A Long-Unpaid Debt

Here’s a funny little story. Judith Freeman, author of such books as The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, says that Republican U.S. presidential nominee Willard Mitt Romney owes her family money -- and has for more than a century.

“The financial connection,” explains the Los Angeles Times, “was between Romney's great-grandfather Miles P. Romney and Freeman’s great-grandfather William Jordan Flake,” both of whom were Mormon polygamists, living in northern Arizona in the 1880s. After Arizona marshals arrested the two men for their plural marriages, Flake -- the better respected and more prosperous of the pair -- “posted bail for both of them: $1,000 each.” But afterwards, Freeman says, Romney “skipped out on his bail, fleeing across the border into Mexico with his three wives,” and leaving his debt to Flake unpaid.

Freeeman “calculates that the $1,000 would translate to about $25,000 in 2012 dollars.”

You can read more of the story here.