Carlton Cole "Carl" Magee (January 5, 1873 – January 31, 1946) was an American educator, lawyer and newspaper editor instrumental in exposing the Teapot Dome scandal. He is also credited for patenting the first practical parking meter, and spearheading efforts to develop the first working models.

Magee was born in Fayette County, Iowa. His father, John Calvin Magee, was a prominent Methodist Episcopal minister. Carl Magee graduated from the Iowa State Normal School, later the University of Northern Iowa, in Cedar Falls, Iowa, in 1894 after serving as editor of the student newspaper. He married a college classmate, Grace Griffin, in 1895. Magee worked several years as an educator in Iowa and was involved in launching a correspondence school for farmers called the Correspondence Agricultural College.

In 1904, the Magees moved to Tulsa, Indian Territory, where he began practicing law and was active as a civic booster. He chaired the board of directors of the YMCA for about eight years from its inception in the city and worked to establish troops of Boy Scouts then served as president of the Boy Scout council. He served on the school board and battled political favoritism in the school district as well as partisanship in municipal government. He helped instigate a grand jury investigation of local corruption that resulted in the indictment of Tulsa Mayor Frank M. Wooden, as well as the police chief, police commissioner, and county sheriff. Magee also was a leader in the campaign to bring water to Tulsa from the Spavinaw Creek basin, a project that secured the city’s municipal water supply. When Oklahoma achieved statehood, he unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for Congress from the state’s new Third Congressional District.

Grace Magee developed tuberculosis, and starting in 1916 the family relocated to Albuquerque, New Mexico, for her health. There Magee decided to pursue a long-held dream of publishing a “truth-telling newspaper,” and in 1920 he bought the Albuquerque Journal from a consortium that had used it to re-elect Albert Bacon Fall to the U.S. Senate. Magee began using the newspaper to expose corruption, especially in the state Land Office, with the help of reporter Clinton P. Anderson, who later would become a prominent New Mexico politician and businessman. The investigations enraged Fall, who brought financial pressure that forced Magee to sell the newspaper in May 1922.

Less than a month later, Magee launched a new newspaper, a weekly called Magee’s Independent. The following year he turned it into a daily called the New Mexico State Tribune. (In 1933 it would become The Albuquerque Tribune, which would remain in business until 2008). Magee continued his muckraking and was charged with criminal libel in Las Vegas, New Mexico, where, he said, the courts were controlled by a “copper-riveted” Republican political machine headed by U.S. Marshal Secudino Romero. Magee was found guilty of libel and contempt in the courtroom of Judge David Leahy, who sentenced him to prison. But Governor James F. Hinkle, a Democrat, pardoned Magee on all charges on July 16, 1923.

Two years later, on August 21, 1925, Leahy encountered Magee in the lobby of the Meadows hotel (later the El Fidel Hotel) in Las Vegas and attacked him. Knocked to the floor, Magee got a pistol from his pocket and shot Leahy in the arm. But he also accidentally shot John B. Lassetter, a Highway Department project engineer, who had rushed over to help. Lassetter died, and Magee was tried the following year for manslaughter but acquitted.

Albert Fall, meanwhile, had been appointed secretary of the interior by President Warren Harding. In that role, Fall issued secret, no-bid leases to two oilmen -- Edward L. Doheny and Harry Ford Sinclair – allowing them to drill in the naval petroleum reserves at Elk Hills, California, and Teapot Dome, Wyoming. The U.S. Senate launched an inquiry into the leases on April 29, 1922, and Magee, who still owned the Journal at the time, began raising questions about Fall’s sudden affluence. After launching the Tribune, Magee collaborated with a reporter from the Denver Post, D.F. Stackelbeck, who gathered evidence of Fall’s newfound wealth. But the Post’s publisher, Frederick Bonfils, refused to publish the information.

In September 1923, Magee agreed to sell controlling interest in the Tribune to the Scripps-Howard newspaper group, which retained him as editor. He told the concern’s executives of his suspicions about Fall and about the information he and Stackelbeck had uncovered. That information was passed on to U.S. Senator Thomas J. Walsh of Montana, who was leading the Senate Public Lands Committee probe of the oil leases. Walsh called Magee to testify before the committee, and his testimony on November 30, 1923, drew intense public attention to what became known as the Teapot Dome scandal. Subsequent investigation revealed that Doheny and Sinclair had paid Fall hundreds of thousands of dollars during contract negotiations. Fall was convicted of bribery and became the first cabinet secretary sent to prison.