Loan Shark?

John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark

The recent arrest of Radovan Karadzic by the International Criminal Tribunal for crimes against humanity and the indictment of Republican Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska for receiving an unreported $250,000 gift from an oil company suggests the machinery of justice is at work at the international and national level. But the mistreatment of the 70-year-old Karol Craft and her son in the county, state, and municipal courts raises the suspicion that in Ohio it is the Halls of Injustice, not the Halls of Justice, that sometimes prevail.

According to Mrs. Craft, the injustice for her started in the halls of the Scioto County Courthouse, on the third floor, on Feb. 9, 2006. Mrs. Craft’s son was facing jail for nonpayment of child support. Under those high-pressure circumstances, Timothy Lyons' attorney Michael Mearan brokered a “disastrous” deal by which Mearan’s former business associate, Joe Lester, loaned Mrs. Craft and her son $3,000 at $1,000 interest so her son could pay his back child support. The loan was to be paid back in six months. Mrs. Craft’s home, which was valued at $57,500 by the County Auditor, was put up as collateral. When Mrs. Craft could not pay Lester’s loan, she lost her house to Lester’s assignee. (In addition to the $4,000 Mrs. Craft and her son owed Lester for the loan, Mearan added an additional $1,700 to the their indebtedness, for a total of $5,700, making it even harder for them to repay Lester’s loan.

The hastily written handwritten document Mearan drew up listed $3,000 on one line for Lester and on the next line an additional $1000 for him, presumably as interest.

$1,000 is 33% of $3,000, but since the O.R.C. stipulates that interest is calculated per annum, the interest on Lester’s loan was actually 66%. As a reader of RiverVices who works in the banking industry pointed out in an email he sent to me at rivervices@gmail.com, the Ohio Revised Code limits the percentage of interest that can be charged on a loan. Ohio Revised Code 2905.21-H defines criminal usury as “illegally charging, taking, or receiving any money or other property as interest or an extension of credit at a rate exceeding twenty-five per annum or the equivalent rate for a longer or shorter period . . .” (At the time Lester made the loan, the legal limit was 21% interest.) The website Usurylaw.com claims that if a personal loan agreement above the O.R.C. interest limit “is brought before a court in that state, the agreement will be declared illegal. The net effect of such a judicial declaration is that the loan agreement will be voided. Once voided by the court, it no longer is enforceable. In other words, the borrower will no longer be obliged to make payments pursuant to the loan agreement. The borrower is off the proverbial hook.” If this statement is correct, the whole long process by which Mrs. Craft lost her home was illegal from the start. The question of whether Mrs. Craft and her son subsequently signed a deed transferring their property to Joe Lester or his assignee would be moot.

If Mrs. Craft could take Mearan and Lester to court, as Karadzic and Senator Stevens are being taken to court, she might presumably find a measure of justice. But lawyers cost money, a lot more than she gets from Social Security each month. After talking with a minister, she came up with the idea of appealing to the public by placing collection jars in stores and businesses, but the sheriff’s office told her raising money that way was panhandling, which is against the law.

Mrs. Craft holding collection jar

Against the law! If only she can raise the money to hire an attorney to take her case, perhaps she can get the courts to enforce the law against criminal usury. There is a more familiar name for criminal usury: it is called loan sharking. Whether Mrs. Craft was a victim of criminal usury, or loan sharking, is something that could, that should, be settled in court.

Dirty Deeds?

Original scribbled "contract." 

The story of the dirty deeds begins, in my opinion, in 1952 when the parents of Karol Craft bought a parcel of land at what later became 1555 Dogwood Ridge Rd., in Wheelersburg. The property was located next to the Sacred Mission Church. Karol Craft’s father, a carpenter, built a home on the property, with the assistance of his wife, who was handy with tools. In the decades that followed, according to Karol Craft, the Sacred Mission Church showed an interest in acquiring her land.

As long as she was not in financial difficulties, Mrs. Craft was not interested in selling any part of her property. But on one occasion, when she needed money to help pay taxes, she sold part of her land, in the rear, to the Sacred Mission Church. But she rejected subsequent offers from the church because she thought the church wanted too much land for too little money. But a serious financial crisis occurred in 2006. Mrs. Craft’s son Timothy Lyons had fallen way behind in support payments for his two teen-aged children. Facing possible jail time, he appeared in court, along with his mother, on Feb. 9, 2006. As a result of her son’s appearance in court on that date, Mrs. Craft would lose her home. She lost it, she and her son claim, through trickery and deceit on the part of Mike Mearan. Mrs. Craft and her son do admit to signing, in the court hallway, the hastily drawn up hand-written "contract" on Feb. 9, 2006, which is shown above. But they deny vehemently signing any"deed" that day.

