Sexual Blackmail in U.S. Oil Policy

I published the article below at this blog on March 30, 2011 before I had ever heard the name Jeffrey Epstein. While reviewing the blog to correct dead links and otherwise clean up the posts, I realized once again how events from the past tend to repeat themselves in the present day. Unfortunately, the past events which were hinted at in the excerpts quoted below as "Deep Politics in Dallas," were never fully grasped by historians or the general public. The men in Texas and Missouri involved in the honey traps described below, for the most part, got away scot-free with their escapades. Their true motives were never revealed during their own lifetimes.

Only as we look back, knowing what we know now, can we begin to see the pattern that emerges. The Texas men owned vast oil resources, not just in Texas, but worldwide. Although they claimed to be "independent" oilmen, they had strong ties to "big oil," as well through relationships with other families in Texas connected to the old Standard Oil banking and securities industries. They also had deeply embedded connections to organized criminal enterprises throughout the country. This is only one part of how those combined resources helped them set up a system of sexual blackmail used to control votes in the Senate and later in the Richard Nixon White House.

Linda Minor, January 16, 2026 

 DEEP POLITICS IN DALLAS

An excerpt from Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK:                                                                                

No one has yet documented the rumors one hears in Dallas that Ruby's relationship to the wealthy oilmen and "high rollers" of the Del Charro derived from his practice of supplying girls for them, their parties, and their private clubs.

What remains unexplained is the story of Ruby's relationship in 1963 to Candy Barr, a nationally known stripper and protegee of Mickey Cohen in Los Angeles. In 1957, Barr had been arrested and convicted on trumped-up marijuana charges, by the same players (prosecutor Bill Alexander and Judge Joe B. Brown) who in 1964 would convict Ruby on evidence that led to a reversal; Barr's defense attorneys, Joe Tonahill and Mel Belli, also represented Ruby. 27

In 1963 Ruby was regularly in telephone contact with Candy Barr, who was then out on parole but not permitted to visit Dallas. The rumor persists that the phone calls related to the stripper's attempt to blackmail someone of prominence. The rumor is reinforced by the knowledge that sexual blackmail was a practice for which Mickey Cohen was famous. 28

For some reason the Barr case also drew the attention of Gordon McLendon, who was one of those who told me in 1977 that she [Barr] had been framed on the marijuana charge (by members of the Dallas Police Narcotics Squad). McLendon's brother-in-law Lester May became her first attorney. McLendon told me this when I asked him for information about his friend Bedford Wynne.

While not giving me the answers I was hoping for, he volunteered the detail, which seemed trivial at the time, that Wynne's intimate friend George Owen, later the first [sic] husband of Maureen Dean, had been the man present at Candy Barr's arrest who may have helped set it up. 29

 Maureen "Mo" Biner Dean

He also volunteered to me the detail, which at the time seemed unrelated, that when Bobby Baker emerged in 1972 from his time in prison for tax evasion and fraud, he went to stay with McLendon at his Cielo Ranch north of Dallas. I thought later that McLendon here was possibly standing in for Bedford Wynne and Clint Murchison, Jr., two of McLendon's friends who had been mentioned in the Bobby Baker hearings and were now unwilling to be publicly associated with Baker.

Since recent revelations about Watergate, I now wonder if the real link was not George Owen. Owen was extremely close to Bedford Wynne, and would party with him in Mexico, or even in his law office, where William McKenzie (of whom more in Chapter 18) was a partner.

George Owen also introduced to Bedford Wynne (the friend of Bobby Baker and member of his Quorum Club) to the woman Owen would later marry: Maureen Biner, who played a much-underestimated role in Watergate as the girlfriend, and then the wife, of John Dean.

27. Gary Mills and Ovid Demaris, Jack Ruby (New American Library, 1968), 64-68.

28. Davis, Mafia Kingfish, 262, where it is asserted that Marilyn Monroe knew both Mickey Cohen and John Roselli.

29. Mills and Demaris, Jack Ruby, 66.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A second excerpt from Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993), p. 236:

The most important of these [scandals in Washington involving politicians, call girls, and assignations recorded by intelligence experts for intelligence purposes] is Heidi Rikan's call-girl operation, a few doors from the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Watergate, which two separate and well-researched books have now seen as the key to the 1972 Watergate break-in and scandal.

According to both books, the phone line inside the DNC which was supposed to be tapped by Howard Hunt's Watergate burglar (including Frank Sturgis) was a special line (not going through the central switchboard), which DNC staffers and friends used to phone the Heidi Rikan call-girl operation. 37 Jim Hougan adds that the phone line was already being tapped by a stringer for Jack Anderson, Lou Russell. 38

Lou Russell was a former FBI agent who had helped Nixon with the Hiss case when he was both HUAC's committee counsel and also Hoover's informant on the Committee. 39 An employee in 1963 of Watergate burglar James McCord, Russell was close to Heidi Rikan's call girls whose line was the target of the Watergate burglars. Russell also had an unexplained financial relationship to McCord's attorney, Bernard Fensterwald (a longtime backer of the Garrison and other investigations of the John F. Kennedy assassination) and may have been working for Fensterwald as well.

The book, White House Call Girl, pictured above, was written as "fully sourced political non-fiction" by Phil Stanford and first published as an e-book in 2013. 

Bernard Fensterwald

Fensterwald

At this point it should be pointed out that James McCord's attorney, Bernard Fensterwald, as early as 1957 was employed as an aide to Democratic Senator Thomas Hennings of Missouri, who became John Dean's father-in-law in February 1962 when Dean was first married to Karla Hennings. An attorney from Nashville, Tennessee, where his father was manager of a clothing store, Fensterwald became an administrative assistant to the Senate subcommittee on Constitutional Rights chaired by Senator Hennings. Fensterwald resigned from that position with the subcommitte in January 1959 to become the top aide of Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee.

Sen. Kefauver's subcommittee had conducted an investigation into the professional sport of boxing and proposed legislation creating a national boxing commissioner with "power to clean  up the fight game by withholding licenses from boxers, managers and promoters in interstate bouts," a bill not supported by Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Soon after that Fensterwald was fired by Kefauver, and soon found a job working for Democratic Senator from Missouri--Senator Edward V. Long, a defender of Jimmy Hoffa.

