pointing out who did what where. “We were told we were under police surveillance, so we couldn’t talk to people in the office,” recalls Evan Schwab, one of Bayley’s young lawyers. “I talked to one guy in the woods on Vashon Island. And I remember interviewing a police major who was in uniform, wearing his gun, and sweating heavily.”

    On April 12, 1971, more than four years after the first press reports, a 17-member grand jury was seated. Reporters and TV crews, barred from the courtroom, thronged in the marble hallway, and the nominallysecret proceedings dominated the news for weeks. By early summer, more than 100 past or present cops had been implicated, some for bribes dating back to 1936. The prosecutors marveled at the system’s tidiness. “In time, we could predict how much a guy was making based on where he was working and how long he’d been there,” says Dave Boerner, then Bayley’s chief deputy. “It sort of ran itself. It required agreement by a lot of individuals—the prosecutor, the police chief, the sheriff. But it was all understood. That’s the way the world worked.”     

    As the testimony spilled out, Seattle police nervously watched from across the street. At times, detectives sat in the courtroom, taking notes. Nobody was sure what they did with the information, but rumors of retaliation flew. “Drowning was the method of choice,” says Dee Norton, who covered the scandals for The Seattle Times (and whose regular courthouse beat I, a cub reporter, covered while he did). “As we understood it, they’d put somebody face down in the water and then plant a foot on their back.” Ben Cichy, the local pinball king, had drowned mysteriously in five feet of water next to his Lake Washington home in 1969. At least one other drowning death was rumored, but never proved, to be murder. Norton says he never felt threatened himself, but squad cars would occasionally park for hours in front of his Wedgewood home. It was “more harassment than intimidation.”

     Three months after being impaneled, the jury indicted 19 police and other public officials for “conspiracy against government entities.” The list included Prosecutor Charles O. Carroll and the affable city councilman Charles M. “Streetcar Charlie” Carroll (no relation), who had chaired the council committee that licensed clubs and taverns. The indictments proved the prosecution’s high-water mark. Over the months to come, Bayley’s office dropped several cases, including the one against Streetcar Charlie. Other accusees were dismissed or acquitted. The final fizzle came on May 17, 1973, when Judge JamesMifflin dismissed eight of the 10 remaining defendants, including ex-prosecutor Carroll and several high-ranking cops, for lack of evidence.

    “Proving a conspiracy, that individuals were knowingly in on it, was tough,” muses Bayley. He admits that he and his team were young and inexperienced. And they were handicapped by witnesses who demanded immunity from prosecution, or who were discredited, reluctant, or both.

     Nevertheless, dozens of suspect public officials took early retirements. The payoff system was abolished. And Seattle changed profoundly. Fueled by the police scandal, CHECC candidates wrested control of the City Council over the course of three elections and instituted wide-ranging reforms. The City adopted a new charter that transferred budget authority and other powers to the mayor’s office, which in theory could be held more accountable than entrenched council members. The old system had collapsed. “And when that happens, somebody has to come build a new system,” says Norm Maleng, one of Bayley’s handpicked prosecutors. “So we came in and tried to rebuild a system of justice on a new model, done with openness and a new ethical standard.”

    Despite their dismal record at winning convictions, Chris Bayley and his aides went on to successful careers. Bayley served two terms as prosecutor, practiced law for several years, and in 1983 became senior vice president of the Burlington Northern railroad conglomerate.After retiring, he ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate and started Stewardship Partners, which promotes voluntary environmentalism by farmers and other landowners. Maleng succeeded Bayley as prosecutor in 1979 and has held the job ever since, widely respected but hardly a powerbroker. Boerner became a law professor, McBroom a judge. Chambliss, the UW professor who crossed the line, went on to a distinguished career at George Washington University. One of his books, “On the Take,” describes his experience with the payoff system.

     Tony Gustin stayed on for seven more years at the Police Department. “ I was too damned obstinate to leave,” he says.   The corruption was cleaned up, but the bitterness lingered. He was demoted twice, ostensibly because he refused to name his SPD informants, who had helped bust the payoff system. “I’d sworn I wouldn’t name names,” he says. “It was a question of integrity.” The demotions “helped me understand what I was made of.”

     Though few crooked cops were actually convicted, many others lived to regret taking bribes. Gustin recalls one old friend who had to sit down with his daughters and explain why he’d been on the take. “The money was poison. It just about killed him.”

