The disaster coming to Dayton that’s decades in the making

Some people have said that the FBI and the DOJ feel sorry for poor old Dayton and there won’t be any more indictments concerning “the Culture of Corruption.” From the Klan rally, to the tornadoes to the mass shooting, we’re a city that has had enough trauma.

I’m not sure what fairytale land they are living in, but that’s not how this all works.

And if you need proof, look what just happened in Warren County Virginia, where the entire board of supervisors and a bunch of other politicians were all indicted on corruption tied to “economic development”- or as I like to say, the code words for stealing from the poor to give to the rich.

Elected officials, along with former and current Front Royal-Warren County Economic Development Authority board members, and high ranking county employees were booked Tuesday after being indicted Friday by the special grand jury investigating local governmental bodies.

The five Board of Supervisors members — Chairman Dan Murray, Vice Chairman Tom Sayre, Tony Carter, Archie Fox and Linda Glavis — were each indicted on two misdemeanor counts of misfeasance and one misdemeanor count of nonfeasance.

Prominent county employees who were indicted on the same charges were County Administrator Doug Stanley and former county and EDA attorney Dan Whitten.

Warren County Public Schools Superintendent Greg Drescher, who previously served as the EDA’s chairman, was also indicted on the same three misdemeanor counts. Earlier this month, Drescher announced his intentions of retiring as superintendent in January. According to previous reports, Drescher said he was retiring to spend more time with his sick wife and that it had nothing to do with the EDA.

Former EDA board members Ron Llewellyn and Bruce Drummond, and former EDA treasurer William Biggs along with three current EDA board members – Treasurer Tom Patteson, Mark Baker and Gray Blanton – were indicted on the same charges.

The Cornell Law School’s legal dictionary defines misfeasance as: “The incorrect, improper or wrongful performance of a legal act.”

Nonfeasance, according to the Cornell Law School’s dictionary, is a charge against an individual for not acting at all.

Misfeasance and nonfeasance charges are less serious than malfeasance charges, which result from officials taking illegal actions in their course of duty.

According to a Virginia State Police news release, the charges are “based on the individuals’ knowledge of and inaction of the EDA’s mismanagement of funds.”

Source: 14 current, former Warren officials indicted | Nvdaily | nvdaily.com

I started this blog in 2005 because it had become apparent that the way politics were done in Dayton even the local media was part of the coverup of the back room deals. Former editorial page editor Ellen Belcher was married to Democratic Judge Dennis Langer. Endorsements were biased toward party picks, and party picks were done in back room deals with the tacit approval of both parties. Our prosecutor never gets challenged, sitting judges rarely get challenged. The money the parties use to push their slate card candidates was so well spent that when one judge, Bill Littlejohn, flipped parties- and printed his own slate cards with all the other Dems plus his picture- the Dems blew a fuse and cried foul. Once in office, re-election is almost guaranteed in this county. Of course, the fact that Ohio lets the two parties run boards of elections like patronage mills doesn’t help either, but that’s another can of worms.

I wasn’t the first to write about the corruption, in the late nineties, Florence Apple and her gang used to meet at the old Frisch’s on North Main near Forrest Park Plaza. She’d sit and talk with her posse- and they’d put out a cut and paste and copy newsletter (before the word ‘zine” existed) and mail it to those who they thought would amplify the message. Her group called themselves “The Citizens Against Corruption.” I still have a little plastic American Flag she gave me before she died, sitting on my desk in a pencil holder. I walk past her grave often in Woodland Cemetery and hope that I’ve carried on her legacy- minus the funky hat with the hanging lace.

When FBI Special Agent Deters, DOJ Special Prosecutor Glassman and our State Attorney General Dave Yost stood in the lobby of the Federal Building and announced the indictments of four men as part of the “Culture of Corruption” the first question, mine, was “do you only indict black men, and what about the big money that went missing at Wright State?”

Some people said I earned a bunch of respect on the West Side with that question. Sad, that is enough to earn respect, and that respect only comes from one side of town or the other.

Granted, the FBI was handed some extra work with the Oregon District Massacre, but, the main reason I believe they’ve delayed is that their first volley broke the gates open and there was a mad rush of folks willing to talk to them about corruption in Dayton, myself included.

When you have public bodies meeting in private discussing city business, when you have elected bodies refusing to publish attendance of elected officials in their legally appointed capacity, when you have people who can go as far as to give their convicted rapist brother a job without posting it- and still not only have a job, but be one of the top officials in a local political party- the fear of being held accountable is so non-existent that the corruption is rampant and epic.

But, here’s the thing, you don’t have to do what Roshawn Winburn did by accepting bags of cash to be corrupt in Dayton, we’ve managed to legitimize it. It’s how we have institutionalized the criminal into the everyday. It’s how we have an intertwined and even biologically related folks sitting in office, holding down jobs they aren’t qualified for, where they hire their “Friends and family” into legitimate positions and pay them. It’s the gravy train for the sociopath sycophants. It’s how mediocre people rise to the top- and it’s not limited to one party or the other, they are just different imbeciles waving a different color flag doing the same thing.

Besides running the Board of (S)Elections like a bouncer at an exclusive club, the prosecutors office picks and chooses which cases will prosecute based on if you matter to the party. Of course, the fact that his office also holds a sizeable voting block in the local party is totally overlooked- and that they pick and choose who gets to run for office.

