July 6, 1998
Blunt Boetsch bites back
The head of a state ethics
panel is not known for her shy demeanor, and some find her candor
too much.
By Steve Friess
Review-Journal
With her bulging blue eyes peering in disbelief
from under salty black bangs, Mary Boetsch seemed like a fastball
pitcher in windup.
"No, no, no," hurled the chairwoman of the Nevada
Commission on Ethics, springing forward in her enormous black
leather seat from a deceivingly reclined position to cut off
the speaker. "You listen to me. Your clients lied. They lied.
Their testimony here before us was one of the sorriest displays
I've ever seen. ... And I'm sorry if you don't have the advantage
of having been here, but we were and ... it was a pitiful show."
Harsh, biting words. The kind that few people
are capable of saying, no matter how true they may seem. The
type even fewer can unload while staring someone in the face
the way Boetsch so earnestly does.
But for Boetsch, such candor was merely a warm-up
in a marathon four days of ethics hearings in Las Vegas at the
end of June. This blistering attack led up to her panel's fast
decision to fine former Clark County Commission candidate Brooks
Compton, his mother, Shari Compton, and her former husband,
Steve Smith, for their connection to a bogus ethics complaint
filed under a fictitious name.
Over the subsequent days, Boetsch's piercing
focus and bluntness would come in handy as the Ethics Commission
finally sorted out the tangled matter of whether Clark County
commissioners unfairly influenced the awarding of shop leases
at McCarran International Airport in August.
By the time it ended, County Commissioners Yvonne
Atkinson Gates and Lance Malone would be found to have violated
ethics laws by not disclosing friendships or familial relations
to some of those for whom they voted to receive airport contracts.
And another county commissioner, Myrna Williams, would be cleared
of similar charges.
Boetsch, a 47-year-old criminal defense attorney
from Reno who has been chairwoman of the ethics panel for three
years, is accustomed to being at the center of such political
maelstroms. There is hardly a powerful leader in Nevada who
she hasn't dressed down at some point, a task she takes to fearlessly
even as she says she hates having to do it.
Among them:
--Las Vegas Mayor Jan Jones. Boetsch wagged
her thick finger in May at the mayor's hiring of her husband's
friend for a $100,000 city job. Warned Boetsch: "This is as
close to the line as you can get without stepping over it. It
looks high-handed as hell."
--Atkinson Gates. When the commission found
in January that the chairwoman tried to use her influence to
secure a lease in a resort for her proposed daiquiri business,
Boetsch admonished: "You are not a stupid woman. ... You are
well-educated. You are well-experienced. But ... for certain
parts of this inquiry, you're in the ozone."
--University and Community College System of
Nevada Chancellor Richard Jarvis. Boetsch admonished the administration's
efforts to try to keep Regent Howard Rosenberg off the board
by declaring it "smells like a rat."
And despite all this, the Irish Catholic from
the northwest suburbs of Chicago claims she's shy. In private,
friends insist, she's nowhere near as combative and withering.
"Oh, no, she's really very sweet," said fellow
Ethics Commissioner Helen Chisholm. "She goes to dinner, loves
movies, she just bought a new home. She's a totally different,
very down-to-earth person in private."
Law school was actually Boetsch's second choice.
After her college graduation, she failed to get into medical
school and instead went to work for four years booking freights
for import-export companies in Chicago. A friend, noticing her
quick wit and her inquisitive nature, suggested she become an
attorney. She enrolled in University of Illinois Law School,
graduated at age 29, and moved to Reno in 1980 because her sister
lived there.
Boetsch served her first five years as an attorney
in the Washoe County district attorney's office before she and
fellow Assistant District Attorney Pat Mooney left to start
their own firm.
There are some things Boetsch simply won't discuss,
chief among them her family life and her relationship with the
Catholic Church. She's single, has no children of her own and
tends to like it that way.
"I am not particularly maternal," said Boetsch,
who nonetheless named one of her three cats Lily, for a friend's
child.
Even so, she rejects the notion that she's a
loner. "I enjoy my own company, but no, I don't sit in a corner
in my house alone every night and drink milk with the cats."
