Last Man Standing: My interview with Bill Mason

Just before Bill Mason left the Cuyahoga County prosecutor's office this fall, he and I sat down for a final interview.  It got tense.

Others had already asked Mason why he didn't catch Jimmy Dimora or Frank Russo in the act of pocketing bribes and exploiting their office.  So I drilled deeper.  I asked about the times Mason's name came up at the Dimora trial, the wrongdoing ex-sheriff Gerald McFaul carried out in the Justice Center (where Mason also had his office), and Mason's longstanding alliance and friendship with Pat O'Malley, the former county recorder who served federal prison time on an obscenity conviction.

Mason, I discovered, remains loyal to O'Malley even today. "I'm a pretty trustworthy and loyal guy," he said. "Period." Mason said he didn't know that sheriff's deputies were illegally selling tickets to McFaul's clambake fundraisers in the Justice Center. And he denied any involvement with Frank Russo's successful efforts to push J. Kevin Kelley out of the 2003 Parma mayor's race.

The interview ranged across Mason's 14 years in office and touched on his dual reputation as a tough law-and-order prosecutor and shrewd political insider.  We talked about Mason's aggressive pursuit of the death penalty, his work fighting mortgage fraud and child porn, and his memories of the 2000 Sam Sheppard case.  As the spotlight turns to his successor, Tim McGinty, my last talk with Mason provides a look at the state of the prosecutor's office during a time of transition.

You can read my interview with Mason, "Last Man Standing," here and in the December issue of Cleveland Magazine.

Why didn't the Plain Dealer catch county corruption?

Doris O’Donnell, one of Cleveland’s best reporters of the mid-20th century, asked the question first. Why didn’t the Plain Dealer expose Cuyahoga County’s corruption before the FBI?

“The reporters had to be pretty goddamn lazy if they didn't know that Jimmy Dimora and Frank Russo have been living on the hog for 10 years,” the retired reporter raged to Scene in 2008, after federal agents raided the county building. “How can they get away with those houses and that real estate company without anyone knowing?”

The ten houses Russo bought and sold, some for upwards of $400,000. The 619 gift-givers and 389 free meals Dimora meticulously reported to the state over 11 years. Why no stories about them before the FBI noticed?

Now, Ted Diadiun’s spent 4,729 words trying to answer the question. His review of the paper’s county government coverage in last Sunday’s paper wasn’t as harsh as O’Donnell’s. The PD wasn’t lazy before 2008, the reader representative wrote, but it was guilty of “sins of journalistic omission -- the failure to follow up leads, to cultivate sources and mobilize resources, to report aggressively on matters of keen public interest rather than accepting business as usual.”

Diadiun’s final verdict was fair and tough. But his story starts slow, leaving the best stuff toward the end. Fascinating details hang in the air, their implications never nailed down. Here’s my guide to the highlights – or, really, the lowlights.


The paper’s old hands let Gerald McFaul off easy. Dick Feagler, former columnist for the PD and the Cleveland Press, offered one of the story’s most honest and disappointing quotes:

I knew Gerry McFaul back in the old days. I knew he was probably playing fast and loose . . . but I think my mind was that that's the way the system was. I don't remember anyone fainting with shock when they found out that the sheriff was taking kickbacks.

Brent Larkin, the paper’s political sage and editorial page editor, also missed a possible chance to catch McFaul. Diadiun writes:

Larkin had a friendly relationship with the former sheriff. … One of [Mark] Puente's sources said that he saw Larkin jocularly talking to McFaul at public gatherings and concluded that he'd better keep whatever information he had about McFaul to himself. Larkin was just doing his job as a columnist by getting out and about, but that's not the way it appeared, at least to this potential tipster.

Diadiun cuts Larkin too much of a break here. He notes that Larkin wrote a column accounting for his failure to see McFaul’s true character, but he doesn’t quote this key line from Larkin’s piece:

There were periodic rumblings about the aggressive fund-raising tactics surrounding McFaul's annual clambake. But the overwhelming consensus in town held that McFaul was a pretty good sheriff.

