Seattle Justice

This book is a fascinating expose of Seattle’s not-so-remote politically corrupt history, which in many ways mirrors the origin story of Seattle or maybe just a less visible extension of Seattle’s original vice history.

This book was especially intriguing to me because when I was in high school in the early 1970s, I lived in Ocean Shores. My dad was a police officer and then eventually the police chief. Back then, the big political issue in Ocean Shores revolved around whether the state would allow gambling. My dad was firmly against it. He worried that the corruption in Seattle would bleed into Ocean Shores(which some of it did for a bit but that is a whole other story). So I was aware of some of the sordid facts and many of the notorious players identified in the book. I was aware somewhat of what was going on while in college at UW and then heard more stories when I worked for the King County Prosecutor in the 1980s.  This book filled in the details about the corruption I had heard about over the years. I just have to say thank you to Chris Bayley for cleaning up the long-established system of vice and payoffs in Seattle government. I hope he knows that what he did in Seattle/King County helped small towns like Ocean Shores.