Fensterwald showed considerable animosity against RFK in March 1965 over the Jimmy Hoffa case:

MARCH 3, 1965

By JACK C. VANDENBERG

WASHINGTON (UPI) — Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, D - N.Y , clashed with a Senate subcommittee today over its airing of charges that he mishandled an investigation of Teamster boss James R. Hoffa while he was attorney general. Kennedy appeared before the judiciary subcommittee to protest what he called the "implication that I handled myself in some shocking manner while I was attorney general." The former cabinet member made no attempt to hide his irritation over the way the sub-committee handled the charge leveled against him by New York attorney Thomas A. Bolan, a witness at Tuesday's hearing.

Bolan said Kennedy had tried to influence public opinion against Hoffa by instigating unfavorable publicity while the Teamster boss was under indictment. 

Makes Special Appearance

Kennedy, who denied the charge Tuesday, made a special appearance before the subcommittee today to repeat his denial and object to this handling of the matter.

He told the subcommittee he believed it was improper for Chairman Edward V. Long, D-Mo., to make statements about the matter "after hearing only one side of the story. After hearing Bolan's charge Tuesday, Long said he considered it a "shocking matter." The chairman said he would refer the testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee for whatever action that group might want to take. Kennedy, a former chief counsel for a Senate investigation subcommittee, said he believed it was standard practice —when it was known a matter was coming up — to try to present both sides of a story.

Bolan had said that Kennedy arranged in March, 1961, to have Life magazine publish a story based on an interview with Sam Baron, a disgruntled Teamster Union official, at a time when Hoffa was under indictment.

Definition Of 'Fink'

In an exchange today with subcommittee counsel Bernard Fensterwald Jr., Kennedy said he saw nothing wrong with his actions as attorney general. Fensterwald asked Kennedy if he believed it was proper for a government official to "act as an intermediary between the press and a fink."

"What's your definition of a fink?" Kennedy demanded. "A person who is a stool pigeon," Fensterwald  retorted. "That's your definition," Kennedy snapped. "I consider Mr. Baron as a public spirited person who was doing his duty."

Fensterwald asked if Kennedy thought it was proper for a public official to arrange for publicity unfavorable to a person under indictment. "I never did anything like that and that is the implication of the testimony and remarks made by the subcommittee yesterday," Kennedy said heatedly.

At Tuesday's hearing, Kennedy's methods in prosecuting New York attorney Roy M. Cohn also were questioned. Bolan represented Cohn in New York last year when the former McCarthy committee counsel was tried and acquitted of charges of attempting to bribe a U.S. attorney. Cohn, who also testified Tuesday, made only indirect references to Kennedy. But Bolan told the subcommittee that Kennedy planted an article about a dissatisfied Teamster official in Life magazine. 

Denies Charge

Kennedy denied the charge, the New York Democrat said the Teamster official—Sam Baron—came to him "in fear of his life." According to Kennedy, Baron said he wanted to get in touch with some non-governmental official to tell his story. Kennedy said he set up a meeting with Life magazine with the understanding that nothing would be published until something happened to Baron. At the same time, Hoffa was under indictment, and Baron was "cooperating with the FBI," Kennedy said. Bolan was testifying before the subcommittee about a mail over placed on him. Bolan said he came across the information about Kennedy's involvement in the Life story while investigating the circumstances surrounding a similar story on Cohn.

Senator Ed Long, for whom Fensterwald worked for several years as counsel for his committees and subcommittees, would later be accused of business relationships with Hoffa's attorney, Morris Shenker of St. Louis. Shenker's 1989 obituary stated:

Shenker

Shenker, a Russian immigrant who grew up in north St. Louis, first made a name for himself as a young lawyer by doing free legal work for the poor and getting involved in Democratic politics.
He had been recurrently in the national spotlight since representing gambling figures before the Estes Kefauver hearings on organized crime in the early 1950s.

Hoffa, his most famous client, had links to organized crime and disappeared in 1975. He is presumed dead.

Because of his Teamsters connection, Shenker, who operated the Dunes Hotel and Casino in the 1970s, ran afoul of the Nevada Gaming Commission. (Shenker's name had also surfaced often in connection with loans from the Teamsters Pension Fund.)

Despite state and federal investigations, however, Shenker escaped indictment until this year. In February, a federal grand jury accused him of conspiring to conceal hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Internal Revenue Service and bankruptcy creditors. The money supposedly was diverted from a California partnership owned by his children to individuals in Canada and then back to Shenker's secretary in Las Vegas in an elaborate scheme to avoid creditors. Shenker denied any wrongdoing.

Shenker had filed for bankruptcy in 1984 after a $34-million court verdict against him for money he borrowed from the Culinary Workers Pension Fund for resorts in Southern California and other projects. He had been involved in court battles over his finances ever since.

What did Gary Cartwright and 'Mad Dog' Know in 1963?

Notes on Mad Dogs: On Being Young, Talented, and Slightly Insane in Old Austin

By Clay Smith, Fri., Jan. 26, 2001

Originally published in The Austin Chronicle

Anyone who has tried to write about Mad Dog, a bizarre moment of this state's literary history, can lay claim to the same feelings Susan Sontag experienced when she wrote "Notes on 'Camp'" in 1964. "It's embarrassing to be solemn and treatise-like about Camp," she declared right off the bat, and proceeded to sketch the sensibility of camp in the form of descriptive notes because "to snare a sensibility in words, especially one that is alive and powerful, one must be tentative and nimble." The essay form is too definite, too knowing, perhaps, to snare a sensibility. Mad Dog is not a sensibility that is alive and powerful, but it was at one time. But the rules are the same for snaring lost or living sensibilities, and in the case of Mad Dog, for which there is not an abundance of recorded history, the effort of resuscitating its lost sensibility can be addressed most effectively by making notes about it. 

These notes are for Bud Shrake. 

"There were people who refused to join Mad Dog. ... I think they thought it was too elitist. So we decided it was: It was too elitist for them."

