Paul Jacobs

Letter: Republican disregard for human life (Rick Bowmer | AP file photo) Utah Gov. Gary Herbert walks through the Capitol rotunda to a COVID-19 briefing in Salt Lake City on Nov. 9, 2020. By Paul M. Jacobs | The Public Forum | Dec. 4, 2020, 1:30 a.m. Gov. Gary “Available Jones” Herbert continues his purge of Utah’s elderly. Unable to show any backbone, Herbert curtseys to the Trumpets in the Republican Party, dropping the gathering limits and separate household ban.

On the afternoon of July 30, 1975, labor leader James R. Hoffa went to lunch in a suburban Detroit restaurant, and never came home. Perceived as a no-nonsense leader of the powerful Teamsters Union, Hoffa became a symbol for labor corruption and ties to the mob. After his disappearance, rumors spread about where his body could be found. Some held that his remains were buried in the end zone of Giants Stadium in New Jersey (no skeletal remains were found after that edifice was torn down in 2010).

David F. Levi seems an unlikely crime-buster. Soft-spoken and bespectacled, the Sacramento-based U.S. attorney for the eastern district of California looks to be more scholar than cop. But this son of a college president--and a U.S. attorney general--has engineered a sweeping 3 1/2-year investigation of political corruption that has rocked the state Capitol and led to the indictments of Sen. Joseph B. Montoya (D-Whittier) and a former top aide, plus a local sheriff and his former chief deputy.