The Lone Ranger

When Travis County Dist. Atty. Ronnie Earle drives home through the broken limestone hills outside Austin, past dry creeks and secret springs, he listens to a local public radio station, KUT-FM. Like so many who gravitated here from other Texas towns, he relishes the KUT programming in which listeners recount whimsical stories of their life in Austin. These one-minute riffs are about nothing much: a man who festoons trees with bottle caps; a former New Yorker who learns to two-step; strangers who meet on a street, fall in love, get married. Hearing them is like taking communion in the church of Austin, a city that defines itself by its vast differences--both real and imagined--from the strait-laced state that surrounds it. You swallow the wafer, and you belong.

Now in his 28th year as district attorney, Earle embodies Austin’s offbeat ethos, casual liberalism and chronic nostalgia for simpler times. By many measures--its vibrant music and filmmaking scenes, its urbane tastes--this is a hip city, but it’s also an earnest one. When Earle lectures about threats to democracy, as he often does these days, he is dead serious.

“I have a belief in the grace and promise of this country that has to do with growing up when we grew up,” he says. “At my deepest level I’m not cynical. I believe all the stuff I say about this. It’s not an act.”

Act or not, Earle is a marquee player in a drama of national import as he pursues a 28-month criminal investigation that threatens one of the most powerful men in the U.S. Congress, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. An Austin grand jury has charged Republican operatives with using corporate millions to bankroll the campaigns of 22 Republican candidates for the state House of Representatives in 2002--campaigns that proved pivotal in securing GOP hegemony in Congress. For 100 years Texas law has barred corporations and labor unions from contributing to state political campaigns--and for good reason, Earle says. “For them to compete with ordinary citizens compounds the influence of corporations at the expense of citizens. It makes ‘one person, one vote’ a mockery.”

Three of DeLay’s political associates have been indicted, and prosecutors are circling a fourth, Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick. All are linked to DeLay’s political action committee Texans for a Republican Majority, which, along with the Texas Assn. of Business, funneled more than $2.6 million in corporate funds to Republican legislative candidates. Four of the eight national corporations that were indicted for contributing funds have turned state’s evidence in return for the charges being dropped. In courthouse jargon, that’s called “flipping”--and it increases the likelihood of testimony against individuals such as Craddick and DeLay, who have not been charged with any crimes.

The lengthy investigation, together with the escalating row in Congress over DeLay’s alleged ethics breaches, is taking a toll on the beleaguered majority leader--not only in Washington, but in his conservative congressional district near Houston, where polls show him slipping. DeLay has amassed a $1.3-million defense fund, and he alludes darkly to a left-wing campaign to destroy the conservative movement. In a 2,500-word missive e-mailed to supporters in April, he characterized the Austin indictments as a “political dirty trick” played by a “partisan Democrat” who wants to “undo with a grand jury what he can’t stop at the ballot box.”

At this writing, the undoing of DeLay is far from certain. But the outcome of the campaign finance case may be even more important to Earle. It will likely define his career, eclipsing the innovative criminal justice programs that are his real legacy. It will either redeem or confirm his reputation as an unpredictable prosecutor who can’t quite make the big cases, whose reach often exceeds his grasp, whose best advocate and worst enemy are the same person: himself. “Most of my wounds have been self-inflicted,” Earle says.

But he also is a formidable adversary in the press, sticking to message: “I’m just doing my job.” He gets the benefit of the doubt on the editorial pages, the interviews on “60 Minutes,” the magazine profiles. “Is a story in GQ next?” asks an exasperated Sherry Sylvester, former communications director of the state GOP. “Ronnie Earle is the most powerful Democrat in Texas. He is a partisan who uses his position as district attorney and works with the media. He simply is not credible.”

The fact that a lowly district attorney is considered the state’s most powerful Democrat says a lot about how far the party has fallen since the days of Lyndon B. Johnson. Texas hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1976, the year Earle was first elected. A map of last November’s election shows its 254 counties bathed in Republican red, save for a few on the Mexico border and the Gulf Coast--and the solitary blue dot that represents Austin and Travis County, where Kerry beat Bush.

The Republicanization of Texas became complete in 2002, when the GOP gained control of both legislative bodies and all major statewide offices for the first time since Reconstruction. DeLay helped orchestrate the sweep for a singular purpose: to redraw the state’s congressional districts so that Republicans would replace Democrats on the national stage. He succeeded spectacularly. When the 109th Congress convened in January, there were five new Republican congressmen from Texas; without them, the GOP would have lost seats instead of gaining them in the House. “God bless Texas,” DeLay exulted after the 2004 election. “The Republican Party is a permanent majority for the future of this country.”