The "contract" was not enough, apparently, to transfer the title from Mrs. Craft to Joe Lester or his assignee. Mearan needed to get Mrs. Craft and her son to sign a deed, which he had apparently failed to do on Feb. 9. But Mrs. Craft and her son refused to sign anything after that date. They concluded they had been hornswoggled and stampeded in the court hallway on February 9, being pressured by Mearan, to take one example, to accept a $3,000 six-month loan from Joe Lester for which they had to pay $1,000 or 33% interest. Because he could not get Mrs. Craft to sign on the dotted line, Mearan or someone else resorted to forging their signatures on the deed to make the transfer appear legal, or so Mrs. Craft and her son now believe. In a letter to the Disciplinary Counsel, Timothy Lyons wrote, "On the 22nd of December, 2006, [Michael Mearan] did wrongfully file with the Scioto County Recorder a forged deed that conveyed our home to Attorney Michael Mearan’s assistant, Terri Chandler. Neither I nor my mother signed this deed.” Lyons offered no proof of forgery, other than his and his mother’s certainty that they had not signed a deed transferring ownership of their property to Mearan’s assistant on February 9, 2006. The Counsel of the Disciplinary Committee of the Ohio Supreme Court was requested by Timothy Lyons to investigate. The counsel did an investigation, though how thoroughly he did it remains an open question. Mrs. Craft claims the counsel never spoke to her or her son. As far as I know, no analysis of the signatures of Mrs. Craft and her son on the original deed was ever done.

That Mearan served as one of the two witnesses on this deed seems poor judgment on his part. If Terri Chandler was holding the property in her name for Mearan or for Mearan's former "business associate" Joe Lester, Mearan's serving as one of the two witnesses of the signing of the property over to her by Mrs. Craft and her son seems questionable. The other witness, whose name is hard to decipher, is yet to be confirmed.

The original copy of this deed is not at the office of the Scioto County Recorder. A clerk there told me earlier this week that, at Mearan’s request, the original had been sent to him. Any determination of forgery would presumably require an examination of that original copy, as it would also require the testimony of the second witness, who claimed to have seen Mrs. Craft and her son sign over their property to Terri Chandler. The Disciplinary Committee Counsel concluded Mearan had not violated a disciplinary rule but that “it was a disastrous decision for Attorney Mearan to encourage Mr. Lester to contract with you,” that is with Timothy and his mother (emphasis added). Mrs. Craft agrees that Mearan's decision was disastrous.

Like her parents, Mrs. Craft worked hard her whole life, including at Williams Manufacturing, while living in the family home in Wheelersburg. But today she does not have a home or bed to call her own. Occasionally, she has had to sleep in her 1990 Chevy pick-up. She told me she had applied to the Portsmouth Municipal Housing Authority, where Mearan is one of the directors, but she was told the PMHA has a long waiting list. The suffering Karol Craft is experiencing is evident in a photo (shown below ) that I took of her recently in Tracy Park. She appears to be still in a state of shock and disbelief. As she approaches her 70^th birthday, she tries to bear up and find some solace in her religious faith. She has not returned to the site of her former home on Dogwood Ridge Rd. since she was forced out of it. If she did go back, she would find the house her parents had built with their own hands about fifty years ago is no longer there. The Sacred Mission Church eventually acquired the property and bulldozed the house.

Mrs. Karol Craft at Tracy Park, trying to make sense of it all.

American Dreams, American Nightmares

I began to hear early on that I was risking my life by criticizing the over-privileged who control Portsmouth. I heard more than once, usually jokingly, but sometimes seriously, “They’re going to take a contract out on you.” Contract? Portsmouth is not a town where people take risks, especially not in business. Just look at the contracts a local developer has with Shawnee State University for student housing. For the over-privileged few, almost all the risk has been wrung out of doing business in Portsmouth. They are born with abatements in their mouths. I doubt anyone would take a contract out on me or others unless they got some kind of government assistance. Unless Rob Portman finds some more pork in the budget of the Dept. of Agriculture, it ain’t going to happen. I don’t think they’re going to risk their own money to get rid of anybody. I don’t think our local wannabees are going to engage in such high risk business as knocking people off. However, I would be very worried about being murdered if I were a drug-addicted pregnant prostitute in Portsmouth.

