Feature | Mr. Liquor: Ken Wynn ran the DABC for 30 years. Now, he wants to fix Utah’s crazy laws 

A lavender-lined path in Red Butte Garden leads to a quiet nook guarded by pines. Two benches there offer a tranquility punctuated by bird song and nearby children’s laughter. One is dedicated to the memory of Verna Wynn, the other to her son, Brian. When Brian died of AIDS in 1994, his father, Ken Wynn, asked for gifts to the arboretum in lieu of flowers. He did the same when his wife Verna died in 1999. Ken Wynn’s colleagues from the Utah Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, where he was director for 30 years, and members of the hospitality industry, which the DABC oversees, contributed over $20,000 to pay for the alcove. For two groups who have fought many hard-bitten battles over Utah’s liquor laws, tragedy for two brief moments brought them together.

Ken Wynn is Utah’s “Mr. Liquor.” For 30 years, under four governors, Ken Wynn directed one of the state’s most powerful and controversial agencies, overseeing the sale and control of alcohol throughout Utah. Now 72, Wynn retired from the DABC in June 2007. A few months ago, he married for the second time. Along with this change in his personal life, the man who steered Utah’s $265 million-in-annual-sales liquor agency for three decades has taken a hard look at his life’s work.

And Wynn doesn’t like what he sees when it comes to how the DABC, in cahoots with the Attorney General’s office, bullies private clubs over alleged liquor-law violations.

“Kenny was a good soldier,” says Jim Sgueo, president of the National Alcohol Beverage Control Association. “I never knew a director who had a better handle on finances and budgeting.” Wynn and his deputy, Dennis Kellen, ran the state’s liquor stores. Under Wynn for 18 years was also regulatory director Earl Dorius, who continues to manage the educational department that helps licensees comply with the law. Dorius also presides over prehearings with the attorney general’s office on licensee violations brought to him by law enforcement.

Wynn reported to the five-person commission, appointed by the governor to serve staggered terms. The commission is charged with implementing liquor laws, including approving new licenses and settlements with violators. Until recently, former DABC compliance officer-turned-attorney Rick Golden says the commission typically consisted of white, Mormon, male lawyers. Now, there’s a new commission in town—three women and two men, only two of whom are lawyers. Their mostly open-minded approach to Utah’s liquor laws is apparent in the recent staging of public hearings on repealing private-club membership requirements.

Wynn is now watching the commission and the DABC as a board member of the Utah Hospitality Association, a lobby group of bar owners. He takes no compensation for the job. A twinkling-eyed grandfather, Wynn drives around town in a Ford Thunderbird with a vanity license plate proclaiming “DA BIRD.” He approaches everything on his own terms, whether as a beer-friendly Mormon or in his work at the Utah Hospitality Association. The man who says he would often go home and pound the walls in frustration at the liquor laws the Legislature passed or at the dictatorial high-handedness of some former commissioners is now lobbying for a better world for Utah’s drinkers and liquor licensees. Finally, it seems, he’s free to speak his mind.

Wynn has survived two sons and his first wife, along with a bout of heavy drinking to cope with his grief. After Verna Wynn died, DABC’s spokeswoman and Wynn’s administrative assistant for seven years Sharon Mackay says the agency became his family. Indeed it’s tempting to see his former deputy, 65-year-old Kellen, now the DABC’s director, and regulatory director Dorius as Wynn’s younger brothers. Now, as if out of the script of a 1960s John Wayne Western, Wynn has returned to the ranch house to put his family—and his legacy—in order.

A Broken Family
The “misbehaving” relative is ex-state prosecutor Earl Dorius. “He did a hell of a job for me,” Wynn says. But prosecution, he adds, is in Dorius’ blood, it’s his nature. And it’s Dorius’ punitive DABC role with which Wynn now finds fault.

“I didn’t like it then, I don’t like it now,” Wynn says, over a beer at his friend Randy Finnas’ Murray establishment, the Barbary Coast Saloon. “It’s just a conflict of interest. You don’t license, regulate and punish all in the same spot.”

Yet Wynn oversaw the very process he’s now criticizing. He sat to the left of the commissioners each month, as they approved—or rejected—the settlements of bars and restaurants’ violations. So why, after so long, is he challenging Dorius, a man he regards as a friend? “I should have done it sooner,” Wynn admits.

