FBI and DOJ embarrassing themselves in the “Culture of Corruption” case

Brent Tabacchi is the kind of guy that makes government employees look bad. He thinks he’s important and doing a lot, but when you get right down to it, he’s a poster child for hiring the intellectually challenged. He’s done nothing resembling justice in the “culture of corruption” case, seeing as Mayor Nan Whaley and City Manager Shelley Dickstein still haven’t been given a pair of bracelets and perp walked for their pay to play operations run out of Dayton City Hall. But, wait, he got an award in January of this year:

Mr. Tabacchi carried the largest caseload in the Dayton office in 2019, spanning almost every substantive area of federal criminal law. In 2019, he was responsible for federal charges against 60 defendants in 34 cases, including Dayton City Commissioner Joey Williams, who pleaded guilty to public corruption, and against 19 defendants in a large drug trafficking investigation. Tabacchi also helped bring federal charges that could carry the death penalty against three defendants in connection with the murder of DEA Task Force Officer Jorge Del Rio. Tabacchi’s 2019 contributions to the community in the enforcement of drug laws led to the seizure of more than 50 kilograms of fentanyl, heroin or mixtures thereof. In addition, he presented arguments before the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and won a jury conviction of a defendant on weapons charges who claimed that the DEA authorized him to commit non-violent offenses.

Source: U.S. Attorney’s Office personnel recognized for outstanding performance | USAO-SDOH | Department of Justice
Thursday, January 23, 2020

Joey Williams did 3 months 21 days in prison (he was sentenced to a year). Clayton Luckie about the same. Roshawn Winburn who accepted bags of cash on multiple occasions for favors in government contracts, got sentenced to 6 months in prison. There are people who had less, who did less, who spent more time sitting in the Montgomery County Jail. This is what the feds spent millions of dollars investigating?

Even with Joey D. Williams acting as a confidential informant and wearing a wire– they still can’t put 2 plus 2 together and get 4. Someone in city hall has been steering contracts and that someone has also raised a boatload of cash for her campaigns as Mayor, Governor and Issue 9. Is the problem that Nan Whaley is white? In both the Toledo and Cincinnati corruption cases against seated officials- only minorities have been charged by the FBI. My very first post on the “Culture of Corruption” April 30, 2019, including my question posed first to the FBI, DOJ and the AG- was “Do you only indict Black people?”

Now, Tabacchi is playing a game with Brian Higgins, the last of the four Black men indicted as some kind of major criminal conspiracy in Dayton back at the end of April of 2019. Higgins still hasn’t been to court, but, his crime was hiring a douchebag as a contractor to repair a fish tank leak in his home- not of being a public official on the take.

Full disclosure- Brian Higgins is a close friend of mine and I’ve done work for him in the past.

Turns out, the contractor, Mike Marshall of United Demolition, is the FBI’s confidential informant in the case. I reported this days after the original indictment. Marshall has been running around Dayton for years, talking shit, screwing people over, and doing questionable work. He told a friend who is a retired journalist, that he was a CI, while sitting in their back yard after he’d come to quote some drywall work. Another friend, tried to hire him to do some drywall work on one of his rentals- and had to stop the work- and have it redone. Marshall’s claim to fame for the feds is that he used to work for Steve Rauch, who the government has been trying to prosecute for years for everything from using the wrong kind of diesel fuel to illegal dumping and they haven’t gotten anything to stick.

Maybe if the Feds hired people smarter than Brent Tabacchi, they could get a conviction of someone who is doing real damage to the public trust by playing games with public contracts? You know- like Nan Whaley and her entire crew of cretins who sign deals with out state developers to build housing for Sinclair students on the old Dayton Daily News site, hire Steve Rauch to half-do the demolition, let him blow the demolition by tearing down part of the building that wasn’t supposed to be torn down, and then give him the remaining building via a mechanics lien…. and there’s no student housing and no one knows where Student Suites LLC went with the money? Nevermind the fact that Nan and her crew gave United Demolition a quarter million dollar contract.

Earlier this month, Dayton commissioners approved a $248,000 contract with United Demolition in Dayton to remove and dispose of the equivalent of 13 commercial buildings, or nearly 1.7 million square feet of commercial space.

Source: Commercial properties bog down blight fight | DAYTON June 15, 2016

Reality is, the Feds think they’ve reclaimed their credibility with the Larry Householder charges. Nevermind the fact that they investigated the last House Speaker Cliff Rosenberger for corruption- but haven’t filed charges yet (it’s been a few years now). The entire State of Ohio is rife with graft in office thanks to a refusal of the political class to realize that this whole “Home Rule” thing is a joke and needs to go away. Basically, every jurisdiction can claim they can do as they please with the excuse of screaming “home rule.”

Back to Tabacchi, who is now pissed because Higgins filed a lawsuit in Montgomery County Common Pleas court against Marshall and United Demolition for failing to complete the work on Higgins home. If you or I hired a contractor who took $40K and didn’t do the work, you’d file a lawsuit too. Well, when Higgins did it, Tabacchi cried foul and said Higgins was engaged in “witness intimidation” – since Marshall is their “Confidential Informant.” It’s as if working for the feds is now a license to steal and not have to face the music. Today in Federal Court, Judge Rose had to ask Chief Magistrate Merz to sit in, on Tabacchi’s complaint about Higgins revealing his CI- and the baseless “witness intimidation charge.” They gave Higgins 10 days to try to put the rabbit back in the hat- which was already exposed long ago by me, and later by the Dayton Daily News.

Frankly, Rose should have just told Tabacchi to go do some real prosecuting- of public figures involved in real public corruption, you know like the $130M that went missing from Wright State? Or how Nan Whaley got a whole bunch of city contractors to pay to play by backing issue 9.

When Higgins showed up the morning he got arrested, he thought he was coming to talk the FBI about corruption in Chicago. Higgins had been the contractor for dead body removal for the city, until he refused to pay to play to now indicted, alderman Ed Burke. Instead, the city of Chicago hired a registered sex offender to go into peoples homes to collect the body (and possibly their ID and their medications as a side hustle). Tabacchi seems to have total amnesia about these parts of the Higgins affair, and has forgotten about a meeting he was in with Higgins and the FBI in January of this year about that very same matter.

Higgins is scheduled to go to trial November 2nd on some kind of bizarre charge. What Tabacchi originally filed for wasn’t a matter for Federal Court or even a criminal matter. insurance fraud is a civil case. Word on the street is that Tabacchi has been trying to trade a plea to a misdemeanor for this to go away- but Higgins refuses.

In the mean time, it’s been a year and a half- and the FBI still hasn’t explained how 6 black folks and one hillbilly demolition contractor have run a “culture of corruption” deal eclipsing the millions of dollars the Feds have supposedly spent in this investigation. None of these folks wrote the checks, and what they “cashed” was chump change compared to some of the other scandals I’ve exposed here, including Wright State, Dayton Public Schools and of course the City of Dayton, Citywide Development Coalition, Downtown Dayton Partnership and the biggest frauds of them all- the Dayton Development Coalition.

As long as Nan Whaley, Shelley Dickstein and half the dem party leadership are still in power, along with some of the union heads and higher ups in City Government, who partook in the pay to play programs in Dayton, we still have a culture of corruption and it’s alive and well- as long as you’re white or getting a paycheck from the government. That includes Brent Tabacchi who at this point has to be counted as complicit.

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