Representative Don Kenney, the public servant best known for his ability to fit $55,000 in cash into a gym bag, was a very noticeable defendant at the group arraignment last week.
For one thing, he came alone, unlike some of the accused, who were accompanied by friends and spouses. For another, he sat right near the front of the courtroom, directly behind the row of gray-suited lawyers, while other indicted legislators slumped onto benches near the back. And while most of the accused barely stirred, he kept fidgeting and leaning forward, in the exact posture of the teenage boys who every week file into Mormon chapels like Kenney's own and cluster together impatiently on similar benches, yearning for the service to be over. It was as though, having agreed to be the "quarterback" during the legislative "sting" that had brought him before the bench, he was still perceiving himself as a leader and thought he should stand out.
To those who knew him well, he stood out for another reason--because he was there at all, and needn't have been. Ever since news of the "sting" had broken, political observers had been pointing to some legislators and figuring that tiny intellects could have made them vulnerable to offers of easy money and power during a setup so obvious that it should have been spotted even by someone who doesn't speak English. But these onlookers were not able to pinpoint any transparent weaknesses or motives that had fated Kenney to become involved.
"Chuy Higuera is a joke. Jim Hartdegen is a decent man, but nobody has accused him of being very bright. Carolyn Walker is one of those nice ladies, a hugger, who reminds me of Aunt Jemima," says attorney Gary Peter Klahr, a friend and business partner of Kenney's since they attended law school together, who is also defending Kenney's co-defendant, Representative Sue Laybe, against the state's charges. "The only one of them who had it made in this world is Don Kenney. He has such tremendous talent. It just doesn't make sense that he is involved.
"If I were his lawyer, I wouldn't plead entrapment. I'd plead insanity."
Others were worried that Kenney was dragged into the "sting" operation by law enforcement officials who feared his willingness, as new chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, to review the state's strict criminal code. They pointed out that Kenney had already made it clear that, where his predecessor Jim Skelly had declared law and order to be government's first priority, Kenney would reconsider measures that would directly affect, among other things, the funding of law enforcement agencies.
Primary among things slated for review was the Criminal Justice Enhancement Fund (CJEF), a slush fund created by a surcharge on fines that pours practically unrestricted into law enforcement's hands. Insiders say that Kenney supported a movement to think CJEF through again.
"I feel a little uneasy about this sting, because he had let it be known that he was willing to look anew at these things," says Representative John Kromko. "And if you have this guy who is going to cut funds, it is something you think about, if you are a cop."
The charge is vehemently denied by the County Attorney's Office ("Nobody was targeted," says spokesman Bill FitzGerald), and even those most suspicious of the motives of the sting's architects cannot point to anything except circumstances to prove their theory. (Kenney himself won't be interviewed.)
What emerges from their comments and others', instead of definitive proof of a frame-up, is a portrait of a bright but not influential official who may have been coming into his era of power when he zipped his political future shut along with his bulging duffel. But he wasn't into that era yet: His peers say again and again that it was absurd for Kenney to believe he could have mustered the support among his colleagues that would have allowed a bill supporting legalized gambling to pass through the House. (And if he believed it at first, he couldn't have believed it for long, as he failed again and again to convince his colleagues to take dirty money. Neither Leo Corbet nor Candice Nagel nor Jack Jewett nor Stan Barnes--among others--bought into the sting, despite Kenney's efforts to involve them that sometimes went on for months.) Kenney was a "quarterback" who never even had a chance at the ball.
They also talk about a man who never demonstrated openly that he was either ambitious or slippery, but who filled many fellow legislators with uneasiness they couldn't pin down. "There was just a slickness, a lack of conviction," says one insider. Even so, there was nothing that would have led the speaker to suspect Kenney was capable of bribery and extortion, as the "sting's" transcripts have revealed. "I was shocked," the insider says. "As much as I didn't care for the guy, I couldn't believe how disgusting those tapes are."
According to friends, Kenney's eagerness to learn the sexual secrets of his fellow legislators in order to shake them down, and his deft handlings of J. Anthony Vincent's stacks of bills, as documented in transcripts and videotapes now on view at the Phoenix Police Department, are particularly difficult to believe in light of his devout conversion to Mormonism.
Attorney Sid Rosen, who attended law school with Kenney at the University of Arizona and later went into practice with him, remembers that Kenney took some flak from his Catholic family in Bisbee when he switched churches as a teenager, but that he never wavered. Rosen says that even during the pinnacle of law school pressures, Kenney never smoked or drank, and that he even abstained from caffeine in deference to the strict Mormon health code.
