Showing posts with label corruption. Show all posts
Showing posts with label corruption. Show all posts

08 February 2015

A Death a Day


Imagine a prison system in which a person a day diesone man every day of the year. This unsurprisingly takes place in a land with the highest incarceration rate in the world.
This isn’t North Korea or Iran.

Florida DoC
Hearses waiting at Florida DoC © WFSU
We’re talking Florida, a state that incarcerates 75% more per capita than the next highest competitor… Cuba.

We’re talking Florida’s lucrative privatized prison system in a land that competes in executions with Texas and a couple of other states, but this isn’t about capital punishment…

We’re talking about ordinary prisoners who hoped one day to get out but died at the hands of other prisoners or … commonly… prison guards. Indeed, a Santa Rosa Correctional Institute inmate complained in letters to his family and in legal filings he’d been sexually assaulted by guards and his life had been threatened if he talked. He talked. He died. And so have others.

FDLE Gerald Bailey
Gerald Bailey © Bill Cotterell
State Archives of Florida
Inmates have written their families that if they’re found dead, it wouldn’t be by suicide but homicide by guards, guards who obscure their name tags to evade identification, who inmates could only identify as, for example, Sgt. Q. Many prisoners have complained about being sexually assaulted and ‘gassed’ into compliance with a noxious chemical agent. State inspectors have investigated and found for the prisoners. Florida's death statistics are so far off that the US Department of Justice is now investigating.

In September, more than thirty guards were fired for sexual assault, physical abuse, starving, poisoning, gassing, or beating inmates to death and in one case, killing a prisoner who'd soiled himself by steaming him alive. The Governor’s office and the Attorney General dismissed the allegations. Not one guard has been arrested or indicted.

Maybe you’re one of those people who thinks prisoners deserve all they get. They deserve rancid, moldy, vermin-infested food. They deserve rape. They deserve beatings. And damn it, if they get killed in prison, they deserve that too. Or perhaps you simply believe in the right of a company to protect the bottom line and not the general population.

Because Florida

I staunchly support free enterprise, but there’s a problem here. Traditional prisons were subject to oversight by its citizens. Not now. A corporation owes responsibility only to its stock holders… and perhaps the political cronies who landed them the contract.

Beatings, rapes, and killings are taking place in your name and mine. Not everyone approves. Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Gerald Bailey thought that was a problem.

Florida Governor Rick Scott
Fl. Gov. Rick Scott © Miami New Times
Governor Rick Scott disagreed. Because Florida, because America. Because of a governor who committed the largest Medicare/Medicaid fraud in the country, who’s never seen the inside of a prison although he deserved to.

Remember that name, Commissioner Gerald Bailey, the head of Florida’s law enforcement. Because Rick Scott brought the private sector corruption he was infamous for into the public realm.

Good Cop, Bad SOP

Under Bailey, the FDLE was investigating those suspicious prison inmate deaths, assisted the search for juvenile remains at the former Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, and was looking into the destruction of emails following Scott’s transition into office in 2010. The Governor was not pleased.

“The most shocking thing was being ordered to target another individual without any justification. I don't know why this woman was in the cross hairs.”
FDLE's Gerald Bailey
The governor’s office, in an attempt to deflect criticism of the prison system under the governor’s control, instructed Bailey to frame an Orange County Clerk of Court, stating she was the target of criminal investigation who allowed inmates to use forged papers from her office. Bailey refused, saying she wasn’t a suspect at all: the forged papers came out of the prison complex. A governor’s press aide asked Bailey if he was refusing a direct order, to which Bailey replied in the affirmative. The Governor was not pleased.

The Governor’s office expressed concerns that State Representative Alan Williams of Tallahassee was fomenting student sit-ins at the state capitol and asked Bailey’s office to keep them posted about Williams’ activities in incidents reports. Williams complained he was politically targeted and singled out by name, and that the governor’s office was trying to shape the protests as being organized not by students but by his political opposition.

