George Beall, the federal prosecutor for Maryland whose supervision of a political corruption investigation forced the 1973 resignation of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, died Sunday at his home in Naples, Florida. He was 79.

The cause was brain cancer, said his wife, Carolyn Campbell Beall.

Beall (pronounced “bell”) was the scion of a prominent family of Maryland Republicans. His father and brother, J. Glenn Beall and J. Glenn Beall Jr., respectively, served in the U.S. Senate.

And Beall, who was the U.S. attorney for Maryland from 1970 to 1975, was an appointee of President Nixon, a Republican.

He stepped into a job with a long-standing tradition of prosecuting public officeholders, among them Sen. Daniel Brewster, D-Md., Rep. Thomas Johnson, D-Md., and Jesse Baggett, the chairman of the Prince George’s County Commission. Beall vowed to continue that tradition.

“Corruption of public officials is heinous, abominable, and has to be ferreted out,” the 32-year-old Beall told The Washington Post in 1970.

In Agnew’s case, the investigation began with a report of a kickback scheme in suburban Baltimore County, where Agnew had been elected county executive in 1962. According to information uncovered by prosecutors, it had been a practice for some time that public officeholders demanded sub rosa payments from engineers and builders for government construction jobs.

Agnew, who was elected Maryland governor in 1966 and picked by Nixon for his vice president in 1968, had accepted such payments, prosecutors said.

Eventually Agnew agreed to a deal in which he would plead no contest to a single charge of tax evasion and resign the vice presidency, which he did in October 1973. He also was fined $10,000. Rep. Gerald Ford, R-Mich., replaced Agnew and then became president after Nixon resigned in August 1974.

The Agnew case was the capstone of Beall’s prosecutorial tenure. The Post said in 1977 that it gave Beall “a national reputation as a fearless political big game hunter.” But it did not endear him to Republican regulars, who weren’t bothered by the bribery charges.