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

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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.