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Friday’s special election to fill the state treasurer post left vacant by Thomas Ravenel is just over 48 hours away. And one candidate wants to make sure that when members of the South Carolina General Assembly cast their vote for him, they’ll know they’re choosing a “clean” candidate.
With Ravenel’s indictment on federal cocaine charges tarnishing the office’s image, Earl Capps, the 36-year-old Summerville resident who has offered his name for consideration, announced Wednesday that he has passed a voluntary drug test.
“I spend all my money on 80’s heavy metal CDs, my kids, high South Carolina taxes, and of course, Green Bean museums,” Capps said on his political blog, The Blogland of Earl Capps. “After all that, I can’t afford a drug habit.
“If this state’s tax system was ever overhauled, you can bet more South Carolinians would find their productive potential freed to have the kind of drug lifestyle that most people could only dream of having.”
Capps said the results will help address concerns about drug use in the state government.
Early Tuesday morning, Capps was endorsed by The Palmetto Scoop, who said, “We feel comfortable that Capps is a welcome alternative to some of the old-hat options being considered to fill the void and that the College of Charleston graduate student will make a bold effort to restore dignity to the tarnished treasurer’s post.”
…”Sarah,” a former white-collar worker at a major Peninsula employer, recalls stopping by an after-hours party not long ago to sober up. Collapsing on a large coach with some friends and acquaintances, she looked around and saw just how prevalent cocaine was in the Charleston party scene.
“Each person on the sofa had their own bag of coke,” she says.
In June, local millionaire developer and recently-elected State Treasurer Thomas Ravenel was indicted on charges that he distributed cocaine to his friends. It would be tragic if it wasn’t so darn familiar. Ravenel’s story mirrors a cocaine bust involving three Charleston attorneys in 2004 that was bizarrely linked to accusations of cocaine use by Charleston professionals more than 15 years earlier.
Coke in Charleston isn’t exclusively a white-collar problem, but they’re the more elusive users, says Charleston Police spokesman Charles Francis.
“It’s hard to find who they are,” he says. “They aren’t going to go on the street corner to buy it. They have a friend of a friend with a connection.”
Federal prosecutors have kept the details of Ravenel’s bust under wraps, citing an ongoing investigation, leaving many a socialite to speculate who among Charleston’s elite will be the next guest at a resort/rehab clinic.
Three years ago, Assistant Solicitor Damon Cook and defense lawyers Tara Anderson Thompson and Todd Anthony Strich pleaded guilty to cocaine distribution. Like Ravenel, the three lawyers were not accused of selling the drug, just passing it around, putting them somewhere between dealers and philanthropists. They each received probation for the offense, but Thompson is serving five years in prison for her role in an unrelated drug trafficking case.
This wasn’t Thompson’s first time in the news regarding the local drug scene. In 1988, she accused Circuit Judge Larry Richter of offering her cocaine at a party. Richter has denied the allegations and was never charged with a crime.
In 2005, Thompson told the Post and Courier that, “after practicing law for 17 years, what I’ve seen and the criminals I’ve represented … I realized it was commonplace, and it was commonplace in Charleston.”