She's likewise relatively quiet on tragedies
that have struck her, including the deaths of her father, a
local school board member, from a heart attack when she was
13, and her brother from an automobile accident when she was
20. Her mother, a schoolteacher, also died of a heart attack,
six years ago.
"Yes, my dad's death was very painful, and it
does alter the way you grow up," she said tersely. "But I don't
view my life as having a signpost here and there that you have
to analyze."
As an attorney, she receives high praise and
last week finished her one-year term as president of the Washoe
County Bar Association. When the offer came from Gov. Bob Miller
to be appointed to the Ethics Commission in 1993, she leaped
at it.
"The whole idea was intellectually interesting,"
she said. "The concept of ethics in government seemed like something
appropriate and laudable. I was raised to give back to the community,
that there's a measure of service that comes with being alive
on this planet."
As private as she tries to be, her position
on the Ethics Commission makes her a public figure. When she
was arrested in March 1997 for driving under the influence,
it was widely reported. She pleaded guilty to misdemeanor drunken
driving, attended drunken driving school and served two days
under house arrest.
"My private life is mine, and it's staying there,"
she answered to questions about the incident. "I learned how
people get treated when they get taken to jail, but that's all
I'm going to say."
Yet the incident has given fodder to Boetsch
critics who have been reprimanded by the Ethics Commission.
"Well, at least I've never been arrested for
DUI," snarled Shari Compton, former chief of the state consumer
affairs division, outside the hearing room after being fined
$5,000 last month for involvement in the bogus complaint. Compton
resigned her post in 1990 amid allegations she accepted favors
from a Las Vegas telemarketing company her office regulated.
Boetsch shot back, "That's catty and it's not
necessary and I could care less what Shari Compton has to say
about it."
Other attacks on Boetsch are taken more personally.
The airport contracts case in June was highlighted by a full-frontal
assault on her integrity by irate Malone attorney Don Campbell,
who lashed out at her "rabid verbal punches and snide remarks."
Campbell insisted she had "abandoned her responsibility to be
a fair and neutral arbitrator" because she had not given him
enough advance notice of when a witness would be testifying.
Boetsch insists Campbell received ample warning.
"That was not a pleasant experience, particularly
because he was wrong," Boetsch said. "When someone sits there
and says I am unprofessional, I am snide and I have not told
the truth -- that's probably the worst attack I've had in 18
years of practicing law."
Campbell referred to the Ethics Commission as
"the Mary Boetsch show," echoing other critics who believe she
does almost all the speaking and steers less engaged panelists
to her conclusions.
Few attorneys would speak negatively of Boetsch
on the record, although animosity between Atkinson Gates attorney
Kathleen England and Boetsch was never far from the surface.
The two women have clashed often since the fall, when Atkinson
Gates appeared to lose any goodwill she had with the Ethics
Commission by not showing up for a November hearing.
Since that point, the transcripts show Boetsch
often interrupted England and rarely concurred with any legal
points raised by the attorney. Reports indicate Boetsch has
admonished England on the telephone for grandstanding and keeping
ethics officials from getting "a word in edgewise."
"Yes, she's very harsh on me," England said
in March. "I don't know why that is, although I think it implies
a bias against my client."
England is out of town on vacation for the month,
and Atkinson Gates said she has no comment on Boetsch.
Yet what critics detest in Boetsch -- that forceful
style that Campbell says implies she's acting as a prosecutor,
not an impartial arbiter -- is precisely why fellow commissioners
made her their chairwoman. Elected officials are more often
appearing before the Ethics Commission with attorneys nowadays,
so it takes a hard-nosed lawyer to neutralize the match, Ethics
Commissioner Hal Smith says.
"She just bores right in," said an admiring
Smith, who added that other commissioners sometimes enjoy listening
to her machine-gun the same question relentlessly until an evasive
witness answers it. "The lawyers are there defending them with
loopholes. You need someone like Mary Boetsch for that."
Boetsch says she has no designs on public office.
"There are people who thrive in that arena,
who thrive on the rubber-chicken circuit and all that," Boetsch
said. "I'm not a particularly outgoing person, and I wouldn't
want my foibles to be so visible. I just know I'd make lousy
politician."
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