Three Bullets Sealed His Lips

by Bruce A. Rubenstein and Lawrence E. Ziewacz

Book Overview

The gangland style slaying if State Senator Warren G. Hooper on January 11, 1945, three days before he was to testify before a grand jury investigating alleged corruption in the Michigan legislature, forced coverage of Allied war triumphs from the state's newspaper headlines. National media representatives flocked to Michigan to join local reporters in following the efforts of grand jury special prosecutor Kim Sigler and the State Police to apprehend...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0870132520
• ISBN13: 9780870132520
• Release Date: September 1987
• Publisher: Michigan State University Press
• Length: 236 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Capitol sleaze continues, but 3 bullets unlikely

The legislature has been the focal point of public outrage in Michigan, as newspapers across the state have described graphically years of unrestrained pillage of the House Fiscal Agency's budget, the dubious role of legislators in administrative decisions conferring million-dollar windfalls on garbage barons, resort developers and snake-oil "technology" peddlers, and the revolving doors between legislative offices and lobbying dens. Historical perspective can be useful as you confront concerned and disenchanted constituents. While it is difficult to judge comparative degrees of depravity, as bread-and-circus drama the Lansing scene of today pales by comparison to the Lansing of the mid-1940s, when the high-powered deal-making among lobbyists and legislators implicated some of Michigan's most powerful political, business and criminal figures in the murder of a state senator. In 1943 the executive secretary of the Michigan Medical Sochety was convicted of bribery for a 1939 offer of a free California trip to a member of the Michigan House of Representatives in exchange for support of legislation barring osteopaths from certain medical practices. In the meantime, the representative, Warren Hooper of Adrian, had become both chairman of the House Public Health Committee and paid executive secretary of the Michigan Association of Osteopathic Physicians and Surgeons! Hooper reported the Medical Society's bribe offer only after an official inquiry into legislative corruption had been forced on Attorney General Herbert Rushton (himself a former state senator) by reports of an independent Detroit Citizens' League investigation and by another representative's unwitting revelation of a bribe when he told reporters that a man in a gray suit had stuffed $1,350 and a note instructing him to vote against an anti-chain-bank bill into his overcoat pocket in the Capitol cloakroom. In August 1944 a jury convicted 20 current or former legislators and four finance-company officials of bribery involving a 1939 automobile financing bill. A key witness was attorney and lobbyist Charles Fitch Hemans, who was also to be a witness in the anti-chain-bank-bill case. By late 1944, the principle witness in the chain-bank case was Representative (and Senator-elect) Warren Hooper. Under intense grand-jury interrogation, Hooper had crumbled, admitting that he was on the payroll of Grand Rapids political boss Frank D. McKay and accusing McKay of bribery to kill the anti-chain-bank bill and legislation to curb corruption in horse-race betting. Indicted in December 1944, McKay became the primary target of the corruption investigation. Michigan's Republican national committeeman and founder of General Tire Company, McKay had served three terms as state treasurer (leaving office in 1931 under the cloud of a grand jury investigation into his handling of state funds). As treasurer, McKay had insured that the state purchased only General Tire products (including inventor