For years, he thought the system was fine. Then, he heard some club operators were getting strong-armed. Wynn cites one club’s 2007 violation for serving an intoxicated person. The club received a letter proposing a 15-day closure for the alleged violation. The club’s manager called assistant attorney general Sheila Page to complain, Wynn says, that the punishment was too harsh. When the manager asked what would happen if the club appealed the sentence, Wynn says Page’s offered this response: He would get more than 15 days in the dark.

That Wynn should be standing up for bar owners against the DABC doesn’t surprise some. Former DABC compliance officer Golden recalls Wynn held little faith in what he describes as “detail-orientated rules, such as membership.” Wynn’s approach was simple, Golden says. “He was more of a ‘Let’s try and keep it simple, stupid. Keep your nose clean when it comes to serving minors or intoxicated customers.’”

Wynn’s personal tragedies showed licensees and the DABC could find common ground in a pine-sheltered alcove high above Salt Lake City. He hopes his new role will provide further reconciliation. “There’s no question there’s a sense of fear out there [among bar owners]—as much as I tried and tried over the years to convince them, “We’re not here to put you guys out of business, we’re here to keep you in compliance,’” Wynn says.

“I don’t want to do battle with the department, although I know it looks like that,” he adds. “It’s about fairness.”

Beer Fear

Ken Wynn was born in 1936 in Thermopolis, Wyo. Raised by a strict Mormon mother and a bourbon-drinking father who resisted entering the LDS Church until his son was 32, Wynn shared some of his father’s diffidence about his mother’s faith.

While Wyoming, like Utah, is a liquor-control state, its approach to control is quite different. Wynn was raised with open public bars and billboards touting liquor. He drank his first beer when he was 19, just before he married Verna, as equally devout a Mormon as his mother. Just prior to the wedding, Wynn was baptized LDS. “I thought it was about time,” he says.

With a degree in bookkeeping, Wynn was appointed a state income-tax auditor in Eleanor, Mont., in 1962. After a theft and bribery scandal in Montana’s state liquor operations, Wynn in 1973 took over the newly formed liquor division. Despite his faith’s condemnation of alcohol, Wynn took a less critical view. “It’s a legal product, so I figured people have the right to drink if they wanted to,” he says.

Montana politics were controlled by an odd coalition of bankers, churches and cattlemen’s associations. Wynn took products off the shelves that weren’t selling, running afoul of liquor companies and their brokers. In 1977, Wynn’s new boss, a former beer distributor, fired him. Wynn was 41.

Utah Gov. Scott Matheson appointed Wynn director of the DABC in the fall of 1977. His wife had mixed feelings about leaving her first son’s grave behind in Montana. Two years before, at the end of a day of tobogganing, 17-year-old David tied his sled to the back of a car. As he rode the toboggan down the hill, he lost control, careened off the road and hit a rock. He had severe brain damage and was comatose for seven months, paralyzed from the neck down. “He’s not going to make it,” a doctor told the family. “I hated him,” Wynn says now about the pull-no-punches physician.

After David’s death, Wynn grew closer to his church. “I just thought we needed to get active, to get to the temple, to have our kids sealed to us,” he says, referencing the Mormon ritual to unify families for existence in an afterlife. Not that he experienced the moment of divine inspiration most Mormons cite as part of their rite of passage into the church. “I don’t know I ever got there, but I spent a lot of time praying,” he says.

The Dictator
In 1933, Utah was the 36th state to ratify the 21st Amendment, and in so doing became the deciding vote in repealing national prohibition. But since enacting its own 1935 Liquor Control Act, Utah has been, in every sense of the word, a control state. The act established a government monopoly over liquor, making spirits only available in state-run stores. Unlike the other 17 control states, Wynn says, Utah regulates liquor for moral, rather than tax-revenue purposes.

LDS Church involvement in the liquor laws never surprised Wynn. The church was like any other special-interest group, he says, be it bankers or insurance companies.

Just how big a role the church played in liquor policy was apparent in the demise of the legendary mini-bottle in 1990. The forerunner to the Utah Hospitality Association, the Private Club Association and local law enforcement supported dumping the 1.7 ounce mini-bottle, in part because the volume of alcohol it contained got many people drunk. Then-compliance officer Rick Golden wrote a position paper advocating metered, one-ounce liquor dispensing. A bill proposing the new system garnered no support on Capitol Hill. Then, Golden’s paper, Wynn says, found some attentive readers in the LDS Church hierarchy. Overnight, 28 legislative co-sponsors signed on.

