Lowell Barron refused to believe the tipster's story. Why would the Alabama Farmers Federation, better known as Alfa, be trying to dig up dirt on him and his fellow state senator, Hinton Mitchem?

   Mr. Barron, the powerful president pro tempore of the Alabama Senate, had voted Alfa's way ever since he was elected to the Legislature in1983 with the federation's help. He considered Alfa's top executives, Goodwin Myrick and John Dorrill, to be his friends.

   But Mr. Barron soon knew the rumor of February 1997 was true. Alfa was determined to punish the two senators. The reason? They had failed to support the federation in its fight to have the Senate confirm an Alfa vice president as a trustee of Auburn University. As Alabama's largest land-grant school, Auburn had old, close ties to the state's big farmers. Mr. Barron sat on that board himself, and Mr. Mitchem was chairman of the Senate committee that considered the governor's trustee nominations.

   Alfa's crudeness may have shocked Mr. Barron, who is a pharmacist and businessman from Fyffe in northeastern Alabama, but the lobby's bullyboy ways are well known in this state's politics. Alfa learned from its forebears - rich planters and industrial bosses, the latter derided in political lore as "Big Mules" -- who wrote Alabama's mean-spirited 1901constitution. Their selfish alliance ran the state with few interruptions until the 1960s, and their political descendants have acted as though Alabama belonged to them.

   The difference in Mr. Barron's case is that he fought back. He also hired the toughest trial lawyer in Alabama, former Lt. Gov. Jere Beasley, to go after his tormentors. On Feb. 23 of this year, Judge Randall L. Cole in DeKalb County Circuit Court awarded Mr. Barron more than $5 million in damages, following a jury trial at Fort Payne.
 
   Alfa's snooping invaded Mr. Barron's privacy, the judge declared in his ruling. Alfa's purpose was clear: The federation wanted to influence the senator's key vote on the trustee issue.

   "It is not unfair to characterize such an investigation for such a purpose as extreme conduct posing a potential threat to the free exercise of representative government," the judge wrote.

   Depositions and other records from the trial, which fill a suitcase-size cardboard box in Mr. Cole's judicial chambers, open a rare window to Alfa's backroom politics. Mr. Barron had good reason to anguish over his new enemy's intentions. Alfa packs a mean kick, and it has lots of ways to get even.

   Much of Alfa's power derives from its lucrative insurance business, which it began in 1946 as a way to offer fire protection to farmers. Today, Alfa Corp. is a conglomerate of companies that operates in three states and boasts more than $1 billion in assets, part of it invested in real-estate developments.

   Alfa requires its policyholders to join the Alabama Farmers Federation and pay annual dues of $19. But only about a quarter of the 400,000 members actually have ties to farming. Alfa also asks each policyholder to contribute another $2 annually to its political-action committee, Elect PAC. These contributions, some perhaps made unwittingly, raise about $600,000 a year, according to news reports.

   Mr. Myrick, the president, bragged in 1997 in the federation's magazine that the political-action committee had helped elect 13 of its favored candidates and pass three pet constitutional amendments in the previous year. But some politicians had blocked Gov. Fob James' appointment of Alfa Vice President Phil Richardson to an Auburn board seat.

   "We will definitely hold these legislators and other officials accountable for their disservice to the farmers and people of Alabama," Mr. Myrick warned in his column.

   Depositions and testimony at the trial exposed what Mr. Myrick was hinting at. Alfa's leaders had targeted the two senators, hoping to find something damaging in their financial and personal affairs. Alfa's strategy, at least in Mr. Barron's view, was to "leverage" the senators into supporting Mr. Richardson's confirmation.

   The obsession of Alfa's top leaders with this issue may seem unfathomable, but there's a lot of history between the federation and Auburn's trustee politics. One of the most notorious battles erupted in1947, when Gov. Jim Folsom, an opponent of the Big Mule/planter alliance, wanted to get the Extension Service at Auburn, and its farm agents, out of politics, particularly in the way they promoted Alfa's agenda. Alfa and its legislative allies struck back viciously, using McCarthy-like smear tactics to defeat Gov. Folsom's slate of reform trustees, one of whom later left the state in frustration.