-- Bud Shrake being interviewed, Jan. 13, 2001

Defining "Mad Dog"

1. An attempt at definition: Mad Dog is the chosen name of a band of rebellious artists -- mainly writers and journalists but also musicians and painters -- who lived in Texas, mostly in Austin, in the late Sixties and early Seventies who partied and wrote in an identifiably Texan, outlaw manner. Members include  

• Texas Monthly senior editor Gary Cartwright and his wife Phyllis; 
• novelist and screenwriter Bud Shrake (Shrake and Cartwright were the founders); 
• Dennis Hopper, who starred in Kid Blue (1973), a movie that Shrake wrote; 
• Marvin Schwarz, who produced the movie; 
• actors Peter Boyle and Warren Oates, also in Kid Blue; 
• Willie Nelson; 
• Jerry Jeff Walker (and later, his wife Susan); 
• Peter and Jody Gent (Peter Gent is the author of the classic football satire North Dallas Forty and a former Dallas Cowboys wide receiver); 
• Bill Brammer, author of The Gay Place; 
• painter and sculptor Fletcher Boone; 
• labor lawyer David Richards and his wife Ann, who would become the governor of Texas; 
• Larry L. King; and 
• Threadgill's proprietor Eddie Wilson, among others. 

Once a Mad Dog always a Mad Dog, but the hotbed of Mad Dog activity has long since passed. The unofficial anthem of Mad Dog is said to be "Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother," by Ray Wylie Hubbard, but the Jerry Jeff Walker version. 

Holding a book-signing at Scholz Garten (in this case, for Larry L. King's … and other dirty stories in 1968) is the epitome of Mad Dog style: a little beer with your books. The man smoking behind King (seated) is artist Fletcher Boone, and behind him, Bill Brammer. (Larry L. King Archives)

Trying to define the sensibility of Mad Dog in one statement would betray the spirit of the group, since harboring anything as sophisticated as a "sensibility" is not what Mad Dogs were after. There was no purpose to Mad Dog (more on this later); its motto was "Doing Indefinable Services to Mankind" and its credo was "Everything that is not a mystery is guesswork.

The Big Bust

George Washington Owen, Jr. started life on August 14, 1925 as the son of a Texas couple near the Corsicana oil fields in small town Emhouse. They moved to the big city of Dallas while he was in high school, graduating from Crozier Tech, formerly Oak Cliff High, in the historic downtown area in 1947. At that point he moved up to playing college basketball for Southern Methodist University, also in Dallas, from 1948 through 1951. As the photo below indicates, his basketball team was successful, taking him all the way to New York to play in Madison Square Garden in his junior year. A guard, he was often there on the rebound and sometimes saved the game, at least according to the newspapers reporting the game results.

At least George was enough of a star at SMU to catch the eye, and for a time the heart, of Nell McGrew, country girl from Rotan, near Abilene. Perhaps she was impressed by the fact he was six years older when they married in their junior year in college; he had taken several years after high school to serve in the war. But the newspaper photos would not have impressed her. She already had a huge portfolio of her own.

They appeared to be the perfect couple by the time Candy Barr appeared on the scene in Dallas. The story we hear from all the reporters who talked to Owen is that he was a young, innocent boy when Pat Gannaway's men showed up at Candy's place and were about to haul George off to jail. They say he was the reason Candy took the bottle of weed out of her bra, for which she was later incarcerated after she lost all her appeals. But we have to realize this so-called innocent boy was every bit of 32 years old, a married man with two sons, creator of a chemical business in Dallas, although what type of chemicals he manufactured remains a mystery.

Capt. W. Pat Gannaway in charge of CI unit on narcotics matters. He had been busting Dallas' underworld for over ten years by the time he got Candy Barr for possession of marijuana in 1957. Eleven years earlier he was written up in Texas newspapers for arresting a preacher who was luring young girls up to his hotel room to take nude pictures of them.

Gannaway had gone from being a lieutenant in 1955 to a captain in 1959. In between those years was his arrest of Candy Barr. It was that big bust (no pun intended) which may have made the difference.

Candy Barr, who danced at the Weinstein brothers' high-class joint next door to Jack Ruby's Carousel Club, was the big time for Gannaway. He liked high-profile arrests. Every cop does, if the truth be known. Big arrests mean better pay, more power. Gary Cartwright's story was posted previously on this blog, but it is worth repeating.

Taking the wrapper off a Texas legend

Copyright 1976 by Gary Cartwright 

Texas Monthly (December 1976)

Juanita Dale Slusher encountered the joy of sex at age five with the aid and comfort of an eighteen-year-old neighbor named Ernest. She remembers that he was gentle, and not at all unpleasant. It wasn’t until she encountered the Dallas police force some years later that Juanita Dale associated sex with guilt. When she was nine her mother died and her father remarried: Doc Slusher, brick mason and handyman, a whiskey-drinking harmonica player and all-around rowdy, already had five kids, and right away there were four more, then two more after that. With all those Slushers around, you’d think the work would get done, but it never seemed to…. At age thirteen and painfully confused, Juanita Dale took her baby-sitting money and grabbed a bus out of Edna, an independent decision that would become socially acceptable, even laudable, to future generations, but an act worse than rebellion in those days: it was the act of a bad girl. For a while she lived with an older sister in Oklahoma City, then a year or so later moved to live with another sister in Dallas. The Dallas sister soon hooked up with a man, and Juanita Dale was on her own….

To be technically correct, it was the old Liquor Control Board (LCB) that first discovered the girl who would become Candy Barr. They discovered her posing as an eighteen-year-old cocktail waitress—the minimum legal age. She wouldn’t be eighteen for another four years, but girls from tough backgrounds develop early, or they don’t develop at all. She kept changing jobs, and the LCB kept discovering her. Once they sent her home to Edna, but she caught the next bus back to Dallas…. Candy’s first husband, Billy Debbs, was a graduate of Shorty’s academy. Billy was a good lover but a poor student. He went to the pen, got out, then got shot to death. Somewhere in there—she can’t fix the exact time—a pimp spotted her jitterbugging in a joint called the Round-Up Club and launched Candy’s movie career. She must have been about fifteen when Smart Aleck was filmed. The thousands (perhaps millions) who have seen this American classic will recall that she was a brunette then. Smart Aleck was America’s first blue movie, the Deep Throat of its era, only infinitely more erotic and less pretentious. It was just straight old motel room sex; the audience supplied its own sounds….