After the FDLE discovered a Los Angeles criminal investigation of a Scott campaign donor and Miami businessman suspected of money laundering, a man the governor wanted to groom for a political appointment, Rick Scott personally asked Bailey to help bring the investigation to a close. Bailey refused to get involved. The Governor was not pleased.

Bailey received solicitations to contribute to the governor’s campaign through the state’s email system. Bailey informed the governor’s legal counsel this was inappropriate, in fact, illegal. The governor’s office said “Then ignore it. Delete it.” Bailey pointed out to the governor’s lawyer that’s illegal too: You can’t lawfully delete official communications from state computers. The Governor was not pleased.

Florida Governor Rick Scott
Florida Gov. Scott © ABC News
In his first weeks in office, Governor Scott worked with the new legislature to pass a bill legalizing illegal campaign donations. At the time called a “Whore of Babylon” by a St. Petersburg Times reporter, they okayed payoffs, directing them into a political slush fund, a corrupt practice that had been banned two decades earlier.

The governor ordered Bailey to a summer conference for Scott’s election campaign. Bailey refused, saying it was inappropriate for a law officer to engage in partisan politics. The Governor was not pleased.

The governor continued to treat the FDLE as his own private security force. His campaign instructed the Department of Law Enforcement to provide transportation for campaign workers. Bailey’s office refused, saying their sole responsibility was the safety of the governor and first lady, not campaign staffers. Bailey also refused a $90 000 check from Scott’s campaign, saying it wasn’t appropriate for law enforcement to accept funds from a political party. The Governor was not pleased.

Governor Fires Chief Cop For Not Breaking The Law

Florida Governor Rick Scott
Florida Gov. Rick Scott © Politico
Scott calls the above incidents ‘petty’. So petty he fired the FDLE head, Gerald Bailey.

What hasn’t been mentioned here is that the FDLE reports not only to the governor, but also three cabinet members. Governor Jeb Bush and the three cabinet members unanimously voted Gerald Bailey into the post nineteen years ago and presumably only the cabinet can fire him. None of the cabinet apparently took part in Bailey’s termination as required by Florida law. Rick Scott merely says they didn’t object.

I’ll give the last word to former FDLE commissioner Jim York. He said the firing could create a lasting perception that politics has compromised the independence of the agency amid investigations of corruption.
“If it’s perceived that the agency is under the thumb of any politician, particularly this governor, it’s going to be devastating to the morale of the agents. They wouldn’t be interested in doing investigations where they felt that the governor was looking over their shoulder, looking out for his donor friends.”
Thus we have further corruption in the Governor’s office and prisoners dying at the rate of one a day.

What is your take?

27 August 2014

The Law & Tommy Rodella


I've written more than a few stories about the political climate in New Mexico, and in particular about Rio Arriba county. Rio Arriba translates to 'upriver,' just as Rio Abajo translates to 'downriver,' and back in the day of the Spanish conquest, that was all there was. These days, New Mexico comprises 33 counties, with Rio Arriba one of the largest in area, but lightest in population density, and it has a troubled history.

In living memory, there's the Tierra Amarilla courthouse siege, which I used in a Benny Salvador story. And there are other examples. Rio Arriba is a poster child, not for corruption, per se, but for a New Mexico habit of mind, the hand-in-glove, where Who You Know counts for everything.

Which brings us to Tommy Rodella, the current sheriff of Rio Arriba, and a disgrace to his office. I might have to tell this story back-asswards, so bear with me. It's an uneasy narrative, without a through-line. In other words, you have to fill in the gaps. Tommy's a slippery guy. His record shifts, like a prism, when you hold it up to the light, and it reflects the eye of the beholder. Whose ox is being gored? I don't have a dog in the fight, but Tommy Rodella's dirty. I don't have a problem saying that.