Wynn’s hardest years at the DABC were spent with commissioners he terms as “zealots.” Chief on his list is one-time chairman Nick Hales. Wynn complains Hales was “so Mormon,” dictatorial, and anti-alcohol. An attorney and Internet security business owner, Hales served from 1991 to 2007, seven years as chairman.

When the DABC wanted to list liquor stores in the phone book, Hales labeled it “advertising” and said no. “How could a phone number and an address be advertising?” Wynn growls. “It didn’t make sense.” Hales says the statute did not allow it but that eventually, they found a way around it.

Their biggest fight was in 2003 over amendments to private clubs that banned children from bars and social clubs. Dorius, Wynn says, went along with it, even when Wynn told his fellow LDS colleague how he’d take his 7-year-old grandson to a private club for lunch. Wynn had dated a woman who took her eight grandchildren to the Barbary Coast every Sunday for breakfast.

“Taking business away from bars was so unfair,” Wynn says. He and Hales argued, “and it got nasty,” Wynn says. He offered to raise the markup on alcohol a half percent if children could stay in bars until 6 p.m. “No deal, Ken,” Wynn says Hales told him. “I’ve already raised the markup 1 percent.” There was no negotiating with Hales. “He just did it,” Wynn says. Hales doesn’t remember any such conversation. He says he didn’t call the shots when it came to the laws. Wynn’s involvement in the legislative process, he adds, was minimal.

All in the DABC family
In his personal life, Wynn remained plagued by tragedy. In 1989, the Wynn’s second oldest son, 29-year-old broadcast journalist Brian, returned to Salt Lake City after several years working for Alaskan TV. He fell ill, although he never told his family what was wrong until 1994, when he was dying. By then, complications from AIDS had taken his eyesight.

Wynn and his wife, Verna, tended their son at home for the last months of his life. The Wynns were devout Mormons at the time. Ken Wynn had told his bishop he needed time off from teaching Sunday School because he was visiting his son daily in the hospital. When Brian came home, Ken Wynn was about to resume his ecclesiastical duties when he heard an LDS general authority gave a speech at Brigham Young University.

“It offended the hell out of me,” Ken Wynn recalls. “He basically condemned everybody, particularly gays and lesbians.” What was he supposed to do, Wynn remembers thinking: Throw his son out on the street? To hell with it, he thought.

“I kind of walked away from the church.”

When Brian died in 1994, Wynn says, his wife “just gave up.” Verna had struggled with lung problems much of her life. In 1999, suffering from anemia, she went into kidney failure.

“When he lost his children, he and his wife always had each other to lean on,” says national colleague Jim Sgueo. “When she passed away, he had a tough go of it for a while.” Wynn spent more and more time at work. Friends suggested he undergo therapy. He thought he could handle the mourning process. “Then something happened, I’d see a scene in a TV show, and I couldn’t handle it anymore.”

Wynn still struggles. He recalls Brian playing baseball as a child with his brothers, and says he could tell the boy was gay, based on his mannerisms. “It was just the way it was,” he says, his chin trembling. Wynn removes his glasses, wipes his eyes. “He was a neat, neat kid.”

The occasional drink became more frequent, Wynn says, to numb his grief. Not that the drinking affected his work. Wynn still arrived every day at 3 or 4 a.m., something he pointed out to Nick Hales when the commissioner came to “clear the air,” Wynn says, about rumors he was an alcoholic.

After Verna died, some liquor brokers and bar owners who shared his passion for golf took him under their wings. Wynn got to know several private-club owners well. “They were just good guys, trying to make a living,” he says. His empathy for bar owners grew the more he saw how they suffered under Hales’ commission. “There were times Nick just wouldn’t be reasonable,” Wynn says, with regard to implementing legislation to the letter or imposing draconian punishments of bars caught in alleged violations.

Hales’ and Wynn’s falling out was bookended by two scandals. A state audit revealed that between November 1998 and May 2003, DABC administrative manager Richard Pearson had misappropriated $130,308. Pearson, who hung up on a call from City Weekly for comment, was accused of using the agency’s petty-cash fund to make what the audit called “inappropriate disbursements both to [Pearson] and to others out of the account.” If there were other agency executives involved, only Pearson ended up in court.

The January 2004 published audit was “very critical of Ken and Dennis,” Hales says. Wynn, ever blunt, agrees. “The auditors would tell you we didn’t do our job; we should have dug that out a long time ago.” The commissioners wanted Pearson fired; Wynn refused. “Richard would give you the shirt off his back,” he says. “I wouldn’t do it.” Instead he let Pearson “retire.”

