Next
Tuesday will determine whether a former Morgan Keegan president and chief
operating officer of Memphis’ Morgan Keegan brokerage firm keeps alive his hopes
of representing Rhode Island in the U.S. Senate. The hopeful is Republican
primary candidate Stephen Laffey, now serving as the mayor of Cranston, Rhode
Island, and running as a hard-right conservative against the moderate GOP
incumbent, Lincoln Chafee. Laffey, who began as an executive with Morgan Keegan
in 1992, departed his perch at the top of the Memphis firm in 2001 as the result
of what The Commercial Appeal then called a “shift in power” and what a
Rhode Island paper this week called “a palace revolt.”
Among several
controversial circumstances imputed to Laffey by his political foes are an
alleged theft of documents belonging to one of Laffey’s prior firms and
anti-gay statements made by Laffey as an undergraduate journalist at Bowdoin
College, where he penned such statements as these: “All the homosexuals I’ve
seen are sickly and decrepit, their eyes devoid of life;” and (referring to pop
singer Boy George’s hit, “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?”) “I want to punch you
lights out, pal, and break your rribs.”