A permanent majority of any party is not exactly the American way, but democracy has not been a big talking point in Texas of late. Earle is using the campaign finance case to force the conversation. In agreements with the four indicted corporations--Sears, Roebuck & Co.; Cracker Barrel Old Country Store; Diversified Collection Services; and Questerra Corp.--he required them to stipulate that corporate political contributions “constitute a genuine threat to democracy.” Sears also agreed to fund “nonpartisan, balanced and publicly informative” programs at the University of Texas on the role of corporations in American democracy.

Local lawyers raised their eyebrows at the idea of strong-arming defendants into giving civics lessons, but Earle is used to doing things his way--quoting Kant and Yeats, agonizing over death penalty cases, speaking of “healing” and “relationships” in the same breath as justice. In short, paddling about as far from the prosecutorial mainstream in Texas (where the credo is “hang ‘em high and let God sort ‘em out”) as possible.

In the ease with which he conveys authenticity, Earle resembles another politician who rose to prominence in Austin and talks a lot about democracy: George W. Bush. He also draws comparisons to another Democratic prosecutor, New York Atty. Gen. Eliot Spitzer, whose crusade against Wall Street corruption positioned him to run for New York’s governorship. But Earle lacks their overweening ambition: “I’m 63 and I’m still down the street,” he says, meaning the county courthouse.

Quite a few politicians have wished Earle were somewhere else. Over the years his Public Integrity Unit has prosecuted 15 elected officials, including 12 Democrats. But two well-known defendants, including Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, were acquitted. And many of the cases involved misdemeanors--penny ante stuff compared to the dozens of felony counts now pending in the campaign finance probe. The money-laundering charge facing two defendants--DeLay fundraiser Jim Ellis and former Texans for a Republican Majority executive director John Colyandro--is punishable by a prison term of five to 99 years.

“This is the real thing--this is ‘The Walls’ over in Huntsville,” says Austin attorney Buck Wood, referring to the 150-year-old brick prison notorious for running the busiest death chamber in the country. “You stand a real chance of going to a real jail for a real amount of time.”

The grand jury investigation has prompted talk of legalizing corporate political donations, as 28 states already have. “Earle has made all corporate money so radioactive, no one is willing to use it,” Andy Taylor, an attorney for the Texas Assn. of Business, told Texas Lawyer magazine. “The idea that $1,000 from a corporation wields an unhealthy amount of influence over politicians who at the same time receive millions of dollars from individuals--in modern-day politics that concern is vastly overstated.” Indeed, Houston home builder Bob Perry gave more than $8 million to GOP causes last year and bankrolled the Swift Boat veterans campaign against Kerry. (In 2004, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, six of the 10 largest individual donors contributed to Democratic organizations.)

“Change that law, and the pretense of any democratic system in the state will be at an end,” says David Butts, a political consultant who worked on Earle’s last two campaigns. “Why have elections at all? Let’s just have an auction and just bid.”

“We all know money is a part of politics, but you need to know where the money is coming from. Faceless corporations are not supposed to determine the outcome of elections,” says former Austin Mayor Kirk Watson, who lost the race for attorney general in 2002. Ten days before the election, Watson became the target of a $1.5-million media blitz by the so-called Law Enforcement Alliance of America, a Virginia-based group linked to Texans for a Republican Majority and the Texas Assn. of Business. With Wood as his attorney, Watson is suing the alliance to disclose the sources of its funds.

“As goofy, as naive, as weird as it may sound, I really do believe we’re at a turning point of democracy,” Watson says. “It is rare in public life that someone has the opportunity to fundamentally affect the future. Ronnie stands at the X-point of something that’s much bigger than him.”

Though his shock of dark hair has gone pewter, Earle has a scattershot intensity that gives him a boyish aspect. Unlike the $400-an-hour defense attorneys with whom he spars, he’s universally known by the diminutive of his first name. Almost every sentence written about him invokes a paradox:

He’s made his name enforcing the law, yet is often bored by its particulars. The son of a rancher, he doesn’t eat beef or tramp into his office wearing boots, the preferred men’s footwear in Texas courthouses. He never fixed the front tooth he chipped playing high school football (“I figured I’d just break it again”), yet bemoans an unflattering photograph. Candid and cheerfully profane, with an explosive laugh, he’s so image-conscious that in interviews he declares innocuous remarks off the record and calls writers back with addendums.

