The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

From the Anchorage Daily News
Low-key anti-corruption campaigner is dead at 62
By RICHARD MAUER
September 1st, 2009 11:08 AM

Dee Hubbard, a behind-the-scenes campaigner who took on private prison interests in Alaska and then expanded that fight as an anti-corruption, volunteer citizen ally of the FBI, died Saturday in Anchorage. She was 62.

While Hubbard is hardly a household name, she was well known to the legislators, FBI agents and reporters who were trying to unravel the complicated syndicate that moved from one Alaska community to another, seeking a willing locale and beneficial financing to build a private prison.

Two members of that group, Bill Allen and Bill Weimar, would eventually plead guilty to corruption charges. Though the federal corruption investigation in Alaska is famous as a probe of bribery associated with oil taxes, it started life in 2003 or 2004 as "Operation Polar Pen" -- a private prison investigation.

"Dee Hubbard played a very low-key role in educating the federal folks into what was going on behind the scenes in the state of Alaska, good and bad," said State Sen. Johnny Ellis, D-Anchorage. "She played a part in helping to clean up the state."

Her husband, Charlie Hubbard, said she died early Saturday morning.

Dee Hubbard was diagnosed with liver and kidney failure in March and spent much of the summer going to dialysis sessions as her health declined precipitously.

Hubbard, an only child, grew up in Spokane. Her dad, George Derr, was a first lieutenant in the elite Alamo Scouts, an Army special forces unit that operated behind Japanese lines during the World War II campaign in the Pacific. In his civilian life, Derr chose teaching over a professional football career, but he taught the game -- and toughness -- to his daughter. As a young high school teacher in Spokane, Hubbard was also the football coach, her husband said.

Hubbard had a master's degree in political science and got involved in insider politics in Olympia, going to work for the Washington legislature there. Someone suggested she do the same in Juneau, and she moved to Alaska in 1977 and was hired by the state Senate. From there, she got a job administering grants at the now-defunct state Department of Community and Regional Affairs.

Charlie Hubbard, an Alaska Native, got a job as administrator for the village of Cantwell. When he started, a $40,000 state grant had been pending for five years and it was his job to figure out why it was never paid. As a new employee at C&RA, Dee Derr was handed the problem grants, including Cantwell's.

"That's how I met Dee," Charlie said.

When he realized the relationship was probably going to be more than just a grantor-grantee one, Charlie said he asked to be removed as local administrator of the grant to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest. He said Dee's boss was surprised by the extraordinary request.

They two were married in 1979 and have two sons, Frank and David.

U.S. Sen. Mark Begich said he got to know Dee and Charlie in 1988 when he served on the Anchorage Assembly and they were living in the Muldoon area and trying to save the neighborhood library.

"It didn't matter if it was setting up a card table to get signatures to save it, or just being a voice out there for northeast Anchorage," Begich said in a telephone interview. "She was a pretty strong-willed person. When she thought something was unjust, she was not going to sit around and wait for someone to do something -- she felt she was the someone."

In 2002, when Charlie retired as a pump station worker on the trans-Alaska pipeline, the couple moved to Sterling. It was there that Dee Hubbard first heard about plans to build a private prison -- from her husband, Charlie.

"There goes our state again," Charlie remembers telling her.

"What are you talking about?" she said.

"They're going to build a private prison, guarantee this prison that it'll have a contract for years, and after so many years, they're going to give the prison to them. I need to go Juneau," Charlie said.

"Why do you need to go to Juneau?"

"Because I want to build a store, and I want the state to guarantee me a contract that they'll buy from me for so many years, I'll run the store, and then the state can just give me the store."

"Let me look into this," Dee said.

She and her husband began following the money, from halfway house contracts that Weimar held with the state Corrections Department to political contributions by Allen, whose company, Veco, would have built the prison.

That's also when Dee met Frank Smith, who once ran prison counseling programs under contract with the state but who by then was fighting the private prison effort. He had already helped stop the consortium in South Anchorage and Delta Junction, and with Dee, they followed the developers around, from Kenai to Whittier and elsewhere.

"The two of us worked closely together on prison after prison after prison," he said. "It was like we were in the same office together, even though we were miles away and we weren't working for an organization."

"We stopped them everywhere," he said.

Starting in 2003, Hubbard began working with the FBI agent who was leading the early stages of the investigation into corruption in the Alaska Legislature, Mary Beth Kepner.

"They would talk on the phone, Mary Beth and Dee," Charlie said. "Dee started sharing this information -- what politicians are connected to who." She took an oath administered by the FBI that she wouldn't improperly disclose investigative details, which was fine with her, Charlie said.

"She was never a witness and didn't want to be," he said. "Alaska's too small." She was afraid her sons would be blackballed in the early stages of their careers, he said.

Kepner declined to comment.

Begich had an idea she played an important role in the corruption investigation, but she always held her cards close.

"She never told the full story, but she would tell you enough to make you aware that she was working on something that sooner or later you'd read in the paper," he said.

A visitation for Dee Hubbard is scheduled Thursday at 3 p.m. and a memorial service at 4 p.m. at Witzleben Funeral Home, 1707 Bragaw St. Burial will be Saturday in Cantwell.
http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/918555.html