Turns out those clambakes were a big story. Investigators say McFaul made deputies spend 500 hours a year selling tickets to them on county time. Also, McFaul pocketed $50,000 in cash over 10 years from souvenirs he sold at them. Oops!

The paper published warnings about Dimora and Russo’s character – then took its eye off them. Diadiun starts by summing up decades of the paper’s Dimora, Russo, and McFaul coverage. The PD ran tough pieces that foreshadowed today’s corruption scandal: 1992 reports on the political mini-machine Dimora assembled in Bedford Heights, coverage of Russo’s guilty plea to misdemeanor dereliction of duty in 1998.

But that sharp coverage begs the bigger question. When Dimora and Russo survived those scandals and became the local Democratic Party’s most powerful leaders, why didn’t alarm bells go off in the newsroom? Why wasn’t the paper watching to see if they’d cut corners on a bigger scale?

Doug Clifton hunted corruption at the city, not the county. For years, the paper had only one reporter covering Cuyahoga County government, Diadiun reminds us. That inevitably reflects on Clifton, editor from 1999 to 2007.

Clifton hangs the reporters who held that beat out to dry. “We had people covering the county, and if they’d been doing their job, they should have been looking into it,” he told Diadiun. Yes, but guidance and resources come from the top.

Chris Quinn, now metro editor, defends Clifton by saying he woke up the paper and took on more serious journalism. True, but he’s reminiscing about the good old days when Clifton set Quinn and Mark Vosburgh loose to aggressively cover Mike White’s third term as mayor. Meanwhile, the county attracted less challenging coverage.

(Of course, Clifton’s hardly alone. Local media attention shifted from City Hall to the county building about three years ago, when the commissioners tried to launch a building boom with taxpayer money. I’ve written about this shift before, and I include myself: I moved here in 2000 and started reporting more about the county and Dimora in 2007. I first heard about Dimora’s gift lists in 2005, and looking back, I wish I’d sent away for them and asked, is this normal? Who are these people?)

What changed? Susan Goldberg – and Jim Rokakis. The Cuyahoga County treasurer outed himself to Diadiun as the corruption scandal’s super-source:

The politification of the county was complete, and in plain sight. All you had to do was match up the hiring rolls with the lists of precinct committeemen. This has been going on for years. As I told Susan Goldberg in my first lunch with her after she got here, this county was Sodom and Gomorrah.

Goldberg took Rokakis’ advice, Diadiun implies, and launched patronage exposés of Frank Russo’s and Pat O’Malley’s offices.

Rokakis also said the FBI interviewed him about county government in 2000, 2004, and 2005 – further evidence that, unlike the Plain Dealer, the FBI never took their eye off Russo after his 1998 conviction.

Rokakis has won a lot of praise for his honesty and conscientiousness in a corrupted county. Now we can add one more thing. When Rokakis knew, or suspected, that Russo was corrupt, he didn’t go along to get along. He blew the whistle to both the feds and the press. For reporters, that’s further proof of the importance of good sources.

Puente, politicians' scourge, leaves Plain Dealer

This Sunday, Mark Puente's byline appeared in the Plain Dealer for the last time. Prosecutor Bill Mason, who found Puente on his front porch more times than he liked this year, is probably shaking off the fear of his own ringing doorbell. Ex-sheriff Gerald McFaul, still under house arrest for crimes Puente uncovered, may feel cursed anew to know his nemesis is free to enjoy southern sunshine.

Puente, the PD's best reporter of the past three years, left earlier this month to write about Florida real estate for the prestigious St. Petersburg Times. It's a shock to readers who appreciated his relentless exposés of Cleveland politicians, but no surprise to those close to him.