I grew up in a Boston suburb that was known as the Crime Capital of New England, where gangsters occasionally rubbed each other out to gain a competitive advantage. After getting to know more about the low lifes of Portsmouth, I have gained some respect for the hoodlums of my boyhood. They were professionals, not amateurs. They were entrepreneurs, not sponges. They didn’t pose as philanthropists while picking the pockets of the people. They weren’t hypocrites who fed on government pork while spouting the myth of free enterprise. They didn’t have a city building committee that conspired to unload worthless buildings on the public. They didn’t have a city building committee with a drug-addicted employee of Mike Mearan as stenographer, a twenty-four-year-old woman who subsequently got arrested for transporting drugs from Columbus to Portsmouth. Not long after that, she was arrested for purse snatching in the parking lot of the local supermarket, and as a result ended up in the Franklin County jail. The gangsters in my hometown didn’t control the local newspaper and get a veteran reporter fired for daring to report that an arrested drug dealer happened to be employed by the largest car dealer in the city. They didn’t keep the news of a robbery at knife point at a local supermarket out of the local newspaper because the newspaper depended for its survival on the advertising revenue from the supermarket, which probably didn’t want customers to get the idea shopping there could be dangerous. I have been told that when the Daily Times reported on Heather Hren’s purse snatching it was not specified that the parking lot where it had occurred was Kroger’s.

Shyster

As my readers in Portsmouth might know, because the Portsmouth Daily Times reported it on the front page, local lawyer and First Ward councilman Michael Hugh Mearan is suing me for $125,000 for libel for expressing my opinion that he is a “shyster.” Merriam-Wesbster defines a “shyster” as “a person who is professionally unscrupulous especially in the practice of law or politics.” Since Mearan is both a lawyer and a politician, I can’t think of a better word for him. In my opinion, Mearan is a shyster. My previous posting, “Mearan’s Conflict of Interest,” gives a detailed account of why I believe he is a shyster.

Shyster is derived from the German word scheisser, which means defecator or shitter. Shyster may sound like a Yiddish word, but it isn’t. I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood, where I learned The Joys of Yiddish. Growing up, I sometimes heard kucker, which is the Yiddish word for shit head, but it is not my opinion that Mearan is a kucker. It is my opinion he’s a shyster. I have a constitutional right to express my opinion of people in public life. I live in the First Ward, making Mearan my councilman, and I think I have a right to express my opinion of him.

Disastrous Decision

I believe Mearan’s suit against me is the first step in his attempt to silence his critics in the blogosphere. I am not the only blogger criticizing Mearan. Portsmouth’s dean of the blogosphere is Austin Leedom, a 75-year-old veteran of the Korean War and a former deputy sheriff. Mearan recently sent Leedom a certified letter, of the kind he previously had sent me, warning he will take legal action against Leedom unless he publicly retracts criticism of Mearan’s mishandling of the legal problems of Mrs. Karol Craft a 69-year-old widow who had the misfortune to find herself being represented by Mearan. The Disciplinary Counsel of the Ohio Supreme Court determined that Mearan had not broken the law in representing Mrs. Craft, but the counsel informed Mrs. Craft’s son that it was (emphasis added) “a disastrous decision for Attorney Mearan to encourage Mr. [Joe] Lester to contract with you . . .” Tell me, what recourse does a client have when her lawyer gives her “disastrous” advice that results in the loss of her home? For many Americans, owning a home is the fulfillment of the American Dream and losing that home is often a nightmare. We have to go back to the novels of Horatio Alger, the creator of the rags-to-riches version of the American Dream, who was born in my hometown, in 1832, to find a more blatant example of a poor old widow living the nightmare of being bamboozled out of the family homestead. As a result of that “contract” with Lester, Mrs. Craft lost the house when she couldn’t repay the loan and the 33% interest she was being charged. “When the young man [Craft’s son] and his mother couldn’t come up with the money [to repay the loan],” John Welton wrote in the Sentinel, “attorney Mearan moved in for the kill and took over the house.” (Do a Google search using the names “Mearan Welton” and you will see what John Welton, aka as Doug Deepe, has written about Mearan.) The value placed on Mrs. Craft’s house in her dealings with Mearan was $5,700. Joe Lester claimed he made the loan to Mrs. Craft only under persistent pressure from Mearan, his former business partner. Mrs. Craft’s property was reportedly worth around $50,000 at the time. Currently owned by the church next door, the property is valued on the county auditor’s website at $60,550. But when I recently drove out to Wheelersburg, to 1555 Dogwood Ridge Rd., I discovered that the house has been bulldozed and there is nothing but an empty lot. Development is taking place in the area, so the true value of the land is possibly considerably more. Maybe it could even be described as “prime real estate,” which is what our doofus Mayor has called the site of the present Municipal Building.

