Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Tom Strickland has an image problem. And it seems he's not above using a little fiction to help fix it.
To win the Senate seat he's running for in 1996, Strickland has to convince voters he's not some slick 17th Street attorney or political lobbyist--even though he is an attorney who lobbies for a big firm whose office just happens to be on 17th Street. So, to compensate, the candidate is drawing on his Texas roots to craft an image as a commoner from the hardscrabble plains--a place as far from Washington's back rooms as you can get.
The biography now being circulated by Strickland's campaign paints a picture of the poor South. "Tom Strickland...understands the challenges and problems facing real people in Colorado--because he's been there," reads the handout. "His father worked nights as a janitor so he could earn a college degree and make a better life for his family. His grandfather was a sharecropper."
It is a touching vignette, and the stuff TV sound bites are made of. The only problem is, it's not completely true. Just ask the "janitor" himself.
"What?" W.C. Strickland exclaims when his son's version of his work history is read to him over the phone. A retired civil engineer who lives in the Western Slope retirement community of Battlement Mesa, W.C. is clearly flummoxed by the claim that he toiled into the wee hours to help Tom and his brother and two sisters get a leg up in the world.
According to W.C., it was the mid-1930s, nearly twenty years before any of his children were born, when he worked his way through college. He didn't work nights. And he wouldn't really call what he did being a "janitor."
"I was going to a junior college in Arlington, Texas, a branch of Texas A&M back then, and it was the Depression," the elder Strickland says in an easy drawl. "The dean of the college loaned me $100, and the deal was, I was to sweep out the library every morning before school. For that I got $15 a month, and because I was living at home and didn't have much expenses, I paid him back right quick the first year."
There's no disputing that W.C. Strickland worked hard once he got out of college. But providing a better life for his children was hardly the uphill struggle described in his son's campaign literature. By the time his children were born, the elder Strickland held a degree in civil engineering and was well-established in his trade. In fact, when Tom was a toddler, his father took the entire family to Spain for two years while he worked on an airbase project there. Later, W.C. would travel the U.S., lending his expertise to nuclear-power and petrochemical-plant projects. Tom and the rest of the family stayed put in their home in a quiet Houston subdivision.
It's hard to tell what's true about Tom Strickland. There's his Old Yeller biography; and then there's the middle-class suburban upbringing his father describes. There are the testimonials from local environmentalists about his fervent conservation efforts; and then there's the case he handled as an attorney for a developer doing battle with the Sierra Club. There's the "down-to-earth" guy described by his friends and supporters; and then there's the wealthy insider who lives in a $500,000 house on Denver's posh Seventh Avenue Parkway, sends his children to the exclusive Graland Country Day School, and is such an avid political operative that in the last four years he has given more than $10,000 of his own money to candidates for office across the country.
The most glaring contradiction for Strickland, though, may be the one between the idealist who wants to "make a better Colorado for his children" and the shareholder and name partner in Brownstein Hyatt Farber & Strickland, Denver's most controversial law and lobbying firm. According to Federal Election Commission records examined by Westword, Brownstein Hyatt and its staff have collectively pumped more than $150,000 into political campaigns nationwide since 1991. What's more, the firm, whose power-broker reputation precedes it in the halls of local and state government, has close links to two of the worst national scandals of the past decade: the S&L crisis and the junk-bond fiasco.
Strickland, a former offensive tackle for the Louisiana State University football team, sidesteps questions about the Brownstein firm as deftly as he fudges the details about his father's past employment. But his association with what local political observers sardonically refer to as "The Firm" is a source of concern even to fellow Democrats. No matter how hard Strickland tries, it's baggage that will take more than just a broad-shouldered shrug to cast off.
In the dimming light of the Trinity Grille, Tom Strickland somehow manages to appear slightly backlit. He has an easy smile, perfect teeth, and looks suspiciously like the Marlboro man, without the hat. After a day that started with a breakfast meeting at 7:30 and has now lasted nearly twelve hours, Strickland's shirt is still neatly pressed, his tie expertly knotted, his hair in place. He is a candidate easily imagined in the senatorial role. He'd look perfect sitting next to Daniel Patrick Moynihan and John D. Rockefeller on the Finance Committee.
He just has to get there first.
"There's no doubt, he's the front-runner," says seasoned Denver pollster Floyd Ciruli. "Any other 43-year-old practicing attorney in this town could announce a candidacy and we'd all yawn. But Strickland is another matter."
Ciruli says Strickland has the money, the people, the endorsements and the connections--all "brought to him largely by `The Firm'"--needed to run a serious campaign. It's an advantage that sets him apart from the rest of the Democratic field of announced and likely candidates such as state senator and Louisville bartender Paul Weissmann, city councilwoman Ramona Martinez, real estate broker Phil Perington, University of Colorado law school dean Gene Nichol and former state senator and lieutenant governor Sam Cassidy. Right now, with a formidable primary battle shaping up between Republican heavyweights Gale Norton and Wayne Allard, Strickland stands the best chance of making it into the general election as the Dems' defender of environmentalism, affirmative action and an even break for the working stiff.
But the same firm whose clout has allowed Strickland to take the early lead in the Democratic race may well doom his candidacy. Brownstein Hyatt has in three short decades risen to prominence among the country's movers and shakers, becoming widely known for its close relationship with numerous politicians, its skill at lobbying and its legal work for some of the financial community's most notorious high-flyers. Such a reputation makes for an expansive, lucrative practice. It also comes with a price.
