John E. Clark

The Fall of the Duke of Duval: a Prosecutor's Journal John E. Clark

The name Parr may not be familiar to most readers, but many know Lyndon Johnson's first U. S. Senate election was tainted: this 1948 "Box 13" fraud was perpetrated in the town of Alice in Jim Wells County, Texas, by George Parr, the "duke" of neighboring Duval County. Clark, an assistant federal prosecutor under U. S. Attorney William Sessions (later FBI director) in the1970s, played a key role in the long federal grand jury investigation of the Parr machine and later trials of its leading operators. His book describes the system of patronage and corruption Archie Parr developed in the early 1900s and his son George ran until a 1970s legal onslaught--set off quite unintentionally by an IRS audit of an Austin contractor--brought it down. The Parrs controlled their territory's dominant Hispanic population by selecting Latino agents and providing jobs and services to needy constituents; in the meantime, astonishing sums of money flowed from county school boards and reclamation offices to the Parrs and their friends. A true-crime tale with a vivid local-politics focus.