"Everybody knew my goal was to live close to the water, where it’s warm," says Puente, who went to college in North Carolina. "The editors, everybody, knew that." Now, he says, "I can walk out of the newsroom at lunchtime and be by the bay in less than five minutes. I can watch sailboats come in, watch pelicans dive for fish. It’s 80 degrees."

Puente's 2½-year winning streak in Cleveland began the day an enraged Jimmy Dimora threw him and fellow reporter Henry Gomez out of a meeting. It ran all the way to this Sunday's latest cash-and-favors exposé of Frank Russo's office, co-reported with Gabriel Baird and Gomez. In between, Puente's relentless investigative reporting brought down the once-impregnable McFaul and had co-workers at the paper talking Pulitzer.

Even the PD's toughest critics respect Puente's work. Consider this line, from Ted Diadiun's Sunday piece on why the paper didn't aggressively investigate county corruption and patronage before 2008: "Some people I talked with think that if a reporter like Puente had been on the beat, the paper would have broken the story earlier," Diadiun wrote.

So Puente's Nov. 4 departure, along with editor Susan Goldberg's the same week, leaves local watchdog-journalism lovers nervous about whether the Plain Dealer will keep it up.

Puente, graciously, says he'll be rooting for his former colleagues to go after the town's slipperier politicians. New editor Debra Adams Simmons calls watchdogging her top priority, he notes. As for the line in Diaduin's story, Puente told Diaduin that reporters can't investigate without sources, and he didn't have them in the sheriff's office until McFaul laid people off.

Cultivating sources was the secret to Puente's work in the Justice Center. The story of his goodbye to the police beat, told in two Facebook posts, could give aspiring young reporters an advanced lesson in how the best beat reporters do their work.

In one last-day post, Puente wrote that he deleted 463 phone numbers from his company cell phone. In another, he wrote: “Headed to the Justice Center to say goodbye to some good people: the hot dog vendors and a few cashiers. These folks know everything; they hear everything. I was proud they trusted me and had me on speed dial.”

"The people with the most meager, lowest paying jobs, they’re willing to talk," Puente says. "They want to talk. They just need to be approached and build that trust up. Talking to the janitors, the clerical people who come up and say hi -- once they found someone willing to listen to them, they came flocking to me."

To read my June 2009 story on how Puente's reporting took McFaul down, click here.

Dimora, McFaul involved in Russo job-search favors, say feds

Jimmy Dimora asked Gerald McFaul to hire a buddy of Frank Russo's for a public job with a retirement pension, according to the prosecutor's charges against Russo.

The charge claims McFaul hired Russo's buddy, "Public Employee 40," as an appraiser in April 2008, and that Russo helped PE40 get the job in exchange for favors -- including sponsoring a $8,000 fundraiser for Russo's brother, county probate judge Anthony Russo.

Two weeks earlier, it says, Dimora, McFaul, Russo had dinner at Delsangro's Restaurant in Brook Park, where Dimora told McFaul he wanted the job for PE40 to be "PERS," meaning covered by the state's government-employee pension program.

The next day, Russo allegedly told PE40 that McFaul would give him the job, but his benefits weren't nailed down yet.

There's no reference in the charge to Dimora or McFaul personally benefiting from the alleged agreement.

Update, 4 p.m.: The Plain Dealer is identifying PE40 as Jerry Skuhrovec, who worked for both McFaul and Russo's offices. Jim Trakas, former county Republican chairman, has written an interesting comment about Dimora and Skuhrovec in response to this post. Click on the comments link below if you can't see it.

Feds charge Frank Russo with 21 counts; Russo resigns, may plead; won't testify against Dimora

The feds just hit Frank Russo with everything they've got -- 21 corruption charges: 14 for bribery, 2 for obstruction of justice, 4 for tax fraud.

Looks like most of the nasty stuff we've heard about is in there: the $1.2 million cash kickback allegation, jobs for sale, setting up a chump Republican to run against him.

