Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 10, 1993 TAG: 9310100178
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID M. POOLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
There's the mountain twang he turns on and off like a switch. The aw-shucks grin. The way that he refers to himself as "the kid from Vinton."
Cranwell has been the master of his image since 1981, the last time someone challenged the Democrat for his seat in the Virginia House of Delegates.
That changed this summer when Republicans offered up a challenger intent on unmasking what they say is the real Dickie Cranwell.
"He's created an image of friend of the Roanoke Valley and champion for Southwest Virginia," says Amy Averill, campaign manager for Republican Bud Brumitt.
"He's been able to hide the fact that he has used his office for his own interests, to line his pockets, so to speak. It is up to us to let the public know what he has been up to."
Cranwell has been put on the defensive as he tries to answer for actions over the past 12 years, a period in which his financial worth and political clout rose dramatically.
There are accusations that Cranwell used his legislative seat for personal gain, first by cornering the market in annexation litigation for his Vinton law firm and, more recently, by lending his name to a controversial mortgage loan company.
Cranwell insists he's broken no laws and bent no rules. He describes the campaign accusations as personal attacks organized by state Republican leaders who, frustrated by their inability to recruit a strong candidate, are intent on taking him down a peg or two.
"I'm a big boy," Cranwell says. "I can take it."
Cranwell has been working to keep the focus of the campaign on the two candidates' ability to deliver for the 14th House District and all of Southwest Virginia.
Democrats contend that the region needs Cranwell more than ever as its political fortunes have been eclipsed by the state's populous eastern rim.
As House majority leader, Cranwell will be in a position to make sure the General Assembly does not ignore the interests of Southwest and Southside Virginia when it divvies up state money for education and transportation, Democrats say.
"We lose if he loses. The amount of dollars is insurmountable," Del. Watkins Abbitt, D-Appomattox, says.
The coalition builder
Cranwell became a legislative force almost as soon as he arrived at the General Assembly as a 29-year-old lawyer in 1972.
He was brash, arrogant and determined to prevail.
His quick grasp of the legislative process enabled Cranwell to leap ahead of more senior members in polls that measured effectiveness.
Cranwell's influence grew out of his intuitive understanding of what it takes to string together a coalition. His office in the General Assembly building became a place where lobbyists and fellow legislators went for advice on achieving the possible.
Cranwell's stature as a coalition builder grew when Democrats, who had long dominated the legislature, recaptured the governor's mansion in 1982. The successive administrations of Charles Robb and Gerald Baliles relied on Cranwell to maneuver their agendas through the House of Delegates.
Cranwell put his mark, either as sponsor or strategist, on virtually every significant piece of legislation enacted in the past decade. He led the fight against a coal slurry pipeline that would have cost Roanoke hundreds of railroad jobs. He helped craft the 1986 transportation bond package, an instant record check for gun buyers, regulations on indoor smoking and a repeal of state sales tax on non-prescription drugs.
"If there is a big fight going on, he'll be in the middle of it," Del. Clifton Woodrum, D-Roanoke, says.
In 1988, Cranwell became chairman of the House Finance Committee, which gives him considerable leverage in the budget-writing process. He controls the revenue portion of the budget on the House side by determining which tax bills reach the House floor and which are never heard from again.
Cranwell uses this leverage to pry loose nuggets for the Roanoke Valley. He saw to it that Roanoke Regional Airport got several million dollars in state grants for a new terminal building; that Explore Park got $6 million to buy land in eastern Roanoke County; that Roanoke County did not lose $400,000 when it formed a police department in 1990; and that Center in the Square continued to receive state operating funds despite a threatened veto by Gov. Douglas Wilder.
"There are many a jurisdiction that would love to have him," Abbitt says.
Cranwell maintains his power through intimidation. When angered, his grin becomes a grimace of pure fury. With his finger jabbing the air, Cranwell lets fly a volley of obscenity-laced threats. He is particularly fond of the phrase "rip your heart out."
"When he has to be, Dick is the meanest son of a bitch who ever walked the face of this planet," says Dave Saunders, a commercial real estate developer from Roanoke.
Some believe that Cranwell's abrasive style cost him his dream of becoming House speaker in 1991. Cranwell had been in so many fights that nearly every member of the House Democratic Caucus had, at some time, felt the sting of his whip.
"I'm not mean," Cranwell says, "but I've learned that these people will run over you if you let them."
`Smart as hell'
Some newspaper profiles of Cranwell have suggested that his scrappy personality grew out of a childhood of poverty in hardscrabble Southwest Virginia.
