Gene Stipe up to his old tricks; FBI not amused {updated}

If you could see the guy and hear him speak for a minute--taking in the flapping jowls, the sanctimonious drone, the Yosemite Sam diction--you couldn't help but size up former Oklahoma State Senator Gene Stipe accurately. He's Boss Hogg and Kingfish and every caricatured stereotypical Southern machine politician you've seen rolled up into one smarmy package. And despite retiring from Oklahoma's State Senate and a subsequent campaign finance conviction, Stipe's still making himself felt in Oklahoma politics.

Stipe's ideology, you ask? His ideology is Gene Stipe, and his bread-and-butter is sweet, sweet pork. Anticipating the tactics of the modern left, Stipe trafficked in gay-bashing rumors about his rivals, prompting his 1978 opponent in the state Governor's U.S. Senate race, David Boren, to call a press conference on the State Capitol steps and rebut the slanders with his hand on a Bible. (Google doesn't give any reliable links to this story, which was before my time, but I've heard it several times and once asked a Boren employee about it, who confirmed it.) [Clarification--the deleted portion is the way I had first heard this story; now that I have the New Yorker article the truth is a bit more complicated and it appears that the rumors were not traceable directly to Stipe. See the end of this post.]

Like some pork-sucking B-movie vampire, though, Gene Stipe just keeps on coming no matter how many times he gets knocked down. And the FBI and the Daily Oklahoman are after him again. In 2004, while still under house arrest for using straw donors in 1998, Stipe allegedly did exactly the same thing. (One of the beneficiaries of the alleged straw donations was David Boren's nephew Dan Boren, a Democratic Congressman representing Oklahoma's third district. He's promised to donate it all to charity, and given the history between the Borens and Stipes I find it highly unlikely that Rep. Boren knowingly took any of that money from Stipe.)

Michael Bates has helpfully arranged links to all the details of this latest scandal, and Michael McCarville has more. If you're like me, you'll love it. Stipe and his corruption and cronyism have damaged Oklahoma for decades, and his methods for keeping power were reprehensible. But what goes around comes around, and the same tricks that kept the state Democratic machine oiled are now coming around to bite them in the fanny.

One more Stipe anecdote? Sure. On the occasion of his 50th year in office, the State Senate honored Stipe with a resolution that proclaimed, among the Whereases, that Stipe was "probably the only Oklahoma state legislator to be profiled in the pages of the "New Yorker" magazine".

How sweet. That profile of Stipe in the April, 1979 New Yorker, by Mark Singer, was entitled "The Prince of Darkness". While the full article doesn't show up online, I did find an excerpt:

Mark Singer, in a marvelous New Yorker magazine disquisition on one Gene Stipe, who remains Little Dixie's "Prince of Darkness," observed that "in Latimer County, one of the three counties in Stipe's legislative district, the smartest thing that someone accused of a felony could have done between 1949 and 1974 would have been to request a jury trial. That quarter of a century slipped by without a single verdict of guilty."

Singer continues, "'Let's say I pick up a Smith & Wesson double-action .22-calibre revolver on a .32 frame with a four-inch barrel and plant one right between your eyes,' a man in Latimer County once said to me, in what I decided to regard as an utterly speculative and friendly tone of voice. 'Now, if I've got a brain in my head, all I need to do is drop the gun and borrow a dime and call Gene Stipe. And I'm pretty sure he can find me a jury of my peers that believes in the good old "Judge not, that ye be not judged." ' "

Anyone want to send the JYB a link to the complete piece, or a .pdf? seedub, at hotmail, if you please.

UPDATE: Received the article and it's a doozy. More to come on that. But as Michael Bates points out in the comments, these allegations were sourced originally to another candidate in the 1978 Senate race named "Anthony Points" and advanced also subsequently by another minor candidate, George Miskovsky. I put Points's name in quotes because, well...

Anthony Points, as it turns out, was not really Anthony Points--at least, not exclusively. At different times in his life, he had used the names Anthony Flores Reyes, Anthony Frank Reyes, Anthony Junior Reyes, Anthony Determan, John E. Determan, and Anthony Points, and at the time of the election he claimed, according to various documents, to be twenty-one or twenty-two or twenty-four or thirty-one years old. A week after the primary...Points/Reyes/Determan became an invisible man. A warrant was out for his arrest on a bogus-check count, and, having confused the public with so many aliases, he was charged with perjury. More than a few people wanted to know who had encouraged Points to become a candidate for the Senate. When the police finally arrested him, nine days after the election, he said two memorable things: He said that he had chosen the name Points because he liked it, and he said, "I was never trying to defraud anybody." He never did say why he entered the Senate race.

In any case the gay smears against Boren are not traceable directly to Stipe and I regret that error.