Meshuge

I confess to being mystified at why Mearan would decide to take anyone to court on the issue of his reputation. It strikes me as a disastrously unwise decision. To hold all the people who could testify to Mearan’s reputation, the court would have to convene in Spartan Stadium. In my opinion, the only word that does justice to this situation, in which American dreams have turned into American nightmares, is meshuge.

* * *

For background on Mearan's "disastrous" treatment of his client Karol Craft, go to Teresa Mollette's informative website:

http://portsmouthcitizens.info/blog/?page_id=128

I have created an email account for those who might want to contact me about this case.

rivervices@gmail.com

Mearan's Conflict of Interest

Robert Forrey addressing City Council

In his actions as a member of the Portsmouth City Council and as chairman of the City Building Committee (CBC), City Councilman Michael Mearan appears to have violated Sect. 160 of the Portsmouth City Charter, “Oath of Office,” and Section 161 of the Charter, “Financial Interests in Contracts, etc.,” which states, “No officer or employee of the City shall have a financial interest, direct or indirect, in any contract with the City or be financially interested, directly or indirectly in the sale to the City of any land, materials, supplies, or services except on behalf of the City as an officer or employee [emphasis added].” In addition to violating Sect. 161 of the City Charter regarding conflict of interest, Mearan also appears to have violated Sect. 102.03 (A) (1) of Ohio’s Ethics Law, which states, “No present or former public official or employee shall, during public employment or service or for twelve months thereafter, represent a client or act in a representative capacity for any person on any matter in which the public official or employee personally participated as a public official or employee through decision, approval disapproval, recommendation, the rendering of advice, investigation, or other substantial exercise of administrative discretion.”

The “Donation”

On the agenda of the March 14, 2005, meeting of the Portsmouth City Council was the following item: “Ord. authorizing the Mayor of the City of Portsmouth, Ohio to accept a deed to the real estate generally known as 807 Washington Street, Portsmouth, Ohio.” At the same meeting, according to City Council minutes: “Mike Mearan – 812-6th Street, an attorney representing Herbert Singer who is offering the former Adelphia building to the City. Mr. Mearan said . . . that the intent of Dr. Singer is to give this property to the City for the City to use. He supported the idea of using the building for a Police Department but acknowledged that would be a decision for Council. Mr. Mearan said that in order for Dr. Singer to take advantage of certain IRS regulations the City could not sell or lease the building because that would set a value on the property and would restrict the amount Mr. Singer can claim as a donation to the City. Mr. Mearan stated that with the understanding that the City would accept the property and use it for City purposes, with a restriction of ten years after which if the City wants to get rid of the building or do whatever they want with the building they could do so.” In a letter to Mayor Kalb, the same day, March 14, Mr. Mearan wrote. “I am hopeful that Council will approve the ordinance to accept the deed to the Adelphia building. As we have previously stated, for Dr. Singer to receive a favorable tax ruling the property must [underlining in original] be used by the City for city related purposes. This restriction would be applicable for a period of no less than ten (10) years.”

