Return with us now for an ambush at the State House > Guest Column

Remember those 12-cent Saturday western movies we used to go to when we were kids? The change I got for taking bottles back to the store would get me into the Center Theatre in Dover-Foxcroft in the afternoon from 2 to almost 5 o’clock. We would watch two westerns and a Perils of Pauline and when we’d get out into the sunshine, the light would blind us and we’d stagger around a while trying to adjust to daylight again.

Wednesday morning at the State House was every bit as exciting as Roy Rogers used to be. There were sheriffs, underhandedness, hijacking, deputies, white hats, black hats, treachery, traitors, bad guys, and an ambush by the good guys. It was all packed into an hour and a half of pure pleasure in Room 334 (State and Local Government Committee) and it didn’t even cost 12 cents to get in.

Plot background: The sheriffs of Maine woke up to the fact that the Maine Legislature wants to rub them out. No, it’s not paranoia. They’ve got the evidence to prove it.

Backed to the wall by a legislature that would turn them into taxi drivers of prisoners, and having heard rumors that the Maine Bar has plans for watering down their role in serving process papers, the Maine sheriffs fought back and returned fire on the steps of the State House in a press conference last week. While holding the offending bills in hand, they called the ringleaders in the legislature an underhanded, irresponsible bunch.

Since truth is the defense for slander, nobody sued them. The culprits just jumped up and down inside the State House and muttered that Hackett must die.

There’s no doubt that Frank Hackett, Kennebec County sheriff, has the courage of a wild west sheriff (whose legal authority by the way is equal to one). Because six days after he spoke from the State House steps he was back to shoot down a bill at a public hearing which was never advertised to the public. He found out about it because that’s the way it always was in the movies. (A chief deputy staggers in and dies at the feet of the good sheriff, but not before he gurgles out the information that turns the tide.)

The private “public” hearing heard LD 2387, An Act To Hijack the Cumberland County Jail. (No, that wasn’t its real name, but out west people used to call a spade a spade. They used to in Maine, too, and the sheriffs are bringing the custom back.)

From the time Hackett took the stand and said he was there to oppose the hijacking of the Cumberland County Jail, the action got real interesting. Sen. Georgette Berube and House member Ruth Joseph, the girls in charge of the committee, weren’t used to the plain talk that came out of Hackett. Berube, a lovely woman, took the opportunity to beat up Hackett for having called the legislature “underhanded” the week before. The audience found that hilarious because she and Joseph were presiding over a public hearing which had been avertised only by a dying deputy! (True, the nice lady who answers the phone at the legislative information number did not know about the hearing until I told her the afternoon before the hearing. Notice wasn’t printed for legislators, it wasn’t in the press, and it wasn’t even on the bulletin board in the rotunda on the morning it was heard.)

The jail hijacking bill takes the jail from the sheriff in Cumberland County, with the blessing of the sheriff there. Since the sheriff’s Maine constitutional office would include the jail just by defining the title of sheriff, this became an act of treason as far as the other sheriffs were concerned. But come to think of it, the old western plots used to have one guy, at least, who tried to endanger the buddies he was riding with.

Speaking for the Maine Sheriffs’ Association, the Kennebec sheriff told the sponsors of the idea, and the Committee on State and Local Shenanigans, that he tried to say something nice about the plan, but couldn’t. He said that if the scheme ever became law, it would be robbery and the Cumberland sheriff would have been an accessory to it, before and after the fact. In words the guy down at the saloon could understand, he went on to cast doubt on its lawfulness, its origin, and its future consequences, in a tale which began, “Once upon a time….”

Ruth and Georgette were steamed. Right in the middle of a session which they said didn’t need to be advertised (“private and special,” they said) in walks Hackett and his buddies, levels his vocabulary to the grass roots and calls it a robbery. They could have stomached the feisty sheriff, but for one thing: The independent, eagle-eyed reporter from the sponsors’ home town area was there taking it all down word for word. For one awful moment, they suddenly realized that Hackett’s biting words might live forever on the pages of the American Journal, their weekly paper.

They could take care of Hackett, but that darned reporter was going to drive back to Westbrook and next week everybody who mattered would know everything. Click. Click. Click. Click. He got right near their faces when he took their pictures. It was so awful that Georgette started firing back at Hackett by defining the word “hijack” and saying that it didn’t apply. Unfortunately for her, everybody else has a dictionary and when we looked it up afterward, we found it did apply. Suddenly, those chocolate-covered doughnuts from Dunkin’ Donuts didn’t taste so good to the committee and they remembered that their mothers had told them they shouldn’t eat in front of company without offering them some. They wished they’d listened to their mothers and acted more like they knew what they were doing. It had to be an ambush. How else could the reporter have known about the meeting?

I don’t see how they can go through with the hijacking now. They got caught red-handed by the sheriff and his pals and the small-town reporter with no hidden agenda. I didn’t even have to blink my eyes to adjust to the light outside because there had been enough light in that hearing room by the guys wearing white hats. They did their jobs well and now the people of Cumberland County will know the truth.

Hackett said on the steps of the State House the week before last that the sheriff belongs to the people because he’s unrestricted, chosen by the voters in the county, and independent. Kennebec County people better keep that in mind and stay close to their sheriff. They need him because he’s the sheriff. He needs them because he’s dog meat at the State House.