Russo resigned this morning, and it looks like he'll plead guilty. The filing is an "information," not an indictment, a sign of cooperation.

Cleveland.com reports that Russo's deal with the feds will resolve the charges against his son, Vince. But Russo won't testify against any other public officials. That means he's willing to go to prison for a much longer time than if he'd agreed to testify against Jimmy Dimora. The charges also reportedly implicate ex-sheriff Gerald McFaul. More on that once I dig into them.

From the U.S. Attorney's press release:

The Information charges Russo participated in numerous bribery schemes beginning in March 1998 and continuing through May 2009, all while serving as Auditor. Specifically, it charges that Russo solicited and accepted things of value, such as cash, home improvements and travel to Las Vegas, Nevada, in exchange for County contracts, jobs, raises, reductions in tax valuations and other official favors. The information also charges that Russo gave Joseph Gallucci a job and cash in exchange for running a sham campaign against him. In addition, the Information charges that Russo filed false tax returns for the years 2004 through 2008 and that he obstructed justice.

More soon.

Jail but not prison for McFaul, readers say

Hang over that badge, Sheriff. And while you're at it, hand over those keys. We're locking you away.

That's the sort of justice you, the reader, would've doled out to Gerald McFaul for his corrupt clambakes. My blog's poll asked what you thought of McFaul's sentence to a year of house arrest.

• 61% of you agreed, "He should've gotten at least a few months in jail."

• 15% would've thrown away the key, agreeing, "He should've spent years in prison."

• 23% said Judge Fred Inderlied's sentence of McFaul was "about right, considering he's in poor health."

• 0% agreed that house arrest was "too harsh" because "what he did used to be commonplace."

That leaves one question. Should McFaul have been sent to an out-of-town jail, to make sure he wasn't housed with inmates he may have incarcerated in the past? Or would it've been too irresistibly ironic not to stick McFaul in the McFaul Hilton?

McFaul sentenced to house arrest, not jail: What do you think?

Guess I was wrong when I wrote that it "looks like Gerald McFaul, who ran the Cuyahoga County Jail for 32 years, is going to jail."

Citing the 76-year-old former sheriff's poor health, visiting judge Fred Inderlied sentenced McFaul on Monday to a year of house arrest. He was also fined $21,000 and has to pay $131,000 in restitution.

That's for two felonies and a misdemeanor. McFaul pleaded guilty to forcing deputies to sell tickets to his clambake fundraisers at the Justice Center on county time, pocketing $50,000 in cash from souvenir sales at the clambakes, and appointing his son as a special deputy.

Cleveland Magazine reader Matt Novak of Lyndhurst is mad. After reading about McFaul's statements at his sentencing -- "That's the way things were done," the ex-sheriff said of his crimes -- Novak wrote to us about Michael D. Roberts' July column on the county corruption scandal.

"I recalled your 'Defense Mechanisms' piece," Novak wrote, "especially the victim stance many of the perpetrators took because they were doing 'what everybody else was doing' and that it was business as usual. Add McFaul to that list. I almost don't know where to begin except to say I'm troubled by the no jail time and the message that sends."

I'm curious what other readers think. So I've set up a poll on the right side of this page. Please vote on the sentence you think McFaul should've gotten.

Peeking at the court docket, I noticed one tidbit I haven't seen reported. McFaul can't drink alcohol during his five years' probation, and he's subject to "substance abuse testing at the request of law enforcement."

So a sheriff who downed extreme amounts of liquor on the job is now exiled at home, forced to contemplate his crimes with sober clarity. It may not have the resounding clang of jailing the jailer, but maybe it's a subtler ironic justice.

