If You Ask Me / By Martha Knight

It must have been in April of 1974 that I broke the Jack D’Arcy story. Well, the one that went beyond assorted cases in which he had been charged with DWI (in those days, Driving While Intoxicated, since then replaced by Driving Under the Influence) and/or driving while license suspended and/or  leaving the scene of an accident and such.

Working for the Buffalo Courier-Express and for the Olean Times Herald, I went to Albany on a Legislative Conference junket, riding the bus with the county legislators and an assemblyman and a state senator from our area. The conference would last several days, and the governor would address the group at a breakfast in the DeWitt Clinton.

We all stayed in the same hotel, seems to me, and most of the group were to be seen chinning with various state notables and with party leaders, in the various suites and dining areas and bars in a few establishments just down the hill from the Capitol complex. But the night before the great breakfast, the Allegany County delegation disappeared, along with the GOP chairman, whose plum job was that of chief bill drafter, with offices in Albany. All I could find out was that they had gone back to Allegany County for “something that came up” but they would be back the following morning.

Next morning they were haggard, and nervous as cats in a room full of rocking chairs. The governor came to the breakfast after delivering his budget message to the legislature, and talked to the group. Afterwards we piled into the chartered bus. I sat by the majority leader of our county legislature, son of that bill drifter guy. He was a lifelong friend of my husband, and we often got together with him and his wife, so we were on friendly terms. I was a Republican stalwart in those days, but he couldn’t be totally open with me what with my being a reporter and columnist.

Besides, he was very tired. Naturally. He had been up all night, I supposed, with this hurried trip back to Allegany County and the return to Albany. All I had learned so far was from snatches of conversation overheard in passing. I believed a county official was about to be charged with something serious, and he would have to resign, and he would be tried, and a special prosecutor would have to be appointed because “of course” the DA’s office couldn’t handle it.

And there had been a meeting in a vehicle parked in a cemetery, to assure total privacy, while the bigwigs from the county had worked out how to handle things. The vacancy might not have to be filled—just leave the work to the assistants…

Plus, it was better I happened to be with them in Albany than back in Allegany County! Or so I had overheard one of them say to some others, with a chuckle.

So the countylegislator and I rode along in the bus, and he would doze off, and I would nod off after a bit, and from time to time he would wake for a bit and say something and I would wake and reply, and then while he was mostly awake but quite drowsy and relaxed I remarked that it was going to be very difficult for him and the others to handle; I did not envy them the task. He agreed that it was certainly going to be very touchy and unpleasant.

Still very sympathetic, I observed that it was really terrible for the family. He agreed whole-heartedly; he wondered if she could even go on teaching.

That nailed it. The elected official with assistants was the district attorney, whose wife taught music in my school district. He was in serious trouble. I had a lot of history with Jack D’Arcy, all of it unpleasant, what with my having been the reporter who would follow the case whenever, as an assistant district attorney, he kept getting drunk and arrested, and kept not getting arraigned where the Wellsville town justice was a great friend of his father. I would get tipped as to when the arraignment would finally be about to happen late Friday afternoon after which everyone would be unavailable until Monday--but then I would be at the arraignment after all.

D’Arcy hated me so much that whenever we seemed about to meet on the Court House stairs or in a hallway, he would turn around and head the other way. This was a standing joke among many people.

Soon my seat mate on the bus began speaking freely with me, since obviously I knew most of it anyway. Well, pretty soon I did.

When the bus stopped at a restaurant I ran for a phone and called the Courier-Express and dictated a story, while the others were having lunch. By the time I got home I had enough additional information to send in an update for the next edition.

At the arraignment a week or so later we were overrun by reporters from other city papers and magazines such as Playboy and Viva and Hustler. I hated the idea of this man having to run a press gantlet and helped engineer D’Arcy’s evasion of that. Clearly he was a tormented man, and his career in law or in politics was over, his marriage and ability to parent his children damaged.

Eventually he pled to five of the 85 counts. For quite some time he had been arranging to get high school girls excused from school, using forged letterhead from a fictitious organization of district attorneys supposedly doing research into the effects of bondage and domination on victims. The girls were told they were not allowed to tell anyone about this research. One finally did tell her boyfriend, and he insisted on telling her parents, and then the school system was asked to cooperate in learning who the other victims were, and the investigation was carried out.

Eight girls, over many months, with numerous incidents! Watching bondage movies, being tied up in this man’s basement lair, being asked to describe their thoughts about the activities. They were paid for their participation in the “research.”

If the first victim had felt able to tell school personnel or her family, there would have been no other victims. Sad to say, she had been intimidated and maybe shamed into silence. Likewise, the next, and the next…

That pattern is repeated. Hushing up exploitation by anyone who abuses a position of power is always the wrong way to go.

Peace.