People seem to like Earle instinctively, without knowing quite what to make of him. For a man who’s been reelected eight times, six of those without breaking a sweat, he remains a puzzle. “You have to realize, he’s not of us,” says former Austin attorney Dave Richards, a longtime player in liberal politics. “I know within reason the behavior of most of those in public office, and he doesn’t fit the pattern. He’s either aloof, or detached, or something.”

Adds County Probate Judge Guy Herman: “I don’t think anybody really knows Ronnie.”

As a young man Earle had an adventuresome reputation, but that’s far behind him now, along with a failed first marriage. His second wife, Twila, is a writer whose intellectual interests parallel his own; she is his closest advisor and sounding board. Married 27 years, they live on six acres southwest of Austin, where they moved to give their children (two are his and one is hers) a country upbringing. The kids are grown and live in town now, but nurturing a blended family occupied the couple’s attention for many years. It was, he says, “the hardest thing I ever did.”

As district attorney, Earle has long focused on families and children, creating special programs for cases involving child abuse and neglect, family violence and juvenile offenders. He helped found the Children’s Advocacy Center, located in an old house in a residential neighborhood, where abused children can meet with police, social workers and counselors in a non-threatening setting. Like many of his ideas, it’s an approach grounded in his own experience.

Earle grew up in Birdville, a tiny town that now exists only in memory, overtaken by the featureless suburbs of Fort Worth. His great-grandmother was a Cherokee and he was raised on his family’s ranch, but the familial connection to the land faded shortly after his birth, when his father went to work for General Dynamics. Still, Earle’s early life was influenced by an extended family, the Baptist church and a town that watched its own closely. That idealized notion of community and collective responsibility informs his view of the world--or the way the world should be.

After law school and stints as a municipal court judge and state legislator, Earle ran for Travis County district attorney. With the backing of the police and the Democratic establishment--there was no Republican establishment to speak of--he won. Most liberals supported one of Earle’s opponents, Ron Weddington, whose lawyer wife, Sarah, had successfully argued Roe vs. Wade before the Supreme Court.

“Ronnie was never an Austin liberal, he was never their guy. He was seen as a goody two-shoes who was having his strings jerked by the establishment law firms,” Richards says. Once elected, Earle didn’t hang with the establishment either. He made no bones about his periodic need to retreat from the courthouse hurly-burly and indulge what Richards calls his “flaky, Zen, spiritualist” side.

“Much of my job involves making moral decisions, trying to decide what’s right. I don’t always know what’s right off the top of my head. I have to think about it,” Earle said in 1981. He talks the same way today.

From the beginning, Earle was criticized for his lack of trial experience. He knew his future depended on hiring and managing lawyers who were, as he put it, “twice as good as I am.” He started with fewer than a dozen attorneys; today there are 75. Some of his top assistants have been with him for decades. A few have gone on to run for elected office as Republicans.

District attorneys routinely boast of their conviction rates (Earle’s hovers between 85% and 90%), but prosecutors can manipulate statistics by cherry-picking winnable cases. By most accounts, Earle does not. The cops roll their eyes at his penchant for new programs, but he has won accolades from the Justice Department and the National District Attorneys Assn. And his nearly Socratic approach to death penalty cases (he weighs advice from a panel of 10 colleagues in the district attorney’s office) made Earle the subject of a lengthy profile in Time magazine two years ago.

“One of the things I admired most about Ronnie was his indefatigable ability to go and meet with groups all over town all the time--right-wing groups, left-wing groups, the Rotary,” says Bill Reid, an attorney who retired from Earle’s office in 1997. “He’s not a bloodthirsty prosecutor who wanted to get notches on his gun. There are some who have a reputation for walking close to the line in terms of evidence and rights, but there was never a push or inclination from him that we ought to bend the rules. Working for him, I was doing what I wanted to do, and I could go home and sleep at night.”

When Ronnie Earle was a boy, one of the most popular radio shows in the country was “Mr. District Attorney,” inspired by the true exploits of Thomas Dewey, New York’s racket-busting prosecutor. Those of a certain age may remember its dramatic opening: “Mr. District Attorney! Champion of the people! Defender of truth! Guardian of our fundamental rights--life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness!” But Earle preferred the exploits of the Lone Ranger, the masked Texas Ranger whose silver bullets always found their target, and who rode out of town as soon as his good deeds were done.