Pearson was convicted and served 150 days in jail. Wynn had other problems that year, too. While attending an out-of-town meeting of liquor agencies, he got drunk and made “out of line” comments he refuses to specify. A senior executive told Wynn such behavior couldn’t be tolerated. Wynn says he quit drinking hard liquor.

The chill between Hales and Wynn reached a deep freeze. For the last two years of Wynn’s leadership of the DABC, Hales did not communicate with its director. Hales spoke to Dorius or then Operations Manager Kellen. Wynn says he sent Hales e-mails asking what was wrong but received no reply.

Hales says their cold war is a private matter.

The men have never reached a truce. Consider the matter of Hales’ portrait at DABC headquarters. Just before Wynn retired, the framed photograph disappeared from the office gallery of commissioner portraits. Hales says he got a phone call shortly after he and Wynn retired last year telling him the picture had been removed. Hales’ only comment: “Ken’s a bitter man.”

Wynn says he doesn’t know about the picture’s fate—and couldn’t care less. “I would hope to never see that son of a bitch in the building again.”

A couple of years after the legislative audit on Pearson, the agency suffered another pummeling from a state audit—this time over allegations of double dipping. Between 2000 and 2005, 12 DABC senior employees took retirement, worked part-time for six months, then came back on full or half salaries. Earl Dorius was the first of two management chiefs to take advantage of a law enacted by the Legislature in January 2000. Newspaper editorials labeled the practice a loophole that needed closing.

“It was perfectly legal,” Wynn says defiantly. “I signed off on every single one of them. If I had to do it over again, I would.”RENT-A-COP

The final skirmish between Hales and Wynn was over Wynn’s replacement. Wynn says he e-mailed Hales, telling him he would retire after a successor had been named. Hales insisted Wynn would not name his own replacement. True to the tight-knit family nature of Wynn’s DABC, no national search was conducted for the position nor were other candidates considered. All five DABC commissioners approved the appointment of Dennis Kellen, who had Wynn’s back for 30 years as his deputy.

“There was a feeling Dennis had earned it,” Hales says.

Commissioner Kathryn Balmforth joined the board in 2005. She views her “yes” vote in the 2007 appointment as “engineered,” and it still rankles her a year later. It wasn’t that she opposed Kellen, she says. It was, simply, given the importance of the position, there was neither criteria for the appointment nor any evaluation of the candidate.

When Balmforth started on the commission three years ago, she noticed that then-director Wynn was, she says, “untouchable.” The only way he could be fired was to show cause. And since Wynn wasn’t evaluated from 1997 on, there was no way to document cause.

In the end, Hales and Wynn left on the same day, June 30, 2007. “Which really disappointed me,” Wynn says. “I wanted to outlast the son of a bitch so bad.”

Wynn even has a favorite to someday replace Kellen—52-year-old John Freeman. He replaced Kellen as deputy director. A friend of Wynn’s for 30 years, Freeman is also a certified peace officer. He keeps his police accreditation by doing 40 hours a year service at the Harrisville Police Department, north of Ogden.

In 2003, Freeman left a job managing Granite Furniture, where he’d worked for nearly 25 years, to join the DABC. After two years in the compliance division, Freeman took over human resources. While there, he assigned himself $16 per hour security work at the state liquor store at 205 West 400 South. Ken Wynn saw no conflict of interest. “He took a tremendous pay cut to come to us,” he recalls. “He needed some money and, [since he was] a certified police officer, I said, ‘Why not?’”

Whether Kellen and Freeman’s promotions are exactly in keeping with the agency’s mission statement of maintaining “sound management principles and practices,” is debatable. It’s clear, nevertheless, Wynn values loyalty to friends and to his DABC family. Even to the point, it might be argued, of ensuring long life for what appears to be an old-boys’ club. One indeed that will reflect his influence for years to come.

He loves me, he loves me not
The Utah Hospitality Association was anxious to sign up the retired Wynn as a board member. “Just your name, your connections will help us,” board members told him. And Wynn has run with the assignment.

Back in 1989, Wynn brought Earl Dorius into the agency. Dorius’ relationship with the DABC dated back to 1981, when then-Assistant Attorney General Dorius was assigned to the liquor agency as legal counsel. Dorius enjoyed notoriety after handling the death-row appeals of one of the Ogden Hi-Fi Shop killers and Gary Gilmore’s execution. In late 1989, incoming Democratic Attorney General Paul Van Dam shuffled Dorius sideways into public utilities. Wynn says Dorius wanted out. 

