I don't think you have to be crazy to be a politician, but a little screwball logic never scared away a base. On the other hand you don't want voters suspecting you might be completely loony. And navigating a path between those two alternatives can be tricky when you build your career on being crazy.
For example, in the 1980's a 5'1” tall combative obsessive/compulsive fire cracker named Ruthann Aron (above), born Ruthann Greenzweig, who dreamed big dreams. Always big. Her father,
David Greenzweig, had owned a diner in the Catskill resort town of Fallsburg. Ruthann earned advanced degrees in both microbiology from Cornel and a law degree. A college boyfriend remembered, "If she was angry, you knew it... There was nothing left to the imagination."
Ruthann was even admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court - although she never did. Instead she took a quicker route to wealth, earning millions by developing shopping centers. She didn't make a lot of friends, of course. Just a lot of money.
Her urologist husband Barry (above), the father of her two children, admitted at the time, “She gets in people’s faces in a very straightforward way and doesn’t tap dance too much.” He should know, given his repeated affairs.
But the definitive chapters of Ruthann's story really begins in the “Washington, D.C.” adjacent enclave of Montgomery county, Maryland (above), one of the richest and best educated counties in America. Everybody here, it seems came from some place else – the county was even named for a Revolutionary War hero who never set foot in the state. This is one of those big ponds where little fish either get eaten or grow big And in 1994 it had not voted for a Republican Presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan retired.
As Barry Rascovar noted for the Washington Post in mid-August of 1994, “...the last time there was a truly contested GOP Senate primary was in the early 1960s.” It was here that our diminutive mother of two faced her first public test when, after just two years on the County Planning Board, Ruthann Aron decided to run for the United States Senate. She was a pro-choice member of the John Birch Society, who boasted, "I'm not a career politician. I'm a businesswoman." She was also a killer.
It was a clever move. The dysfunctional Maryland G.O.P had little hope of beating the popular Democrat, Paul Sarbanes (above) who had held his U.S. Senate seat since 1976 and seemed a shoe-in for re-election. Even if she lost the primary, Ruthann could still lay a foundation for a future in politics.
The only drawback was that there were seven candidates vying for the Republican nomination, so Ruthann decided to stand out, by attacking her best known fellow Republican opponent, the multimillionaire candy heir, ex-Senator from Tennessee, and ex-GOP Chairman, the handsome Bill Brock III.
Ruthann spent nearly a quarter of a million of her own dollars buying radio ads, in which two “hillbillies” laughed about the way Maryland voters were being fooled by the “tax-raising, carpetbagging, career politician”, Senator Brock (above). The ex-Senator chose to not even mention Ruthann in his few radio ads. No since giving the little lady free publicity.
Then, a poll released Labor Day weekend found Brock leading, as expected, but with just 23% of the vote. And in second place and well within the margin of error for a tie was Ruthann, at 20%.
With just two weeks to go before the primary, Brock decided he could no longer ignore the tiny upstart, and called an afternoon press conference for Thursday, 8 September, 1994, on the Rockville courthouse square (above). His stated intention was to attack his female opponent. That was sure to draw the media.
As the Baltimore Sun noted, “The minutes preceding yesterday's news conference had the feel of a mock thriller....About 2 p.m. the (Ruthann) Aron camp entered...About 10 minutes later, Mr. Brock arrived with his contingent of sign-wavers.”
The reporters were having a ball, bouncing "between the two candidates like pin balls.” Brock backed up the theatrical press conference with a quarter of a million dollars in new radio ads, 800 ads in just 5 days, claiming that Ruthann had been convicted of fraud “more than once”, and had to pay “hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines”. Said his narrator in the ad, "Before Ruthann Aron starts attacking anybody, maybe she ought to look in the mirror.”
On Tuesday, 13 September, Ruthann lost the primary by 50,000 votes. Even worse, a poll released just before the election showed that rather than laying a foundation for her future, her campaign style had raised her negatives within the Republican Party to 16%. Her reputation was not even helped when Block was easily beaten by the Democrat Sarbanes in the November general election. So, finding herself in a hole, Ruthann decided to keep digging. She sued Brock for defamation of character. No politician had ever done that before. I wonder why?