"The BrownSteam Rollers is what we call them," candidate Phil Perington says without smiling. "They've spent many years buying this moment." Perington says his campaign manager calls Strickland's race for the Senate seat "an attempt by the lobbyists to take out the middleman."
Washing away the political stain left by Brownstein Hyatt will be Strickland's "foremost immediate challenge," says Denver political consultant Eric Sondermann. "It's all sitting out there," says pollster Paul Talmey. Predicts Ciruli: "He's going to be bloodied."
But though everybody else seems to be focusing on the issue, Strickland is loath to talk about his firm's reputation. Questions about it throw him into a virtual rage that robs him of what is usually an elegant and composed demeanor. His starlike veneer cracks, his smooth face suddenly folds into lines of anger, and he starts gesticulating with large hands that were made to cradle a football. Suddenly, instead of being the finely wrought pencil sketch of a statesman, Strickland is reduced to blobs of finger paint.
To understand just why the mere mention of Brownstein Hyatt can raise hackles on the local political scene, you have to go back in time--back to a day when Dynasty was making Denver famous, the Petroleum Club was the place to be, and oil and gas seemed to be making everybody on 17th Street rich. You have to go back to the beginnings of the savings-and-loan scandal. And then you have to start reading the fine print.
Brownstein Hyatt has never been found guilty of any criminal wrongdoing. But its proximity to several notable bankers and businessmen who were convicted has been enough to give the firm a reputation for legal tightrope-walking that has persisted to this day. Back in the 1980s Brownstein Hyatt's client list included American Continental Company (the Phoenix-based parent company of Charles Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan), Columbia Savings and Loan of Beverly Hills, and Denver's own Silverado Banking Savings & Loan. When the three S&Ls went belly-up, they cost taxpayers nearly $5 billion.
Keating, the conservative anti-pornography crusader who peddled high-risk securities disguised as federally insured investments, was sentenced to twelve years in jail and fined $122 million for his part in Lincoln's collapse. In all, nine people were convicted in connection with the thrift's failure. This past June the federal Resolution Trust Corporation sued former executives at Columbia for $27 million in damages, asserting financial negligence. Silverado's majority owner, James Metz, pled guilty to felony charges of misusing $100,000 in 1992; he turned state's evidence. Even Neil Bush, son of former president George Bush, paid $50,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by the federal government over his role in Silverado's demise.
Attorneys at Brownstein Hyatt also served as trustees for a number of Denver developer Ken Good's 174 trust funds--complex financial instruments many observers suspected were set up by Good in an attempt to put his assets beyond the reach of creditors. Good contributed to the downfall of Silverado by defaulting on $30 million in loans in 1988--the same year he managed to donate $100,000 to the Republican National Committee. Lead partner Norman Brownstein says the trusts arranged through his firm were "inconsequential" and contained no assets. "They were set up for estate purposes only," he claims, and had nothing to do with Good's financial default.
Strickland chafes when asked whether his firm's involvement with a number of since-convicted bankers and developers concerns him. "We've represented hundreds of clients over the 28-year history of the firm," he says, "and during the S&L debacle we were looked at like any other firm. We were not found to have had any involvement in illegal activity, and we were never implicated in anything"--unlike, he adds, "some Denver firms like Sherman and Howard," which paid $16.5 million to settle a lawsuit filed against it by the feds.
But Brownstein Hyatt's ties to the S&L crisis aren't all Strickland may have to answer for in the campaign. The firm also had connections to Drexel Burnham Lambert, representing numerous companies financed by the freewheeling brokerage firm. Drexel Burnham founded the $200 billion junk-bond industry that went on to play a key role in a number of S&L collapses. Eventually, executives at Drexel would plead guilty to multiple criminal charges, pay $650 million in fines and agree to fire junk-bond king Michael Milken (who was later convicted of fraud and served 23 months in prison).
During Drexel's heyday in the 1980s, newspaper accounts described Brownstein as the company's lobbyist. Today Brownstein denies lobbying directly for Drexel Burnham but acknowledges that he headed up a junk-bond lobbying group known as the Alliance for Capital Access, which was jointly funded by Columbia Savings, Keating's American Continental, the Florida-based Centrust S&L, and a number of other thrifts that invested heavily in junk bonds. (Later, David Paul, chairman of Centrust, was sentenced to eleven years in prison and fined $65 million for fraud and racketeering.)
Brownstein makes no apologies for the firm's representation of clients who wanted "high-yield investments in their portfolios." In fact, Brownstein was also a registered lobbyist for Columbia Savings in the mid- and late '80s. According to the Los Angeles Times, it was during that time that then-House Majority Whip Tony Coelho, a California Democrat, arranged a meeting between Brownstein and fellow California representative Richard Lehman, who sat on the House Banking Committee. Since Coelho had made about $7,000 from a junk-bond transaction that involved both Brownstein client Columbia and Drexel Burnham, the action raised eyebrows and sparked a preliminary criminal investigation by the Justice Department. In the face of that scandal, Coelho resigned. His attorney, Robert Bauer, told the Times that "setting up the Lehman-Brownstein meeting was the only act" that could possibly be construed as illegal on Coelho's part.
Brownstein denies any impropriety. "Unbeknownst to us, Columbia had a relationship with Coelho," he says. "We had no prior knowledge of that relationship. All I did was ask Tony for an introduction."
Questions about such past associations--especially in connection with Strickland's campaign--rankle the normally placid Brownstein. "If someone wants to make innuendo, fine," he says. "But Tom isn't running as a partner in the firm."
end of part 1
