confident he would have gotten them. “I know if I had stayed, that Charles and David would be in jail now,” Elroy said.
In Elroy’s absence, however, the investigation took a sharp turn in Koch’s favor. There was a growing body of evidence that Koch Industries might be innocent. Now, in the summer of 1990, the FBI interviewed dozens of Koch gaugers throughout Oklahoma and Texas, and the gaugers all said essentially the same thing: Koch had never instructed them to steal, they had never heard of the “Koch method,” and they never falsified their measurements. The gaugers said this even when they were alone with their FBI interrogators—one gauger was interviewed in a Dairy Queen parking lot. Other gaugers would contradict this testimony under oath in later court cases, but the litany of interviews undermined the case dramatically. The FBI was searching for corroboration, but just as the interviews started to cloud the picture, there was a management shakeup at the US Attorney’s office. Nancy Jones’s boss, US Attorney Bill Price, quit his job to run for higher office. Price’s replacement would be selected by Oklahoma senator Don Nickles, a close ally of Koch’s. Nickles had previously spoken about the case with Koch’s lobbyist Ron Howell, who remembered pulling Nickles aside at a luncheon to discuss the case. Nickles would later leave office and open a lobbying shop in Washington, DC, where Koch Industries was one of his clients.
In 1989, Nickles chose a politician and lawyer named Timothy Leonard to fill the US Attorney’s job.III This shocked Jones, who had expected one of Price’s deputies, a longtime prosecutor name Bob Mydans, to be selected. Mydans had years of experience in the office, while one of Leonard’s primary qualifications seemed to be his tenure as a Republican state senator, where he had briefly served with Don Nickles.
Jones quickly developed her own opinion about Leonard. She considered him to be a “political hack.” Leonard was aware of her opinion, and the two of them never had an easy relationship. Leonard thought that Jones was an intelligent lawyer, but he became concerned about her work when a judge ruled against her in a high-profile case. Jones was particularly offended by Leonard’s reaction. He assigned Jones’s boss, Arlene Joplin, to be the “second chair” on one of Jones’s major fraud cases. Being second chair essentially meant that that Joplin would oversee Jones’s work. Jones pressed ahead. Eventually, Joplin approached Nancy Jones to talk about the Koch Industries investigation. Joplin’s comments were not encouraging. She said there was lukewarm enthusiasm over at the FBI for the Koch case. The FBI wasn’t sure it would dedicate more resources to the Koch investigation.
Jones ended up quitting her job. She was tired of working for a boss she didn’t like and was tired of feeling that she was being micromanaged. She was also tired of the lack of cultural life in Oklahoma City. She and her husband wanted to live in a more cosmopolitan city. She said that the Koch Industries investigation was not a major factor in her decision. It wasn’t unusual for an assistant US Attorney to move on to another job and leave a case behind. Jones organized her material and left the case in good shape to be pursued by another attorney.
It would be up to Timothy Leonard to determine how to pursue it.
* * *
In April of 1991, as the Koch case was still moving forward, Don Nickles nominated Timothy Leonard to become a federal judge. It was a prestigious distinction for Leonard. He’d been born and raised in the small town of Beaver, Oklahoma, and now he was offered a lifetime appointment to the federal bench.
In November, President George H. W. Bush confirmed Leonard’s appointment. Less than four months later, while he was still US Attorney, Leonard dropped the case against Koch Industries and his office sent a letter to the company saying that it would not be indicted. Leonard did not explain publicly why the case was dropped, even though Jones said that the grand jury had obtained evidence showing criminal conduct of Koch Industries employees and managers. Whatever evidence Jones obtained could never be made public because of secrecy rules that govern grand juries.
For years afterward, Leonard’s decision raised suspicion that Koch used its political influence to kill the investigation. Koch had obviously deployed its lobbyists and think tanks to influence public figures in Oklahoma, and the trail of influence between Koch, Nickles, and Judge Leonard seemed straightforward: Koch’s political