Free, And Fired Up George Hansen Back In A Scrap, Leading Group Probing Inmate’s Death

At a time when other former seven-term congressmen are counting strokes on the golf course, George Hansen is counting his teeth.

He’s missing 24 from his three stints in prison, along with all his toenails.

Hansen doesn’t sit on any corporation’s board of directors or manage his investments from a downtown suite. He lives in a rented Pocatello apartment and drives a leased white Honda.

He doesn’t hang out with congressional cronies or lionize his career. Indeed, he’s lucky if some of his former colleagues even return his calls.

A lot of people have forgotten about George Hansen - the flamboyant former Idaho congressman whose rocky adventures with foreign policy, the Internal Revenue Service, campaign finance and the federal prison system dominated political headlines in the Intermountain West for most of the 1980s.

But he’s back - and leading a Utah-based group seeking an investigation into the death of federal prisoner Kenneth Trentadue.

On the political landscape of the Intermountain West, few characters stand out like George Vernon Hansen, a Mormon kid from Tetonia, Idaho, who climbed the ladder of political power only to plunge in a belly-flop of scandal, financial ruin and imprisonment.

He was George the Dragon Slayer, a moniker loyal followers bestowed for his ceaseless battles with the IRS, Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Immigration and Naturalization Service on behalf of “ordinary people.”

He was Poor Old Lonesome George, a title he gave himself in a bawling 1984 speech on the House floor before he was reprimanded for filing false financial disclosure reports.

He was Globetrotting George, who went to Iran twice without authorization in the late ‘70s to negotiate the release of American hostages. He went to Bolivia to try to break a constituent’s son out of prison. He went to Taiwan and promised leaders they would get equipment to complete their “atomic program.” And he went to Kuwait after the 1992 invasion by Iraq and declared the United States was “overreacting.”

He was Unsinkable George, winning re-election in the face of scandals that would have torpedoed the most adept politician. Even when he was on the doorstep of a prison cell, Hansen came only 170 votes short of keeping his congressional seat.

And he was Jailhouse George, serving four years in prison for two separate crimes - one that later turned out to be an illegal conviction.

In prison he went on hunger strikes, grew an “AIDS beard” to protest the sharing of razors among inmates, got recurring bursitis from having his legs shackled all the time, and pulled his own toenails out by the roots to avoid the pain of hangnails from too-small prison-issue shoes.

Although 67 years old now, Hansen remains a Great Dane of a man with a bearpaw handshake and a 6-foot-6 frame that, while never returning to his preincarceration fighting weight of 330 pounds, would still serve an offensive lineman well.

He is only now emerging from a self-imposed hibernation, a purposeful attempt to stay out of the media spotlight. His release from prison last year after serving three years for bank fraud, as well as the Supreme Court vindication that he was falsely convicted on ethics charges a dozen years ago, have all but been ignored in the mainstream news media.

“It’s been a real recess, but I’ve done it because I’m not running for anything and I don’t need to read a news story to know who I am,” Hansen says. His legendary firebrand demeanor may be more like damp gunpowder today, but Hansen is back to championing his trademark cause that made him and broke him: An oppressive and excessive federal government threatens us all.

As head of his latest activist group - the Salt Lake City-based “U.S. Citizens Human Rights Commission” - Hansen has placed 800 billboards and bus signs across the country demanding justice in the 1995 death of Trentadue.

The U.S. Department of Justice maintains Trentadue, while awaiting a parole hearing, committed suicide by hanging himself from an air vent in an isolation cell in Oklahoma City.

The condition of Trentadue’s battered body - soaked with blood and what appeared to be boot footprints and high-voltage stun gun burns on his face - has led Oklahoma’s medical examiner and others to conclude Trentadue was “very likely” murdered by prison guards.

Hansen’s stark billboards in California, Oklahoma and Washington, D.C., offer a $10,000 reward for information, plus harangue Attorney General Janet Reno for perpetrating a cover-up.

