news story / By Tim Stelloh

Coward of the County

Former Mendo County Republican chief Kenny Rogers given 25 years for attempted murder

(April 8, 2010)  “The sucking thing.”

It was an incongruous phrase to hear repeated ad nauseum within the proper environs of a courtroom. Yet there it was — this reference to Kenny Rogers’ principal argument that his old lawyer was a bush leaguer and that he deserved a new trial — repeated again and again for everyone gathered at Ukiah Superior Court on March 26. It was an argument Rogers would lose, and by the end of the day he’d be sentenced to 25 years to life for attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder. (For the full rundown on the bizarre Rogers case, see “Know When To Kill Them,” Aug. 20, 2009.)

Yet there he was, this former assistant fire chief and chairman of the Mendocino County Republican Central Committee, as gaunt and pale as you’d expect, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, seated in the jury box with a handful of other inmates. There was Alan Simon, who says that nearly five years ago Rogers tried to have him murdered over a water-related political dispute in Westport, the village in Mendo’s remote northwest corner where the Kenny Rogers saga unfolded. There were friends, family and supporters, divided by loyalty, fiddling with hearing aids, whispering to one another as the day’s proceedings wore on. There were the other orange-clad inmates who, upon hearing the attorney with the dark suit and devilish eyebrows pepper his lawyerspeak with the reference, giggled like kids who’d just overheard their churchgoing parents drop an f-bomb.

“The sucking thing.”

Usually, the sucking thing — or the sucking “issue,” as it was later phrased — was accompanied by another squirm-prompting expletive: “The nigger statement.”

This couplet referred to an incident from the spring of 2004 — more than year before Richard Peacock, an ex-con and a former employee of Rogers’, was arrested for firing a .22 Ruger at Simon nine times. A drive to recall Rogers from his post as Westport’s water district chief had recently commenced, and Rogers was going door to door trying to convince the town’s few dozen or so year-rounders who’d signed the recall to please reconsider. He showed up at Simon’s two-story home on Hillcrest Terrace and made the pitch; Simon, who was fairly new in town but would soon replace Rogers as the district’s leader, declined.

“I said, ‘No, we’re a democratic society and people feel you’re not doing your job,’” Simon testified during last summer’s trial. J. David Markham, Rogers’ attorney at the time, asked what happened next. After a few awkward moments, Simon dropped a bombshell: “[Rogers] said, ‘You want to have a nigger run this town? You want to have a woman who’s sucked the cock of every man in this town be in charge?’”

Simon testified that he then told Rogers to leave.

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