Gambling corruption trial continues to have impact

Gambling corruption trial continues to have impact
Sebastian Kitchen

In a hectic week in Ala­ bama politics, the inves­ tigation into corruption at the Alabama State House claimed two more people, one of whom was supposed to be a star wit­ness.

Former state Rep. Terry Spicer was never accused of being a party to trying to take bribes to vote for gambling legislation, as some current and former state senators were in the corruption case, but two people who have pleaded guilty in the case rolled on Spicer and shared testimo­ny about him taking cash, a ski trip and other bribes in exchange for his help.

Former Country Cross­ing developer Ronnie Gilley and his former lob­byist, Jarrod Massey, rolled on Spicer once they began cooperating with the FBI.

Some people have been curious if Spicer, with them believing he was be­ing let off easy, was going to turn on other people. But his attorney said, aside from the gambling corrup­tion trial, that he did not expect his client to testify in any other trials. Some people are shocked, after Spicer's admissions of tak­ing about $100,000 in brib­es over the better part of a decade, that prosecutors allowed him to plead to just one count.

But, in his case, prose­cutors would have had to rely on the testimony of Gilley and Massey, which did not appear to be overly effective in the gambling corruption trial of Victory­Land owner Milton McGre­gor and eight other defen­dants. There were no convictions following that 10-week trial.

While state Sen. Scott Beason was a witness for the prosecution in that cor­ruption trial and wore a wire to record conversa­tions for the FBI, defense attorneys roughed him up while he was on the stand with them claiming he was politically and racially mo­tivated. The judge who presided over the case agreed.

Beason, who at the time was chairman of the pow­erful committee that de­termines which bills come to the Senate floor for de­bate, recorded many more conversations than he needed to and somehow managed, when taping himself and fellow Repub­licans, to refer to support­ers of a west Alabama casi­no and dog track as "Aborigines."

He apologized after the trial and the Republican leadership in the Senate left Beason in his key post, arguably one of the most powerful in the Legisla­ture.

But, last week, the lead­ership voted during a con­ference call to remove Beason from the post, which surprised some peo­ple since the lawmakers had previously left him in power despite pleas for him to be removed.

While the Republicans have a large majority in the Senate, their superma­jority, which has allowed them to run over Demo­crats and push through their agenda, is not as large and an agitated Bea­son and an ally or two could cause some problems for the GOP.

One of Beason's key leg­islative accomplishments, the state's tough law to fight illegal immigration, could have had a better week, also. Opponents of the law have claimed it could hurt economic devel­opment in the state and de­ter some large internation­al corporations from selecting Alabama to ex­pand their business, de­priving the state of much-needed jobs here. They questioned what would happen when an executive for Mercedes-Benz, Hyun­dai or ThyssenKrupp -- or one of their spouses -- was picked up for somehow vi­olating the law.

Republican leadership, including House Speaker Mike Hubbard and Senate President Pro Tem Del Marsh, shot down that ar­gument Wednesday and said they had seen no evi­dence of the law hurting economic development.

Well, that likely changed that same day, when Tus­caloosa police arrested a German executive with Mercedes-Benz for not having proper identifica­tion, according to The As­sociated Press. The police chief there said the execu­tive would not have been arrested without the law.

With a colleague retriev­ing his passport, visa and other documents from his hotel, police released the executive.

While his stay was not long, executives with other companies cannot look fa­vorably at the arrest or the thought of having one of their executives arrested while here on business.

Many Republicans have not been moved by repeat­ed protests and have said they will refuse to make any changes to the law even with opposition from farmers, some business groups, some religious leaders and from the state's Hispanic popula­tion. But this arrest, espe­cially so soon after the law went into effect, could help change some minds be­cause of the potential for the arrest to hurt the per­ception of the state in the eyes of the business world.

That executive was like­ly not a threat to national security and was not tak­ing a job from an Alabami­an. His company instead has created thousands of good-paying jobs in the state.