http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/09/jim-traficant-was-our-kind-of-crook-111376.html?cmpid=sf#.VCdVPvldUfUJim Traficant Was Our Kind of Crook
A Youngstown tribute.
By VINCE GUERRIERI
September 27, 2014
Nobody believed the stories I told about Youngstown until Jim Traficant was indicted – for the second time.
My tales – about a judge who got disbarred, ran for mayor and won; a prosecutor who was the subject of an attempted assassination and his predecessor, who did time for corruption; a group of gangsters who incorporated their own municipality for the express purposes of hiding a brazenly-operated illegal gambling casino from local law enforcement – were too far-fetched to anyone who’d never lived in the steel town on the Ohio/Pennsylvania border.
But James A. Traficant Jr., a man who once had his salary garnished by the Internal Revenue Service for failing to report a bribe by organized crime figures on his income tax – was the living embodiment of every yarn spun about the region and its residents. He was the Congressman you’d call from central casting – if Quentin Tarantino was directing the movie.
Traficant died Saturday at the age of 73 following a tractor accident at a family farm in the hinterlands of Mahoning County. Shy of him actually being “beamed up” after a Congressional speech – a phrase he was fond of using when the world had become too strange even for him – this is how it had to end. The farm had proven his undoing once already.
When Traficant was indicted for a second time in 2002 by a federal grand jury, the allegations included getting local contractors and staff members to do work for him on the farm. Traficant pleaded not guilty “by reason of sanity” – a local political enemy tried to have him declared legally insane in the 1980s, and it didn’t take, leading him to declare himself sane ever since – and once again swore to defend himself in court.
It had worked in the 1980s. By then, Traficant was a folk hero. There are two paths to immortality in the Mahoning Valley: Success in sports or involvement in organized crime. Traficant had done both. He led Cardinal Mooney to victory over Ursuline in the first installment of the rivalry that lasts to this day, more than 55 years later, and played quarterback at Pitt. He was drafted by the Steelers in the NFL draft and the Raiders in the AFL draft, but eschewed them both to return home.
Youngstown in the 1960s was still a relatively prosperous place. The population of the city itself was started to ebb from its prewar peak of 160,000, but the county’s population continued to grow as people moved out to the suburbs. Traficant worked for a local community action group and served as a counselor (he styled himself as the son of a truck driver, but did have a master’s degree in counseling — just one more example of how the American Dream still worked in Youngstown at that point).
At that point, the Youngstown area was represented by Michael Kirwan, a different kind of American success story. Kirwan was a third-grade dropout and onetime “breaker boy” in Eastern Pennsylvania coal country. He spent more than 30 years in Congress as a behind-the-scenes power broker. As head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he was regarded as second only to longtime speaker Sam Rayburn as the most powerful Democrat in the House.
By 1980, when Traficant was elected sheriff, it was an entirely different place. Sept. 19, 1977, is still referred to as “Black Monday” in the area. The Lykes Corporation, which a decade earlier had bought Youngstown Sheet and Tube, the area’s largest employer and at one point the largest corporation in Ohio, announced that the Campbell Works would close at the end of the week. There were no workplace protections requiring notice be given, and the dominoes started falling. Within five years, Sheet and Tube would be no more, and an entire way of life would vanish.
Among Traficant’s duties as sheriff was to serve eviction notices. Traficant refused to do so, saying he couldn’t fault steelworkers for being unable, through no fault of their own, to pay their mortgages. He served time for contempt of court.
