JACKSON - When Mike Moore became Jackson County's district attorney in 1980 at age 27, he soon began to doggedly pursue ousting a powerful county supervisor and his supervisor cohorts he suspected of being corrupt.
The eager, wavy-haired, young DA's immediate target was Eddie Khayat, who had for years been statewide spokesman for the politically potent county supervisors and was revered locally for spearheading economic development.
His first attempt to bring down Khayat ended in an acquittal of the supervisor. But Moore tried Khayat again on a different charge, and this time the jury deadlocked, though nine jurors voted to convict.
Seeing that the young DA wouldn't give up, Khayat bargained for a misdemeanor count and resigned.
Moore didn't stop there. He convicted another veteran Jackson County supervisor and got plea bargain resignations from two others. No other DA anywhere in the state had ever shaken up the entrenched courthouse crowd as had Moore.
Seven years later, still peppery and enthusiastic, the feisty Pascagoulan arrived in Jackson to declare himself a candidate for the state's highest law enforcement office, attorney general. He didn't even know whether or not the incumbent in that post, Edwin Pittman, would run.
As political history records, Pittman did choose to not run for AG and Moore went on to not only win the Democratic nomination, but later to trounce better-known Republican Jim Herring, the heavy favorite to win, in the general election.
So Mike Moore, who by 1988 had reached the "ripe" age of 35, began a career as Mississippi's AG, a career that saw a tilting of windmills and smashing of shibboleths as this state had never before experienced.
I recall asking the straight-ahead Moore when he took office if the rumor was true that he would prosecute his own grandmother. Under those circumstances, he laughed, "I would ask for a special prosecutor."
So when Moore announced last week he is going to hang it up as attorney general after four terms in the office and take a breather from politics (for at least three years), it left an enormous void in the arena of public service that no one on the political horizon seems likely to fill.
Some, among them several pundits, have for years badly misread Moore and what he is about, characterizing his crusades as just headline-grabbing, made-for-TV political stunts.
The truth is Moore undertook his job with sincere dedication and an almost messianic zeal to use reform as a tool to make government work better for the benefit of Mississippians and the righting of wrongs done by the political system in the past.
There was no more dramatic case of righting old wrongs than his 1997 reopening of a notorious 1966 civil rights crime, the fire-bombing death of a respected black leader, Hattiesburg country grocer and businessman Vernon Dahmer.
Thirty years after onetime Klan Wizard Sam Bowers went unpunished for sending Klan night-riders to torch the Dahmer farm house as the family slept, the Moore-driven reprosecution of Bowers brought a murder conviction.
Though he, himself, was a Democrat, his party label didn't prevent him from removing from office two elected Democratic officials - state Sen. Bob Montgomery, Madison County's political powerhouse, and newly elected Public Service Commissioner Sidney Barnett in the early 1990s.
Montgomery was brought down under an ethics charge of using his office for personal gain, and Barnett for taking a campaign contribution from a utility he would regulate.
Moore angered state legislators early in his first term by asking the state Supreme Court to revive the 1916 constitutional "people power" of initiative and referendum to write laws and to amend the constitution, which had been suspended by the court in an ambiguous 1922 ruling.
He didn't get the state's high court to retract the 60-year-old mistake. But Moore's move pushed the Legislature to talk about enacting I&R for the first time in many years, and in the 1990s resulted in giving people power to put constitutional changes on the ballot by petition.
Few also really understood in 1999 when Moore, though far ahead of then Lt. Gov. Ronnie Musgrove in gubernatorial polls, because of concern for his family decided against seeking the Democratic nomination for a race for governor.
When he said he came to the decision after agonizing over how a tough campaign would have affected his wife, Tish, and his son, Kyle, he sincerely meant it.
Again, his family was no doubt at the heart of his decision to give up the job he loves, and finally have a chance to make some real money, after literally working for peanuts while putting many millions of dollars in the state coffers from litigation he instituted.
The biggie, of course, was the $4 billion settlement that came from a Moore-filed lawsuit against the tobacco industry for damaging the health of Mississippians. Payments from it have virtually bailed out the foundering state budget the past two years.
A team of private attorneys commissioned by Moore to pursue the lawsuit, using their own funds at a time when there was little hope of success, did garner some fat fees when the settlement surprisingly was won. However, despite what some Mississippians think, none of that money went into Moore's own pocket.
While the numbers in the 1994 lawsuit against Big Tobacco were dazzling, not to be forgotten is that Moore several years before brought in $15 million from the asbestos industry for the state's public schools to remove asbestos installed in the 1950s and 1960s.
The tough side of Mike Moore was seen in his swashbuckling pursuit of redressing damage done by tobacco and asbestos to Mississippi citizens and making government more honest. However, for the past few years the boyish-looking AG has dedicated his career to a softer side: The well-being of Mississippi's children.
Until Moore landed the money from Big Tobacco, the state was unable to implement CHIP (Children's Health Insurance Program), and provide health coverage for the many thousands of children who were protected by no health insurance. After two years, the number enrolled in CHIP has risen from 3,000 to more than 50,000.
A separate $62 million tobacco settlement exacted by Moore for reduction of tobacco use by young people has made it possible to put public health nurses in most school districts, and with Moore's Partnership for a Healthy Mississippi, drug and alcohol use among teenagers has been dramatically reduced.
"Whatever private law practice I get into after I leave the AG's office, one thing is certain I'm still going to devote myself to working with children," Moore told me.
And children couldn't have a better champion.
- Correction: I was in error to imply in a recent column on gaming taxes that a 1999 study on casino revenues by USM researchers was subsidized by the gaming industry. Sorry.