   To bolster Mr. Richardson's appointment to Auburn's board, Alfa turned to investigators -- first, an Alfa employee named Kelli Vanlandingham. According to her deposition, she had impressed Executive Director Dorrill with her undercover work in Alfa's fight against a school tax increase in Tuscaloosa County. Ms. Vanlandingham had pretended to be a graduate student and persuaded school supporters to reveal their media strategy to her.

   But Ms. Vanlandingham, again working undercover, had no luck in finding dirt on Messrs. Barron and Mitchem. So Alfa's team called in George Culver, a political operative from Talladega. Trial testimony revealed that he set up a corporation under a contract with Alfa to hire a Birmingham investigative firm named Argus. Presumably, that arrangement put Alfa at arm's length from the skullduggery.

   The idea, it seems, was to catch the senators in some compromising position or show improper connections to Bobby Lowder of Montgomery, chairman and chief executive officer of Colonial BancGroup Inc. Mr. Lowder had refused to step aside from Auburn's board to make room for Mr. Richardson.

   What followed was almost comical. An investigator forgot his briefcase in an Auburn office while asking questions about Mr. Barron's business dealings with the university. Copies of the investigator's notes promptly ended up in the senators' hands. The two senators held a news conference on July 8, 1997, and denounced Alfa's snooping. An indignant Mr. Dorrill dismissed their accusations as nonsense.

   The senators then came right back and fired an even more damaging salvo. This time, they brought forward Ms. Vanlandingham, who had left Alfa and was ready to tell reporters about her role in the scandal. Her story, fleshed out by sworn depositions, showed a young woman tossed by the political seas, riding high one moment and hobnobbing with the big lobbyists, then abandoned by Alfa to survive on menial restaurant jobs.

   Not long afterward, Mr. Myrick and Mr. Dorrill were gone from the federation.

   Alfa's new president, Jerry Newby, came to call on Mr. Barron and his counsel, Mr. Beasley. Couldn't Alfa's old friend forget a few mistakes and drop his plans to sue? Mr. Barron recalled his lawyer's chilling reply: Alfa had done wrong, and somebody was going to pay.

   Indeed, Alfa continues to pay through its loss of credibility and, more important, its weakened political clout. Mr. Barron, who is more influential than ever in the Senate, says he is finished with the federation, no matter who is in charge. "They are just not my kind of folks," he said in a recent interview.

   For the rest of us, this episode reveals how a powerful and unaccountable special interest plays politics. Despite the folksy image Alfa likes to project, it represents some of the state's biggest landowners, a key group in the alliance that helped write the 1901 constitution. Alfa also has succeeded in amending that document, when necessary, to ensure that timber companies, agri-businesses and other big landowners pay the nation's lowest property taxes.

   Efforts to reform the tax system by broadening its base and spreading its burden more equitably have foundered on the shoals of Alfa's resistance. And many Montgomery insiders predict the same fate for any effort to reform the 1901 constitution, no matter how badly Alabama needs it.

   But who knows? Perhaps the new leadership has better things in mind for Alfa. One positive sign is that Mr. Newby, the new president, has organized a committee to re-examine Alfa's opposition to letting counties govern themselves rather than beg the Legislature for local laws.

   As a cotton farmer in booming Limestone County in the Tennessee River Valley, Mr. Newby surely sees that counties need authority to zone and plan for growth to avoid divisive and expensive conflicts over land use. Farmers often find themselves the victims of unmanaged growth, as residents of new subdivisions complain about pesticides, dust and noise.

   History indeed can take some strange twists.

   The old Big Mule companies -- utilities, insurance, steel, banks, mining -- began mellowing in the 1960s, particularly as their leaders questioned whether it made sense to promote low-wage factories and to starve schools with cheap taxes. Today, business leaders routinely bemoan the state's failure to elect more progressive governors, while many of these captains of commerce promote school and tax reforms.

   Meanwhile, a chastened Alfa nurses its wounds while a new management team moves into place at the federation's well-appointed headquarters in Montgomery. The rest of us are left to wonder: Will the last Big Mule kick out of its traces and join the 21st century?

Return to: Century of Shame, Introduction

Part 6: Absurd in Alabama

Reprinted with Permission from the Mobile Register.