"Campbell Brown".
Sounds like one of those typically improbable TV anchor names, like "Willow Bay," "Hannah Storm," and "Ashleigh Banfield."
Posted on 10/15/2002 3:54:44 PM PDT by Hillary's Lovely Legs
NBC's Campbell Brown's Father Is Set To Leave For Prison John Hill Shreveport Times
BATON ROUGE - After having coffee and beignets at Baton Rouge's Coffee Call with friends, suspended State Insurance Commissioner Jim Brown will drive to the Oakdale federal prison, his home for the next six months.
Brown spent Monday visiting with his family - talking with his daughters from the White House to Peru - and packing up the last of 125 books he has arranged in order of preferred reading for his wife Gladys to mail off 5 at a time every Monday.
"I'm going to make the best of it," said Brown, who vowed he will continue appealing his conviction of federal charges of lying to an FBI agent to the U.S. Supreme Court long after he finishes serving his sentence.
Brown can take with him one pair of reading glasses, a religious ornament - in his case, a cross given him by a priest, and his wedding band. Once his wife and her sister, Gloria Carter, drop him off at the gate and he checks in, even the clothes on his back will be mailed back home.
His 4-year-old Yorkshire Terrier, "Shorty," who sleeps by his legs stayed close by Monday as Brown showed a visitor some of his paperback books purchased from the recent LSU Book Fair, a fund-raiser for the LSU Library. Among the reading: Mississippi writers Eudora Welty and William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men (based on Huey Long), as well as more recent books such as York Times reporter Rick Bragg's All Over But the Shouting.
Brown, who has 5,000 books in his personal library, has been a voracious reader since childhood and college. Reynolds Price, who taught Brown at Duke University, is among his favorite authors.
"I've probably already read about 40 percent of these," Brown said. "But books are like old friends. You need to take them out and revisit them every now and then."
Brown's phone was ringing constantly Monday with well-wishers, too many calls to return. So Jim and Gladys Brown decided to tell friends to come by the popular Baton Rouge coffee house that is modeled on the French Quarter's Morning Call this morning.
He plans to spend about 45 minutes visiting before leaving for the two-hour drive to Oakdale, an 86-bed small federal prison that is centrally located. His mother, Helen Brown, and brother, Jack Brown, both of Shreveport, are just more than 2 hours away. It is also only about 2 hours away from Baton Rouge, where his son, James, is an LSU freshmen.
Brown spend part of Monday talking on the phone with his three daughters from a previous marriage: Campbell Brown, 34, the NBC-TV White House correspondent; Gentry Brown, 31, a Memphis ad executive, and Meredith, 29, a nurse who is in Peru giving free medical care.
"One of the worst things about this is not being able to contact my family whenever I want," Brown said. He said he will be limited to 300 minutes a month in telephone calls.
"At this stage in life," the 62-year-old Brown said, "the most important thing to you is your right to do what you want when you want to do it. I am losing that right."
He awoke Monday facing his last 24 hours before beginning the six-month sentence worried. "But not about the big picture, but the little things - paying my bills, making sure my kids are taken care of, the things any person would do if he were going away for six months," Brown said.
Brown was convicted in October 2000 of lying to an FBI agent by the same jury that found him not guilty of charges he conspired to fix the liquidation of the failed Shreveport-based Cascade Insurance Co. on terms favorable to owner David Disiere. Former Gov. Edwin Edwards and Shreveport attorney Ron Weems were acquitted of all charges that they were co-conspirators.
"What happened to me was unfair," Brown said, noting that prosecutors refused to give him the FBI agents' handwritten notes that he could have used to challenge the agents' testimony. In the same trial, Weems got those handwritten notes and did use them in his defense.
Appellate courts have disagreed with Brown's assessment that not having the notes violated his rights to confront his accuser. The U.S. Supreme Court will have the final say.
Brown remains Louisiana's elected insurance commissioner, but all duties are performed by First Assistant State Insurance Commissioner Robert Wooley.
Wooley said Brown is suspended without pay "until he exhausts all of his appeals," which means until the U.S. Supreme Court acts on Brown's appeal.
If the nation's highest court reverses his conviction and there is time left in Brown's term - which now ends January 2004 - Brown is automatically reinstated and can ask the Legislature to reimburse him all attorneys' fees and his back pay.
If the court upholds Brown's conviction, Wooley becomes insurance commissioner.
Back to the top
"Campbell Brown".
Sounds like one of those typically improbable TV anchor names, like "Willow Bay," "Hannah Storm," and "Ashleigh Banfield."
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.