Exposed in Spokane

By Unmesh Kher

Battling colon cancer two years ago, Washington State's senate majority leader James West, who was at the time also a mayoral candidate, granted an interview to the Spokane Spokesman-Review in which he confided that his illness had brought him closer to his maker. He had come to believe that his supporters' prayers had helped drive back the malignancy. West joked that he imagined God, inundated with requests for his recovery, was barking, "Get me an angel. I need to know who this Jim West guy is."

What he apparently hadn't imagined was that the Spokesman-Review's editors wanted to know too. Prompted by rumors of West's homosexuality (a five-year marriage ended in divorce in the mid-1990s) and a tip about his alleged predilection for boys, the paper had months earlier begun investigating his personal life. The results of that probe, which culminated in a controversial Internet sting operation, landed on Spokane's collective doorstep on May 5 like a paper bomb. "For a quarter-century," the report began, "the man who is now Spokane's mayor has used positions of public trust--as a sheriff's deputy, Boy Scout leader and powerful politician--to develop sexual relationships with boys and young men." The FBI last week opened an inquiry into whether the mayor should be investigated for corruption. West has told the paper he does not believe he has abused the powers of his office.

Several young gay men have since told the paper of their encounters with West. Ryan Oelrich, 24, says the mayor appointed him to Spokane's human-rights commission after they met on gay.com, the same website on which the Spokesman-Review set its trap. Oelrich says he resigned after six months because West kept propositioning him and once offered him $300 to swim naked with him. Most disturbing were the accusations leveled by two men--one in jail, the other on parole--who say they were molested by West in the late 1970s, when they were between the ages of 7 and 11 and he was a deputy sheriff and a Cub Scout leader. West "categorically" denied their allegations. The statute of limitations for molestation charges has expired. But the Republican mayor who built his career in part supporting legislation hostile to gay rights, including a failed bill to bar gays and lesbians from jobs at schools and day-care centers--was forced to come clean about his double life. "I have visited a gay chat line on the Internet and had relations with adult men," he confessed. "I don't deny that."

He couldn't if he wanted to. The paper had also printed, in humiliating detail, Internet exchanges between the mayor and its hired computer-forensics expert posing as a 17-year-old boy. Over three months, the former federal agent, under the screen name Moto-Broc, engaged the man who called himself Cobra82nd and RightBi-Guy in instant-message conversations. The exchanges are in turns offensive, ironic and saddening. West is the first to bring up the topic of sex with a boy who says he's 17. But when Moto-Broc complains that his parents don't give him enough privacy, West replies, "Kids get into a lot of trouble in today's world. Parents should be concerned." Later the mayor tries to arrange an internship at his office for the young man.

In April, as West arranged a first date with Moto-Broc at a golf course, he intimated that he was worried: "Guys like you don't come along very often and I want it to last .. ?am I crazy here?" Later West, having revealed his identity, expressed a more pragmatic concern. "Someday I may run for Governor, and this would be bad if you know what I mean," he wrote. Of course, Moto-Broc never made it to the rendezvous. But three people from the Spokesman-Review were there to witness the mayor's hopeful arrival.

The night before the story broke, West sat down for a two-hour interview with the Spokane-Review and left so distraught that its editor, Steven Smith, asked the police chief to check on him. "We did not want the man's suicide on our hands," Smith says. Yet three days after the story ran, he says, an unhinged and rambling West called him and in the course of the conversation "thanked us for our diligence." Although the paper's covert methods have prompted tut-tutting from some editors, Smith says reader responses have been at least 10 to 1 in the paper's favor.

West has refused to resign, but he is taking what city spokeswoman Marlene Feist calls "a vacation ... to sort this situation out." So far, few Republican leaders have demanded he step down. One exception is Shaun Cross, a Spokane conservative who ran for Congress last year. The mayor, he says, "has created a tsunami of hypocrisy." Feist says Spokane's response has been mixed. Some people have called in sounding supportive, some upset. Still others say West is in their prayers. --Reported by Sandeep Kaushik/Spokane

With reporting by Sandeep Kaushik/Spokane