Print

Email Favorites Twitter Facebook

One quiet Sunday evening in March 1994, Pat Nolan pulled his five- and six-year-old daughters close to him in their living room. He had thought long and hard about how to word his announcement, so they could understand what was happening without being afraid.

“Courtney, Katie,” he began gently. “Has someone ever told the teacher that you did something that you didn’t do, and you got a timeout?” Both girls nodded. They understood this level of injustice and punishment.

“Well, some people told some lies about Daddy, and I’m getting a timeout,” Pat continued. He inhaled a deep breath, as if trying to suck in extra courage. “I have to go to a prison camp, and I’ll have to be away from home for a long time.”

Katie, the younger child, perked up at the familiar mention of camp. “Will you take a sleeping bag and sleep in a tent?” she asked innocently. Courtney’s furrowed brow signaled confusion. Daddy’s going away?

The next day Pat and a friend of his drove to Dublin, California, about 85 miles from the Nolans’ Elk Grove home outside Sacramento. For Pat, it was a one-way trip; he now belonged to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Investigations and Allegations

Just weeks earlier, the 15-year California assemblyman had pled guilty to one count of racketeering. It came as a shock to those who knew Pat but not the circumstances. To both constituents and colleagues, the Catholic conservative was known as “a straight arrow,” a law-and-order guy, “a pudgy Eagle Scout”—as one reporter had described him. But nearly six years earlier, FBI agents had swarmed his office—unannounced and while Pat was gone—and spent the next five hours rifling through file cabinets and desk drawers. That day launched a prolonged and virulent investigation, targeting other legislators as well as Pat, to root out alleged “corruption in the Capitol”—such as trading votes on bills for lobbyists’ lucrative contributions. Anyone socially or professionally connected to Pat could be grilled—and re-grilled—for hours at a time.

Throughout most of the ordeal, Pat clung to the belief that truth would triumph. The first year or so, “I kept expecting to get a phone call saying it had all been a big mistake, that I was exonerated.” But the call never came. As he and Gail started and added to their family, the stigma of suspicion and the threat of an ugly court battle shrouded them in a chilling fog.

Finally, when a trial was certain, Pat’s attorney laid it on the line: “You have a strong case, and I can put on a strong defense,” he told Pat and Gail. But the government had charged Pat with six counts of wrongdoing. Conviction on any one of those counts would mean a minimum of more than eight years in prison.

The government had made an offer: 22 months in prison in return for a one-count guilty plea and Pat’s implication of other legislators. Without his testimony, 33 months.

Pat immediately refused to be manipulated into testifying against anyone else. But the option of a plea bargain presented the most difficult struggle of his life. “My reputation for integrity was the hallmark of my public service,” he explains. “Should I plead guilty to a crime I did not commit?”—which would shatter his reputation and his career, but ensure a shorter separation from his family. “Or should I fight for my good name” in a hostile, highly publicized trial, with the risk of losing his freedom and his family for many more years?