After working his way through law school, Kenney struggled for success. Despite his good academic record and abilities, he never did climb into elite legal circles. (He refers to himself as a tax lawyer, and yet some of the more prominent tax attorneys in town had never heard of him before the "sting.") He made a decent living though, and Rosen says that mattered greatly to him. For as long as he and Rosen have been friends, becoming financially independent was a top priority for Kenney, perhaps because his beginnings in Bisbee--he was the stepchild of an unprosperous plumber--were humble. "He had a burning desire to succeed, and the prestige element was very important to him," says Rosen.
If prestige mattered, Kenney may have thanked God for the real estate boom of the early Eighties. Klahr, a former city councilmember and current school board member, says he still has "hundreds of thousands of dollars" invested with Kenney in partnerships. He remembers that Kenney invested heavily in Chandler land and made the killing there that had eluded him in law. Very shortly, his Chandler deals had netted him about $10 million, according to Klahr, and Kenney moved his family from an average home in central Phoenix into a genuine spread in Moon Valley.
Unfortunately, that $10 million was not the beginning of a lucky streak: Klahr says that Kenney continued to buy after '85 when he should have been selling and that there have been no more big deals. These days, his spreads of land and apartment houses are "at best breaking even and at worst losing badly," and are highly leveraged, says Klahr. There is a part of Kenney that is a natural real estate speculator.
"Don is a wheeler-dealer," says Klahr. "I always thought he was ethical as far as any kind of land dealer can be. In that way, he reminds me of Dennis DeConcini, who also speculates in land, and who is basically honest but could be taken into questionable areas because of the nature of his business."
One aspect of Kenney's wheeling-and-dealing comes up more than once when talking with his friends: He drives a relentless bargain. Rosen remembers that, despite their many years of congenial partnership, their business negotiations when they separated their practices were actually fierce. And court documents show that, although Kenney loaned money to his first wife after their divorce in the Seventies--money that enabled her and their two children to hold onto their home for a while--he did so at 19 percent interest.
If he is a wheeler-dealer in the business world, his image was the opposite at the legislature, where he served four terms, took a four-year break and returned in 1989. Observers say he hasn't seemed inclined to cut political deals--that he is not the sort of hustler who prowls the halls trying to put fellow legislators in his debt, for a payoff, and that lobbyists have not lined up outside his door. Beyond his desire for the chairmanship of Judiciary, he hasn't seemed to burn with political ambition. (He did want the chairmanship badly, to the point of voting to pass a hotly contested budget last session after Speaker of the House Jane Hull had made it known that chairmanships awaited supporters.)
Or perhaps it was just that he knew better than to press anything. He told Rosen five years ago that he yearns after a seat in Congress, and he confessed to Vincent, the undercover agent who led the "sting," that he hoped to become Speaker of the House--perhaps as a steppingstone to grander things. But he may have been quiet about such dreams at the statehouse, since he knew that the time hadn't come when his fellow legislators would line up behind him. The time hadn't come because of his identity problem.
The Republican party at the legislature is split cleanly between archconservatives and moderates, and Kenney has never seemed to fit in anywhere. Although he is a Mormon and pro-life, he also favors spending for education--an unusual position for a right winger. He has supported moderates against archconservatives in several leadership fights, and yet the moderates don't trust him, either. "Legislators often said to me that he would commit to them on a position, but that you could never be sure of Kenney. You would always have to check with him again," says one moderate legislator. "Don was always looked at suspiciously because you never knew what camp he was in."
This impression of isolation was so strong that some legislators say they were surprised to read since news of the "sting" broke that Kenney hoped to become Speaker. "He didn't have the respect or loyal following to become Speaker," says one insider.
Although another legislator says that Kenney may have been preparing to make his bid for influence by spreading money around, a time-honored tactic among politicians. (Police transcripts reveal that he was planning to keep for himself $30,000 of the $55,000 he obtained from Vincent, but that nearly all of the rest was earmarked for other legislators' campaigns.) "Kenney was talking about dishing out a lot of money to people, and that is how [former speaker] Burton Barr ran this place," says Representative Kromko. "When he stood up and said, `Vote for this,' the Republicans knew that they were voting on whether they were getting $2,000 for their campaign, or their opponents were." If Kenney's political career has been destroyed just as he was preparing to claim it, there is a peculiar epilogue to the event: He is remarkably in step with other law school classmates who first became Arizona's political future and then its shameful present. His path is so entwined with theirs that he could seem to be on a schedule.
Now 52, Kenney came through the UofA with Senator Dennis DeConcini and former legislator Leo Corbet. In the past twelve months, Corbet, DeConcini, and Kenney have all become embroiled in major scandals--Corbet in connection with another attempted "sting" that cost him his legislative seat and DeConcini as one of the notorious Keating Five. So far, only Corbet has been cleared.
"If I were his lawyer, I wouldn't plead entrapment. I'd plead insanity.