Thomas Martin Dies; Led State Liquor Probe

Thomas W. Martin, a principal investigator of the California liquor license scandals of the 1950s who later became the first director of the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, died of cancer Tuesday at a Roseville hospital. He was 71.

Martin received his law degree from Boalt Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, and began his legal career in 1939 as a law clerk with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

He later became an assistant state attorney general in Sacramento directing a special investigation on the administration of liquor laws for California. The investigation led to the conviction of three state assemblymen.

Martin also had issued a subpoena for William B. Bonelli, chairman of the state Board of Equalization, to testify about his involvement in the license scandal in which between $500,000 and $1 million had been paid under the table in Los Angeles County from 1952 to 1955 for licenses--which at that time sold legally for $525.

The subpoena and additional bribery charges drove Bonelli to Mexico in 1956 to avoid prosecution. He died there in 1970.

In 1959, when then-Atty. Gen. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown was elected governor, Brown named Martin as the first director of the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. Martin left the office a year later to return to private law practice in Sacramento.