The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (76 page)

MRS. DEAN:
It was the low point of his life when he lost his son.

ROSEN:
How did he deal with it?

MRS. DEAN:
By remaining even more quiet. I think he didn’t want to make it too bad for those that were around him, but he couldn’t hide what was happening to him.

With his brother, James, with whom Mitchell had frolicked in the sands of Patchogue a half century earlier, the former attorney general maintained virtually no relationship at all. The last time he saw his brother Robert was at a post-prison release party thrown by the Wall Street firm of Standard and Poor’s in 1979, almost a decade before Mitchell died. This obvious estrangement the brother, also a lawyer, attributed both to Mitchell’s innate inwardness and “a psychological reaction” on his own part. Robert never once took his older brother aside and asked what the hell had happened in Watergate, never sought even feigned reassurance he was not the irredeemably evil character that
Time
and
Newsweek
had made him out to be. “I never really had the opportunity,” Mitchell’s brother said, “and I don’t think he would have talked about it, anyway.”

Asked what it was like to watch his brother go down the way he did, one of the most vilified Americans of the twentieth century, Robert said: “Very unpleasant. You try—to try and defend him, and yet not agreeing in my heart with him. Just, just put yourself in that position. What would you do? I mean, you have your loyalty to your brother and you have your loyalty to your own principles.”
What did your brother do that clashed with your principles?
The eighty-three-year-old retired lawyer paused before answering, in a quiet voice. “Well, I don’t want to think about that, if you don’t mind, yeah?”
⁶

Mitchell went to his
grave knowing he was going to cause still more pain to those he loved. For among his ventures at Global Research was a set of deals that came to haunt Deborah Gore Dean, Mary’s attractive and outgoing daughter, who had come to regard Mitchell as a father.

After earning her bachelor’s degree in political science from Georgetown University and tending bar at family-owned restaurants, Debbie secured a job, with Mitchell’s help, at the Department of Energy; from there, using his name as a reference, she went to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), as an assistant to Secretary Samuel R. Pierce Jr., the Reagan cabinet’s sole African American. A disinterested administrator, Pierce delegated ever greater authority to the twenty-nine-year-old Dean, and in June 1984 appointed her executive assistant. She stepped right into the vacuum Pierce created. “It’s common knowledge on the Hill,” a representative remarked, “if you wanted to get something done in the secretary’s office you talked to Deborah Dean.”

Among the many projects Dean oversaw was HUD’s Section 8 Moderate Rehabilitation Program. Established in 1978, Mod Rehab, as insiders called it, was essentially a giveaway program, a multimillion-dollar bonanza under which developers of low-income housing projects received rent subsidies and tax credits for approved renovations to their housing stock. Developers eager to obtain federal funding happily paid hefty fees to GOP consultants who promised direct access to HUD officials and an inside track on Mod Rehab contracts.

In early 1983, Mitchell’s old friend Louie Nunn, the former governor of Kentucky, wrote the former attorney general requesting assistance on behalf of one of his clients, a Florida real estate developer named Aristides “Art” Martinez. The regional HUD office in Jacksonville had denied Martinez’s request for loan increases to help refurbish Marbilt, one of the developer’s low-income housing complexes; could Mitchell help? Though no record of it survives, Mitchell evidently contacted Debbie Dean. Documents show they communicated about Marbilt as early as February 1983. The following month she wrote Mitchell a “Dear Dad” letter in which she noted that the relevant HUD office had “tried as best it could to be lenient,” but otherwise refused to get involved in the matter. “As you know,” she wrote, “I stand behind the decision of the carreer [
sic
] people in Headquarters.” Four months later, in October 1983, when the department reversed itself and approved Marbilt’s loan increases, she sent Mitchell a copy of an internal HUD document announcing the decision and scrawled on it: “Daddy. F.Y.I.” In July 1984, Nunn sent Mitchell a check for $8,613.94.