Clambake corruption detailed as McFaul pleads guilty

Did you catch this detail in the coverage of Gerald McFaul's guilty plea? The former sheriff pocketed $50,000 in cash from selling souvenirs at his infamous clambakes. From this morning's Plain Dealer story, which says McFaul will repay $130,000 in ill-gotten gains:

$50,000 will go back to McFaul's campaign fund. McFaul sold items -- coffee cups, shirts, hats and instant bingo tickets -- at his annual clambake but never listed the cash in his campaign filings, Lingo said. ... The money can only be used for political purposes or donated to charity.

That's 50 grand in 10 years, or $5,000 a year. How many T-shirts and hats is that? I wonder if they'd have a residual value as kitsch. Surely authentic McFauliana would be even funnier than these satirical pins. Frequent clambakers should sell their swag on eBay. I'd buy it.

Although McFaul held the clambake for more than three decades, the theft charges stem from 2000 to 2009 because investigators could only prove the thefts during that time, Lingo said. "I can't tell you how long it was going on," he said.

The answer is, a long, long time. Here's another key detail:

$80,000 of the restitution will go to the Sheriff's Office for the time employees spent selling clambake tickets while on-duty. He estimates workers spent about 500 hours a year selling tickets.

Who bought these tickets? Well, who's at the Justice Center every day? Judges, lawyers, bailiffs -- the people who administer justice in Cleveland. This shows us how Cleveland's political culture has changed quickly -- how corrupt corner-cutting was tolerated, unquestioned, whispered of for years. Everyone knew.

What changed? With McFaul, the answer is Mark Puente's exposés, all the more impressive because he found something others at the PD missed. Consider former PD editorial page editor Brent Larkin's March 2009 mea culpa for having endorsed McFaul five times. He wrote then:

Sure, there were warning signs, either dismissed or downplayed. ... there were periodic rumblings about the aggressive fund-raising tactics surrounding McFaul's annual clambake.

Then, in 2007 and 2008, light after light switched on, first at the local FBI offices, then in newsrooms. I've blogged before about how quickly the county government went from unexamined to relentlessly watchdogged after the $40 million Ameritrust Tower debacle, how secrets tumbled out once people knew someone wanted to know.

Now a retired judge from Geauga County will decide whether McFaul goes to jail, maybe even the jail he used to run. I may have spoken too soon when I said he'd probably be locked up -- lots of people think he'll get probation. His plea and restitution might buy him freedom. It may depend on whether the judge holds McFaul to the standards Cleveland is holding elected officials to today, or considers the much lower standards McFaul got used to years ago.

Clambakes and cane: McFaul charged

Looks like Gerald McFaul, who ran the Cuyahoga County Jail for 32 years, is going to jail. The former sheriff was arraigned this morning on theft in office charges. He'll plead guilty to criminal clambake sales and other crimes on Thursday, says his lawyer.

To mark the occasion, here's a greatest-hits compilation: my article about Mark Puente, the Plain Dealer reporter whose 17 stories in three months brought McFaul down; my blog post on McFaul's liquor collection; and best of all, a video of McFaul poking Puente with his cane.

The reporter who took on the sheriff

I've got a new politics article in the June issue of Cleveland Magazine. It's about Mark Puente (pictured), the Plain Dealer reporter whose exposés this winter ended with Sheriff Gerald McFaul's resignation.

Here's a link to the article on clevelandmagazine.com.

(If you'd like to link to it, you can use this shortcut: tinyurl.com/PuenteMcFaulCM)

Wearable satire: McFaul pin, O'Malley and Mason T-shirts now on sale

In this economy, unemployed journalists have to hustle. Former Scene/Free Times staff writer James Renner, in a fine display of local entrepreneurial spirit, has come out with a clothing and memorabilia line satirizing some of Cleveland's favorite politicians.

Choose from a Gerald McFaul clambake button, a "Free O'Malley!" T-shirt, or a bumper sticker proclaiming "I was subpoenaed to testify against Jimmy Dimora" (or Frank Russo)!

The "Mason's Mean Machine" T-shirt is named after this story about prosecutor Bill Mason, which Renner worked on this fall with Charu Gupta. (The joke about racial disparities on the front is probably best explained by my blog post here. There are other T-shirts I won't try to explain.)

