Archives of Don Boyd – then and now
There is a pony somewhere in these photos. The documents hold so many road apples the scent sticks with you.
One string of them starts with the one-handed-man who may have murdered his Duluth wife. She had joked that she had found a briefcase full of cash under their bed. The one-hander worked for my high school speech teacher who, in later life, attended to the elderly Minnesota governor/senator Wendy Anderson. Wendy once made the cover of Time Magazine holding a fish he’d just caught.
The fisherman’s senatorial election defeat in 1978 was the first triumph of my Republican life. it was eclipsed when Democrats voted for and reelected Minnesota’s Republican Governor Arne Carlson 16 years later. They were scared shitless, as was I, that religiously extreme Republicans were going to take over the state.
Two years before that election I was booed off a Republican stage when I predicted that Donald Trump was the Republican Party’s future.
I never found the pony. Neither did the FBI. The papers belonged to Donald Boyd, who was being set up as a patsy to save Minnesota’s Democratic Party. Anticipating this, Don organized more evidence than the FBI was willing to wade through. He left a trailer full of records at the FBI’s doorstep, making sure that the press took a picture of his documents.
He was sure they would vindicate him from news stories that suggested he had stolen a fortune from taxpayers. He was a target in a politicized investigation by an FBI which was eager to put the scandal to bed fast.
Mr. Boyd was also in partisan judicial cross hairs. Defending the Democrats behind the scenes was Judge Gerald Heaney, whose name would later grace Duluth’s federal courthouse. Heaney pushed Boyd into the night and the glare of watch tower searchlights, like the POW in Billy Wilder’s movie Stalag 17.
Manning the tower was another judge, former Republican Congressman Donald Alsop. Appointed by former house colleague Richard Nixon to his judgeship Alsop was smarting from the Republican party’s Watergate humiliation. Surely, some Democrat was guilty of something. Boyd’s goose was cooked.
Donald Boyd was an entrepreneur in the employ of the federal job creation bureaucracy. Among other things he had traveled northern Minnesota helping promote tourism when he set up office in the Upper Great Lakes Regional Commission (UGLRC).
This was Congressman John Blatnik’s baby and it was thick with DFL operatives. The records he took to the FBI filled 20 boxes.
His major project was working with industrial engineers and Michigan Tech to develop a machine that would mold wood chips into commercial products. A prototype to mold them into pallets for shipping cargo was just about ready.
He was not happy to find that the UGLRC leadership was eager take over his project and cash in on it. He had the same ambition. After his imprisonment an associate told him that he had been too selfish.
After his release from prison Mr. Boyd filed a Freedom of Information request against the FBI for the return of his wagon load of documentation. They grudgingly returned some disorganized scraps, absent much of the most important evidence. The documents fell into my possession.
My dad was phobic about corruption. It started when he was a kid living next to the infamous Boss Pendergast’s Kansas City.
No one has ever loved the Hatch Act like dad did. It forbids federal workers from politicking.
As I write this, my dad’s ashes are blowing into a tornado over our tax dollars being spent on prime-time television to praise President Trump for his ICE raids.
We moved to Minnesota after my dad missed a promotion because he told his boss, the Kansas Insurance Commissioner, that he should stop accepting gifts from the companies that Kansas regulated.
Of course, my ears pricked up 45 years ago when Claudia mentioned that FBI agents were waiting to question her boss, John Muldoon, the city’s Director of Personnel. They were curious about the 1974 congressional election.
That year there had been a civil war between area Democrats over who would succeed the retiring Congressman John Blatnik. The convention endorsed one of the Perpich brothers rather than John Blatnik’s pick, his Administrative Assistant, Jim Oberstar. The Perpich side was outraged when Oberstar backed out of his agreement to abide by the endorsement and won the primary. The Perpiches couldn’t help but wonder where Oberstar’s money came from.
Rumors had it that it came from Blatnik’s baby, the UGLRC? Those rumors reached the FBI.
This was ancient news when I published a column called “Oberstar’s Laundry” in the Reader’s November 2005 issue. At the time I was thinking about challenging Oberstar in the 2006 election. I hadn’t forgotten that old news.
My column offhandedly mentioned the sentencing of a Don Boyd to prison. The day after my column appeared I got an email asking if I was interested in letting a jailbird buy me a cup of coffee. You’re damn right I was.
From the moment I met Don Boyd, I was sure he had been badly wronged. I started interviewing him. I took notes as he showed me the scraps the FBI sent him back. I printed out 20 inches of news stories about a scandal that helped Republicans sweep the state in 1978.
I spent months traveling to St. Paul to research in the Minnesota State History Museum.
The only thing beyond my reach were the transcripts of lengthy federal trials. They were too fragile to be sent to me.
I did file to run against Congressman Oberstar and even got invited to debate him on public television in a three-way debate as an independent candidate. But I didn’t campaign. I’d spent too much time researching to organize.
I kept at it until another swindle distracted me. It was the refusal to allow voters to vote in a referendum on a massive school building project. Apparently, I’m always up for a lost cause if it’s a good one.
My failure to vindicate Don is still on my conscience but I’m keeping Don’s docs just in case I outlast Donald Trump.
Welty tries to make sense of America’s hallucinations at: lincolndemocrat.com.