One of the fringe benefits of being in films was that Candy got invited to all the best stag parties. Several prominent and wealthy Dallas business and professional men, on my oath that their names would not be revealed, recalled a Junior Chamber of Commerce stag where Candy was the star attraction. One auto dealer told me, “She went for two hundred, three hundred, even five hundred bucks. There was a banker who paid five hundred every time he put a hand on Candy.” … The Colony was the Stork Club of Dallas, the Cocoanut Grove, the butterfly of the Commerce Street neon patch where Jack Ruby ran the sleazy Carousel and conventioneers intermingled with cops and hustlers and drug merchants.

…Nobody in the Dallas Police Department wanted to talk about a marijuana case from twenty years ago, and Pat Gannaway, who retired a few years ago to join the Texas Criminal Justice Division, wasn’t available for an interview. But I know this: Pat Gannaway spent a lot of man-hours bringing one stripper to justice. The confluence of these two forces—Candy Barr, desecrater of all that is decent, and Pat Gannaway, the terrible swift sword—is surely the quintessence of a morality frozen in time.

Captain Pat Gannaway was referred to in newspaper accounts of the time as “Mr. Narcotics.” As a lad he had been so eager to join the Dallas Police Department that he lied about his age. For twelve years, until he was kicked upstairs (he was put in charge of rearranging the Property Room) in the 1968 department shake-up, he ran the special services bureau as his private fiefdom. He reported only to the chief. “His passion,” reporter James Ewell wrote in the Dallas Morning News on the occasion of Gannaway’s retirement, “was police work, down on the streets with his men.”

He loved the Army, too. He served in Army intelligence and was an expert wiretapper. When he wasn’t swooping down on the vermin that afflicted his city, Gannaway and his entire force were making speeches to civic clubs, warning of the peril. Those recent 1,000-year sentences that made Dallas juries such a novelty may have been the direct result of Pat Gannaway’s tireless crusade. Gannaway told James Ewell: “It was always a good feeling to see someone on those juries you recalled being at one of those talks. We always told our audiences if you got rid of an addict or pusher, you were also getting rid of a burglar, a thief, or a robber.”

In the autumn of 1957 Gannaway assigned Red Souter (now an assistant chief) and another of his agents, Harvey Totten (now retired), to rent an apartment near Candy Barr’s apartment and establish surveillance. A telephone repairman would testify later that he discovered a “jumper tie-up” connecting Candy’s telephone to the telephone in the apartment occupied by Souter and Totten, but the jury either ignored this or didn’t believe it. A few days after the surveillance began, Candy received a visit from a friend, a stripper named Helen Kay Smith, who laid out a story about her mother coming to visit and asked Candy Barr to hide her stash—the Alka-Seltzer bottle of marijuana. Candy agreed and slipped the bottle inside her bra, next to her big heart. Two hours later, as Candy was talking on the telephone to a gentleman friend (and therefore obviously at home, in case anyone with a search warrant wanted to drop in), there was a knock at the door. Candy’s defense attorneys claimed the search warrant was a blank that Gannaway filled in after the arrest, but the court didn’t buy that either.

Candy’s gentleman friend, who asked to not be identified, told me what happened next: “Candy said hold on, someone is knocking at the door. I heard some noises and someone hung up the phone. All I could think of was she’s in some kind of trouble. I got over to her place. When I walked in I saw Gannaway, Totten, Red Souter, Jack Revill, and I think one other narcotics officer.
Gannaway picked up a chair and said something like, ‘Well, well, that looks like a joint on the floor.’ I swear to you, it was the first marijuana cigarette I ever saw. That’s when Candy, God bless her, said to Gannaway, ‘He’s just a square john kid. He doesn’t know anything about this. If you let him go, I’ll give you what you came for.’ She reached in and pulled out the bottle. Gannaway decided he would take me in anyway, and that’s when Jack Revill said, ‘Captain, if you do that, I’m turning in my badge.’ So they took her away.”

Candy’s four-day trial the following February was a farce, which didn’t prevent it from also being a sensation. 

In its year-end review the Dallas Morning News headline read: Candy’s Trial Led ‘58 Scene.
Judge Joe B. Brown, who would later make his mark as the buffoon judge in the Jack Ruby trial, borrowed a camera and during one of the recesses snapped pictures of “the shapely defendant.” Defense attorneys Bill Braecklein and Lester May realized from the beginning that their problem was much larger than a bottle of marijuana, although, as May explained, “In those days marijuana was worse than cancer.”

“It was a time when the pendulum had swung far to the right,” May told me. “If the police decided you were guilty of something, they made a case and you were found guilty. It was just that simple. Candy’s real crime was she wouldn’t cooperate with the vice squad.”

No, the real problem wasn’t the marijuana, it was Candy Barr herself. It wasn’t merely her reputation, though God knows that was strong enough to kill a rogue elephant, it was that combative stubbornness, that unwillingness to throw herself at the feet of the jury and beg forgiveness. Chief prosecutor James Allen offered her two years for a guilty plea, and if Les May hadn’t got her out of the room she would have spit in his eye, or worse.

They decided not to put her on the stand; without her testimony, of course, it would be almost impossible to challenge state witnesses: she was in possession of marijuana, regardless of Helen Kay Smith’s testimony. That mysterious cigarette on the floor, though, was something else entirely. The attorneys worked out a way to let Candy make a statement to the jury without actually testifying, which meant that she could not be cross-examined. No one remembers Candy’s exact words, but it must have been a stirring oration. When she had finished, the jury just retired and voted her fifteen years in the Big Rodeo. It was Valentine’s day 1958.
“She was a very naive young lady,” Braecklein recalled. “While we were waiting to come to trial, she was out in Las Vegas, doing her act. Just one week before we came to trial, I got word that she was going to be a bridesmaid in Sammy Davis, Jr.’s wedding [to a white actress]. Anyone who grew up in Texas knew …

Although they didn’t anticipate anything approaching fifteen years, the defense team had braced itself for a verdict of guilty. They had already drafted a list of reversible errors that would have choked the Star Chamber. The real shock came when they lost a 2—1 decision in the State Court of Criminal Appeals. In the eleven months that separated the trial from the appeals verdict, Candy had reinforced her public image by moving in with hoodlum Mickey Cohen: one assumes justice is blind, but just how blind is an open question.

