But the seeds of Mattes’ crusade to expose wrongdoing in government were planted not in sunny Florida, but in wintry Madison.
As the new Bunker Crew/MSW Media podcast“Lawyers Guns and Money” chronicles, the Connecticut-born Mattes attended school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late ‘60s and joined the antiwar movement there. In the 1970s, while still a student radical, Mattes was elected to the Dane County Board and later the Madison City Council.
“We were in a bar, and my friend said, ‘One of us ought to run for county supervisor and throw these bums out,’” Mattes recounts on the first episode of the six-episode podcast, which is available on iTunes, Spotify and other podcast apps. “We flipped a coin and I lost, so I had to run. Somehow I won.”
While serving on the county board, Mattes said he conducted a yearlong investigation into nepotism in county hiring and spearheaded a change in hiring practices based on merit. “That was really the first time I ever used my research skills to make something happen in government.”
Mattes later became a city alderman, and he said there was talk about him running for mayor. Instead, he left politics in 1981 to attend law school in Florida.