Okay. Tommy and his son just got busted by the FBI, in relation to a road-rage incident, and abuse of office. Ran a guy off the road, shoved a gun in his face, put him in handcuffs, and lied on the police report. Two sides to every story. Maybe the guy lipped off. He says he asked to see some ID, and Tommy punched him in the head with his badge. "Don't you know who I am?" Now, if it were me, I wouldn't give mouth to Tommy Rodella. I'd lose whatever teeth I had left. He's a loose cannon. Don't you know who I am? Kiss of death.

Sounds like some crazy-ass noir plot from the 1940's - cop with a hair across his ass busts a drifter climbing off a freight train - or FIRST BLOOD, drop some long-hair in the tank, and live to regret it. But unhappily for Tommy, this is the last in a long line.

Let's go back, as I said. BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK. No joke. Tommy Rodella's a once-upon-a-time state cop. Later, he gets appointed as a magistrate by former governor Bill Richardson. A pal of Tommy's gets busted for DWI. Tommy goes up to Tierra Amarilla - on a weekend, mind - and bonds the guy out. This raises some questions. Richardson, who has his own issues (pay-to-play crashes his hopes of a cabinet post with Obama), calls Tommy on it. Tommy figures he can bluff it out. The gov fires him, anyway. State supreme court backs the gov, rules Tommy is ineligible to hold office as a judge again, but then Tommy wins the primary, and gets elected sheriff. Nothing the governor can do about this, although it must chafe his ass. Richardson is trying to mend fences with the Clinton camp, and Obama. Tommy Rodella is the least of his problems. Is it even on his radar?

I grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. North Cambridge, Tip O'Neill's old district. All politics is local, he famously said. Really? You look at Boston, or Baltimore. Chicago. Machine politics. THE LAST HURRAH.

New Mexico is the back of beyond. It's a Third World country. Tommy Rodella's wife, Debbie Rodella, is a state legislator. Cheap shot, maybe, but it points up the intersection of family, and influence, and inertia.  We had a mayor, she appointed her brother to the post of city manager. The new guy on the city council called her on it, and she told him, "Oh, you just got off the bus."

It's not that it's only us. That's not what I'm saying. And it's nothing new, either. It's as old as the pyramids. You know those contractors padded their invoices. Old stone, fresh slaves. Tommy's small change. Every guy like this, every cheap asshole like him, whether it's Iraq or Rio Arriba, trades on lives. No joke. The illegals in Espanola, the cartels in Mexico, the migra - all that crap? You gonna tell me we have no responsibility. Right.

Every dirty cop. Not that it's common. Like a slippery priest, not that common, either. But it gives you pause, a guy like Tommy Rodella. You know what it is? No accountability. He imagines it slides off a duck's back. Typical of New Mexico. He's a dirty secret. The back side of the so-called Land of Enchantment.

Pull up your big boy underpants. We're not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy. It's all about the shoes. I'm going to post this, and will Tommy Rodella come after me? He in fact might, the kind of guy who carries a grudge, if I even care. He can kiss my ass.

There's a long game.

We win. They lose. Doesn't seem like it, I know. Feels as if the bastards wear us down, over time. In the end, it ain't true.

They sell despair, our percentage is hope. All those Tommy Rodellas? We'll beat the ticket.

22 June 2014

There was a Crooked Village


Little Stomping

Picture a village whose reason for being is a criminal enterprise. Imagine its entire raison d’être, its very existence hinges upon fleecing the public. Typical of such towns, as many as one in fifteen to twenty of residents– men, women, children and chickens– are part of its politico-judicial machinery: crooked cops, municipal machinators, and corrupt clerks.

And not ordinary crooked cops, but heavily armed with the latest in high-power assault weaponry and shiny pursuit vehicles. Police– poorly trained but still police– yet some may not have been certified officers at all. One fancied himself Rambo and stopped tourists with an AR-15 slung across his chest like that inbred couple in Open Carry Texas.