Earle’s story has lately reminded journalists of a different Western, the favorite of presidents: “High Noon.” He had talked about retiring before the 2004 election, but couldn’t find another Democrat willing to run. It’s easy to see Earle as a modern-day Marshal Kane, reluctantly staying on to fight the good fight while everyone else hangs back. But he rejects the cinematic comparison.

“It’s not about me,” he says. “I’m really not comfortable with all this attention. It’s pretty much the opposite of what I’ve spent my whole career trying to teach. . . .The job of citizens in a democracy is to figure out what the truth is and act on that. The point of ‘High Noon’ is that the citizen in the long run has to take responsibility. The man on the white horse, that’s not democracy.”

Robert Kane, a philosophy professor at the University of Texas, remembers Earle calling him to his apartment in 1978 to meet with a group from the district attorney’s office. Earle was wrestling with his first capital murder case--a young man accused of machine-gunning an Austin cop--and he wanted help sorting out how to present the ethics of capital punishment to an Austin jury. Kane cannot recall anyone else who works in criminal justice seeking his counsel.

“As far as prosecutors go, no. Only Ronnie,” Kane says. “He’s always been a searcher. You know, Plato’s definition of a philosopher is a person who loves wisdom more than they love power. There is an aspect of Ronnie that is this lover of wisdom.”

Why did this dreamer gravitate to criminal law--an avocation focused on precise arrangements of cold, hard facts? Why did someone with a basically sunny disposition pick a career that is inherently isolating--not only from normal human affairs, but also from other prosecutors who like putting notches in their guns?

“I don’t feel alone,” Earle insists. But the subject troubles him, and several days later he has more to say.

“If justice involves holding people accountable, you’re not going to be the most popular boy,” he explains. “The isolation of this job puts pressure on friendships. One of the first things I had to do was prosecute a friend of mine. But the things this job calls on you to do kind of trump loneliness. Why in the hell would you do this work if it doesn’t have something to do with the larger questions?”

Steeped in politics from its beginning as the state capital, Austin understands--even delights in--the vagaries of political power. Though progressive by nature, the city has an ecumenical tolerance for all political faiths. It’s a place where Republican strategist Karl Rove and liberal commentator Jim Hightower have both prospered, where cars sprout bumper stickers reading “Redneck Democrat.”

But the 2002 election brought a sea change to Austin. For the first time since Reconstruction, Republicans had it all: the governorship, both houses of the Legislature, every important statewide office. They wanted even more. At DeLay’s behest, the leadership of the Texas House began the process of redrawing the congressional districts, a task that would normally await the next census in 2010. Over the fierce objections of Democrats, the Legislature approved a redistricting map that virtually guaranteed the defeat of several incumbent Democratic congressmen in 2004.

It was a winner-take-all strategy that DeLay intended to use in other states to boost GOP numbers in Congress. However, it failed in Colorado, where the state’s high court blocked a Republican redistricting plan, and became an example of political overreaching that helped fuel the push for redistricting reform in California. When the Texas Assn. of Business bragged in its newsletter that it “blew the doors off” the 2002 election with a $1.9-million “voter education drive” funded by corporate donors--an effort that included attack ads against Democrats--citizen watchdog groups took notice. So did Earle, whose office is charged with investigating wrongdoing by state officeholders.

“There really isn’t anybody in Texas who can do this,” says Bill Allison, a professor at the University of Texas law school. “Not because Ronnie sees himself as the sheriff in ‘High Noon,’ but because there’s no place else this is going to happen. This is where the lobbyists are, this is where the money gets handed out.”

The case against Texans for a Republican Majority involves the question of what is a lawful use of corporate money by a political action committee. The case against the Texas Assn. of Business focuses on what constitutes “voter education”--for which corporate money may be freely used--and what is actual campaigning. Some courts have said that as long as political advertising avoids words such as “vote for,” “defeat” and “elect,” it does not constitute campaign advocacy, but the legal standard isn’t clear. Unclear too is what difference the questionable corporate contributions made in the outcome of the legislative races, which raked in plenty of perfectly legal cash. Donations to GOP candidates totaled $32.7 million; to Democrats, $21.9 million.

Tim Storey, an elections analyst for the National Conference of State Legislatures, believes that the Republican sweep in 2002 was a foregone conclusion because of legislative redistricting that had occurred after the publication of the 2000 census. “By far the predominant reason the GOP took the House in Texas in 2002 was because they had redrawn the map,” he says. “It would have surprised everybody if the Democrats hadn’t lost the House anyway.”

