Jim Hensley

Hensley was born on April 12, 1920 in San Antonio to Jessie and James L. Hensley. The family was poor and his father suffered from alcoholism. They lived in the South until moving to Arizona; Hensley graduated from Phoenix Union High School in 1936. He married Mary Jeanne Parks, his high school sweetheart, around 1937, and worked as a paper salesman.

Hensley and his older brother, Eugene, began working in the liquor distribution business before World War II, in the employ of Kemper Marley, Sr., an Arizona rancher who had become wealthy in that business in Phoenix and Tucson following the end of Prohibition. The brothers started the United Liquor Co. in Phoenix and the United Distribution Co. in Tucson.

Jim Hensley served three years as an officer in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. He was a bombardier on B-17 Flying Fortresses. On his thirteenth mission, his plane was shot down over the English Channel; around the same time, his wife gave birth to their daughter, Kathleen Ann Hensley, in February 1943. In all, his planes were shot down two or three times. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Hensley was injured during his service, and sent to a West Virginia medical facility to recover. There he met Marguerite "Smitty" Johnson (born Cairo, Illinois, January 16, 1919, died Scottsdale, Arizona, October 11, 2006, daughter of Swedish American parents), who had one daughter, Dixie, from a previous relationship. Hensley divorced his wife, and shortly thereafter married Marguerite on March 29, 1945, in Memphis, Tennessee, while on leave from the USAAF. They had one child together, Cindy Lou Hensley, born 1954. Hensley's first daughter grew up with her mother, but he maintained occasional contact with her.

Following his discharge in 1945, Hensley and his brother went back to work for Marley in his United Sales Company in Phoenix and United Distributors in Tucson. In 1948, both brothers were prosecuted by the federal government and convicted of multiple counts of falsifying liquor records in a conspiracy to conceal illegal distribution of whiskey against post-war rationing regulations. Jim Hensley received a six-month sentence (later upheld but suspended by an appeals court) while his brother received a year in federal prison, and both were fined. In 1953, Jim Hensley and Marley were charged by federal prosecutors with falsifying liquor records. Defended by future Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, they were acquitted.

In December 1952, the Hensley brothers bought into the Ruidoso Downs racetrack in New Mexico, with Eugene running it and Jim returning to Phoenix. In a May 1953 hearing before the New Mexico State Racing Commission, the Hensley brothers concealed the existence an equal partner, Clarence "Teak" Baldwin, who had been banned from any ownership role due to illegal bookmaking activities. A 1953 New Mexico State Police investigation found further that Kemper Marley was a financial backer for bookmakers and had connections with Baldwin and with the bookmaking operations of organized crime, a conclusion echoed decades later by the Arizona Project investigative reporting team. The Hensley brothers gained their Ruidoso Downs racetrack license in 1953, as no New Mexico law barred convicted felons from race track ownership, although in 1955 new Governor of New Mexico John F. Simms said he was "appalled" by the previous administration's decision to do so. Previous Governor Edwin L. Mechem had defended the approval, saying that the Hensleys had been under constant surveillance and deserved continued attention, but that no action was taken against them because the investigation showed that as race tracks go, all laws apparently were being observed. Jim Hensley sold his interest in Ruidoso Downs to his brother Eugene in 1955 (who in turn sold it to a Marley-connected company in 1969).