156. Tennessee slime

Utter shamelessness has a kind of crystalline purity of its own.  Take the case of Tennessee's long-serving General Sessions  judge Thomas Alva Austin (no Edison, he), already encountered once before.  (See post 60.)  Judge Austin's court had jurisdiction over misdemeanors and traffic offenses, and he regularly ordered offenders to attend certain private driving schools or patronize a particular "private probation firm. "  (Private probation firm?  And they were surprised by what happened??) 

You might be wondering how the judge chose which driving schools and private probation firms to favor with his defendants' patronage.  This sequence of stills from an FBI video explains the judicial decision-making process.  You'll notice that the particular bid wasn't sealed.

Having been caught in full-color - none of that old-fashioned grainy b & w through-the-vent stuff - what could ex-Judge Austin possibly say in his defense?  Well, how about: It's my wife's fault.

You see, the reason he extorted kickbacks from the driving schools and probation firm, it turns out, is that his wife was having what Austin's lawyer terms an "extramarital lesbian relationship".  (Did you know there was another type of lesbian relationship in Tennessee?) 

Tim Buckley once sang about this very situation: "The saddest thing in the whole wide world / Is to find your baby's been with another girl."  But the character in the song dealt with it by drinking himself blind, not with extorting thousands of dollars from local business people.

Furthermore, nothing in the song indicates that the character stayed blind drunk even for six months, which is how long the judge says he was demanding kickbacks.  By coincidence that also happens to be the the length of time during which the FBI documented the judge's shakedowns.  Amazing, isn't it, the staggering good luck that led the FBI to begin its investigation into the judge's regular commission of major felonies on a systematic basis at the precise moment the judge first began to commit them?

(The prosecution's witnesses alleged that the judge's shakedown schemes continued for ten years, and I'd peg the probable truth of those allegations at someplace north of 99.99%.)

So ex-Judge Austin, we know for a fact, was a thug who used his power to shake down local business people in the style of Mafia hoodlums.   We can feel quite certain that he's also lying to the federal judge.  He gives every sign of lacking a conscience, the distinguishing feature of sociopaths.  But he's got one thing going for him.  It's the trump card played by his attorney:  He's heterosexual. 

Tending to confirm my long-distance diagnosis of sociopathy, ex-Judge Austin was cruel enough to get one of his own children to write, or at least attach his or her name to, a letter to the sentencing judge that said, "My younger brother will have to live with his mother and her new girlfriend if my dad has to go away."   It will be interesting to see whether a judge in Tennessee will be receptive to the argument that it's better for a child to be raised by a crook and a liar - and the type of creature who would extort such a letter from his own child - than by a lesbian.

Austin's lawyer, trying to put a positive spin on things, pointed out in his sentencing memorandum that "[a]t no time was Mr. Austin charged with any crime or with judicial impropriety prior to the current indictment, and the current charges did not compromise his judicial integrity."  Which raises the interesting philosophical question: Is it possible to compromise a quality you don't possess?