Aide to Ex-Governor Busted For Internet Child Porn LEXINGTON, KY - A former aide to former Kentucky governor and Major League Baseball commissioner Albert (Happy) Chandler has been indicted on Internet child porn charges, the Associated Press reported June 7.
Thomas Arthur Manus was first arrested in April, on sexual abuse charges, and he's accused of using a young girl to create online child porn. He could get up to 20 years behind bars for each of five charges of using a minor to create child porn.
It's not exactly unfamiliar turf to him, the AP said: he faces similar charges in Orange County, California and in Fayette County in Kentucky.
Manus had spent the last 17 years living under the name Reuben Roberts in Woodford County, building a reputation as a simple man whose passion for gardening included writing a column in the Woodford Sun, the AP said.
Manus worked during the 1980s as an assistant to Chandler, who was Kentucky's governor from 1935-39 and again from 1955-59. In between his gubernatorial terms, Chandler succeeded baseball's first commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, in 1945. His signature moment was approving Jackie Robinson's contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers' organization in 1946, opening the way to re-breaking the major leagues' color line when Robinson was called up to the Dodgers a year later.
Chandler died in 1991, forty years after he was forced to resign as baseball commissioner, after owners refused to re-elect him after he started probes into the gambling activities of some of the owners.
