Roldo: Run Dimora and Russo out

Roldo Bartimole says it's time for citizens to get "off their asses" and swarm the county building every week until Jimmy Dimora and Frank Russo resign. From his blog post:

It’s time for citizens to take the action themselves. A protest should begin at the Cuyahoga County Administration Building at the corner of Ontario and Lakeside every Thursday, the day Commissioners meet. Hopefully, such a demonstration would get larger and larger each week until Dimora and Russo find it uncomfortable enough that they get the hell out.

It'd be great political theater. Could it happen?

I see two problems. Weekly Thursday morning protests require a special kind of protester, the unemployed kind. How many of the 234,346 people who voted to throw out the county government in November are angry enough to show up every week and have the free time?

Also, Roldo can't mobilize them on his own. So he calls on local bloggers to get the word out. This brings up the question: Could the blogosphere round up a better turnout than the county Republican party? Last July, Rob Frost & Co. tried to pack a meeting with protesters who wanted Dimora to quit. I was there, and if memory serves, they only made a small dent in the crowd in the commissioners' tiny meeting room.

The Vegas trip, the prostitute, and the $38 million contract

Plenty of good stuff in the feds’ latest charge (pdf) against a Jimmy Dimora crony. First, 21 months after the FBI hauled it out of his house, we finally learn the significance of Dimora’s refrigerator:

Shortly before November 29, 2006, Dimora asked Kleem to purchase a refrigerator valued at approximately $1,150 and to have it delivered to the Dimora residence. … Kleem, through one of his companies, purchased the refrigerator and arranged for Blaze employees to deliver it.

(The blue quotes are from the prosecutors’ filing, with “Dimora” substituted for “PO1,” because we all know the feds’ code name for the un-charged Dimora by now. Kleem is contractor Ferris Kleem, charged with bribery conspiracy in federal court on Thursday. Around the same time as the fridge delivery, Dimora allegedly called a county employee and tried to get a grant to the city of Berea expedited at Kleem’s request.)

Next, our story takes the pulp-novel turn we all anticipated and feared. Keep reading if you dare.

On or about April 8, 2008, and during the Las Vegas trip, Dimora asked Kleem to hire a prostitute for Dimora. In response, Kleem paid a prostitute approximately $1,000 in cash and escorted the prostitute to Dimora’s suite at the Mirage for the purposes of providing services to Dimora. …

Dimora called back and asked, “I just said, she gives me a massage. Is that how we’re going to start her out?” …

At approximately 12:44 a.m., Dimora called Kleem and thanked him. Kleem asked Dimora, “Was that the best or what?” Dimora said, “Yeah, she’s good but a little chatty.” Dimora thanked Kleem, who said, “No problem, buddy.”

Dimora and Kleem then agreed to meet at 1:00 a.m. at the Chinese restaurant in the Mirage.

This is where Dimora’s defense gets really good. "If it was anything at all, it was exactly what he said it was it was: a massage, and that's not illegal," Dimora’s lawyer, Richard Lillie, told the Plain Dealer.

A $1,000 massage! Could this be what Dimora meant by, “I’m no angel, but I’m no crook”?

{Update, 5/1: Dimora tells Duane Pohlman he got a massage, not sex, and paid the woman himself. See this new post.}

Despite the ick factor, Dimora’s alleged Mirage encounter is (of course) the runaway hit from the Kleem charge, attracting airplay from PD cartoonist Jeff Darcy and less reputable news sources alike.

But sex can distract us from other, homelier sins. Let’s step back a page in the Kleem charges to see what’s happening in Cleveland while Kleem and Dimora are partying on the Strip: Kleem’s $38 million bid for a contract at the new juvenile justice center gets beaten out. As the feds tell it, when the bad news reaches the VIPs at the Mirage, Dimora hits the phones, looking for ways to disqualify the bidder who beat Kleem’s Blaze Building, putting in his last call in about 10 hours before the prostitute arrives.

