Illustration by Kyle T. Webster
At Charles Polk's sentencing hearing, defense attorney Scott Rosenblum described his client as a patriot (son of an Air Force master sergeant, and enlistee in the National Guard at age 17), a devoted husband and the father of three teenagers.
“Next he’ll say the guy just had a little drinking problem but now he’s found Jesus,” muttered a cynical observer in the back of the federal courtroom downtown.
Rosenblum went on, admitting that Polk was “smart enough to know better” but emphasizing how penitent he was, how he had owned up to his crimes and was a changed man ... and how he’d been plagued by a drinking problem.
The observer snorted in triumph: “No Jesus?”
Now Polk was speaking. “I understand what I did wrong,” he said almost inaudibly, choking on either the guilt or the necessity of admitting it. “I’m just asking for a
second chance.”
U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh wasn’t about to grant one. Polk wasn’t just any defendant, the judge pointed out. Polk was a lawyer who had abused his position of trust and used his legal skills to commit fraud. “Lawyers are the backbone of our system of justice,” Limbaugh said. “If clients and the public cannot depend on lawyers, we are in deep trouble.”
Polk wasn’t just any lawyer, either. He was a politically connected African American who claimed friendship with John Ashcroft and pull with top Republican officials all the way up to Vice President Dick
Cheney and President George W. Bush himself. And Polk was used to sliding by, leaving one St. Louis law firm only to be immediately—and apparently innocently—snapped up by another.
Over the years, he’d left behind many people who had a little on him but didn’t tell, and it had taken a three-year federal investigation to piece together the scattered bits of evidence against him. The extent of his machinations became public only last year, when a federal grand jury slapped him with a 23-count indictment, including five counts for federal income-tax evasion plus 18 for various schemes to defraud—for his own financial gain—individuals, banks, his employers and his clients, notably the Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District.
Rosenblum whittled the charges from 23 down to two, negotiating an agreement with the feds in which Polk pleaded guilty to the biggest tax count—evading $198,695 due on income of $539,814 for 2002—and one count of pocketing $45,190 that he overbilled MSD.
Limbaugh sentenced Charles Edward Polk Jr. to 46 months in prison—the maximum—followed by three years of probation. Earlier, Limbaugh had made it clear that he found the probation office’s recommended 78-month maximum more appropriate but would abide by the range agreed to in the plea bargain. He did include a provision for alcohol treatment during Polk’s incarceration but said it would only apply if prison officials found that Polk qualified. Polk had already surrendered his law license.
The game was over.
The image of the supplicating felon at the sentencing hearing was hard to square with that of the trusted senior advisor and character witness who, just five years earlier, had helped former Missouri Gov. John D. Ashcroft get confirmed as U.S. attorney general.
When questions surfaced about Ashcroft’s record on civil rights and race, Polk took to national television, appearing with NBC’s Bryant Gumbel and then–CNN host Greta Van Susteren and spiritedly defending his friend of 15 years. Fifteen years? That would place the start of the friendship in 1986, when Polk was just a newly minted law school grad—and a legal and political nobody.
Ah, but never mind. To make the case he needed to make, Ashcroft couldn’t have chosen better than the persuasive, well-dressed black lawyer from St. Louis. No matter when the friendship was forged, it was tight now—so tight that, on the first day of the confirmation hearings, when Janet Ashcroft confided on ABC’s Good Morning America that she’d once been attacked by a rapist, Ashcroft referred all press questions to their trusted family friend Charles Polk.
Polk even acted as master of ceremonies at the celebration of Ashcroft’s confirmation, introducing a black gospel choir and a black pastor singing a song Ashcroft had written.
Still aglow from the national spotlight, Polk started doing regular commentary on Fox News and working as a Washington lobbyist. That is, until one of his schemes got him fired—again.
A personal rise-and-fall story as dramatic as this one is inescapably about a man’s character, his tragic flaw. Polk’s story, though, is also a broader tale about how race, politics and the mores of the legal profession interacted to advance him and, even after he began pulling fast ones, protect him from discovery and allow him to game another day. Had Polk been, say, an accountant, he might not have gotten away with so much for so long, because one burned employer might have tipped off the next.
Lawyers, though, are slow to tattle. According to one well-placed St. Louis lawyer who’s seen this sort of thing happen over and over, firms keep their rotten-apple experiences to themselves to protect their reputations and economic self-interest—and because they’ve signed confidentiality agreements with their hiring mistakes to make them go away.
The Polk indictment set legal St. Louis abuzz, but only one of the lawyers and others interviewed for this story was willing to speak on the record. The others didn’t want their names even remotely associated with a man who had so disgraced himself and his profession—and for no better reason than to prove that he could.
