Larry Murphy is fifty-five years old. A compactly built five feet eight, he has the sun-bleached blond hair of a road worker; dry, ruddy cheeks; and an open, friendly face dominated by a wide nose and alert, mischievous blue eyes. He keeps his hair short and wears aviator-style Ray-Ban sunglasses. Murphy put himself through school—first at tiny Loras College, in Dubuque, Iowa, and then at Drake University, from which he graduated in 1975 with a degree in journalism—by working the graveyard shift on the kill-floor of a slaughterhouse in Davenport, Iowa. Before the night’s work began, he says, he’d head across the street to the bar with the axmen and the sledge-heads who’d worked at the plant for decades. They drank boilermakers—shots of whiskey dropped into pints of beer—to help deal with a job that was by turns brutally boring and just plain brutal.
Murphy is a lifelong Democrat who makes his political home on a tightrope stretched between a staunch support of unions and a solid rejection of abortion. He works at home, in the den of his house, in order to save Oelwein the money it would cost for him to have a proper office. Political activism predicated on liberal fiscal beliefs seems less a calling for Murphy and more a part of his genetic coding. He was in his twenty-fourth straight year of elective office in Iowa, including stints as county supervisor, state senator, and now, mayor. One of his seven surviving siblings, Pat, had just become Speaker of the Iowa House of Representatives after seventeen years in office. Murphy’s father worked at the telephone company in Dubuque for thirty years and was a lifelong member of the Communications Workers of America. Murphy’s sister Margaret left a convent in order to organize migrant laborers in California and Arizona on behalf of César Chavez. His brother David is a former welder turned nurse, and his brother Bob is a negotiator for the United Food and Commercial Workers. Murphy himself organized his first labor union, at a grocery store in Dubuque, in 1959, when he was fourteen years old.
Murphy said he had little trouble understanding why people with difficult, low-income jobs would do methamphetamine, and why, once they’d lost those jobs or had their wages slashed, they’d turn to making the drug themselves. Murphy knew well the utility of a little pick-me-up before beginning the graveyard shift at a slaughterhouse, even back in the day when you could make a decent wage, get health insurance, buy a car, and put yourself through college doing that kind of work. It angered Murphy that trends in the industries that had once buoyed towns like Oelwein now contributed to the numbers of people digging in the trash behind the Conocostation. To scenes like this, Murphy still reacted with disbelief. Every time he saw a destitute person in his town, it got his dander up. A proud, action-oriented Midwesterner, Murphy just couldn’t square what he saw now with the little town he’d moved to in 1977. The rundown homes and the trash piling up on the lawns broke his heart. What bothered him most were the kids who, abandoned by their parents and set adrift in the foster care system, flunked out of Oelwein High. At that point, those same kids were summarily condemned to the Alternative School, which, for an astonishingly bleak 60 percent of the students, was nothing more than a stepping-stone to jail. It killed Murphy, he said, that there was no money to help the kids of addicts or their parents, beyond visits by underpaid and overworked DHS in-home caseworkers. That, or the Northeast Iowa Behavioral Health Clinic, which had but one addiction specialist to minister to the needs of a town of over six thousand people.
If Oelwein could just kick-start itself, said Murphy—if it could just get some decent business into the IP—there’d be time to consider more sides of the equation. Maybe Murphy, given his extensive connections in state government, could create some momentum for Nathan Lein’s idea that meth addicts serve five-year probationary periods, during which they have to hold jobs and attend mandatory meetings with a counselor. Maybe, once there was more revenue in town, they could bring in an actual treatment facility, as Clay Hall-berg had begged him to do. Some real treatment alternatives might help Oelwein nip drug abuse in the bud, rather than simply treating its symptoms—even as those symptoms gained ineluctable momentum.
For now, though, that was all a pipe dream. There was no excess revenue for anything, never mind treatment. Murphy’s task was to raise the town from the ashes. He had to build a foundation of decent economic growth, and he had to do it ASAP. Businesses like the call center could afford to be choosy—every hard-luck town in the United States was courting them. In fact, Murphy believed that most companies were looking for a certain modicum of poverty as a fail-safe against union organizing. If people were desperate, they’d concede this essential ground to the company. Murphy understood the game. As he once put it to me in an e-mail, he was “enough of a student of economic trends in the last two decades to understand [he had to] play on the edges for wage and benefit rates.” The trick was to look like something in between a union town and a town that was downright criminally dangerous. Oelwein had to appear complacently impoverished but nonetheless like a nice place to raise a family.
That meant that social order needed to take precedence, even if it involved taking a few un-civil liberties, and Murphy’s sympathy regarding meth addicts was trumped by a certain mercilessness. No business was going to invest in a town with a bunch of tweakers riding around cooking dope on their bicycles, blowing up their own homes, and shaking inside their overcoats as they picked through the Dumpster behind the gas station. The trick, if Murphy could succeed in getting a handle on Oelwein’s meth problem, would be to lure businesses that wouldn’t automatically reinvigorate the meth industry by offering substandard jobs. Oelwein needed work, but it didn’t need the kind of work that had inundated Greenville, Illinois: half-time jobs with no benefits at Wal-Mart or Super 8, which injected little revenue into the local economy. Oelwein didn’t need any more meatpacking plants, either, which offered high worker-injury rates and minimal compensation. Bad jobs, Murphy knew, had gotten Oelwein in trouble in the first place. Being treated poorly by employers, he said, had sucked the hope out of people’s lives. It made meth seem like the only alternative. Nowadays, bad jobs came with the added burden of immigrant workers who couldn’t afford their hospital bills and whose children had to be taught English by the already overextended schools. And yet towns across the nation were clamoring for what ever jobs they could get. It was an almost impossible situation in which Murphy found himself. Compared with this, his past battles as a liberal pro-lifer had been a cakewalk.
During 2004 and 2005, Murphy had done everything possible to run the small-lab meth business out of town as a means of preparing Oelwein to rebuild. This was not just to compete with the towns in India or Nebraska that might lure the likes of the call center. It was to compete with Oelwein’s more immediate neighbors. Nathan had told me, along with several other people, that DHS workers in nearby Buchanan County—home of pretty, prosperous little Independence—had for years been recommending that their worst cases move to Fayette County, and particularly to Oelwein, where taxes were low and the rental market was burgeoning. A kind of economic cannibalism had set in following the farm crisis, the ravages of population loss, and the onset of the meth epidemic. Towns, unsure of their own futures, hedged their bets, often to the detriment of their neighbors. According to a local real estate broker, In dependence had effectively made Oelwein its ghetto. “Low rent,” the broker went on, was synonymous with “meth lab.” It’s in this way that ridding Oelwein of its small labs became a kind of shoving match between two city-states, with the de facto goal of running the people from Buchanan County out of Fayette.