If Dimora did try to nudge the contract to Blaze, it didn’t work: Blaze competitor Panzica, the low bidder, got the job. So when Dimora’s lawyer tells the PD, "Kleem received absolutely nothing from Mr. Dimora," that could well be true.

But Lillie’s job just got tougher. Looks like this is the story prosecutors want to tell a jury: Dimora tried to steer a $38 million contract to his friend the same day the guy bought him a hooker in Vegas.

(You can read the prosecutors' press release here and their charging document here.)

'What's taking so long to expose crooks?'

That headline isn't mine. It's from a column the Detroit Free Press published earlier this month. Clevelanders, impatient for our public corruption investigation to show results, might be interested to know Detroit's getting antsy too.

You've heard about Kwame Kilpatrick, right? The lying, sexting, cop-firing, justice-obstructing former Detroit mayor? Scandal and a tough local prosecutor knocked Kilpatrick (pictured, in mug shot) out of office a year and a half ago. Now, a massive FBI probe of Detroit City Hall -- which has already brought down the former city council president -- seems to be aiming to add bribery charges to Kilpatrick's tawdry legacy.

The feds seem late to the party, so columnist Rochelle Riley called up the U.S. Attorney in Detroit and asked, what's the hold-up?

"There are important investigative reasons that it can take so long," Barbara McQuade told Riley. "Sometimes, you have to work your way up a chain," she said. "Sometimes, you talk to someone who pleads guilty and that leads you to new people. And we're analyzing records that lead to other records."

That's how federal investigators in Cleveland are pursuing Jimmy Dimora and Frank Russo: Still not charging them with a crime, still racking up guilty pleas from potential witnesses 21 months after raiding county offices.

They're getting results. Consider Bruce Zaccagnini, one of the lawyers who's pleaded guilty to bribing Russo with $1.2 million in cash kickbacks. From the Plain Dealer story on his February sentencing:

As soon as federal investigators approached Zaccagnini, he agreed to help make their case against his co-conspirators. The financial records he handed over revealed the corruption was more extensive than investigators had realized, Assistant U.S. Attorney Antoinette Bacon said at the sentencing. "He saved months upon months of agents' time," Bacon said.

Could "more extensive" mean $1.2 million?

The water-torture drip of charges have triggered wild mood swings in the town and the targets themselves. Dimora's gone from reclusive to obnoxiously defiant to subdued to cocky again. He swung back to his innocent-persecuted self-defense last month, because he thinks some of the latest charges against buddies of his are weak -- they did work on his house but didn't do county work.

The favors Dimora allegedly did for the latest contractors may seem small -- recommendation letters and such. But the prosecutors are trying to establish a pattern they can take to trial. The explosive charges involving Steve Pumper look more damning if other contractor buddies testify that they, too, helped remake Dimora's back yard into a patio paradise and didn't get paid until the FBI started nosing around.

Clevelanders want charges, trials, verdicts, closure. But as impatient as they feel now, many of them would be furious if Dimora walked -- if jurors in a future trial were to decide that the investigation had left some fuzzy gray areas between Dimora's Vegas trip and barbecue shelter and his alleged nudges and phone calls at the county building.

In the meantime, the town could use some reassurance from the normally tight-lipped local U.S. attorneys, something like the words McQuade, a Detroit native, offered Riley:

"We recognize the need to act with thoroughness, but also a little bit of urgency," she said. "The city really needs some closure, and it's not healthy for anyone in this city to have a cloud of suspicion hanging over them indefinitely. In public corruption cases, we want to move as quickly as we can."

New county exec candidates: Welo, Brown, and... Frazier?

Wow, what a day for the county executive race! Three new candidates all jumping in: former University Circle president Terri Hamilton Brown, South Euclid Mayor Georgine Welo, and, most exciting of all, Cleveland Magazine contributor Mansfield Frazier!