But neighbors in the Tazewell County town of Richlands say the Cranwells had plenty of money. His father, J.W. Cranwell, was a strip miner who hit it big during the coal boom that followed World War II. His older brothers, Billy and Bobby, both tooled around town in brand new Buicks while in high school.
Dickie is the youngest of four children. Their father was a workaholic before the word was coined. He left early in the morning and didn't return until dark.
Their mother, known as Mary P., is remembered as a rabid football fan who would drive anywhere to see her boys play. She was known to shake her umbrella at fans who criticized her boys, but she also would give her boys a tongue-lashing if they were poor sports.
"It was never a question of whether you were going to do something," Dickie recalls. "It was a question of whether you were going to do it better than anybody."
All the Cranwell children were seared with the need to excel; the fire within Dickie burned white hot.
Part of it had to do with being the youngest. His childhood idols were his brothers, nine and five years older, who were football heroes for the Richlands High School Blue Tornadoes and, later, Virginia Tech.
"We idolized them. We thought they were the greatest thing to ever hit the country," says Gene Hurst, one of Dick's childhood friends, who runs a family funeral home business in Richlands.
Dickie had more to overcome than filling his brothers' shoes. A childhood accident at age 3 left him blind in his left eye. He was playing with a glass tube and decided to smash it with a brick. The tube shattered, and a shard of glass flew into his eye.
Cranwell is reluctant to talk about his eye, but friends and family say the handicap is what drives him so hard to succeed.
His parents went out of their way to treat Dickie no differently than others, but he was different. His left eye wandered noticeably, and other children made fun of him. Dickie was pint-sized, but he would fight anyone who even looked at his eye the wrong way.
If the world could be cruel, he could be tough.
"Man, he never asked for any quarters for it," says Dick McGee, a high school football teammate who owns a grocery story in Richlands.
Though he was one of the smallest boys on the squad and had only one good eye, Cranwell eventually matched his brothers' achievements on the field.
When he got the chance to play quarterback in his senior year at Richlands High, Cranwell tossed 11 touchdown passes - more than anyone in the state.
He won a scholarship to Virginia Tech, where he found he would never make it as a college quarterback. He switched to place-kicker and set a school record with a 48-yard field goal against Syracuse in 1964.
"I learned that it's not the smartest and the swiftest who wins the race," he says. "It's usually the person who is most tenacious and most unrelenting."
Cranwell brings the same approach to his law practice representing plaintiffs with medical malpractice and personal injury claims.
His tenacity paid off in 1988 when he landed a railroad injury case. Other Roanoke lawyers have tried for years - without success - to break into this lucrative field, which is dominated by out-of-town law firms favored by railroad unions.
Cranwell has made a name for himself with a string of huge jury awards, including a $4.7 million judgment, on behalf of injured rail workers.
"Whatever anyone thinks about Dickie, they can't deny that he is smart as hell," says one lawyer who has squared off against him more than once. "He's not smart as an intellectual. He is street smart.
"He is genetically wired up to be the ultimate competitor. I believe that if you were shooting marbles with him, I think he'd do anything to win."
`I can deal with the law'
Privately, some lawyers complain that Cranwell is so intent on winning that he pushes ethical boundaries.
Like other legislators who practice law, Cranwell sometimes jokes about "changing the law" when he loses a legal point or a verdict. Some people wonder if Cranwell means it.
In a railroad injury case last year, Cranwell was upset that Norfolk Southern Corp. lawyers had contacted doctors who had treated his client, even though the railroad had paid for the treatment.
A few months later, Cranwell introduced legislation that changed the law to limit NS or other employers from speaking with doctors.
Cranwell said later that he was not trying to get even with the railroad. His intent, he said, was to "keep doctors from getting in a bad position" by divulging confidential information about their patients.
"I don't want to put myself in someone else's place and divine their motives," said Wiley Mitchell, chief counsel for NS and a former legislator.
"I can tell you that the bill, whatever its intent, is going to be a source of contention as far as we are concerned."
When faced with questions about possible conflicts of interest, Cranwell defends his actions by citing the state's conflict law, which he helped write.
This summer, Cranwell flew into a rage when Brumitt, his opponent, questioned the fact that Cranwell was among five senior Democratic legislators who had teamed with a powerful lobbyist to organize a mortgage insurance company called International Guaranty.
"I didn't violate the law, and that son of a bitch knows it," Cranwell said.
He insisted that he was on solid ethical footing - despite what some fellow Democrats were saying - because his investment did not violate the law.
"I can deal with the law. I don't know how to deal with perceptions," he said.