    Eventually, Gustin destroyed his notes and files. It was all too sordid and painful. “Still, I was a pariah.” He shrugs. “I’d get nasty notes in the mail. In their eyes, I created disorder, and Caesar said, man can’t tolerate disorder. I suppose there were guys who would have liked to shoot me, but I knew they didn’t have the guts.” When he finally retired in 1977, “they could have held my retirement party in a phone booth.”

    Gustin finally realized his ambition of becominga police chief¾first in American Samoa, then in Sandy, Utah, where he ran things his way, “like a total asshole¾you don’t accept so much as a free cup of coffee. The guys on the street didn’t like it, but when I left, I think they respected me for it.”

    Eventually Gustin retired to the country, a few miles from where he grew up. He reads avidly, thinks hard, and worries at how quickly Seattle moved on and forgot this ugly chapter in its history, making it all the more likely to happen again. The lesson he draws from the payoff scandals is an ancient one: “Power corrupts. We elect people and then we ignore them.

    “There is no limit to human greed, nor to human cruelty. It’s our curse.”

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

Scientists and Scribes: Strange bedfellows

THAT faint gurgling sound you hear wafting across Seattle this weekend is the Sound of Science, generated in the grey matter of some 5,000 biologists, geologists and other-ologists who have convened downtown.
The giant sucking sound, on the other hand, can be attributed to some 600 journalists who have converged upon the same meeting place, there to roam about in desperate search of something new and startling to report.
This is a curious relationship. The scientists are here to exchange notes on what they've learned in the last year or so. The journalists are here to eavesdrop, glean something newsworthy and tell the rest of the world.
When science and journalism mix, the result is a volatile chemistry. Scientists are deeply suspicious of journalists; they believe we have little real understanding for what they do, and tend to fracture it in the reporting.
We reporters are equally wary of scientists, whom we suspect spend many years in graduate school learning how to obfuscate and torture the English language.
But we need each other, which is why everybody is trying to get along down at the convention center.
At bottom, we both seek Truth. Our mission is to increase humanity's understanding of the world. And we all feel vaguely underappreciated and not-so-vaguely underpaid for our efforts.
The similarities end there.
We ask different questions. Scientists ask: "What is this and how does it work?" Journalists ask: "So what and why does this matter?"
This gets us both in trouble - particularly when we deal with issues such as risk. Solid research on things like cancer becomes distorted when our reports stretch the results into Page One stories.
Scientists are specialists who know a lot about a few things. Journalists are generalists who know a little about a lot of things. I went to college in the '60s, studied literature and politics and the social sciences. I negotiated a "C" in college biology only by promising to never again darken the door of my professor's classroom.
Thirty years later, I've developed a belated respect for science, and even a few street smarts. In my next life, I plan to be a marine biologist. Meanwhile, I have to constantly remind myself of the difference between "induction" and "deduction."
To scientists, truth is determined only by data derived from repeated experiments. Their bible is the scientific method, an orderly process of inquiry that requires maximum precision and caution. Their findings are tentative and qualified; they don't believe there is a last word on anything.
The reporter's scripture is the democratic process and especially the First Amendment. We value freedom of speech and an open exchange of ideas that has little to do with precision. We mix science with politics and business. We try to track the flow of money, and speculate about why people do what.
We believe truth can emerge from conflict. If we depict both sides of an issue, truth will ultimately win out. This is a concept that baffles most scientists.
Most important, journalists are communicators. We believe knowledge and ideas are valuable only to the extent they are communicated. To do that, we resort to storytelling and anecdotal evidence that frequently fracture the scientific method. If something is lost in the retelling, too bad.
Most scientists are loners. They work alone, conduct their experiments, and eventually submit their findings to other scientists for review - usually in a jargon unintelligible to others.
This is a potentially fatal flaw. Most scientists still work for the government - at universities or research institutions such as the marine labs at Sand Point. These days, their jobs and their work are in real jeopardy. Congress already has slashed spending on science, and the pending crisis in Medicare and other programs creates budget pressures to cut even more.
"Science can only be funded if the electorate and their representatives remain convinced of its value and contribution," writes Dr. Neal Lane, director of the National Science Foundation, who is attending the Seattle convention.
Reporters are obligated to increase their understanding of the scientific method, of statistics and risk management. Ignorance is a weak defense, at best. We need to resist the impulse to turn tentative research findings into Page One blockbusters.
But scientists are equally ill-served by their instincts to hibernate, to operate behind closed doors, and to speak and write in terms understandable only to other scientists. That approach plays directly into the hands of the budget-cutters, who would rather not know what society is losing.
For all our ill-conceived "cure for cancer" stories, scientists are equally guilty of poor risk management when they use the risk of miscommunication as an excuse to not communicate at all.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link