Um, OK, so maybe Mansfield is ... how should I say it? Not entirely serious?

From his new Cool Cleveland column:

… why not? I can sling bullshit, make empty promises, and not call people back once I’m elected with the very best (or worst) of ‘em. And the real upside is, I’ve already been to prison — been there, done that — so that’s not something the electorate has to be concerned with.

Some readers must've thought he meant it. Since Cool Cleveland came out this morning, the note "a satire" has been added to the column's top rail.

WVIZ's Applause explores abandoned homes

Last month, WVIZ/PBS's Dee Perry interviewed me about my March article, "Tear It Down!" The interview airs in tonight's episode of Ideastream's show Applause at 7:30 pm. It'll also air Saturday at 6:30 pm and Easter Sunday at 12:30 pm.

Thousands of abandoned homes mar Cuyahoga County's landscape, creating a major political issue for both the city of Cleveland and the county government. My articles accompanies Billy Delfs' striking photos of dozens of empty homes.

Applause, an arts show, is looking at creative responses to the foreclosure and abandonment crisis, including Billy's photography. Perry interviewed me on the porch of Langston Hughes' former home.

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.

Dimora defends himself: "Who doesn't argue to try to get a better price?"

Jimmy Dimora's talking again, trying to poke holes in the federal investigation of him, giving us more glimpses of his potential defense.

"We’re very confident," he told Duane Pohlman of NewsChannel 5 on Thursday. "I feel that I’ve done nothing wrong."

Dimora thinks he's found a weakness in the case the feds are building: the latest two contractors who've pleaded guilty to bribing him with home improvements didn't do any work for the county.

This is true: Nicholas Zavarella and John Valentin say they bribed Dimora to get recommendations for friends and family, not to get county work. (See my posts here and here.) Dimora says he's probably written thousands of recommendation letters.

"When I’m personally going to use them for my own use, I try to get companies and businesses that do no work with the government that I’m involved with," Dimora told Pohlman. He said his Ohio Ethics Commission disclosure forms list contractors who gave him discounts.

"I pretty much try to disclose for any type of discounting or any gift that I receive. Most of these people are friends." Dimora said he haggled with those friends for discounted work. "Who doesn’t argue to try to get a better price on work being done?"

Dimora also claimed a forthcoming state audit will show that his personal dealings did not involve taxpayer dollars. County staff "have been told by the auditing firm that the audits are clean, and they’re good, and they show that all the bids that were approved are all the lowest and best bids," he said.

Should we buy Jimmy's latest defense? Well, what he's saying may be true, but at most it highlights the gray areas in the feds' investigation of him. Dimora didn't address the prosecutors' claim that he didn't pay his contractor buddies until he learned the FBI was after him. Or the allegations that Dimora took $33,000 in cash and $60,000 in work from Steve Pumper, whose companies were very much involved in county business.

But we're seeing more and more of Dimora's defense emerge, and he's sounding a consistent theme: He still insists publicly that he's done nothing wrong.

Pohlman, NewsChannel 5's chief investigator, is good at getting Dimora to open up. The most infamous quotes from Dimora's already-legendary July press conference -- “I’m not an angel, but I’m no crook,” and “I’m not doing anything different than any other public official does” -- were responses to Pohlman's questioning. His interview style is probing, but seeks understanding; his questions sound almost sympathetic, but zero in on key parts of the charges.

Like other TV reporters, Pohlman also benefits from Dimora's running feud with the Plain Dealer. Dimora's decided the paper's out to get him, so he'd rather argue with PD reporters than give them straight answers. On Thursday, Dimora complained to Pohlman about the paper in front of PD reporter Henry Gomez. Awkward!

(You can watch most of Pohlman's interview with Dimora by clicking the six-minute video embedded above. The segment that aired on NewsChannel 5 on Thursday night, which includes a few more quotes, can be seen here. To read my Oct. 2009 profile of Dimora, "Life of the Party," click here.)