If that’s the case, why did Republicans pour so much money into those races? Why not just let nature take its course? “That’s one for the ages for political scientists,” Storey replies. “Every candidate is never convinced they’re going to win. So if you can raise the money and spend it, you’ve got to do it.”

Defense attorney Roy Minton and Ronnie Earle go back a long way. One of their first face-offs occurred in 1978, when a 13-year-old named John Christian shot and killed his history teacher. John was the son of former LBJ press secretary George Christian, whose wife called Minton to the scene while the body still lay on the classroom floor. Over Earle’s objections, Minton got a juvenile court judge to agree that the youth needed therapy, not jail time. After a stint at a private psychiatric hospital, he was released with no criminal record, and is now a lawyer practicing in Austin.

“The evidence was crystal clear that boy was psychotic,” Minton says. “Ronnie didn’t agree with any of it. He fought it all the way.”

The 73-year-old Minton is no longer the courtroom virtuoso he once was, but he’s still the go-to man for public figures in serious trouble. He currently represents Texas House Speaker Craddick in the campaign finance case. Despite his good-old-boy manner, Minton is careful with his words.

“He’s a kind-hearted, interesting, fun guy,” he says of Earle. “He wants to contribute to the community. He’s done as much for victims’ rights as anybody, almost to a fault.

“Ronnie doesn’t think like a lawyer,” he adds. “That’s not an unkind thing to say--I think he would agree. I come from the old school where the D.A. knew as much if not more than his associates on how to evaluate and try a case. You can’t go sit down and talk to him about a particular case, because he can’t evaluate it from a legal standpoint.”

According to Minton, Earle steers by his own moral sense instead of the law. “A lot of lawyers, the young ones, have this thing of not being able to distinguish sin from crime,” Minton says. “He’s not even interested in trying to distinguish sin from crime.”

“I would say that thinking like a lawyer is not the only way I think,” Earle counters. “Lawyers are taught reductionist thinking, to reduce everything to its smallest component parts. I think it’s more important to see things in a more holistic way, in terms of the connections between parts. If I only thought like a lawyer, I’d never have done the Children’s Advocacy Center or any of that stuff.”

But Earle might have avoided the biggest misstep of his career if he had better courtroom instincts. In 1994, he bewildered everyone, including his own staff, when he abruptly dropped his ethics case against Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison on the day her trial was to begin. The judge had refused to rule beforehand on whether crucial evidence gathered by the district attorney’s office would be admissible. Earle felt the case was lost, and folded.

A decade later, seasoned trial lawyers still shake their heads at his decision. Earle broke a cardinal rule: Never walk away from a courtroom fight. If the judge rules against your evidence on a lousy technicality, you bluster through anyway. If that doesn’t work, you take your case to the court of public opinion.

Instead Hutchison was automatically acquitted, Democrats were horrified, and jubilant Republicans vowed revenge. In 1996 and 2000, for the first and second times in his career, Earle faced a strong GOP challenger and won reelection with only 55% of the vote. He had always enjoyed wide support from conservatives, but in those elections he was shaken.

“Boy, they were after him,” recalls Butts, his campaign consultant. “The money was streaming in from Midland, Odessa, from Republicans all over the state. It shows that the choices you make will come back and bite you.”

Earle doesn’t talk much about the Hutchison case--”I did what I thought was the right thing at the time,” he says. But that failure shadows him still, and it is one reason why his office has proceeded cautiously on the campaign finance case.

Another reason, of course, is that this is the most important case of his career. Doesn’t that make him a little nervous? His response is characteristically uncensored.

“You mean because I might [mess] up? I’ve [messed up] before--it’s not the end of the world.”

Running against a third-party candidate last year, he won another term with 83% of the vote. He has the mandate to do what he wants, and that’s exactly what he says he’s doing now: calling into account those who violate the spirit of the law.

“There’s something about doing this work that makes you reach deeper and higher than you thought you could,” Earle says. “I’ve chosen it over and over again. And I’d do it again.”

He recently heard someone on the radio say that people are usually surprised by how their lives turn out--they had expected to accomplish more. Earle jotted it down on a scrap of paper and stuck it in his pocket, as he often does with random thoughts. Maybe he’ll come up short in his own mind too, this iconoclastic prosecutor nearing the end of his career.

Then again, maybe not.