… I offered her one of my cigarettes and asked about Mickey Cohen. Cohen had personally guaranteed her $15,000 bond while the marijuana appeal ran its course. In a cruel way, those were the peak years for Candy Barr. She lived in a villa in the notorious Garden of Allah on Sunset Boulevard in L.A. and earned up to $2000 a week stripping there and in Vegas. Simultaneously, a pack of lawmen and profiteers howled like hungry dogs in her shadow—FBI agents, CIA agents, treasury agents, IRS agents, L.A. cops, Vegas cops, Dallas cops. The pressure was so enormous that the El Rancho Vegas had her replaced with Nelson Eddy. She was also in and out of the hospital with hepatitis. Candy recalled that the first time she ever heard of Mickey Cohen was when he sent an orchid in a champagne glass to her hospital room in L.A., along with this note: “Don’t worry, little girl, you got a friend.”

I had heard from good sources that the reason that Cohen got rid of Candy was she was giving him a bad press. The vast majority of those agents were interested in Mickey Cohen, not his girl friend. Word came down from “the Eastern organization” that if Cohen didn’t drop Candy, they would. Somewhere between Catalina Island and Hawaii….

~~~~~~~

Aug 14, 1925 - Jul 20, 2000
  OWEN, GEORGE W.

Age 74. Born in Emhouse, TX, August 14, 1925 and passed away July 20, 2000. After graduation from Crozier Tech High School, Dallas, he served three years U.S. Army, First Infantry Division, including the Battle of the Bulge in WWII. He attended Arlington State, before transferring to SMU where he played varsity basketball and was a member of Lambda Chi Alpha. After graduation, he started Mustang Chemical and other business ventures. During the mid '60s, he was the Player Relations Director for the startup franchise, New Orleans Saints. Later, he was a commercial and residential builder in North Dallas before retiring.

He is survived by children: Mitchell Owen and wife Suzzane, of Dallas; Bart Owen and wife Sheron of Garland, Kyle Owen, Wynne Owen and Mark Owen all of Dallas, and grandchildren: Haley Owen, Jenna Owen, and Scott Owen.

SERVICES: Restland Memorial Chapel at 10:00 AM, Sat, July 22, 2000. Interment to follow in Restland Memorial Park. Family will receive friends from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM Friday, July 21, 2000 at Restland Funeral Home, located on Greenville Avenue, 1/2 mile North of L.B.J.

George W. Owen, a Friend of LBJ's Mistress

Madeleine Brown has often been criticized for her claim that she first met Lyndon Johnson, the love of her life, at a victory celebration party in Dallas  around the first week of October, approximately three weeks before the official party at the Driskill Hotel in Austin on October 29, 1948. 

Barr McClellan, in his book,
confirms that LBJ was involved in litigation in the court of Judge T. Whitfield Davidson in the Dallas area at about that time frame. In the days when Texas was a one-party (Democrat) state, the November election was a mere formality; the political wrangling took place in the primary and run-off elections. LBJ's opponent in the 1948 Democratic run-off, Coke Stevenson, filed a lawsuit to prevent Johnson's name from appearing on the ballot for the November election. From the documentation below, one can easily infer that Johnson was in Texas for the litigation until he first appeared back at his Congressional desk in Washington, D.C. on October 11, 1948.

 In Blood, Money and Power (at page 94), McClellan writes:

"Johnson had a team of lawyers representing him in federal district court before Judge Whitfield. One was John Cofer, who would become Clark's attorney for all criminal matters. Angry at the order allowing masters to take further evidence, the legal team contacted Abe Fortas, an old friend and later Supreme Court judge, who happened to be at a conference in Dallas. Fortas made an illegal, off-the-record telephone call, to check with his former mentor, Justice Hugo Black of the United States Supreme Court. In that brief conversation, Fortas made certain Black would rule in Johnson's favor."

LBJ's having FDR's old fixer, Tommy the Cork, in his corner of course didn't hurt.

David B. Perry, alleged researcher into the JFK assassination, concluded on his website that the party where Madeleine Brown claimed she met Lyndon Johnson could not have occurred in Dallas three weeks prior to October 29. His logic was faulty, based as it was on the assumption that Coke Stevenson and Dan Moody did not concede defeat until October 12. 

But LBJ knew by September 29, when Justice Black ruled in his favor, and the state court refused to take jurisdiction of the matter, that he had won; he didn't need to wait for Stevenson to tell him it was party time.

The rest of what Dave Perry says is just as easily discounted.  He asks: "Would Johnson actually know in advance that voting problems in Jim Wells County would be called the 'Box 13' scandal and would he really want to celebrate this budding predicament with a gala at the Driskill on the 29^th?"

Hell, yes he would. That's what made it even more fun for a man like LBJ, who sought power through secret connections and maneuvers. One of Johnson's lawyers, Donald B. Thomas, had been sent to the Valley by his law partner Ed Clark to take care of just that anticipated situation--and with enough cash to buy as many votes as necessary.

Barr McClellan tells us the initial vote count was accurate, showing that Johnson had lost. Three days after the polls had closed, while votes were still being counted, 

"Thomas added the fraudulent votes Johnson needed to win. Realizing the simple necessity for additional votes, he made up voters and added their names to the poll list and then to the ballot count."   -- Blood, Money and Power, p. 83.

THE CORSICANA (TEXAS) DAILY SUN,
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1948:

Dan Moody, attorney for Coke Stevenson, said at Austin today that Stevenson would appeal to the U. S. Supreme Court in his hot fight against Lyndon Johnson for Democratic nomination to the U.S. Senate. Moody, a former Texas governor, said Stevenson intends to file a motion in the U. S. Supreme Court asking that an unfavorable order by Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black be set aside. Black last Tuesday stayed an injunction issued by Federal Judge T. Whitfield Davidson which had prevented the name of Johnson from going on the general election ballot as the Democratic party nominee. The effect of Black's ruling was to allow Johnson's name to go on the ballot and to halt an Investigation of alleged vote fraud which Judge Davidson had launched in three South Texas counties, Duval, Jim Wells and Zapata. Commenting on Black's ruling, Judge Davidson said in Dallas today:

"The U. S. Supreme Court has altered my opinion, but it hasn't changed my mind."

The little gray-haired jurist said "There is nothing further I can do in the case. I must observe the ruling of a higher court."

... Asked what, if anything, he could do about the findings, the jurist said: "Nothing."

The ruling by Justice Black found that the federal district court had no jurisdiction in the case. Davidson, commenting on this, said that It had been the contention of Johnson's attorneys that the U. S. Senate was the proper place for the election tangle to be unraveled....

