Word: katze
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
THINGS ARE GETTING complicated for the con boys these days. It's no longer quite as easy to ride roughshod over the range six shooter in hand, rustling a few hundred heads here and there. Today's Texas stock is mostly paper not cattle or sheep, but as Harvey Katz's expose of Texas politics demonstrates that same frontier morality still exists, despite the increasing complexities of the world of high finance...
Focusing on a stock scandal perpetrated by Houston promoter Frank Sharp that proved to involve Gov Preston Smith Speaker of the Texas House Gus Mutscher. Houston mayor Louis Welsh former state attorney general Waggoner Carr and even NASA astronaut James A Lovell Katz cracks the golden egg of the Texas state capitol for a broad look at the kind of "business" that state officials are really doing under that dome...
Posing as a legislative aide, Katz travelled to Texas in February, 1971, shortly after the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that it was filing suit against Sharp Smith Mutscher and other state representatives. He quickly befriended Francis "Sissy" Farenthold runner up to I am Eagleton in the balloting for the Democratic Vice presidential nomination as well as Lane Denton Curtis Graves and other state representatives all members of the Dirty Thirty a group of "suicide" liberal legislators who set out to expose the quagmire of corruption upon which Texas politics is based...
...Katz points out, Connally and Johnson were polished politicians, adept at their art, and in that way much unlike their successors, Smith, Mutscher, and the rest, whom the author calls "second stringers." Only one man among them Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes, seemed to be cast directly from the Johnson-Connally mold. And even Barnes, despite being more clever and more personable than his fellow legislators, had his political fortunes spoiled by his association with the Smith-Mutscher clan...
MARVIN S. KATZ...