Published: April 19, 2008 07:20 pm         

Bob Graham speaks out

By BILL ARCHER

Bluefield Daily Telegraph

PRINCETON — For a while, it appeared as though Bob Graham, former executive director of the Wyoming County Council on Aging and its associated entities, might be spending two years of his life in a federal prison. That all changed in March when the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out his conviction on a single count of illegally cashing in $31,000 and change of his accrued sick leave.

Before statewide newspapers started gulping down barrels of ink on stories about his six-figure salary and perks, Graham was a popular personality around Mercer County, serving with the Princeton Senior High School Athletic Boosters for a time and as the voice of Princeton Tiger football on radio. He also called football games for his college alma mater, Concord University.

Graham withstood a pounding from the statewide press, as well as a 39-count federal indictment, but although the single count of conviction on his criminal charges didn’t hold up under the review of the federal appellate court in Richmond, Va., the jury’s still out in the court of public opinion on Bob Graham the man. The 61-year-old grandfather with seven grandchildren who served more than half of the sentence that was overturned on appeal now finds himself out of work, facing a state civil complaint and still not getting any love from the media.

“I liked being on Hoppy Kercheval’s MetroNews statewide talk show,” Graham said during an interview April 16, in the Bluefield Daily Telegraph newsroom. “I feel like I can control what is going out. It’s more like talking with people face-to-face.” He expressed his disdain for the general coverage of his situation. “The media just follows the pack ... reporting what the first guy reported over and over. The press has run a lynch mob in my case.”

Graham said he would love to go on “Larry King Live” to tell his story, but settled for radio, a four-hour visit two weeks ago with veteran Charleston Gazette reporter Tom Searls who covered Graham’s criminal trial in Bluefield from gavel to gavel and an almost two-hour stop in the Telegraph newsroom.

Graham brought a four-page typewritten talking-points document with him to the Telegraph newsroom, complete with a three-page attachment that addressed the English Common Law principal of quo warranto, the legal argument he claims the state applied to its civil complaint against him that seeks to take his IRA retirement nest egg as well as more than $356,000 the state claims Graham embezzled from the agency.

Both in the interview and in the pages of his talking points, Graham claims to have been victimized by, first the flood of July 8, 2001, that disrupted the flow of his life and transformed him from being a salaried 40-hour per week worker into a workaholic who became obsessed with rebuilding the losses his Wyoming County agencies lost in the natural disaster that ripped through the county.

Graham claims the flood and his work to save his agency made him vulnerable to his enemies in various levels of state government who stirred public opinion against Graham based on the success of his agencies and his ever-growing salary — a salary that he claims was more in line with other similar county agencies if a true comparison was made. However, he claims others who wanted to expose him “fed” the salary totals to the media to throw interests away from allegations of wrong-doing he was making against them.

During the interview, Graham said that the salary figures that have been kicked around in the press of as much as $457,000, has been grossly overstated. While admitting to having a six-figure salary that he claims is in keeping with operating a company with a $6 or $7 million annual budget and 400 employees, he said that the big total represented moneys that he received from cashing in his accrued sick time.

“The feds try to starve you out and get you to accept a guilty plea even if your not guilty so you can save your home without having to sell everything to pay your legal fees,” Graham said. “I told my board what I was doing when I first got wind of what the feds were up to. They spent almost four years going through the books of the agency trying to find the dirt on me, but they couldn’t find any.

“I think I’m also guilty of being successful in Wyoming County,” Graham said. “If I would have built a $125,000 agency into a $7 million operation that could withstand the kind of scrutiny that the Wyoming County Council on Aging has been put through in the past five years... If I would have done that in Kanawha County, they would have had me speaking to the chamber of commerce to tell them how I did it,” he said.

When he made a point during his interview, Graham would often pour through any one of the three spiral notebooks he carried with him in search of the documents that supported his claims. Along with making himself vulnerable to his detractors when he tried to rebuild after the 2001 flood, Graham said that he became a political target when former U.S. Attorney Kasey Warner of the Southern District of West Virginia, his brother Kris Warner, former chairman of the West Virginia Republican Party and Monty Warner, unsuccessful Republican challenger in 2004 for the race for governor won by Joe Manchin, targeted him as a symbol of southern West Virginia corruption.