"This is not true," said Judge Davidson. "The senate can act in such cases only where there has been a general election. There has not been a general election in this case—only an election to determine a party nominee. No one has yet stood for election to the U. S. senate. Johnson and Stevenson only sought the Democratic party nomination." Therefore, the only thing the senate could do would be to declare, after the general election, that Johnson could not have a seat in the senate and this would not do Stevenson any good....

Johnson yesterday was certified by Secretary of State Paul B. Brown as the Democratic nominee. The State Democratic Convention had certified Johnson as the winner by 87 votes. Stevenson's appeal would be to the full supreme court. It meets next Monday.

Federal commissioners appointed by Davidson were ordered yesterday by the jurist to stop their investigations, just as the hearings were yielding some interesting developments. Out of 10 Jim Wells county ballot boxes opened over the bitter protests of Johnson's attorneys, one was empty. A precinct 13 box containing poll lists and tally sheets for the precinct was missing. It was this Precinct 13 that had occupied a prominent spot in Stevenson's application to Judge Davidson for an injunction, Stevenson had claimed that 200 votes were added to this box after the Aug. 28 second primary. It was his contention that vote frauds in the three counties had deprived him of a constitutional right to be the Democratic nominee.... The Supreme court must first grant permission for filing of the action, before it can pass directly on the mandamus petition. If it rejects the motion, that would have the effect of killing the suit.

Votes had been for sale in South Texas for many years, and Johnson, having worked in that Congressional District for Richard Kleberg, knew how it could be done. All that he needed was cold-blooded attorneys with no principles. He found that in Ed Clark and Donald Thomas. The only mistake they made was in revealing the secret scheme to their law partner, Barr McClellan, who had a sense of ethics and morality. The violence that was so commonplace in the South Texas lifestyle in those days has been further described in "What Can We Learn from Madeleine Duncan Brown?"

Madeleine Brown was relatively old by the time she began telling what she knew about the man she loved, about how he wielded power and had people killed without blinking an eye. Like all of us, her memory would have faded and been supplemented with a little creative writing. However, it's important to verify and document what she told us as much as possible because there are other statements she made that relate to events after Lyndon Johnson left office.

The most significant statement could possibly be about the meeting she described that took place at Murchison's house. Dave Perry says she always said the party took place at the home of Clint Murchison, Sr., but what she actually said is: "I attended a social at Clint Murchison's home. It was my understanding that the event was scheduled as a tribute honoring his long time friend, J. Edgar Hoover, whom Murchison had first met decades earlier through President William Howard Taft..." It is not clear whether those were her words or those of her ghostwriter, but the book does not specify that it was Murchison, Sr., although the description could not have applied to the younger Clint.

This description appears an article styled "Johnson's illegitimate Son":

When asked what time Johnson came in, Madeline said:

Well he came from Houston. It must have been 11:00 o'clock. The party was breaking up at that time. And it shocked everyone that he came in. Of course, I was thrilled to see him. Normally, I knew his agenda when he was in Texas, but that night, I did not know that he was coming. And they all went in to this conference room.

It gets a little bizarre when Madeline says, "He (George Owens) was there socially, and of course, Jack Ruby had brought one of the call girls to the meeting." When asked about the call girl, Madeline said, "Her name was Shirley. I know her, but she doesn't want to talk about this." Maybe, she's married now, and maybe, one day she will also tell her story.

When asked who picked up Nixon, Madeline said, "Nixon was already in town. He came in on Tuesday and met with Lyndon that no one knew anything about. But Lyndon met Nixon in Dallas on Tuesday."

What is most important in my opinion about what she has revealed about that social event is the fact that this man named George W. Owen (whom she calls Owens) was there. 

In a 2001 conversation she had on another occasion--an interview with John Delane Williams and Gary Severson--she revealed more information about Owen:

JDW: Now, the Murchison party. One of the things, I don't know that you ever heard this, but, what is his name, Brown, Walt Brown. One of things he's said is that everything we've heard about the Murchison party has come from you. And no one else  who was at the party has said anything.

MB: Gary Barker has come forth, I think. Galen Ross [sic], are you familiar with his new book?

JDW: Galen Ross?
[Note: This book is by Robert Gaylon Ross, Sr.]

MB: Some of them I'm not familiar with. But George Owens that worked for Clint Murchison. [Note from QJ: Owen worked for Clint JUNIOR, who owned the Cowboys team, not for Clint SENIOR.] He [Owen] passed away not long ago, and I've known George . . . George went to . . . we didn't have the DFW airport back then [1963]. Dallas only had about 450,000 people. He went out to the Bluebird [sic] Airport and George was going on camera to tell the story of what happened. And do you know the day we had that all set up he died suddenly. I mean a bunch of this . . . sometimes I feel bad.

***
GS:  Did you know of any family background of Mac Wallace?

MB: Well, I told him [George Owens?], one of our neighbors is Carl Wallace, and Carl and George Owens, who said he picked up Hoover out here at the airport, were close friends, and if George would have lived long enough, I might have got more information, you know, but this Carl Wallace's father owned the Wallace Plumbing Company here in Dallas, and the Wallace Plumbing Company was in Dealey Plaza that day, I don't know if John had.

GS: That was my next question.

MB:  Well anyway, not too long ago, I talked to Carl. He comes by once in a while with his little dog. And I said "Carl, what happened to your mother and father?" And he said, "My dad killed himself," and I wanted to say, when did he kill himself? and eventually, I want to know, why did he kill himself? Knowing what I know about the story, and the background, Big Time.

GS: Could the plumbing company be Wallace-Beard?

MB: I couldn't tell you.

GS: There is some evidence the truck in Dealey Plaza that day was Wallace and Beard.

***
GS: It's so mind-boggling.

MB: You know, I told you about this neighbor, Carl Wallace. He told me enough that in my mind, I keep thinking, George Owens died instantly, you know. What is the connection, really. Why would a man, a prosperous businessman in Dallas, Texas kill himself? You can't help but wonder.

