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.

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.

PD maps Mason's power

The Professor is still in hiding, so I'll say it: Class, Mark Puente's big Sunday report on prosecutor Bill Mason's office is required reading.

After weeks of research, the Plain Dealer has given us an evolved sequel to its 2008 "Politics and Payroll" series on Pat O'Malley and Frank Russo's offices. Patronage is no longer the buzzword: It's power.

No one who follows Cleveland politics will be shocked to hear that Bill Mason is a political prosecutor, or that he gets involved in small-suburb council and school board races, or that he wields clout in the Democrats' mid-term appointments to county offices. (See my Oct. 2008 Pat O'Malley profile, for instance, which describes how Mason and O'Malley rose to power together.)

But Puente maps out Mason's vast influence, documenting what was anecdotal. Four former Mason employees are now on Cleveland city council. Five are judges. Current Mason employees work for 21 Cuyahoga County towns. Ten are on city councils. An assistant prosecutor on Solon's city council voted to appoint his boss's boss to a vacant council seat in December. Tom Day, a Mason ally and business partner -- and the possible future county Democratic chairman -- co-owns Qwestcom Graphics, northern Ohio's biggest distributor of campaign literature, which gets lots of work from Mason, his employees, and towns where his network is strong.

Puente's report isn't just thoroughly researched, it's well-thought-out. I sense meticulous editing as well as strong reporting, for fairness and impregnability against counterattack. The "to-be-sure grafs" -- the passages where the writer offers counterweights to his thesis -- are carefully crafted. Mason gets a chance to cast his office's political connections in a positive light. ("I have a highly educated and hard-working staff... I strongly encourage them to be involved in their communities. When good people are involved in government, good things will happen within government.")

Gone is the front-page mug-shot exposé feel of the O'Malley and Russo reports, maybe because the paper found that the recorder's and auditor's offices more closely resembled pure patronage machines. Lots of people are qualified to record deeds, but prosecutors have to pass law school and the bar. "The records show that about 18 percent of Mason's current work force had political ties before they were hired," Puente writes -- compared to about 33 percent in Russo's office and 35 percent when O'Malley was recorder.

By publishing this, the PD gets a small monkey off its back. Joe Wagner, author of the 2008 patronage exposés, reportedly looked into writing a sequel on Mason, but the project was shelved. That became Exhibit A in anti-Mason forces' arguments that the PD had gone soft on the prosecutor (see this backhanded imitation, for instance). If that was ever true, it isn't now.

My Medical Mart story, on the radio

Here is my story about the Medical Mart, which I talked about on WCPN's Reporters' Roundtable this morning. And here is the audio archive of the show.

I got to talk about most of the main points in my story, but not all. (We talked about the Mart being a promising but risky concept, because medical manufacturers are noncommittal about it so far. I didn't get into how the risk is mitigated by the fact that Cleveland will also get back into the competition for conventions of all kinds.)

The most fun was talking with Mark Puente of the Plain Dealer (who I profiled in the June issue because of his exposés of former sheriff Gerald McFaul). Dan Moulthrop and I asked him about his story on Earle Turner, the city clerk of courts, apparently not showing up to work much.

Some odd details that didn't make the story, but came out on the air: Turner was wearing a blanket during one interview with Puente. Another day, Turner sat in his car for 45 minutes, trying to avoid getting his picture taken. Eventually he gave up and the newspaper photographer got his shot. It's not that bad a photo!

me on WCPN

I'll be on the Reporters' Roundtable on WCPN, 90.3 FM, tomorrow morning from 9:06 to 10 a.m.

Mark Puente from the Plain Dealer will also be a panelist. I'm looking forward to asking him about his exposé of Cleveland clerk of courts Earle Turner. Bill Cohen of the Ohio Public Radio Statehouse News Bureau will be on with us.

We're also going to talk about my Medical Mart story, the reform effort's proposed county charter, and the end of Cleveland's residency requirement. Lots of news this week!

Earle Turner latest target of PD exposé

Has the Plain Dealer run out of county officials to expose as patronage kings? Maybe -- because now they're investigating a city official: Earle Turner, the Cleveland municipal court clerk.

Both stories are by Mark Puente, the reporter whose exposés of former sheriff Gerald McFaul I wrote about in this month's Cleveland Magazine.

I'll let Puente's latest work speak for itself:
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Turner averaged about seven hours in the office per week last year, according to parking records at the Justice Center.
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Turner has hired 127 clerks since taking office in 1996, but none of them have taken a civil service test. ... Turner said state law allows him to use the "chief deputy" title on all hires. The label is not used to skirt civil service laws, he said. But he later added that if his employees took entrance tests, the city's civil service commission would oversee it and determine how many workers the office needs.

"I would lose my power," Turner said. "I wouldn't have no authority."

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)

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.)