Village authorities arbitrarily moved town limit signs beyond the actual town’s boundaries in a bid to increase exposure to radar patrol… and revenues. When cops sat in lawn chairs aiming their radar guns and sipping from their open containers, they turned a blind eye to the citizens who dried their marijuana in the convenience store’s microwave. Oh, and those shiny police cars? The town often didn’t bother to insure them, this in a village where the police department wrote more tickets than Fort Lauderdale but still outspent its budget.

speed trap
First of three speed traps in
a 20 mile stretch of US 301.
AAA believed to sponsor sign.
Speed Trap

Set this supposition aside for the moment.

When I was a kid who couldn't yet drive, a short story left an impression on me. The plot centered around a man traveling to Florida who was caught in a small town speed trap. The police tossed him in jail.

Andy Griffith they weren't: they kept him imprisoned as the authorities systematically drained his assets like a spider sucks juices from a fly. Who do you turn to when the law is corrupt?

Florida sunshine has always attracted northerners during the icy winter months. In the first half of the 20th century, snowbirds filtered south through the highways and byways of America. Before the 1950s, towns and villages in the arteries of early tourism discovered they could make money fleecing tourists  passing through their area.
Lawtey, Hampton, Waldo
Lawtey, Hampton, Waldo speed traps
 
US 301
US 301: Jacksonville ↔ Gainesville
Atlantic at right, Georgia border at top


Some places in the Deep South considered northern travelers carpetbaggers and therefore fair game. Even so, town fathers and others found it easy to offset moral compunctions when considering the sheer profit involved. Could they help it if a Yankee ran a stop sign obscured by tree branches or failed to notice the speed limit abruptly changed from 55 to 25?

Where’s Waldo?

In the tiny towns of Lawtey, Hampton, and Waldo, that’s exactly what happens as the speed limits bounce every block or so from 55 to 30 to 45 to 25 and back again. If you have the time and patience, you might try locking your cruise control in at 25mph, hoping to beat the system. But they have an answer for that too– tickets for failing to maintain a safe speed.

In the early 1990s, it dawned on Hampton that nearby US 301 was an untapped piggy bank with the emphasis on piggy. The highway had been a source of resentment when it passed within a few hundred metres of the town limits, but devious minds found a way to make the road pay. The village annexed a strip of land 420 yards (384 metres) along the federal highway and began hiring candidates for police officers. Hampton’s speed trap was born.
(See maps below.)

In a state with a governor who committed the largest Medicare/Medicaid fraud in history, it takes a lot to outrage the Florida Legislature, but over time, Hampton succeeded. Their downfall started when they had the audacity to ticket State Representative Charles van Zant. Thanks to him, Florida lawmakers drew up plans to revoke the city's charter and revert the village to an unincorporated plat of county land.

Hampton with annex
Hampton with annex
Hampton with annex
Hampton
The events that set Hampton above (or below?) its speed trap neighbors, Lawtey and Waldo, is the corruption that took place off the highway. The village can’t account for monies in the high six-figures while at the same time failing to provide basic maintenance and repairs. Under one free-spending family that ‘managed’ the little city, it ran up large debts at local stores and on the municipal credit card.

While the town failed to properly bill residents for the water utility, the clerk collected cash– Sorry, no receipts. The water department can’t reconcile nearly half of the water actually distributed, telling auditors the records were “lost in a swamp.” And if residents complained about inefficiency and corruption, their water supply was cut off altogether, prompting Bradford County Sheriff Gordon Smith to refer to the situation as “Gestapo in Hampton.

As CNN suggested, the town became too corrupt even for Florida to stomach. State and federal auditors agreed and wheels started turning to unincorporate the town and strip it of its charter. The road to perdition seemed inevitable.

Road to Recovery

But not everyone saw it that way. Once corrupt authorities slunk back into the shadows, good citizens of Hampton stepped forward. A former clerk took over the reins. A new resident made plans to run for mayor, replacing the current mayor who resigned from his jail cell. Volunteers put together a plan to bring the town into compliance and moreover, they acted upon it. Among other things, the town plans to de-annex the strip of land encompassing US 301 although the ‘handle’ part of the town’s griddle shape will remain.

