Word: ferguson
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Friendly, mild-mannered, solid Homer Ferguson was just another circuit judge until 1939. Then a woman "numbers" operator, jilted by her policeman lover, left a suicide note which uncorked a bad smell in Detroit's police department. Judge Ferguson was assigned to sit as a one-man grand jury to investigate the smell...
Honest Judge Ferguson found Detroit's graft-ridden officialdom as helpful as a pair of handcuffs. County Prosecutor Duncan C. McCrea insisted that the smell in the police department was only an embittered woman's imagination-until he was convicted of obstructing justice. Pompous, handshaking Mayor Richard W. Reading professed that all was civic virtue-until he was found guilty of graft. And one of the first men Judge Ferguson indicted in the handbook racket was a policeman assigned to "protect...
Bugs From A Log. Every time Judge Ferguson got a new witness to talk, it was like turning up a rotten log: the bugs swarmed out and he had to work fast before they got away. He took witnesses to his office building through the garage, whisked them upstairs unseen. He kept them secluded in hideouts, surrounded by dictographs and investigators...
...paused only for the law which forbade him to sit on Sundays. Sometimes he started again at 12:05 a.m. Monday. He examined 6,000 witnesses, heard 20,000,000 words of testimony, indicted 500 men & women. Of those brought to trial, 94% have been convicted. Says modest Judge Ferguson: "My old Dad used to say, 'Even a blind hog will find an occasional acorn if he just keeps his nose down...
...also learned a lot about democracy. A less steadfast man might have been sickened by the mess, might have lost his faith in popular government. Not so Judge Ferguson. He found it no fatal fault that democracy gives its opportunities to the weak and vicious as well as to the virtuous...