Why Doesn’t State Look Into Cuyahoga County?
Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 By Marc KilmerThe Cleveland Plain Dealer published another article yesterday about the unfolding corruption scandal in Cuyahoga County. It’s too bad that the Columbus Dispatch isn’t doing more to investigate this issue, considering the potential impact this will have on the state.
From the Plain Dealer:
The note in Frank Russo’s office about a $20,000 payment. The paperwork for a downtown condo that Jimmy Dimora might have shared with friends. The meals and trips a county worker received from contractors.
Federal agents knew what to look for and where to find it during raids last week on Russo, the county auditor, and Dimora, a county commissioner and Democratic Party chief, and several contractors.
The details of how the investigation began and what it was based on may not come out for months — if not years — as investigators have to plow through thousands of boxes of paperwork taken in the raids. No criminal charges have been filed.
But former prosecutors and federal agents who have worked public corruption cases in the past — and defense attorneys scrambling to answer grand jury subpoenas for their clients’ records — said the documents give a glimpse of how the investigation may have unfolded to this point.
They said the minute details found in records — the note in Russo’s office, pictures of Dimora with county worker Rosemary Vinci, gifts, campaign literature and casino chips — show the investigation probably started years ago and included informants close to the men, some of whom probably recorded conversations.
So the feds have been looking at this for years, possibly? There certainly seems to be a strong suspicion among the feds that these two men misused their office. According to Governor Strickland, though, the state shouldn’t investigate, too. While nothing has been proven and no charges filed, I find it hard to believe that there aren’t grounds for the state to at least begin looking into this situation. I wonder what the governor would be saying if these two men had an “R” after their name instead of a “D”?
Tags: Cuyahoga County, Dimora, Strickland
August 12th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Of course it isn’t just the Dispatch which is giving this important state issue a pass. As far as I am aware of, neither the Toledo Blade, the Akron Beacon Journal, the Cincinnati Enquirer nor the Dayton Daily News have ventured a trip to Cleveland for a look into this issue. This is odd to me given the story’s potential to be Ohio’s biggest public corruption case in decades.