A few of Renner's products refer to his love of unsolved crimes. "Run, Ted Conrad, Run!" is a reference to his fascinating story about a Cleveland bank robber who got away. "It Was the Bushy-Haired Man" is the perfect Father's Day gift for any dad who's convinced Sam Sheppard didn't kill his wife.

Politics headlines: McFaul, Fudge, Harris and Coats

Behind that King James front page, today's Plain Dealer has lots of good politics stories:

Gerald McFaul faces down Mark Puente for the first time since the reporter's many exposés knocked McFaul out of the sheriff's office. "I have nothing to say," McFaul said to Puente. "You got it all wrong." McFaul also had nothing to say yesterday in testimony in a lawsuit filed by two deputies. He repeatedly took the Fifth.

U.S. Rep. Marcia Fudge got together with Mayor Frank Jackson, Dennis Kucinich, and about 20 local elected officials to say that would-be county reformers need to create their reform plans in public instead of closed-door meetings. The subtext of her speech: the reformers all talk about the need to reach out to black political leaders to make reform happen -- but they haven't actually done that.

Mark Naymik rips Fudge for not working harder for Clayton Harris in the sheriff's race. Naymik noticed what I noticed about the Democrats' Saturday vote to name a new sheriff: it went mostly along racial lines. Naymik, taking the power of racial solidarity in Cleveland politics for granted, focuses on the low turnout at the Democratic party's vote and asks why Fudge and other black politicians didn't have a better get-out-the-vote effort for Harris. "The county's black leaders proved to be the real losers," Naymik wrote. (Update: Cleveland.com took a while to post Naymik's column, but it's up now.)

Phillip Morris gives Roosevelt Coats the boot in his column today. He seconds the motion of Powell Caesar, editorial writer for Don King's Call and Post, that the ex-city councilman not be allowed to switch seats with Eugene Miller and go to the state legislature. "Councilman Coats needs to go quietly into the good night," read the Call & Post headline. (The editorial isn't online. Too bad!) "Clean, ineffectual incompetence can only take you so far," says Morris. This can't be what Coats had in mind when he asked in his farewell statement, "How do you measure the work of 21 years?" Henry Gomez, who covers Coats' departure on his City Hall blog, is also not overwhelmed.

And of course, the PD covers Tim Hagan and Frank Jackson's announcement of the convention center deal. Hagan told the press conference that Positively Cleveland, the convention and visitor's bureau, will survive and remain "positively important." However, he didn't guarantee its budget would remain intact. There's been some talk that some of its taxpayer funding would be used as a second stream of revenue for the Medical Mart.

30 bottles of booze on McFaul's wall

Mark Puente's story about the interim sheriff's first day in office is as pure and taut as a poem. After the news of Frank Bova's memos banning political activity, solicitations, and gift-taking comes this gem:

After Bova was sworn in Saturday, he found two cabinets stuffed with about 30 liquor bottles. The booze was packed up and delivered to McFaul.

"It is his personal property," Bova said.

Perhaps someone compiled a detailed inventory before shipping the alcohol. Then reporters could file records requests to find out what McFaul drank on the job.

I hope he kept a fully stocked bar. That would be so much more suave than 30 bottles of the same thing.

Any guesses what McFaul's favorite drink might be? I'm torn between Jameson Irish Whiskey and Gordon's Dry Gin.

(Photo, not necessarily representative of McFaul's collection, from Krizalis on flickr.com.)

McFaul resigns, Hagan defends him

Check out Channel 3's report on Sheriff Gerald McFaul's resignation. Then read the Plain Dealer's.

The announcement from McFaul's office says his doctor advised him to resign yesterday because of his poor health. But the Plain Dealer notes that the resignation came 30 minutes after a reporter called to ask about cash McFaul got from his employees:

For years, his workers have provided him with thousands of dollars in cash and other gifts for his birthday, at Christmas and before vacations to Ireland and Florida.

