U.S. Attorney: "Very, very little" connection between city, county corruption probes

Why hasn't the FBI investigation of Cleveland building inspectors gotten more attention? Because the Plain Dealer keeps treating it as a sideshow to the probe of Jimmy Dimora and other county officials. (Take this May 16 story, for instance.)

But check out what Bill Edwards, acting U.S. Attorney for northern Ohio, said after yesterday's press conference about the inspectors. A reporter I didn't recognize walked up to Edwards and asked him, "What information did you gather that’ll be helpful in the ongoing corruption probe in Cuyahoga County?"

"Very little from this investigation," said Edwards, the top federal prosecutor in Cleveland. "Very, very little."

That’s not what people are writing, I said.

"I know!" Edwards said. He pointed across the room at Peter Krouse, the PD's federal courts reporter. "The Cleveland Plain Dealer keeps making these connections which we have never made."

The paper's angle seems based on a tip it got last July, right after the FBI raided the county building. It reported that a breakthrough came in the county probe when Steve Pumper, a contractor said to have done work on Dimora's house, was caught trying to bribe a Cleveland building inspector.* I mentioned that to Edwards.

"I can’t get into anything involving the county probe," Edwards said. "What I said to [the other reporter was], 'very little connection.' Maybe some, but it’s very small.

"This is not one investigation, which the Plain Dealer would lead you to believe," Edwards said. "These are really two separate investigations."

A small point? I'm sure the PD would say so. Edwards didn't deny there's some connection. But his comments show a few things:

-The Plain Dealer's angles have a huge influence on how everyone in town thinks about the news. (The other day, someone asked me if buddies of Dimora's had just been indicted.)

-The paper doesn't know much about what the feds are thinking.**

-The lead graf in today's front-page story is misleading.

-The paper doesn't really know how the county probe started.**

-Its assumptions about how the FBI is collecting evidence against county officials are more thinly sourced and speculative than they seem.**

-The first indictments from the county investigation are still to come.*

*Update, 7/9/09: The tip about Pumper and the inspector got confirmed in the charges filed against him on July 8, lending credence to the Plain Dealer's theory of the case. (I posted about the Pumper charges here, though I focused on Pumper's alleged relationship with Dimora, not the inspector.) The first charges in the county investigation were filed June 12, and one of those charges suggested another possible connection between the city and county investigations. See my post, with second thoughts about the PD coverage, here.

**Update, 1/5/12: At last, we know more about how the county corruption investigation started, and the Plain Dealer's 2009 theory of the case holds up very well. A new court filing strongly suggests that Cleveland housing inspector Bobby Cuevas was one of the FBI's two best sources about Dimora in 2007. See my post here.

City Hall corruption scandal grows: feds charge more inspectors

No, it's not some little offshoot of the county investigation. Cleveland City Hall has its own corruption probe on its hands -- an FBI sting of the city's building and housing department, complete with lots of video and audio surveillance and an undercover agent posing as a New York businessman.

If the charges are true, these building inspectors deserve their own scandal.

Federal prosecutors, FBI agents, and Mayor Frank Jackson held a press conference today to reveal that two more Cleveland building inspectors face extortion charges. That's a total of six current or former inspectors busted, out of 75 total in the department.

"They've now forfeited their careers, their reputations, and possibly their freedom for amounts of money that each inspector would now tell you were simply not worth it," said Frank Figliuzzi, the FBI Cleveland division's agent in charge. (The alleged bribes ranged from $200 to about $1,500.)

The six men may not be the last. Today's new charges mark the end of the federal investigation of Building and Housing, said Bill Edwards, acting U.S. Attorney for northern Ohio -- but the FBI is giving the Cleveland police more information that may lead to state charges or disciplinary action against more city employees. Figliuzzi also asked anyone "victimized by a building inspector demanding bribes" to call the FBI at (216) 522-1400.

The two men charged today, Juan Alejandro and James McCullough (pictured), have been suspended without pay, the mayor said. They're accused of manipulating violation notices to lower the prices of homes. (See today's press release here, as a pdf.)

I wonder how many businesses the six alleged extortionists chased out of Cleveland. So strong was the city building department's reputation for obstructing construction projects that (if you believe the feds) some of the accused inspectors seem to have played off of it to extort bribes. Edwards said they took cash for "speeding things up, making things easier, getting things done quicker."

That suggests the norm was slow and difficult! So the city's inefficiency created an opportunity for corruption: efficiency was rare, but buyable with cash.

Cleveland so badly needs new businesses and new homes. But if the feds are right -- and they spent three years investigating these cases, collecting what Edwards called "a lot" of audio and video surveillance -- then some of the accused inspectors shook down the contractors working on new businesses, including (how's this for heartless?) Sweethearts Ice Cream on Payne Avenue. If they did so, they not only risked their own reputations, but the city's; they undermined Cleveland's rebirth.

"I'm disturbed, as I know you are, by any dishonest behavior or wrongdoing by any public employee," Jackson said. "The violation of public trust is something we cannot tolerate."

The mayor said the police would investigate and the administration would look for structural changes in building and housing to make it more difficult for inspectors to abuse their power. He also said he planned to issue a new city-wide policy clearing up any "grey areas" and making it "very clear to people what is proper behavior and what is not proper behavior."

One reporter aggressively asked the mayor and Edwards why taxpayers should trust City Hall, since the scandal happened on Jackson's watch. But Jackson said the FBI kept him and the police informed of the investigation, and the city backed off to let the feds take the lead. At one point, Edwards told the reporter he believed the Jackson administration would take whatever steps it had to now.

The cost of corruption: "City Hall is like a Bermuda Triangle for builders"

Sometimes one article gives you the news and another explains why it matters.

The Plain Dealer reported Saturday that three more inspectors for Cleveland's building and housing department have been indicted on federal corruption charges. That's on top of a fourth guy indicted earlier. They're accused of shaking down business owners.

Now, in this week's issue of Cool Cleveland, Mansfield Frazier reminds us of the building and housing department's reputation: Impossible to deal with.

"Most local contractors would rather get beat with a two-by-four with a rusty nail in it than go down to B & H," Frazier writes. "The 5th floor of City Hall is like a Bermuda Triangle for builders."

Past stories about this department have always made it sound like a red-tape problem. Now the feds say it was corruption.

Think about how desperately Cleveland needs new commerce, how badly its 80-year-old neighborhoods need inspections. Then read these two stories and get mad. There's no way of measuring how many businesses have walked away from the city over the years because of practices like these.