He held firm, even after Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Sue Terry said it was inappropriate for so many powerful legislators to serve on the board of a state-regulated company.
International Guaranty was set up to sell insurance to banks and other lenders that make loans of more than 80 percent of a home's value. The insurance protects the lender, but the premiums are paid by the home buyer.
Common Cause of Virginia, a political-reform group, said the involvement of five powerful legislators in the company could have led banks, which need favors from the General Assembly each year, to steer home buyers to International Guaranty. The banks could have been happy, the five legislators could have reaped handsome profits, and no laws would have been broken, Common Cause said.
Julie Lapham, executive director of Common Cause, says Cranwell does not appear to recognize the difference between what is legal and what is ethical.
"The boundaries are not clear. That's where people get into trouble, and the voters get cynical," Lapham says.
In August, Cranwell gave in to public pressure and resigned from the International Guaranty board. He also proposed a law that would make it illegal for more than one legislator to serve on the board of a state-regulated company.
"I don't know how you have a citizen legislature where you have people who are going to make a living," Cranwell says. "That's why you need a law . . . so that citizen legislators have enough guidance to know if specific activities are right or wrong.
"It never dawned on me that anyone would say, `These guys are going to go down there and twist everyone's arm in the legislature to make this business work.' "
`Let's hire him'
The International Guaranty deal was not the first time that Cranwell waded into murky ethical waters.
After he steered a landmark annexation law through the General Assembly in 1979, Cranwell established himself as the lawyer of choice for counties fending off land grabs by adjoining cities and towns.
Counties have paid his Vinton law firm more than $2 million in legal fees since 1980.
His legal work for counties does not violate the state's conflict law, but there is little doubt that his position in the General Assembly brings counties to his door.
"Our thinking was: He's the man who wrote the [law], so let's hire him," Rockbridge County Supervisor Maynard Reynolds told The Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1989.
Critics say his legislative work on this specialized area of law gives him an advantage in court, where annexation lawsuits can turn on the General Assembly's intent. Who better to argue intent than the author himself?
Cranwell disputes the suggestion that his law firm became the state's top annexation litigator because he wrote the 1979 law.
Cranwell credits his firm's success - beginning with its first annexation case in 1981 - to his willingness to fight on behalf of counties with aggressive and innovative legal strategies.
"The reason I say that is that you have to go back to the time of our first case. I wasn't considered an influential legislator at all.
"Had we not done a good job down there, I don't think we would have been as successful as we were."
Lapham says there is something wrong with ethics laws that allow someone such as Cranwell to make millions of dollars because of his legislative clout.
"That is why there is no `corruption' in Virginia, because it's business as usual," she says.
Cranwell replies, "I do not think that a legislator ought to get rich off his service as in the General Assembly. As a matter of fact, I would say that I'm suffering monetarily because of my service in the legislature.
"I get 2 percent of my income from the General Assembly, but it takes up 50 percent of my time."
Republicans accuse Cranwell of enriching himself through his legislature service, but those who know him well say he is driven by more than money.
In fact, his brothers say that Cranwell could make more money if he dropped out of politics and devoted all of his energy to his law practice.
Cranwell acknowledges that he is worth at least a million dollars, but says he has not accumulated the vast fortune that some people assume he has.
"My family spends a lot of money," he says.
Cranwell has come nowhere close to matching the financial status of his two brothers, Bill and Bob, who run the HCMF nursing-home empire, which had 1,600 beds and $41 million in gross revenue last year.
Cranwell still turns to his brothers for financial assistance. They control the company that owns the plane in which he flies around the state for legal and legislative work; they guaranteed a loan when he bought 168 acres of farmland surrounding his house; they let him invest in a nursing-home subsidiary when he needed a tax break.
In addition, the brothers retain Cranwell's law firm to represent HCMF and a myriad of partnerships. Bill Cranwell declines to disclose the amount of legal fees paid to his brother's firm last year because his partners would not want the information disclosed.
(Cranwell says he has never lobbied state agencies on behalf of his brothers' nursing homes. "I just have absolutely refused to do anything with a state agency. I understand the glass bowl I live in now.")
Although some people have encouraged him to leave politics, Cranwell remains in the legislature because it feeds his intensely competitive nature.
"Somebody gets beat, and somebody wins. I think that is what appeals to Dick," Del. Ford Quillen, D-Gate City, says.
"Bob and I were headline-grabbers in our school years and had enough of it," Bill Cranwell says. "Maybe politics is Dick's way of saying, `I'll show you all.' "
Keywords:
PROFILE POLITICS
by CNB