Tim Hagan defends McFaul to Channel 3. I hope Hagan is the victim of bad sound-bite editing here, or a slip of his own tongue:

Nobody questioned his integrity or the people around him. ... These accusations that are made without foundation run him out of office. It's too bad that somebody, after all these years, is given this kind of farewell.

Which allegations are without foundation? The tapes that provoked a special prosecutor's investigation? The timesheets that show McFaul was only in the office once a week? The deputy who threatened to kill four cops, but didn't get charged because McFaul's office protected him?

But for a different farewell, here is the Plain Dealer's retrospective on McFaul's career. It's a great story: a near-fistfight with Dennis Kucinich, a police dog's bulletproof vest, an armored vehicle named Big Ben, dumb crooks lured to jail by promises of free cash. As one online commenter says: "Damn, now that's a re-cap."

Update, Friday 3/27, a.m.: Channel 3 also seemed to say that Hagan hopes the special prosecutor's probe of McFaul is "moot" now that he's resigned. Guess not. The Ohio Attorney General's Bureau of Criminal Investigation raided the sheriff's office yesterday.

Update, Tuesday 3/31, a.m.: Hagan backed off his earlier comments about McFaul on WMJI's Lanigan and Malone show this morning. Chip Kullik asked him if he stood by his comment that no one had questioned McFaul's integrity. "No, did I say that?" Hagan answered.

Hagan said he had privately pressed McFaul to resign. "We had 15 phone calls to try to encourage him to understand what was happening," Hagan said. "It looks like he made some serious mistakes."

Peter Lawson Jones on the McFaul controversies

Should Sheriff Gerald McFaul go? That's the other big question in Cleveland politics this week.

Right now a cleveland.com headline says, "Jim Rokakis and Peter Lawson Jones expect Sheriff Gerald McFaul to resign within days."

Not so, Jones just told me. He thinks McFaul will wait to see if the special prosecutor's probe gets him indicted. Then he might make a deal and resign, months from now.

But should McFaul resign now? In today's PD, county Republican chair Rob Frost blasts local Democrats for not calling for him to step down.

Jones said some of the "host of allegations" against McFaul "appear to have the ring of truth." Combine his poor health with the scrutiny he's under and the allegations against him, "that would normally lead one to resign," Jones said.

Sheriff = Santa?

Jimmy Malone, the morning radio host, has a great talent for political satire. I've appreciated it since 2005, when I asked him who Cleveland's perfect mayor would be, and he replied, "Nate Gray. Because that would cut out the middleman." (Gray, ex-mayor Mike White's ex-best friend, was about to go on trial on 45 charges of political corruption.)

You've got to read Malone's op-ed in today's Plain Dealer, a hilarious rewrite of the famous newspaper article, "Yes, Virginia, There Is A Santa Claus." Malone assures Virginia that yes, there is a Cuyahoga County sheriff, even if he never comes to work.

If you don't remember how the original goes, read it first, then read Malone's update. He doesn't change much of the text -- which makes it even funnier.

If you don't get all the Sheriff McFaul jokes, click here.

Bonus McFauliana: The PD's best photo gallery ever -- McFaul's Jan. 5 reaction to reporter Mark Puente's first exposés of his office, including McFaul poking Puente with his cane!

Why now?

Here's the strangest thing about the Gerald McFaul scandal: the county sheriff faces a special prosecutor's investigation into taped phone calls of his from 1986! Why did his ex-girlfriend wait 23 years to come forward with the tapes? That's not clear yet. But I think the simplest reason this came out in 2009 was because she knew someone wanted to know.

For years, no one watched the county government. Now everyone is watching. What changed?

