Word: thompson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...chair, called the Robert P. Burden Professorship, will add a faculty member to the Center for Earth and Planetary Physics. "The center concentrates on the new geophysics--a modern interdisciplinary science encompassing the study of the earth, its interior, atmosphere, its oceans and other planets," Charles D. Thompson, development officer for the University, said yesterday...
...three years that he has been the U.S. Attorney for northern Illinois, James ("Big Jim") Thompson has won convictions of 239 errant politicians, cops and other public servants. Currently another 40 are under indictment; having put eleven different grand juries to work in recent months, Thompson cautiously predicts that 1975 "could be our biggest year." Big Jim's impressive score reflects the fact that he works in an area exceptionally rich in corruption. In addition, he and his aides have honed sharp weapons out of two statutes often overlooked by federal prosecutors...
Committed to cracking down on official corruption when he took the job, Thompson was well aware that such cases often present complicated proof problems. Bribery, conflict-of-interest and conspiracy prosecutions usually contain gray areas easily exploited by defense attorneys. Then Samuel Skinner, now Thompson's chief deputy, came across a 1941 case in Louisiana in which a federal mail-fraud statute was used to prosecute former associates of Huey Long. The defendants had happened to use the mail in the collection of inflated fees for a bond deal. Thompson's men looked closely and with growing delight...
Members of Congress who wrote the basic language in 1909 had bad checks and phony mail-order offers in mind, but Thompson's staff concluded that people could be defrauded out of their "right to honest government" as well. Trial and appeal courts agreed, as Thompson proceeded to use mail-fraud charges in the successful prosecutions of former Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, four Chicago aldermen, the former clerk of Cook County, Mayor Richard Daley's former press secretary and others...
Another old law in which Thompson found new possibilities was a 1934 extortion statute, originally aimed at strong-arm labor racketeers, which carries a 20-year maximum sentence. Big Jim turned the statute into a particularly potent law-enforcement weapon in a major 1973 case in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Previously, prosecutors had expended considerable effort proving, say, that a policeman who had extorted payments from a tavern owner had used fear of violence or harassment to force his victim to pay. The appeals court bought Thompson's argument that the law did not deal only with...