Tin Star Tyrants: America's Crooked Sheriffs

From Kirkus Reviews Cautionary law-and-order tales by Yant (Desert Mirage, 1991), former commentary editor of the Columbus Dispatch. Corruption and brutality in law-enforcement are explored expertly here by Yant--who, he tells us, once got into a heap of trouble with lawmen while reporting for the Mansfield, Ohio, News Journal. Surveilled and threatened by local cops, his wife's car followed by sinister allies of the local sheriff, his daughter's school days poisoned by a teacher-friend of the sheriff, Yant has a lot to say about the relationship between media and lawmen. The harassment of newsmen--and the threats to their lives--that he details are particularly thought-provoking. Yant makes it clear how much can go wrong in law enforcement, suggesting that this is especially true for sheriffs, and that the problem has historic roots, even mythic ones (the Sheriff of Nottingham vs. Robin Hood.) He points out that today's sheriff is usually an elected official with few professional qualifications and great power, and that the incidence of these sheriffs being indicted (sometimes convicted) of serious crimes is very high. The better stories here are pungent with local authenticity and crackle with a sense of small-town America not much changed since Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest. Many are horrifying--a man left to freeze in a snow-buried truck; another castrated for an unproven and unlikely rape charge; a woman handcuffed and forced to walk naked among male inmates; a witness shot in his hospital bed. There's humor as well--the murderer moonlighting for the sheriff and driving to work in his car; the Florida deputy convicted of pimping for his wife; the sheriff who dreamed of God wearing cowboy boots. Yant strikes a nerve but his writing is uneven, with the latter third of the book feeling hurried and lacking the substance of earlier sections. (Photographs--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. From Publishers Weekly In this eye-opening expose, Yant ( Presumed Guilty ) reports on the seamier side of law enforcement under the jurisdiction of a sheriff, an autonomous position achieved by election at the polls. In Tennessee, for example, 16 sheriffs were convicted of corruption between 1981 and 1991. Elsewhere, sheriffs are being indicted and convicted for shaking down massage parlors, running drug rings and abusing prisoners, sexually and otherwise, according to Yant. Editor of the Columbus (Ohio) Free Press , he relates more than a dozen stories of lawbreaking law officers in, among other places, Starr County, Texas; St. Francis County, Ark.; and McCormick County, S.C.. In one lengthy section Yant recounts a story he broke in 1978, involving an Ohio sheriff who held office through intimidation for 14 years before being indicted for a variety of crimes. The book is a powerful reminder of the importance of a free press, even in a strong democracy. 30,000 first printing; $30,000 ad/promo. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Yant surveys the corruption and criminal activities of county sheriffs throughout the United States (mainly in the South and West) and identifies their roots in the lack of accountability to higher governmental authority. He recounts his own run-in with a free-wheeling sheriff in Mansfield, Ohio where, as the editor of a local newspaper, he became the object of harassment and threats that eventually led to the loss of his job, his house, his wife, and his savings. This section (about a third of the book) is dramatic and fast-paced. Unfortunately, the rest of the book consists of short summaries of the careers of criminal sheriffs, divided into broad categories such as urban, rural, suburban, jails, deputies, and election frauds. While these sections include much information, there is not enough detail to provide narrative interest, and the repetition of cases finally becomes numbing. For large true crime collections.- B