Impressed with Nunn’s effectiveness, Martinez retained the former governor again, in early 1984, this time to help obtain Mod Rehab funding for 293 units in the developer’s Arama project. Nunn’s fee was set at $225,000 for legal fees and $150,000 in consulting fees; on the consulting contract, Nunn scribbled his intention to pay half to Mitchell. That July, Debbie Dean sent Nunn a letter—care of Global Research—informing him that the Arama request would be approved. A year later, Nunn made good on his scribbled promise and sent Mitchell a check for $75,000.

The timing of the Arama deal coincided with another on which Mitchell had been working—not with Nunn but with Richard D. Shelby, a former Reagan White House aide and regional director of the 1984 Reagan-Bush campaign. In May 1985, Shelby, also a consultant, contacted Mitchell—wholly ignorant, he later claimed, of Mitchell’s relationship to Debbie Dean—to discuss the Park Towers Apartments in Miami. The Park Towers’ developer, Martin Fine, had retained a local consulting firm, EMF & Associates, which had in turn subcontracted with Shelby in a quest to secure Mod Rehab funding for the complex’s 143 units.

Amid a number of one-on-one meetings Shelby held with Mitchell and Dean, the three met together once, in September 1985, to discuss the project. Shelby later testified he intentionally withheld from Dean the fact that Mitchell stood to share in Shelby’s fee if the deal came off; as far as Shelby knew, Dean never learned that fact until after she left HUD. Two months after the three-way meeting, the Park Towers got its Mod Rehab contract, a project worth $14 million. It took another seven months for the legal details to be worked out, but that came with a waiver which exempted the Park Towers from regulations prohibiting it from receiving the approved funds. On January 4, 1987, Shelby sent Mitchell a check for $40,000.

Art Martinez, meanwhile, must have been hard-pressed to believe his good fortune. Things had worked out so swimmingly at Marbilt and Arama, he decided to hire Louie Nunn once more. This time Martinez paid the former governor $200,000 to help obtain Mod Rehab funding for a development called South Florida I, also in Dade County. For unknown reasons—perhaps because Mitchell feared leaving his fingerprints on too many HUD deals—Nunn this time worked through Jack Brennan. The next month, in May 1986, Martinez sent letters to Nunn and Brennan audaciously requesting that they not only secure the Mod Rehab contracts, but with them an explicit declaration from HUD that the funding was set aside for 219 units.

Three weeks later, Brennan met with Debbie Dean and turned over some paperwork on South Florida I. Three months after that, HUD once again authorized Mod Rehab funding for the Metro-Dade Public Housing Authority—for precisely 219 units. Four days after the agency formally approved Martinez’s proposal to refurbish the 219 apartments, in December 1986, Nunn sent Brennan a check for $109,000. That Brennan’s involvement was an act of subterfuge, concealing Mitchell’s role, was suggested by separate deposits into the men’s personal bank accounts within the next forty-one days: $60,000 for Mitchell, $50,000 for Brennan.

All this—the intrigues surrounding Marbilt, Arama, Park Towers, and South Florida I—would likely have remained known only to a small circle of developers, consultants, and bureaucrats, denizens of HUD’s obscure nether regions, had Debbie Dean not sought the position of Assistant Secretary for Community Planning and Development, a post requiring Senate confirmation. That led to hearings, and hearings led to investigations.

Spearheading the fight against Dean’s nomination was Senator William Proxmire, a Wisconsin Democrat who, as chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, had cultivated a reputation as a leading penny-pincher on behalf of the American taxpayer. In colloquies with Proxmire, Dean had airily dismissed suggestions that developers lobbied her as something that would have been “a tremendous waste of time” on their part, and she declared: “I have never given or approved or pushed or coerced anyone to help any developer.” In the end, the Senate withheld confirmation and Dean was denied the promotion, but the damage to her life and career was to prove far worse.

Spurred by the Proxmire hearings, HUD’s inspector general launched a probe of the Mod Rehab program. Released in April 1989, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report documented a five-year pattern wherein hundreds of millions of dollars in Mod Rehab funds were allocated “on an informal, undocumented, and discretionary basis.” A follow-up probe by a House subcommittee found “rampant abuse, favoritism, and mismanagement.” From there, the Justice Department took over, and the affair acquired the one appurtenance that, in the post-Watergate era, conferred major status on medium-sized scandals: a special prosecutor.