~~~~~~~~

When Madeleine told us George Owens worked for Murchison, she would have been talking about George Washington Owen, Jr., who went to SMU on a basketball scholarship and later became a scout for the Dallas Cowboys. The team was mostly owned by Clint Murchison, Jr., except for a small percentage owned by Bedford Wynne.

We first meet George Owen through Texas Monthly's prolific writer, Gary Cartwright whose writing actually dates back in Texas journalism before TM magazine was created:

Mad Dog may have been founded in Mexico, and flourished in Austin, but its roots can be traced all the way back to Dallas, 1963, when [Bud] Shrake and Cartwright were noted young sportswriters for The Dallas Morning News who didn't think that sports were the most important thing in the universe. "Our apartment had become a late-night hangout for musicians, strippers, and other nocturnal creatures," Cartwright recalls in "1963: My Most Unforgettable Year," an essay in his recently published collection of articles, Turn Out the Lights: Chronicles of Texas During the 80s and 90s.

"One of our regular drop-bys was George Owen, manager of the University Club, a former SMU basketball player who had dated the fabulous Candy Barr before the Dallas power structure [Pat Gannaway] sent her away on a phony marijuana charge.

Two other regular visitors were Jack Ruby, the cheesy little hood who owned the
Carousel Club, and Jada, an exotic stripper. ... Her act consisted mainly of hunching a tiger skin rug while making wildly orgasmic sounds with her throat."

So George Owen managed the University Club? 

FBI reports reflect the address of George Owen’s University Club to have been 1413-1/2 Commerce, one block on the other side of the Carousel. 

Gary Cartwright also wrote the following article, using George Owen as his confidential source, in 1976:

Taking the wrapper off a Texas legend

by Gary Cartwright   

December 1976

The "Quintessence of Morality"

Juanita Dale Slusher encountered the joy of sex at age five with the aid and comfort of an eighteen-year-old neighbor named Ernest. She remembers that he was gentle, and not at all unpleasant. It wasn’t until she encountered the Dallas police force some years later that Juanita Dale associated sex with guilt.

When she was nine her mother died and her father remarried: Doc Slusher, brick mason and handyman, a whiskey-drinking harmonica player and all-around rowdy, already had five kids, and right away there were four more, then two more after that. With all those Slushers around, you’d think the work would get done, but it never seemed to…. 

At age thirteen and painfully confused, Juanita Dale took her baby-sitting money and grabbed a bus out of Edna, an independent decision that would become socially acceptable, even laudable, to future generations, but an act worse than rebellion in those days: it was the act of a bad girl. For a while she lived with an older sister in Oklahoma City, then a year or so later moved to live with another sister in Dallas. The Dallas sister soon hooked up with a man, and Juanita Dale was on her own…. 

To be technically correct, it was the old Liquor Control Board (LCB) that first discovered the girl who would become Candy Barr. They discovered her posing as an eighteen-year-old cocktail waitress—the minimum legal age. She wouldn’t be eighteen for another four years, but girls from tough backgrounds develop early, or they don’t develop at all. She kept changing jobs, and the LCB kept discovering her. Once they sent her home to Edna, but she caught the next bus back to Dallas…. 

Candy’s first husband, Billy Debbs, was a graduate of Shorty’s academy. Billy was a good lover but a poor student. He went to the pen, got out, then got shot to death. Somewhere in there—she can’t fix the exact time—a pimp

spotted her jitterbugging in a joint called the Round-Up Club and launched Candy’s movie career. She must have been about fifteen when Smart Aleck was filmed. The thousands (perhaps millions) who have seen this American classic will recall that she was a brunette then.  

Smart Aleck was America’s first blue movie, the Deep Throat of its era, only infinitely more erotic and less pretentious. It was just straight old motel room sex; the audience supplied its own sounds….

One of the fringe benefits of being in films was that Candy got invited to all the best stag parties. Several prominent and wealthy Dallas business and professional men, on my oath that their names would not be revealed, recalled a Junior Chamber of Commerce stag where Candy was the star attraction. One auto dealer told me, “She went for two hundred, three hundred, even five hundred bucks. There was a banker who paid five hundred every time he put a hand on Candy.” … 

The Colony was the Stork Club of Dallas, the Cocoanut Grove, the butterfly of the Commerce Street neon patch where Jack Ruby ran the sleazy Carousel and conventioneers intermingled with cops and hustlers and drug merchants.

…Nobody in the Dallas Police Department wanted to talk about a marijuana case from twenty years ago, and Pat Gannaway, who retired a few years ago to join the Texas Criminal Justice Division, wasn’t available for an interview. But I know this: Pat Gannaway spent a lot of man-hours bringing one stripper to justice. The confluence of these two forces—Candy Barr, desecrater of all that is decent, and Pat Gannaway, the terrible swift sword—is surely the quintessence of a morality frozen in time. 

Captain Pat Gannaway was referred to in newspaper accounts of the time as “Mr. Narcotics.” As a lad he had been so eager to join the Dallas Police Department that he lied about his age. For twelve years, until he was kicked upstairs (he was put in charge of rearranging the Property Room) in the 1968 department shake-up, he ran the special services bureau as his private fiefdom. He reported only to the chief. “His passion,” reporter James Ewell wrote in the Dallas Morning News on the occasion of Gannaway’s retirement, “was police work, down on the streets with his men.” 