“Mr. Hansen’s agenda is to expose and clean up the Justice Department, and he sees this case as one of the most striking examples of what’s been going on,” says Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue, who has brought suit over his brother’s suspicious death.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, has announced hearings on the Trentadue case, and Oklahoma County District Attorney Bob Macy vows to convene a grand jury.

The national news media have begun picking up the story: The latest issue of GQ magazine features a detailed investigation into the federal government’s alleged coverup of the murder.

Hansen is no stranger to vitriolic attacks on federal agencies. In the late 1970s he published To Harass Our People, a scathing indictment of the IRS. The book came out shortly after a newspaper revealed Hansen had been delinquent filing his income-tax returns seven times between 1966 and 1975.

“George has always been a giant battleship rowing out into sub-infested waters without a destroyer escort,” says John Runft, the Boise attorney who has represented Hansen off and on for the past 25 years.

The tales of Hansen’s misdeeds are only matched by the stories of his good deeds. He once woke up Pentagon brass in the middle of the night to demand they release the body of an Air Force pilot killed in a crash to the man’s Idaho family.

And he once tracked down a mother’s son who had disappeared after World War II and was missing for 35 years, finding the man in Japan.

“Helping constituents is how I survived when everybody was out to get my scalp,” Hansen says today. “I always felt if a guy called me about his neighbor’s barking dog, then government wasn’t working for him and he didn’t know what to do. I could have said, like most people, ‘Call the damn mayor,’ but instead I called the mayor myself.”

Hansen has an uncanny ability to connect with regular people. They have problems, he has problems. Rapscallion or raconteur, folks like him.

His re-election squeakers notwithstanding, perhaps the most stunning example of the loyalty Hansen engenders came at his 1992 Boise bank-fraud trial.

After his release from prison the first time, Hansen and an associate were convicted of running an elaborate multimillion-dollar check-kiting and bank-fraud scheme. Hansen took loans from more than 180 people, promising big returns, yet eventually wound up bankrupt and owing creditors $16 million.

At trial, nearly 100 of the supposed victims of Hansen’s deception presented affidavits and petitions telling the judge and prosecutors to lay off George.

“Now these were not dumb farmer types, but business people who testified George was their political champion and if he could pay back the loans, fine, if not, that was fine too,” says Runft, who represented Hansen in the criminal trial.

U.S. District Court Judge Edward Lodge was flabbergasted. He sentenced Hansen to four years in prison, less than half what federal sentencing guidelines called for.

A funny thing happened while Hansen was again behind bars.

In 1984, he had become the first congressman ever convicted under the Ethics in Government Act and had done two six-month stints in prison in 1986 and 1987 as a result.

In May 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on an obscure Michigan case, Hubbard vs. U.S., finding that the Ethics In Government Act applied only to the Executive Branch, not members of Congress.

The Supreme Court ruling was supreme vindication for Hansen, who had sworn all along the law was being misapplied to members of Congress.

Because of the year he had served under the now-vacated conviction, Hansen was released from prison on the bank fraud charge a year early, gaining freedom in March last year. The government returned his $40,000 fine with interest, restored his federal pension and said, “Sorry.”

Hansen says if he hadn’t been falsely convicted on the ethics charges, he never would have wound up involved in the bank fraud. And the Idaho congressional delegation is looking into sponsoring “private legislation” to force the federal government to financially compensate Hansen, who sold his homes in Idaho and Virginia.

Hansen would like Congress also to reverse its 1984 vote to reprimand him, a move that “destroyed” his political career.

While Hansen chuckles that some southeastern Idaho folks want him to run for governor, he has no plans for a political resurrection.

“Around my house, my wife tells me, ‘If you run for anything again, it’ll be for your life,”’ Hansen smiles. “The trouble is, politics anymore is for the rich.

“I used to think you could offset it with some hard work and ingenuity, but things have changed.”