Word: mutscher
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Focusing on a stock scandal perpetrated by Houston promoter Frank Sharp that proved to involve Gov Preston Smith Speaker of the Texas House Gus Mutscher. Houston mayor Louis Welsh former state attorney general Waggoner Carr and even NASA astronaut James A Lovell Katz cracks the golden egg of the Texas state capitol for a broad look at the kind of "business" that state officials are really doing under that dome...
Posing as a legislative aide, Katz travelled to Texas in February, 1971, shortly after the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that it was filing suit against Sharp Smith Mutscher and other state representatives. He quickly befriended Francis "Sissy" Farenthold runner up to I am Eagleton in the balloting for the Democratic Vice presidential nomination as well as Lane Denton Curtis Graves and other state representatives all members of the Dirty Thirty a group of "suicide" liberal legislators who set out to expose the quagmire of corruption upon which Texas politics is based...
...group of business associates were effecting a stock manipulation scheme involving three state banks two insurance companies and a computer firm all owned or controlled by Sharp In a separate series of allegations in the complaint, the SEC charged that Sharp had arranged loans and stock purchases for Smith Mutscher. House appropriations chairman W.S. "Bill" Heatly, State Representative Tommy Shannon and two Mutscher aides, in order to obtain passage of two banking bills that would have helped Sharp...
...Katz points out, Connally and Johnson were polished politicians, adept at their art, and in that way much unlike their successors, Smith, Mutscher, and the rest, whom the author calls "second stringers." Only one man among them Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes, seemed to be cast directly from the Johnson-Connally mold. And even Barnes, despite being more clever and more personable than his fellow legislators, had his political fortunes spoiled by his association with the Smith-Mutscher clan...
...Barnes the young candidate defeating a powerful opponent with a door-to-door campaign, then quickly rising to the House Speakership. And finally, we see Barnes as lieutenant governor, concerned with presenting as "progressive" image to the public, while engaging in the same backroom politics as Smith and Mutscher...