“When I read in Mannix Porterfield’s story in the Beckley Register-Hearld that Monty Warner was coming to Itmann as part of his corruption tour of southern West Virginia, we were ready for him,” Graham said. “We had spaces blocked off in front of the old company store and people waiting to see him. When he came here, he drove right on past and went to Pineville. Some of the ladies went over to see him, but it didn’t much matter.”

Graham likens the 13-month, and three or four days he spent in the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Morgantown, a minimum security prison camp for male inmates to the nearly identical 13 months and 20 days that he spent in Vietnam with the U.S. Marine Corps in 1968-’69. He emerged from both of those experiences without a scratch.

Graham’s family was living in the Montcalm area when he was born Jan. 22, 1947. His family lived in several other Mercer County towns, and he was living in Lashmeet when he started attending Princeton Senior High School in the 1960s. He left high school before graduating and entered the Marine Corps at age 17. He earned his GED when he was in the Marines, came back home in 1969 and entered Concord University on the G.I. Bill.

“I finished at Concord in two and one-half years and went to the University of Wisconsin graduate school where I majored in history,” Graham said. “It has the best history graduate school program in the country.” After he earned his master’s degree, Graham came back to Mercer County, spent a year and one-half working as “Congressman Ken Heckler’s man in Bluefield,” and tried his hand at a few jobs before finding his stride heading up a consumer advocacy group — the Princeton Area Citizens Group.

Graham and his fellow advocates tackled GTE South to push for free phone service between Princeton and Bluefield and battled West Virginia American Water over the removal of a water tank in the Princeton water system. He parlayed his growing popularity into a seat on Princeton city council in the late 1970s, and was serving as a councilman in 1978 when he read an ad in the classified section of the paper that the Wyoming County Council on Aging was looking for an executive director.

“When I first went there, the council was operating on a two-year $125,000 budget, and auditors had questioned $25,000 of the costs,” he said. “From the time I took over until the day I left, the auditors never questioned a penny of the Council on Aging costs.” At the time, the council was headquartered in C.C. Cottrel’s office in the old Glen Rogers School building. Graham said he worked to get new buses, then worked to consolidate the council’s services at the old Itmann Company Store.

“In the late 1970s, the state approved Bingo as a fund-raiser for agencies like ours,” he said. “That helped us with the buses, and (U.S.) Senator (John D. “Jay”) Rockefeller (IV, D-W.Va.) worked with Pocahontas Land Company to get the use of that building. It’s a great building.”

Graham’s primary complaint about his federal criminal trial remains his complaint that the government made an 80-year-old lady wait another day to testify, and called a stripper to testify that Graham financed her breast augmentation surgery. “Several of the senior citizens from the Wyoming County Council on Aging remained supportive of me,” Graham said. “Ten or 15 of them even wrote to me regularly when I was in prison.”

Graham said his attorneys told him to “lay low” through the period of his trial and said they urged him against talking with the press now. “I’m not going to leave the state,” he said. “I’m not convicted of a felony. I’m not going to hide in a hole.” He said he has no intentions of trying to return to his job with the Council on Aging, but he said he would be willing to help the local athletic teams he supported if they need his help.

“I was always out in front, doing things that I thought would help the people I was serving,” Graham said. “I helped the sports teams as more of a hobby than anything else. I never got paid for any of it. I will still do anything I can do to help local sports.”

As for work, he said he hopes to launch three for-profit companies what will provide assistance to elderly people on a fee for service basis, not relying on Medicare to fund operations. “West Virginia is still locked into the Medicare mentality. I think a fee-for-service plan will work.”

He has been gathering materials for a book on his experiences as an iconoclast who has spent more than 30 years battling various institutions. He doesn’t have a publisher lined up, but he said he hasn’t started looking in earnest yet. He said more things about quo warranto, his specific complaints against other state officials and even provided documents detailing his various points. He did not say if he had additional press interviews planned.

— Contact Bill Archer at barcher@bdtonline.com

     

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