Corruption charges rock Union, already facing economic woes

By Ron Barnett - The Greenville News

UNION -- Folks around Union thought they had seen enough notoriety for a lifetime when a young mother named Susan Smith claimed her two sons had been kidnapped, then admitted that she actually had killed them herself.

Fifteen years later, the town is under a dark cloud again. The mayor, the county supervisor, the city zoning and building director, the county tax assessor — and even the former sheriff who convinced Smith to confess to her crime — have been indicted on varying charges ranging from extortion to obstruction of justice to sale of illicit drugs from a county office.

Most recently, the county clerk of court was charged with embezzlement of more than $200,000 and misconduct in office.

This all comes at a time when one in five Union County residents are unemployed — giving it one of the highest unemployment rates in the state.

‘New brooms sweep clean'

Gov. Mark Sanford, facing his own political and personal problems after admitting to an affair with a woman in Argentina, came to town recently to install a new clerk of court.

“It's our belief that new brooms sweep clean,” Sanford said.

A week later, he appointed a retired National Guard brigadier general to replace the county supervisor. Tommy Sinclair, also a former assistant superintendent in Union County schools, said he'd do the job for a dollar a year.

In a town of 8,800, where everybody knows everybody, the charges have hit close to almost everyone.

“It broke my heart,” said Jeannette Tatum, a 67-year-old school bus driver who remembers former Mayor Bruce Morgan from the time he was a little boy, riding around town with his dad who picked up laundry for dry-cleaning.

“I thought he was a good Christian boy — which he probably was,” she said after finishing lunch at the Palmetto Restaurant one recent afternoon. “The devil just got in there and got ahold of him, just like everything else.”

Down at Main Street Hair Care, retired textile machinist Larry Lawson and barber Robbie Jett, who says he cut Susan Smith's hair on the day she rolled her car into John D. Long Lake with her sons inside, were laughing it up over a news report about a former state legislator who was caught in a cemetery in Columbia with an 18-year-old stripper, sex toys and a Viagra pill.

What's happened in their town is no laughing matter though, they said.

“I know times are hard, but there's no excuse for that,” Lawson said of the crimes his lifelong friends are accused of.

Morgan, along with former building and zoning official Jeffery Lawson, no relation to Larry Lawson, pleaded guilty in February to taking $30,000 in bribes or kickbacks from contractors seeking to do business with the city. Morgan is serving a 71-month sentence in federal prison.

Lawson, who agreed to wear a recording device to help authorities build the case against the mayor after they confronted Lawson about the scheme, is serving a year, according to U.S. Attorney Walt Wilkins.

The FBI and the State Law Enforcement Division began investigating after one of the contractors tipped authorities, and the probe grew to include the county officials, Wilkins said.

An indictment alleges that County Supervisor Donald Betenbaugh and County Tax Assessor Willie Randall Jr. received $50,000 in kickbacks related to the county's purchase of a building, and that Randall, with Betenbaugh's “knowledge and acquiescence,” sold cocaine and hydrocodone from the tax assessor's office.

Both have pleaded not guilty, as has former Sheriff Howard Wells, who gained national prominence in leading the investigation in the Susan Smith case in 1994. Smith is serving a life sentence in a maximum-security women's prison 50 miles away.

Wells is accused of witness tampering and lying to authorities in a case involving a personal loan agreement for “at least $100,000,” Wilkins said. His charges are unrelated to those of the other county and city officials but grew out of the same investigation, Wilkins said. Wells wasn't in office at the time the alleged crime occurred, Wilkins said.