For St. Louisans, the Charles Polk story begins in 1986, when “Chuck” Polk was a catch for Peper, Martin, Jensen, Maichel and Hetlage (now Blackwell Sanders Peper Martin). The firm hired Polk fresh out of law school at Jesuit-run Creighton University in Omaha, Neb., not a place where Peper Martin typically recruited. “I think he sent us a résumé,” recalls a firm attorney, who remembers Polk as seeming “very personable and very impressive.” Moreover, he was black, and the firm was eager to sign up “very qualified African-American minority associates.”
At Peper Martin, the young Polk proved himself as eager as his recruiters—too eager, in fact. He moved on after four years, says another source at the firm, because he wanted faster advancement. He also, no doubt, wanted the money that would go with a promotion.
Already Polk was displaying an inclination, eventually to become a habit, for keeping money that wasn’t his own. In early 1987, he and his wife, Cheryl Polk, were sued by Love Management, their landlord at the Plaza Square apartment complex in Midtown, for back rent of $791.
But Husch & Eppenberger was delighted to snag Polk. In the first of several facile firm-to-firm moves, the ambitious young lawyer apparently lost not a single day of work, and, in his eight years at Husch—his longest stint at any firm—he became a partner. He paid his dues, doing bread-and-butter work as city attorney for Berkeley and Pine Lawn and municipal judge for Moline Acres.
Polk was gaining respect in the wider St. Louis community. The Herbert Hoover Boys & Girls Club and Allegiant Bank invited him onto their boards, and he was accepted into Leadership St. Louis, a prestigious training program in civic engagement for promising well-placed professionals.
Meanwhile, Polk was establishing himself politically. From 1989 to 1993, he helped handle workers’ compensation cases for the office of Republican attorney general William Webster, a plum assignment reserved for the well-connected. (Polk was not implicated in the campaign contributions scandal for which some lawyers who did workers’ compensation work for Webster eventually went to prison.) Polk contributed to the U.S. Senate campaigns of “Kit” Bond in 1992 and Ashcroft in 1994, and he frequented Republican fundraiser parties and other events. One GOP insider speculates that it was at one of the 1994 campaign events that Polk met Ashcroft.
In his choice of party, Polk had taken calculated advantage of a “market” created by the scarcity of black Republicans, says a Democratic operative. “Republican politicians are nervous that they not look exclusionary, and they value highly those that can play a symbolic role.” Had Polk been a Democrat, he would have had to work harder and longer for high-level political access, the operative adds: “He saw two lines; he went to the shorter one.”
Bald, thickset, of medium height, Charles Polk didn’t stand out physically, even in that shorter queue of black GOP aspirants. Personally, however, he was a star and something of a natural-born politician himself. He was friendly and outgoing, a guy who said hello to people he passed regularly in his daily rounds even if he didn’t know their names. His ingratiating manner and cherubic smile drew fond responses. He was self-deprecatingly funny, easy to like and be with; even, some say, charismatic.
“Polk was one of those people who made it his business to get to know people,” his Democratic detractor says. “He had good enough networks that he had the capacity to find out what was going to happen and take advantage of it.”
By the mid-1990s, Polk was living the part of the young lawyer who’s already made it big. He was driving luxury cars, and he and Cheryl had moved from the less-than-elegant Plaza Square to a fine house on tony, private Washington Terrace in the Central West End. But the high-style façade hid the growing shabbiness of Polk’s personal finances. Normandy Bank sued Polk for arrears of $3,408 on a car loan, and St. Louis Children’s Hospital and Saint Louis University Hospital each sued him and Cheryl for several hundred dollars in back bills. For three straight years the couple failed to pay the city of St. Louis their annual bills of about $2,000 for personal-property taxes.
Asked whether Husch was aware of Polk’s nonchalance about paying bills, an official at the firm says that it comes as news even now. It was Polk’s sleight of hand with the firm’s money that got him into hot water there, though. In January 1998 he deposited—to his own account, instead of turning it over to the firm—a $10,203 cashier’s check for legal work he did for Faith United Church of the Living God, a financially troubled black church that eventually went belly-up. He left Husch a month later.
By that time, other lawyers at Husch were circling the wagons, an insider says: “Nobody knew what the hell Polk was doing.” They’d started asking questions—but he left before they found the answers.
