Word: cooksey
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...nailed on a driver's license violation, and Friedman himself for interfering with a police officer. Some troublemakers were tossed into Sabo's jail, and the sheriff could not be located to approve bail for hours. In what Sabo claims was retaliation, Bowie County District Attorney Lynn Cooksey, a friend of Friedman's, ordered the arrest of a sheriffs deputy for carrying an unauthorized weapon Cooksey later insisted that he had been unaware of the gun toter's identity...
...about the same time, a joint Texas-Arkansas agency won a $77,000 grant from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration to monitor the area's Dixie Mafia through an Organized Crime Intelligence Unit. Cooksey is one of the unit's directors. OCI's achievements have been modest, to say the least. Last year's major accomplishment, for example, was the confiscation of 225 lbs. of marijuana...
...turned out to be a sophisticated $2,800 radio transmitter, a tracking device. That night, as Sabo kept watch, a shadowy figure crept up to the patrol car. When the interloper reached under the fender. Sabo jumped out and arrested one Gary Morgan, an OCI investigator and the man Cooksey had utilized for pre-election snooping into Sabo's background...
...Cooksey suffered visibly from the trouble. In Texas, Cooksey is permitted to practice law on the side, and uses his county-paid secretarial help and office (in a building owned by Friedman). Last year, in a guardianship matter tossed his way by a friendly judge, Cooksey netted a $22,000 fee; that reflected, he said, 440 hours of work, equivalent to 3% months of full-time work. He continued to receive his full $26,100 annual district attorney's salary, of course, which helped pay for a $38,000 private airplane and a private deer-hunting lodge. Sabo, incidentally...
Nobody doubts Cooksey's abilities as a prosecutor: he claims a record of 3,500 criminal convictions, v. only five acquittals in nine years. "I've got the best prosecution record in the state of Texas," Cooksey modestly admits. But the taxpayers may be getting shortchanged overall. Since 1971, Cooksey's office has cadged five separate LEAA grants, totaling $245,801, to speed prosecutions and unclog court congestion. Result: while there were 799 case dispositions and a backlog of 1,149 cases in 1970, by 1976 there were only 587 dispositions and a whopping 2,400 cases...