All Muck Is Local: Earning Votes and Stripes in Milwaukee

In an election season when the electorate is passionately debating the relative merits of change, experience and straight talk, Milwaukee’s 6th District gave their one-term alderman, Michael McGee, a plurality of their votes in a 9-candidate race last Tuesday. He will face Milele Coggs in the aldermanic runoff in April.

What’s so unusual?

McGee is running his re-election campaign from his jail cell. He was arrested last May, and is still behind bars. Charged with 12 counts of election fraud, bribery and contempt in the state court and nine federal counts, which include bribery and extortion, he faces a theoretical, though unlikely, 115-year sentence if convicted of all the felonies. Though he posted bond on the state charges, the judge in the federal court is holding McGee without bail because he was allegedly intimidating witnesses even from prison in order to influence their testimony. McGee could take office from jail if elected, because his trial dates are after this April’s runoff. If convicted as a felon, he would be removed from office.

Last April, McGee survived a recall election with 64 percent of the vote against seven challengers. Yet a month later he was arrested for conspiring with two friends to murder a man for $3,000. Their conversations were captured in the course of a federal investigation of McGee’s alleged demand for bribes in exchange for help in obtaining a liquor license. Since the tape also revealed the gang later agreeing to give the victim a mere “head-busting,” in which they would “beat” him “down,” “peel back [his] wig” and “sew his cap together,” — all for $1,000 — the charge was reduced to substantial battery.

Nothing — not allegations of shaking down business owners, buying votes, soliciting bribes, nor restraining orders, three arrests in a year and a half, nor threatening to kill his extramarital pregnant girlfriend — seems to dissuade McGee’s faithful supporters.

“I think he’s a nice person, and I think he’s been railroaded. I don’t think he can do as good of a job in prison. But I think if he’d been a white man, he’d already been out of jail,” says one voter.

McGee’s district is largely African-American. After last May’s hearing, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that McGee’s supporters feel that “the case is weak and shows that the government targets leaders who represent the underclass.” As he was led handcuffed into court, several of his supporters in the packed courtroom raised closed fists.

McGee’s attorney on the state charges, Glenn O. Givens, says that McGee is the target of a trumped up, racist prosecution. Or, as he put it during a hearing last spring, “It was the government that actually committed the crimes that Alderman McGee is charged with.”