Once again Polk landed on his feet—this time at Stinson, Mag & Fizzell, now Stinson Morrison Hecker. His tenure there was his shortest yet—less than two years—and it proved a disaster for him, the firm and Game Face International, a minority-owned startup manufacturer of sports apparel that he had brought to Stinson as a client. While he was supposedly securing financing for Game Face, the company went bust—and blamed Polk for dragging his feet, exaggerating his expertise in venture capital and personally extorting $25,000. Game Face brought a $15 million “legal malpractice” suit against Polk and settled out of court last year, just as the federal indictment against Polk was announced.
Polk’s tricks at Husch and Stinson were bupkes compared to the dodging he was simultaneously doing—at much greater risk to himself—with the Internal Revenue Service. He paid no federal income taxes in 1996 or 1997, a fact uncovered only by a routine investigation before he was sentenced. According to the indictment, he also failed to file from 1998 until 2002 on income that added up to nearly $2 million (with a tax liability of $470,000).
By the end of 2002, the feds were on his tail. Polk had cycled quickly through two more law firms, managing a St. Louis office for Pittsburgh’s Doepken Keevican & Weiss and then going to work for Kansas City–based Lathrop & Gage, which immediately made him vice chairman.
According to the indictment, he squirreled away more than $100,000 in MSD and firm money while he was at DK&W, but it was at Lathrop & Gage that he hatched the biggest plan of his career: He would get victims and relatives of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing the same kind of federal compensation the U.S. government was paying 9/11 victims and their families. Polk went into partnership with James Helenthal, publisher of a “shopper” newspaper in Quincy, Ill., promising him 45 percent of future legal fees. But first he insisted that Helenthal write two checks as down payments—one for $250,000 to himself and one for $132,000 to Cheryl Polk.
Polk dazzled Helenthal, urging him to rent BMWs and make big political contributions and inviting him to Washington to advance their case with officials at the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission, influential congressmen and senators and Vice President Dick Cheney. In the end, the scheme came to naught and Helenthal sued, claiming that Polk had fleeced him. Polk countered by filing a breach-of-contract suit against Helenthal—but the case was dismissed because Polk failed to respond to motions.
In March, St. Louis County Circuit Judge Melvyn W. Wiesman ordered Charles and Cheryl Polk to pay Helenthal $600,000 in actual and $3 million in punitive damages. The case is now tangled in continuing litigation.
As with money, Polk played loose with the truth, especially about himself. He claimed to be “a member” of Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, but a spokeswoman says the theater’s records show that he was merely on the mailing list and never bought a ticket or made a contribution. He claimed to be an adjunct professor of international law and business at Webster University, but First Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Reap said at the sentencing hearing that Polk took a $2,000 advance from the university to teach a course that he never showed up for—and kept the money.
Charles Polk didn’t have to fib and crib. He was savvy, suave and capable of earning an honest living ample enough to send his three children to private schools (including John Burroughs), own property on Martha’s Vineyard and satisfy his tastes for first-class travel and, his most obvious extravagance, the BMWs, Jaguars and Mercedes-Benzes he sometimes leased in pairs.
What’s more, his wife was a successful high earner in her own right, having worked her way up in the nonprofit world to become executive vice president and chief operating officer of the United Way of Greater St. Louis. According to the group’s most recent government filings, she’s making $168,420. The United Way, after investigating, has assured its board that she was not involved in any impropriety or conflict of interest and had filed all her personal tax returns for the years in question.
So what drove Charles Polk outside the lines of ethics, morality and propriety? His own defense attorney has used the word “greed.” Others prefer “arrogance”; one acquaintance calls him “a controlling personality.” A former colleague who spent social and professional time with him—and, by the way, never saw him drink to excess—believes he was undone by his self-image as a big-time operator, his craving for the limelight and the secret thrill of pulling off his scams consequence-free.
J.R. Hullverson, Helenthal’s attorney and the one source for this story willing, even eager, to be quoted about the man, is damningly blunt. He puts Polk down as “a pathological liar.”
If Charles Polk serves his full term, he’ll be 49 when he’s released. He won’t be a lawyer, having surrendered his license and promised not to try to get it back. He will owe hundreds of thousand dollars in back taxes and various other judgments, and his attorney has assured Limbaugh that Polk intends to pay back every dollar.
According to Rosenblum, Polk’s wife and children have forgiven him. Rosenblum also predicts that, after prison, Polk will redeem himself and use his smarts to become what he once appeared to be: a worthy member of society.
In Polk’s court file are letters of support from family members, friends, Polk’s pastor—and John Ashcroft, whose handwritten letter was described by a cynic who’d read it as “pablum.” Now a registered lobbyist doing business in Washington, D.C., under the shingle Ashcroft Group, the former attorney general didn’t return calls seeking comment on Polk. Says a friend, “I’m sure it’s a very painful thing for him.”