Kellen and Wynn visited Gov. Scott Matheson and asked his blessing on adding Dorius as the DABC’s in-house attorney.

Dorius was also hearing examiner for a year, until he and Wynn decided it would be better for an external officer to hear violation cases that had not been resolved at pre-hearings. “I felt I could be fair, but I didn’t want the perception of unfairness,” Dorius says.

That, however, is exactly what he’s got. Clearfield’s Bogey’s club co-owner Mark Livingstone calls the prehearing process a “a kangaroo court.” Piper Down owner Dave Morris complains bar owners are automatically guilty in the DABC’s eyes.

Morris characterizes a meeting with Dorius and assistant attorney general Sheila Page: “They say, ‘This is what you did; this is what you get; end of story.’” Which is one reason why, Livingstone says, every licensee is scared to death of the DABC.

Rep. Curt Oda, R-Clearfield, says he heard from friends who own bars, including Livingstone, that Dorius and particularly Public Safety’s liquor-law-enforcement division were acting like “the Gestapo” going after bar violations. Oda threatened legislation to transfer Dorius’ punitive duties to the attorney general’s office and then accepted commitments from the DABC to effectively be “nicer” to licensees. Wynn praises Oda for raising the issue but says the bill “wouldn’t have done a damned bit of good. Page prosecutes the cases now and she wouldn’t change.” He suggests a full-time administrative law judge should deal with the pre-hearings. Whoever it is, the judge must know the liquor laws.

“Monday morning quarterbacking” is how Hales describes Wynn’s criticism of Dorius. Dorius’ reputation as someone who loves to close clubs down is undeserved, Hales says. “The biggest criticism from the conservatives on the commission was that Earl was too willing to do whatever he could to keep a licensee in place.”

What matters to Wynn, though, is that most bar owners don’t have the $20,000 (the cost bar owners cite) to fight a violation charge. They feel they have no choice but to roll over. “Earl’s got too many complaints from licensees about the heavy-handedness of the department,” Wynn says.

Dorius deflects his friend’s criticism. Their relationship is complicated. “Ken has a kind of love-hate relationship with me,” he says. “He genuinely loves me and the effort I’ve given this agency. He just doesn’t like this one little corner of what I do.” He adds with a strained laugh, “Hey, it’s my job.”

Civilian Wynn has a significant ally in new commission Chairman Sam Granato, who agrees on moving the screening and prehearings of violations out of the DABC. “We’re here to be [licensees’] friends, not their enemies,” deli and restaurant owner Granato says. He prefers providing a better training program for licensees rather than a punishment program. As to what legislators would make of such a move, he responds, “Wouldn’t that be interesting?”

Locked out

When Wynn retired, he promised his tearful staff the process would be seamless. But there are differences in style between Wynn and Vietnam veteran Kellen. For a start, Wynn’s top rule as director was that he alone spoke for the department. Kellen, on the other hand, mirrors so many other agency heads these days by directing media inquiries to a public information officer.

Other departures from Wynn’s approach include on-hold music played on the telephone. Another is new electronic locks on all the doors.

Much of Wynn’s value to the Utah Hospitality Association is access. He recently took some of the UHA board to meet with Dorius, Freeman and Kellen. Several group members came away—to their own surprise—favorably impressed with Dorius.

“There’s room for coming to terms, for negotiation,” Wynn insists. And he’s playing a part in that, bringing his state-friendly profile to the fight. The governor’s office recently contacted Wynn for his own, and UHA’s, views on liquor control. When Wynn learned that cops had gone to a bar claiming the DABC had asked them to “keep an eye” on the place, he went straight to Dorius. Dorius denied giving those instructions. “Because of who I am, I can contact a licensee and say, ‘We’re not doing that,’” Wynn says.

As Wynn works for change in laws he represented for three decades, he also does the same in his private life. He and his new wife, Jeanene, have talked about going back to the LDS Church. He hasn’t decided whether to give up beer. “It’s part of the Word of Wisdom,” he says, referring to the church’s scriptural edict against tobacco, alcohol and caffeine.

He pauses for a moment before finishing his beer and paying off his tab. “When you hit that final judgment day,” he says with a quiet smile, “I don’t think that will be a big issue.”

Next Week: Sell booze, you lose.