At present, efforts to revoke the town’s charter remain in abeyance and it looks like the town may have saved itself. We can only wish legislators had the political gumption to rid the state of speed traps altogether in places like Waldo, Lawtey, and Windemere.

Short Story Bonus

And, in case you were wondering, Jacksonville is probably not named after Shirley Jackson, despite her [in]famous short story about a small town. Read it on-line | download eBook PDF | download audiobook.

21 June 2012

The Wild West Continues



     For those of you who believe that fly-over country is the last bastion of American family values, boy, do you have a lot to learn.  South Dakota is ranked 49th in the nation for government honesty; i.e., it's 2nd in the nation for government corruption.  Only Georgia is worse.   
We get an “F” in everything from political financing to state budget process (always manufactured late the night before the legislature goes home) to ethics enforcement to…  it just goes on and on.  Basically, no accountability, no transparency, and no public access.  It’s the wild west, but with less gunfire. 
     And they get away with it for two main reasons:  
(1) this is a nice state, full of nice people, who would never do anything wrong; and 
(2) this is a nice state, full of nice people, who would never be so impolite as to raise a ruckus no matter what.  
A lot of people blame the Norwegian Lutheran Syndrome (there are whole books on this subject, not to mention Garrison Keillor), but people up here avoid conflict as if it were an unsedated colonoscopy.  The result is…   
      We get a lot of interesting businesses.  The national credit card industry, for example, is based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota because, back in the day, SD passed a law that eliminated caps on interest rates right after the Supreme Court ruled that banks could charge interest based on where their credit-card operations were headquartered, even if the bank's main operations were somewhere else.  So everyone moved to Sioux Falls, and you’ve – we’ve – all had high interest rates ever since.  
      Another booming business in SD is selling South Dakota residency.  Check out: http://mydakotaaddress.com/  This is only one example of multiple little store-front operations that allow a person, in exchange for a yearly fee, to establish South Dakota residency and thus avoid paying state taxes in the state in which they actually live.  They provide a SD mailing address, and help people obtain “your new SD drivers license, SD vehicle registration and voters card.”  They collect the mail and send it on, send on absentee ballots for voting, and basically allow a lot of people to “live” in South Dakota, thereby avoiding property taxes in their home state and perhaps avoiding other things as well.  Who’s to say that the name they give is their real name?  
      Now, this is all fraudulent:  It’s mail fraud, voter fraud, tax fraud…  But, when I investigated it and brought it to the attention of all my state officials, I was told there was nothing illegal about it, and to contact them “when a crime had been committed.”  Well, at least one crime is going to be committed, at least on paper, because I can think of all kinds of reasons for people to use these, and some of them are going to show up in my mysteries.  
    And the latest hot businesses are shelf corporations.  These are entities that are created by lawyers incorporating a bunch of corporations that exist in name only—no assets, no employees, and no board members except the agent filling out the paperwork. (It’s sort of like the residency corporations, who have an owner and a person doing the mailings, and that’s it.)  Anyway, if you want to start a business, you pay a fee to the incorporator, and you’ve got a corporation.  And you the purchaser get complete anonymity.  The following is a pitch from Corp95.com:  http://www.corp95.com/
     “South Dakota is one of the best kept secrets in the corporate formation world.  The state has NO corporate income or franchise taxes.  Their annual fees are minimal ($50 per year) and they allow for the most privacy of ownership than in any other state. South Dakota is a low key environment and does not require that its businesses maintain any physical presence in the State.  Formation is fast and requires a minimum of personal information.  You will pay no more and sometimes less than some of those states that claim to offer privacy but do not actually do so. Why form your company in a state that claims to have no taxes, but then charges high fees to compensate for this. South Dakota truly does offer the most privacy at a very reasonable ongoing fee.  Call us at 800-859-6696 and let us provide you with the details for formation of your business entity in this friendly state.”
     Forty-ninth in the nation:  Georgia, look out.  We’re going to catch up with you.