LITTLE ROCK — IT’S AN OLD, old story and an all too familiar one. Power corrupts. Temptation lures. And a public official whom all once respected goes bad. And may now be headed for a prison cell. It just happened to 57-year-old Clarence Harold Smith. The former county judge of Newton County has pled guilty to mail fraud-and cheating the county out of at least $69,140.
Sad.
Harold Smith admitted to initiating a phony sale-of some heavy equipment-that netted him more than $24,000 in public funds. The FBIdiscovered the scam and built a solid case against the county judge, who’d spent 11 years in office. Confronted with the evidence, he had little recourse but to fess up and face the music. And it’s not a pretty tune: He faces a prison term of up to 20years, a $250,000 fine, and having to make restitution.
The current county judge, John Griffith, who defeated Mr. Smith for re-election by only 33 votes, supplied the moral of the story when he told our reporter, Robert J. Smith: “My opinion is, as an elected official, you are held to a higher standard, and if there’s wrongdoing, you are held to a higher standard. You suffer the consequences.”
Or as a news release from the FBI’s special agent in charge of the case, Valerie Parlave, put it well: “Corruption erodes public trust and strikes at the heart of good government.”
Harold Smith’s tumble into a federal courtroom began in 2008 when a diligent FBI agent began examining the county’s finances. They weren’t in good shape. Indeed, that same year, Judge Smith had told his fellow county officials to cut their budgets by 20 percent. Even while he was stealing from his.
He was found out. Last year a state auditor told lawmakers that in 2007 and 2008, then Judge Smith had approved undocumented expenses totaling $214,000. No wonder the county was hurting. Federal investigators said Judge Smith had bought heavy construction equipment at least six times through a third party, then directed the buyer to sell the equipment to the county at an inflated price.
According to the feds investigating the case, the single most flagrant example of how Judge Smith scammed the taxpayers he was supposed to be serving came in May of 2008. That’s when he bought a Caterpillar bulldozer from a Little Rock company for $2,500. The ’dozer was put in somebody else’s name, and that somebody repainted it and put new tracks on it. Then, following Judge Smith’s instructions, rather than bill the county for the work, the buyer inflated the price of some dirt work he was doing for the county by $7,600. Also at Judge Smith’s direction, the man then mailed a check to a tractor company to pay for the newlyinstalled tracks on the bulldozer.
Finally, the man sold the refurbished bulldozer to the county in June of 2008 for $26,900, paying that money to Mr. Smith, and leaving the former county judge with a nifty profit of $24,400. Thewhole deal was as twisty as it was corrupt. And in retrospect, it’s hard to see how Harold Smith ever thought he could get away with it in this era when cell phones and computers retain such good (and incriminating) records.
It’ll now be up to the federal district judge in this case, Jimm Larry Hendren, to weigh the extent of damage done by this breach of the pubic trust. The judge is expected to announce his sentence in the coming weeks.
Beyond his formal sentence, Harold Smith will also forfeit what is beyond price-his once good name. And a man’s good name really counts in Newton County, a close-knit rural community deep in the Ozarks where everybody seems to know everybody else, if they’re not actually kin. In that sense, it’s a kind of intensified Arkansas. It’s also a place where a man’s word is his bond. Or better be. And when that bond is broken, people don’t take kindly to it. They note and remember. It’s part of the code of the hills.
One member of Newton County’s quorum court, J.R. East, summed up a whole folk attitude when he said, “Harold was a friend of mine, but he shouldn’t have done what he did and he deserves whatever he gets.” Justice is justice. Even and especially for a public official who has broken faith with the friends and neighbors who put their trust in him. And that may be the saddest part of all that Harold Smith did.
Editorial, Pages 10 on 07/29/2010