Early Business Career, Legal Issues
Following his discharge in 1945, Hensley and his brother went back to work for Marley in his United Sales Company in Phoenix and United Distributors in Tucson. In 1948, both brothers were prosecuted by the federal government and convicted of multiple counts of falsifying liquor records in a conspiracy to conceal illegal distribution of whiskey against post-war rationing regulations. Jim Hensley received a six-month sentence (later upheld but suspended by an appeals court) while his brother received a year in federal prison, and both were fined. In 1953, Jim Hensley and Marley were charged by federal prosecutors with falsifying liquor records. Defended by future Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, they were acquitted.
In December 1952, the Hensley brothers bought into the Ruidoso Downs racetrack in New Mexico, with Eugene running it and Jim returning to Phoenix. In a May 1953 hearing before the New Mexico State Racing Commission, the Hensley brothers concealed the existence an equal partner, Clarence "Teak" Baldwin, who had been banned from any ownership role due to illegal bookmaking activities. A 1953 New Mexico State Police investigation found further that Kemper Marley was a financial backer for bookmakers and had connections with Baldwin and with the bookmaking operations of organized crime, a conclusion echoed decades later by the Arizona Project investigative reporting team. The Hensley brothers gained their Ruidoso Downs racetrack license in 1953, as no New Mexico law barred convicted felons from race track ownership, although in 1955 new Governor of New Mexico John F. Simms would say he was "appalled" by the previous administration's decision to do so. Previous Governor Edwin L. Mechem had defended the approval, saying that the Hensleys had been under constant surveillance and deserved continued attention, but that no action was taken against them because the investigation showed that as race tracks go, all laws apparently were being observed. Jim Hensley would sell his interest in Ruidoso Downs to his brother Eugene in 1955 (who would in turn sell it to a Marley-connected company in 1969).
Read more about this topic: Jim Hensley
Famous quotes containing the words early, business, legal and/or issues:
“The girl must early be impressed with the idea that she is to be “a hand, not a mouth”; a worker, and not a drone, in the great hive of human activity. Like the boy, she must be taught to look forward to a life of self-dependence, and early prepare herself for some trade or profession.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“Our business being to colonize the country, there was only one way to do it—by spreading over it all the associations and connections of family life.”
—Henry Parkes (1815–1896)
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circulating there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gasmask handy, it is our business to puncture gasbags and discover the seeds of truth.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)