In 1973, Spiro T. Agnew resigned the presidency to contest criminal charges of extortion, tax fraud, bribery and conspiracy; on the same day he was formally charged with accepting bribes totaling more than $100,000 whilst holding office since 1962 as Baltimore County Executive, Governor of Maryland and Vice President.

The President of the United States is a crookThe scandal quietly fizzled out over the next decade; Agnew was allowed to plead no contest to a single charge that he had failed to report $29,500 of income received in 1967. In January 1983, he paid the state of Maryland nearly $270,000 as a result of a civil suit that stemmed from the bribery allegations.

Whilst satirists published cartoon strips of Agnew and Nixon sharing a prison cell, leading journalists soundly condemned Nelson Rockefeller for failing to bring to bear the full force of law against either of his two predecessors.

Born Spiro Anagnostopoulos in 1918, he was the first Greek American to hold high political office, an achievement that would be repeated at the 1988 election which brought to power Michael Dukakis.