Ex-Governor Hopes to Polish Sullied Image

Guy Hunt is a preacher and a farmer who considered himself a righteous man following the path of the Lord when he got into trouble. But now, even with a pardon in his hand, he can’t persuade some folks he’s innocent.

Many can’t understand why Hunt, a convicted felon, is trying to win back his old job: governor of Alabama.

To Hunt, it’s deeply personal. His legacy is at stake.

With little more than a week before the June 2 primary, Hunt is hoping that voters will choose him as the Republican candidate and put him a step closer to finishing the job he started when he was thrown out of office in 1993. Two years into his second term, Hunt was convicted of using his office for personal financial gain.

Just last March, an administrative board pardoned him, concluding that he was innocent. The lanky 64-year-old was elated, stepping lightly out of the board’s hearing room. But worries soon nagged him: Would this pardon be enough? Or would he be remembered as a crook?

Four more years in office would set those worries to rest, he believes.

“I don’t know if it will vindicate me anymore, but I think that it will cause history to be written correctly, and that’s a very important thing to me,” Hunt said, sitting on a porch swing at his Holly Pond farm earlier this month.

With barely two months to campaign after his pardon, Hunt set out to take the state by storm. But it hasn’t happened. A recent poll showed Hunt a distant third behind incumbent Gov. Fob James and businessman Winton Blount.

How could this be? For a man done wrong, where are the indignant hordes eager to carry Hunt on their shoulders into office?

One poll showed that most people, though glad for the pardon, still thought he was guilty. And twice as many people had a negative opinion of him than a positive one, according to the survey conducted by Southern Opinion Research Inc.

Abandoned Even by Old Friends

Even some of Hunt’s old friends who believe that he was a victim of dirty politics give awkward excuses as they abandon him.

John Dorrill, for instance, who helped him shop for suits years ago so he would look more like a governor and less like a farmer, has switched loyalties.

“We appreciate what Gov. Hunt did when he was in, and we probably were his strongest supporters. But we’re staying with Gov. James,” said Dorrill, executive director of the Alabama Farmers Federation. “I hope he pulls out. I don’t see how he’s going to win, and he’ll just feel worse.”

Even Mickey Kirkland, who provided moral support by attending Hunt’s trial, endorsed Blount. That was before Hunt joined the race, but he won’t change now.

“I think there is a time to exit,” said Kirkland, a Baptist minister and head of the Coalition of Christians for Family Values. “It was very tough because I felt like I was between a rock and a hard place. I weighed this thing out. I know his character. Whatever decision I make will not affect our friendship. He is my friend and my brother in Christ.”

Hunt’s troubles began on a mission for Christ, when he routinely used the state airplane to travel to churches in and out of Alabama fulfilling his Sunday morning preaching obligations.

The state Ethics Commission found probable cause to believe that he had violated ethics laws when on these trips he accepted “love offerings” from churchgoers who pressed cash into his hands at the end of services. Hunt sued, arguing that the ethics laws didn’t apply to the governor.

The ethics violation led to an investigation by the state attorney general. He didn’t prosecute Hunt on the airplane issue, but he pursued charges that Hunt had used about $200,000 in leftover donations to his tax-exempt inauguration fund for personal use, including the purchase of a riding lawn mower and a faux marble shower for his home.

Hunt never took the stand, but his lawyers argued that he believed the money came from a campaign account that allowed spending for personal use.

Hunt’s accountant, Gene McKenzie, could have corroborated Hunt’s story (and later did). But at the time, he was under indictment as well and refused to testify for fear of self-incrimination.

On April 22, 1993, a jury that included two Baptist ministers convicted Hunt in 30 minutes. He was placed on five years’ probation and ordered to serve 1,000 hours in community service and pay $212,350 in restitution.

Automatically, the conviction threw him out of office.

First, though, he would say goodbye. Returning to the governor’s mansion in a silver Lincoln Towncar, he stood at the base of the grand double staircase and held himself together.

“I’m going to clear my name. And we’re going to be overturned on this. And we’re going to be back,” a former staff member recalled Hunt saying.

“The only thing you have in life is your name.”

He prayed that he and his wife would live long enough to be exonerated. But every appeal that Hunt made was denied. Finally a break came.

Accountant’s Story Cleared Hunt

After four years and after the indictment against him was dropped, McKenzie, the accountant, went public with his story.

Standing before the Board of Pardons and Paroles, McKenzie acknowledged that he might be guilty of bad judgment: He had diverted donations that prosecutors said were intended to go into a tax-exempt account to pay for Hunt’s inaugural parties and transition team. McKenzie believed that the donations were meant for a political campaign account, permitting personal use, he said.

“I made a decision that Guy Hunt knew nothing about, because he was a busy person,” McKenzie said recently. “I made my decision based on what I thought was right. Apparently I made a bad decision.”

Considering McKenzie’s testimony as new evidence, and acknowledging that Hunt had completed his sentence and paid his restitution, the board granted Hunt a pardon based on innocence.

Melvin Cooper, the former head of the Ethics Commission who started the investigation of Hunt, believes that Hunt is guilty and that his pardon is a mockery of justice. Two of the three board members had ties to Hunt, he said.

“A lot of people saw him as a country bumpkin preacher,” Cooper said, “but he knew enough to take that money out of that account and keep it quiet.”

Hunt considers himself no felon, just a farmer who lives by the word of the Lord.

Growing up on the farm that his grandfather tilled at the turn of the century, Hunt raised chickens and sold pulpwood. He met his wife at church and they lived on the farm in a one-bedroom tin-roof cottage, which was so cold in the winter that buckets of water froze inside. On Sundays, he would preach to his Primitive Baptist flocks in nearby Gum Pond, where his normally droll tone would change to a vibrating staccato.

He entered politics as the Cullman County probate judge in 1964 and in 1978 ran as a Republican for governor, losing badly in the overwhelmingly Democratic state. Campaign debts nearly cost him his farm.

But he came back in 1986 and, in a shocking upset due mostly to Democratic infighting, Hunt was elected Alabama’s first Republican governor in more than 100 years. Although critics called him “the accidental governor,” a few years later Hunt was named one of the country’s 11 best governors by U.S. News & World Report.

Hunt says he wants to finish what he started in office: improve education, reduce crime, invigorate the economy. Although polls may not show much support for him, he’s confident that the country folk living along Alabama’s “byways and crossroads” will turn out.

At his church in Gum Pond, he’s right.

“We think he was done dirty,” Wilda Holmes said outside the simple church on a recent Sunday morning. “He’s a very honest man, a very honest man.”

And that’s how Hunt wants to be remembered.