And while I don’t have the power to prove how deep this goes (when you fight the Sunshine laws in Dayton, against the School Board or the City or even the Library- you have to fight it solo, and face off against endless tax dollar funded public defendants who will waste your money to prove they have power- the Library just hired Friend Freeze and Arnold to go after me- costing more than the settlement offer proffered long ago- after they admitted they were wrong). I can tell you that this post, where it looks like the Board of Elections was maintaining two different databases– what better way to rig an election? Should be fully investigated.

The fact that Wright State lost over $130M in 5 years and no one has been put in handcuffs, yet Roshawn Winburn took $20K and was should tell you a lot about the difference between the different standards for white folks and black folks in America even when committing what is considered white collar crime. Hell, despite being caught red-handed in the H1B visa scandal, both Nina Joshi’s company and Michael Bridge’s companies were both rewarded with healthy government contracts- and Bridges still sits on the Wright State board of trustees. One of his employees, Andrea Kunk, ridiculously, sits as the head of the Wright State Foundation. How the hell does this happen?

We’ve set up what amounts to a whole network of quasi-public shell companies in this community to do things that look like government functions, and then fund them with tax dollars yet provide no elected oversight. These organizations then help funnel dollars back into the parties and candidates campaign chests which then almost guarantee that the voters stick with the same old folks- and even when one outlier like Gary Leitzell squeak in, he’s ignored by the local media. Did I mention that Cox was so proud of themselves for sitting on the board of the Dayton Development Coalition, one of the biggest slush funds going- which ultimately was the petri dish for the pathogen that ate Wright State. Never in a year of Sundays would my dead father, an old school journalist, have joined an organization that he was supposed to hold accountable from his position in the fourth estate. Or how about the Issue 9 funded private school board run by Dr. Tom Lasley and Robin Lightcap- where tax dollars for education now go to private companies running glorified day care centers instead of to the 5 star rated DPS pre-school program?

Lately, Mayor Nan Whaley has attacked Democratic outsider Darryl Fairchild for actually bringing up a question of equality in economic development in Dayton as a “campaign speech” despite the fact that he’s not running, and when he did run the last time- it was to fill the seat of Joey Williams who wasn’t stepping down because of his new job, but because the FBI and the DOJ told him he had to, as part of a deal he struck to wear a wire and delay his public lynching until his youngest son was out of Stivers. Williams just changed his plea from not-guilty to accepting charges of “corruptly soliciting a bribe” as part of the April charges. Of the four black men they charged, Williams and Higgins both escaped getting cuffed- while Clayton Luckie and Roshawn Winburn were both arrested and cuffed (Higgins was coming in voluntarily under pretenses that the FBI was going to hear his evidence against the same kind of corrupt mob in Chicago when they told him he was under indictment). BTW- I saw Nan making campaign speeches galore after the massacre including her testifying to congress yesterday. When you have a press conference, lining up your lackeys behind you is a political PR thing- not an actual necessary action.

Clayton Luckie, btw, had already served a 3 year prison term for doing the disgusting thing of dipping into his campaign fund for personal expenditures. Yet, when Mike Turner used to hire his wife’s firm to do his campaign work, no one batted an eye. Clayton is one of the stupidist criminals I’ve ever known and yet, he was elected to both the Dayton Board of Education and the Statehouse with the backing of the Montgomery County Democratic Party.

Of course, I now have a personal interest in seeing the FBI and the DOJ finish their work, since I’m running for Dayton City Commission to try to unseat Russ Joseph’s pawn brother, Matt Joseph from his previously untouchable position on City Commission – and that of Chris Shaw who isn’t related to anyone (that I can tell) but is just as much another pawn in the Dem Party proletariat. If voters wake up (and if their votes are actually accurately counted and reported) they will realize that this is their first chance in decades to swing the Dayton City Commission from a 4-1 insiders (Darryl Fairchild being the only outsider), to a 3-2 outsiders by electing Shenise Turner-Sloss and me on November 5th. 

Of course, if the FBI and the DOJ would do their job, we might be without 4 members of the Dayton City Commission, a city manager, a bunch of flunkies in City Hall, the people at CityWide, Learn to Earn, the Dayton Development Coalition, The Downtown Dayton Partnership, and a bunch of County office holders and political party faithful. But, so far, things like that only happen in Warren County…. Virginia.

If it happened in Dayton, the only truly sad part is that the Feds have their own holding facility, and that these criminals will never have to suffer the risks of having to be held in their own house of horrors, the Montgomery County Jail- which has already cost over $11M in settlements and climbing for totally preventable deplorable acts of injustice and torture.

November 5th, voters if you’re listening, you can start the purge by voting against every single candidate “endorsed by” a political party or labor organization. Or wait. The disaster is coming- we just don’t know when.

 

 

If you enjoyed reading true breaking news, instead of broken news from the major media in Dayton, make sure you subscribe to this site for an email every time I post. If you wish to support this blog and independent journalism in Dayton, consider donating. All of the effort that goes into writing posts and creating videos comes directly out of my pocket, so any amount helps! Please also subscribe to the Youtube channel for notifications of every video we launch – including the livestreams.