It took over a year for what the Baltimore Sun called Ruthann's “frivolous lawsuit” to work its way to trial, which it did in early 1996. As the Sun described the testimony, “Jurors have been schooled in subliminal suggestion...the role of Russian composer Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky in an effective campaign commercial....harked to the tonal difference between a major chord and a slamming jail door, listened again and again to the definition of "Ronald Reagan's 11th Commandment" (Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican) and been told that staff members look at members of Congress the way undertakers look at corpses.”
Chief witness for Brock was Arthur G. Kahn (above), lawyer in a 1984 suit against Ruthann's real estate company, Research Incorporated. he compared Ruthann to an octopus. When it was attacked, he said, "... it emits a dark fluid, a black fluid, and it escapes in the darkness and muddies the waters." More specifically, Kahn testified that Ruthann had betrayed investors in one of her shopping malls.
The mall had never been built, because before it could be Ruthann sold the rights to the project to a third party for $200,000. And kept that money. The jury decided she had violated her agreement with the investors and awarded them $175,000, which Ruthann paid only after Arthur Kahn agreed to request the judge wipe the verdict from the record. Which the judge had done.
It had been a civil suit. Ruthann had lost it, but there had been no conviction, and the civil verdict had been wiped away, so technically what Senator Brock had said at the press conference had been a lie. But ...
....this new jury decided that was splitting hairs, and, besides, my bet is they just did not like Ruthann very much. Who did? Her own father, who had been murdered during her campaign, had written Ruthann out of his will. "I specifically and unequivocably leave absolutely nothing for my daughter...and direct my executor to reject any claim that she may make..."
So the jury found for Brock. That made two defeats in one election for Ruthann, making her double-dog-gone done in politics And that should have been the end of Ruthann Aron's political dreams, unless she had thrown herself into charity work or earned a Nobel Peace Prize or saved a sinking sack of kittens. Instead she switched to the Democratic Party and raised the curtain on what was supposed to be Ruthann Aron, act two.
Instead, on Saturday, 7 June, 1997, Ruthann Aron was arrested for hiring a hit man to murder her old nemesis, Arthur Kahn., and, as an afterthought, her own husband Doctor Barry Aron, who had finally asked for a divorce.
The little lady had walked into the lobby of a Marriott Hotel, disguised in a trench coat, a wig, a floppy hat, dark glasses and carrying the $500 down payment for a double murder. She must have looked like a munchkin spy. On tape she spelled out the names of her intended victims. "Last name A, like apple, R-O-N, first name B like in boy, A-R-R-Y", she was heard saying on tape. The hitman/cop asked if Ruthann wanted her husband's death to look like a traffic accident, Ruthann replied, "If it would pass muster". Ruthann then called her husband to ask what he wanted for dinner. It was an open and shut case. Mostly shut.
Ruthann insisted at both of her trials (the first jury hung, 11-1 for conviction) that she was crazy. Nine doctors argued she had a borderline personality disorder, had suffered a brain injury as a child, had
been molested by her father since the age of seven. But explaining her vindictive personality, her maniacal approach to interpersonal relationships failed to justify two counts of conspiracy to commit murder. Let's just say she was nuts and let it go at that.
The ten women and two men on the jury found Ruthann guilty of all counts. At her sentencing Ruthann's lawyer pointed out what her brief career in politics had cost the little lady. "She's lost her credibility, her reputation, her family as she knew it, her dignity, her lifestyle, her husband, almost everything she had”, he said. She still got three years in jail, with a suspended sentence of ten more years hanging over her head. Barry the urologist not only filed for divorce, he sued Ruthann for $7.5 million. So she counter-sued him for $24 million. Some people never learn.
After she got out of jail in 2001, Ruth Ann moved to Florida, and changed her last name to Green. And then, throwing off whatever cloak of anonymity she now had, she wrote her autobiography, in which she blamed everything on Barry. She called her self-published book, “Corrupted Justice: A Killer Husband,” The jury didn't buy it, why should anybody else?
And that is the end of the sad story of Ruthann Aron-Green, She is still worth between $1 and $5 million. Her son died in the World Trade Center attack on 9/11. Her daughter no longer speaks to her. The lesson from our little tale of this little lady is that if you sleep with a politician, you may or may not find love, but you will defiantly get screwed. Those people are nuts.
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