Mitchell’s death likely spared him another go-round with the special counsel, but Dean was not so fortunate, and in her thirteen-count federal indictment, issued in July 1992, the man she called “Daddy” appeared as “Unindicted Co-conspirator One.” Nunn and Shelby, who cooperated with the prosecutors, were listed as numbers two and three. The indictment charged Dean with conspiracy to defraud the government, acceptance of illegal bribes (in dealings unrelated to Mitchell), and lying to Congress in her statements to Proxmire.

In a lengthy interview conducted four months before she was indicted, Dean seemed strangely at a loss in knowing what to believe—or how to feel—about John Mitchell. “What his role was, precisely, is in doubt,” she said. Her one certainty was that Mitchell never divulged to her his financial stake in Mod Rehab funding decisions. “I did not know that John Mitchell had any involvement himself until after he was dead,” she said, adding that he only sought two favors during her tenure at HUD. The first was a routine call seeking information; the second was a request that she write the July 5, 1984, letter to Nunn telling him the Arama project had been approved for funding.

When the OIG report was released, eight months after Mitchell’s death, Dean was “flabbergasted” to see his name listed as one of the consultants who profited from the Mod Rehab contracting process. “I thought people were lying about John to get me,” she said. Angrily, she telephoned the inspector general’s office and took “strong exception” to the inclusion of Mitchell’s name. “I want to see a copy of the check that Louie Nunn supposedly wrote to John Mitchell!” she demanded. When the agent said he couldn’t produce it, she threatened to hold a press conference, exposing the OIG report as a smear of Mitchell, and hung up. Next she dialed Jack Brennan. “I am furious!” she cried. “I will not allow them to slam John like this!” “And Jack said, ‘Whoa, little Debbie [laughs], whoa!’ He said, ‘You may not want to do that. Because John did have some dealings with HUD; they just weren’t with you.’ And I said, ‘What?!’ And he said, ‘Well, how much detail do you want me to go into?’ And at that point I decided that what I did not know was my defense.”

Dean’s case, described by the
New York Times
as “an illustration of the ways of power in Washington,” took five weeks to try. If convicted, she faced up to sixty-two years in prison and fines totaling $3.2 million. She spent six days on the stand, trying to persuade the jury that despite her closeness to Mitchell, her powerful position at HUD, and the consulting fees he earned from the agency’s decisions, the two never discussed the projects in which he had a financial interest—the very convergence of events that, a year and a half earlier, she had conceded to an interviewer would not “sound believable.” Prosecutor Robert O’Neill hammered her mercilessly, waving the “Daddy” notes in her face and denouncing her to the jury. “Her six days of testimony is worth nothing,” O’Neill said. “You can throw it out the window into a garbage pail for what it’s worth.”

The jury convicted Dean on all counts. Yet her legal odyssey had only just begun. At sentencing, in February 1994, she stopped short of acknowledging guilt, but, in a letter read aloud in open court by Judge Thomas F. Hogan, she said she “mourn[ed] the fact that this case has cast dishonor on myself, my family, and a department whose mission I heartily admire.” As for “Daddy,” she said, “I should not have entertained any inquiries from John N. Mitchell on any HUD matter.” Judge Hogan sentenced her to twenty-one months in prison and fined her $5,000—only slightly more than what she was convicted of accepting in illegal gratuities. The special prosecutor denounced the sentence as “far too lenient.”

Two years later, the U.S. Court of Appeals threw out five of Dean’s convictions while affirming the other seven (one count had already been dismissed). Unbowed, Dean appealed her convictions to the Supreme Court, where she also lost. To pay her legal bills, which exceeded $750,000, she went into the antiques business, at first selling off pieces handed down by her mother. But she never served time. Instead, she spent six months under house arrest in 2002, during which time she was permitted to report to her Georgetown shop and make buying trips to New York.