When I moved to Cleveland in January 2000, the big political story was Mayor Mike White and his battles with Cleveland city council. So I, too, started writing about City Hall. Now and then, as I interviewed sources, some would say, "You know, you should really cover the county!" Cuyahoga County awarded lots of contracts with little scrutiny, they'd say.

I didn't know much about watchdogging government contracts back then, but I sensed my journalistic future didn't lie in looking into who pours asphalt. I remembered what Coleman Young, the salty and quotable former Detroit mayor, once said about counties: "That is a backward form of governmental organization. It goes back to John Wayne, the stagecoach and Judge Bean, and all of that shit." County government was a boring backwater, a sleepy social services provider. I figured City Hall was where the action was. Almost every political reporter in town seemed to agree.

Then, it's summer 2008, and I'm walking out of the Board of Elections office, a thick pile of campaign finance reports teetering under my arm. A guy from the press room sees me and grins slyly. "County officials?" he asks. I nod. (I was working on my Pat O'Malley story.) He laughs. Everyone's after them these days, he says.

Since 2000, Cleveland has run out of money and elected quiet, shy personalities to office. City Hall is no longer where the action is. But the county has made itself a force it had never been before. A few years ago, the commissioners decided they'd stimulate Cleveland's economy with a $700 million building boom: a new convention center and Medical Mart, a juvenile justice center, a huge new county administration building. They bought the Ameritrust Tower, then fought over whether to move into it or tear it down. Attention turned the county's ambitions, its huge workforce, the way it made decisions, its lack of checks and balances.

Then the plans for the Ameritrust Tower went bust, costing taxpayers $6 million -- or $41 million if the county can't sell it. People noticed the county recorder and auditor had way more employees than in Ohio's other big counties. When challenged, county officials reacted poorly. Then the FBI raided the county building.

The Ameritrust deal, patronage exposes and FBI raid were like the realization that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction didn't exist. Much like the Washington press corps after the invasion of Iraq, the local press has revoked the benefit of the doubt and discarded the assumption that county officials are competent and honest. Now they're questioning everything.

Before the FBI stepped in, no one looked at Frank Russo's financial disclosure forms and asked why the guy who sets real estate tax values was moonlighting as a real-estate agent. Before this year, the conventional wisdom said McFaul was a good sheriff. But once someone starts asking questions that weren't asked before, the climate changes. People who know the answers decide it's safe to emerge.

How long will McFaul last?

Today's front-page PD headline, "McFaul told how to dodge subpoena," makes me wonder, how much longer will Sheriff Gerald McFaul stay in office?

The paper's been after the sheriff since Jan. 2, when he laid off about 20 people but promoted some relatives and friends. Usually, by this point in a scandal, the other side pushes back, accusing the PD of a vendetta. But look at what reporters have found. Sheriff's deputies selling tickets to McFaul's fundraiser in the Justice Center, breaking the law. McFaul using the foreclosure crisis as an occasion for patronage, naming political buddies as real-estate appraisers, even though some don't have a license. Add to that the death of Sean Levert in the county jail last March after sheriff's employees took his medication away.

Now, the paper has a 23-year-old tape of McFaul telling his then-girlfriend how to avoid a subpoena from his alleged ex-girlfriend -- who was suing him for sexual harassment, claiming he fired her after she broke up with him. Girlfriend/Employee #2 didn't testify. Alleged Girlfriend/Employee #1 lost her case.

I don't think any public official survives being heard on tape saying, "The only one who can put the finger on me is you. The only one who can put a finger on you is me." (He was talking with G/E #2 about their relationship, but still!)

Someone needs to start a betting pool: which county official resigns next? I'm placing my bet: it's not Dimora, probably not Russo, but McFaul.

Update, Fri. a.m.: Bill Mason says he'll appoint a special prosecutor. "The rule of law applies equally to all -- let the chips fall where they may," Mason says. A local attorney says McFaul may have "committed bribery, obstructed official business, obstructed justice and interfered with someone's civil rights."