William J. Scott was born in Chicago to William Earl Scott and Edith Victoria Scott. He was the second of two children; his sister was Jeanne Scott (later Jeanne Delaney). He attended South Shore High School in Chicago, served in the US Navy Air Core at the end of WWII (but never saw combat), attended Bucknell and the University of Pennsylvania on the GI Bill and then Law School at Chicago Kent College of Law.
He was married for 20 years to Dorothy Johnson Scott, and fathered two children, William G. Scott and Elizabeth A. Scott (now E. A. Petersen). The marriage ended in 1968. After a brief stint in the private sector, he became a US Attorney, then Illinois State Treasurer for 4 years and then in 1968 he became Illinois' longest-serving Attorney General. He also made an early and unsuccessful bid for the Governor's office. As Attorney General, he transformed the office into a vehicle for legal activism. The Attorney General's office became an aggressive defender of civil rights, consumer rights and the environment, vigorously pursuing major corporate polluters, price-fixers, organized crime, public utilities and even the ineffectual Federal Environmental Protection Agency and Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
He sued GM, Ford and Chrysler for conspiring to avoid installation of anti-pollution devices in cars. He sued the major airlines and power utilities for air pollution. He sued major industries such as US Steel and Inland Steel for air and water pollution. He sued these utilities, industries, and the cities of Milwaukee, Wisc. and Hammond, Ind. for dumping toxic chemicals and raw sewerage into Lake Michigan, poisoning the largest body of fresh water contained within the United States. He sued GM for installing Chevy engines in their Oldsmobiles. The list goes on...
Doing so made William Scott immensely popular with the electorate, and he was one of the few Illinois Republicans to carry the City of Chicago (in 1972) since Abraham Lincoln. It also made him very unpopular in some other circles. Nixon's Project CRIMP was famous for making the IRS an instrument of political repression; sadly this continued long after Nixon's departure. A US Attorney named Thomas Sullivan made William J. Scott the target of a several year special grand jury investigation. It appeared that its main design was to weaken him politically, but immediately following Scott's announcement of candidacy for the United States Senate, he was indicted for income tax evasion. The claim would be made that he converted campaign funds to his personal income and did not pay taxes on this. After a major coronary bypass operation, William Scott was put on trial for six counts of income tax fraud. Vincent Bugliosi, famous for the successful prosecution of Charles Manson (and who recently wrote an article and then a book on the 2000 election that you should read), was so outraged by what appeared to be a politically-motivated prosecution, he moved from LA to Chicago to lead Scott's defense.
Despite this, Scott was convicted of a single count of income tax evasion for supposedly pocketing $5K. Although the jury had rejected over 99% of the prosecution's case, Scott's career was destroyed the day after he narrowly lost the Republican Primary for the US Senate. He received a year and a day prison sentence, which made him eligible for an earlier parole. He was granted parole on his second attempt, and wound up serving almost 8 months in the United States Federal Penitentiary in Pleasonton, CA. He was never sent a tax bill for the tax he supposedly owed on that $5K, but the US government spent well over a million dollars to prosecute him. (A decade later, convicted Iran-Contra figures such as Oliver North and John Poindexter were to avoid all prison time. Poindexter for a time headed the Orwellian Total Information Awareness Program of the US Government.) The lesson to the public was clear enough: Even "Mr. Clean" can go to prison if he creates too much trouble for the corporate establishment. Ironically he probably "got away" with as much legal activism as he did because he was the top vote-getter for the Illinois Republican Party and successfully defeated the powerful Democratic Machine candidates who stood against him. He died a few years later of a massive coronary at age 59.