He loved the Army, too. He served in Army intelligence and was an expert wiretapper. When he wasn’t swooping down on the vermin that afflicted his city, Gannaway and his entire force were making speeches to civic clubs, warning of the peril. Those recent 1000-year sentences that made Dallas juries such a novelty may have been the direct result of Pat Gannaway’s tireless crusade. Gannaway told James Ewell: “It was always a good feeling to see someone on those juries you recalled being at one of those talks. We always told our audiences if you got rid of an addict or pusher, you were also getting rid of a burglar, a thief, or a robber.”

In the autumn of 1957 Gannaway assigned Red Souter (now an assistant chief) and another of his agents, Harvey Totten (now retired), to rent an apartment near Candy Barr’s apartment and establish surveillance. A telephone repairman would testify later that he discovered a “jumper tie-up” connecting Candy’s telephone to the telephone in the apartment occupied by Souter and Totten, but the jury either ignored this or didn’t believe it. A few days after the surveillance began, Candy received a visit from a friend, a stripper named Helen Kay Smith, who laid out a story about her mother coming to visit and asked Candy Barr to hide her stash — the Alka-Seltzer bottle of marijuana. Candy agreed and slipped the bottle inside her bra, next to her big heart. 

Two hours later, as Candy was talking on the telephone to a gentleman friend (and therefore obviously at home, in case anyone with a search warrant wanted to drop in), there was a knock at the door. Candy’s defense attorneys claimed the search warrant was a blank that Gannaway filled in after the arrest, but the court didn’t buy that either.

Candy’s gentleman friend, who asked to not be identified, told me what happened next:  “Candy said hold on, someone is knocking at the door. I heard some noises and someone hung up the phone. All I could think of was she’s in some kind of trouble. I got over to her place. When I walked in I saw Gannaway, Totten, Red Souter, Jack Revill, and I think one other narcotics officer.

 

Gannaway picked up a chair and said something like, ‘Well, well, that looks like a joint on the floor.’ I swear to you, it was the first marijuana cigarette I ever saw. That’s when Candy, God bless her, said to Gannaway, ‘He’s just a square john kid. He doesn’t know anything about this. If you let him go, I’ll give you what you came for.’ She reached in and pulled out the bottle. 

Gannaway decided he would take me in anyway, and that’s when Jack Revill said, ‘Captain, if you do that, I’m turning in my badge.’ So they took her away.”

So it appears from this article of Gary Cartright's that George W. Owen ("Candy's gentleman friend, who asked to not be identified") owed a big-time debt to both Revill and Gannaway--two vice detectives on the scene on November 22, 1963 in Dallas!

The Cartwright article continues:

Candy’s four-day trial the following February was a farce, which didn’t prevent it from also being a sensation. In its year-end review the Dallas Morning News headline read: Candy’s Trial Led ‘58 Scene. Judge Joe B. Brown, who would later make his mark as the buffoon judge in the Jack Ruby trial, borrowed a camera and during one of the recesses snapped pictures of “the shapely defendant.” Defense attorneys Bill Braecklein and Lester May realized from the beginning that their problem was much larger than a bottle of marijuana, although, as May explained, “In those days marijuana was worse than cancer.”

“It was a time when the pendulum had swung far to the right,” May told me. “If the police decided you were guilty of something, they made a case and you were found guilty. It was just that simple. Candy’s real crime was she wouldn’t cooperate with the vice squad.”

No, the real problem wasn’t the marijuana, it was Candy Barr herself. It wasn’t merely her reputation, though God knows that was strong enough to kill a rogue elephant, it was that combative stubbornness, that unwillingness to throw herself at the feet of the jury and beg forgiveness. Chief prosecutor James Allen offered her two years for a guilty plea, and if Les May hadn’t got her out of the room she would have spit in his eye, or worse.

They decided not to put her on the stand; without her testimony, of course, it would be almost impossible to challenge state witnesses: she was in possession of marijuana, regardless of Helen Kay Smith’s testimony. That mysterious cigarette on the floor, though, was something else entirely. The attorneys worked out a way to let Candy make a statement to the jury without actually testifying, which meant that she could not be cross-examined. No one remembers Candy’s exact words, but it must have been a stirring oration. When she had finished, the jury just retired and voted her fifteen years in the Big Rodeo. It was Valentine’s day 1958.

“She was a very naive young lady,” Braecklein recalled. “While we were waiting to come to trial, she was out in Las Vegas, doing her act. Just one week before we came to trial, I got word that she was going to be a bridesmaid in Sammy Davis, Jr.’s wedding [to a white actress]. Anyone who grew up in Texas knew …

Although they didn’t anticipate anything approaching fifteen years, the defense team had braced itself for a verdict of guilty. They had already drafted a list of reversible errors that would have choked the Star Chamber. The real shock came when they lost a 2—1 decision in the State Court of Criminal Appeals. In the eleven months that separated the trial from the appeals verdict, Candy had reinforced her public image by moving in with hoodlum Mickey Cohen: one assumes justice is blind, but just how blind is an open question.

Mobster Mickey Cohen

… I offered her one of my cigarettes and asked about Mickey Cohen. Cohen had personally guaranteed her $15,000 bond while the marijuana appeal ran its course. In a cruel way, those were the peak years for Candy Barr. She lived in a villa in the notorious Garden of Allah on Sunset Boulevard in L.A. and earned up to $2000 a week stripping there and in Vegas. Simultaneously, a pack of lawmen and profiteers howled like hungry dogs in her shadow—FBI agents, CIA agents, treasury agents, IRS agents, L.A. cops, Vegas cops, Dallas cops. The pressure was so enormous that the El Rancho Vegas had her replaced with Nelson Eddy. She was also in and out of the hospital with hepatitis. Candy recalled that the first time she ever heard of Mickey Cohen was when he sent an orchid in a champagne glass to her hospital room in L.A., along with this note: “Don’t worry, little girl, you got a friend.”

I had heard from good sources that the reason that Cohen got rid of Candy was she was giving him a bad press. The vast majority of those agents were interested in Mickey Cohen, not his girl friend. Word came down from “the Eastern organization” that if Cohen didn’t drop Candy, they would. Somewhere between Catalina Island and Hawaii….