807 Washington St., aka "Adelphia building"

At that same March 14, 2005, meeting, the city accepted Dr. Singer’s offer and formalized the transfer of the property to the city in ordinance Number 20-2005. That ordinance contains the provision that “said property to be used for city-related purposes for a minimum period of 10 years.” (A copy of the ordinance is in the City Building Committee’s “Final Report,” which can be found on Councilman Mollette’s website http://mollette.info/ under “CBC-Marting.”) In addition to the tax advantages he would derive if the city used the property for city purposes for a period of ten years, Dr. Singer derived another financial gain from the transfer of the property to the city. Dr. Singer had been delinquent in paying his city property taxes, which amounted to almost $18,000. (See Ord. 11-2006.) In the arrangement that Mr. Mearan worked out with the city, Dr. Singer did not have to pay the city the nearly $18,000 he owed in back taxes. The city signed a Warranty Deed to the property dated Aug 23, 2005. (“Final Report.”) It should be emphasized that Dr. Singer’s “donation” of the 807 Washington St. property had financial strings attached, strings that would enable Dr. Singer, in Mr. Mearan’s words, “to take advantage of certain IRS regulations,” regulations that would qualify Dr. Singer for a tax break of an unspecified amount.

Mearan Appointed to Council

At the June 12, 2006, Council meeting, to fill a vacancy, Mearan was appointed to City Council and took the oath of office: “I solemnly swear that I will obey the Constitution and laws of the United States and of the State of Ohio, that I will in all respects observe the provisions of the Charter and ordinances of the City of Portsmouth and faithfully discharge the duties of the office of [City Council].” In his maiden speech as councilman at that June 12, 2006, meeting, according to council minutes, “He [Mearan] stated one of his goals to be trying to determine what is best with regard to relocating the municipal building in a way that won’t cost the citizens any money.” In view of the contingent and provisional nature of the agreement between Dr. Singer and the city of Portsmouth regarding the 807 Washington St. property, and given. Mearan’s role as Dr. Singer’s attorney in creating that agreement, Mearan, as a member of city council, should have recused himself from any discussion or vote related to the relocation of the Municipal Building. He should have done so to avoid a conflict of interest. The “public purposes” condition of Dr. Singer’s “donation” had still not been met by the city when Mearan was appointed to City Council, so he appears to have been in violation of Section 102.03 (A) (1) of Ohio’s Ethics Law, which prohibits a public official from representing a client while rendering decisions, giving approval or disapproval, making recommendations, rendering advice, or exercising “other substantial exercise of administrative discretion.”

City Building Committee

Left to right: Mearan (Chair), Robinson, Johnson, Kalb, Ockerman

At the July 10, 2006, City Council meeting, according to Council minutes, City Council President Howard Baughman told Council that “he has been talking with Mr. Mearan and has made the decision to appoint a committee to study the City’s assets for a building, study the information that has already been acquired, talk to new people with new ideas and to make a few decisions and proposals to Council. He expressed his hope that this be done in a timely manner.” What the minutes of the meeting do not show, but what a tape of the meeting on Portsmouthcitizens.info reveals, is that Mr. Baughman said, “Mr. Mearan has come up with some new ideas and is very excited about it.” Mearan was apparently eager to serve on the City Building Committee. In any case, Baughman not only appointed Mearan to what became known as the City Building Committee, he appointed Mearan as chair of that committee. By accepting an appointment to chair the City Building Committee, Mearan compounded his conflict of interest regarding Dr. Singer and the 807 Washington St. property. Mearan’s presence on the City Council and especially his chairmanship of the City Building Committee put him in a position to help Dr. Singer get his tax break.

“Abstaining” on the “Donation”

At the August 14, 2006 meeting of the City Building Committee, Mearan said, “I personally have no interest whatsoever in the Adelphia building. I have no client that has any interest. I represented Dr. Singer, who owned the building, and donated it to the city and I would even abstain from voting so there would be no appearance of impropriety.” But on Dec. 11, 2006, the City Building Committee issued its “Final Report,” which recommended the city use 807 Washington St. for a "City Hall complex," incuding a new police station. The vote to send the recommendations on to City Council was 4 in the affirmative (Mearan, Johnson, Ockerman and Robinson) and 1 (Kalb) in the negative. So Mearan did not abstain on this important vote. At this same August 14 meeting, incidentally, Mayor Kalb said, “There is this question of whether the city does own the Adelphia building. The city does own the Adelphia building. There is no stipulation that we have to be in it for ten years.” But five months earlier, as I have pointed out, on March 14, 2005, the City Council had passed Ordinance 2005-20, which stipulated “the Mayor of the City of Portsmouth, Ohio to accept a deed to the real estate generally known as 807 Washington Street, Portsmouth, Ohio, said property to be used for city-related purposes for a minimum period of 10 years” (emphasis added). And on Dec. 11, 2006, when the City Building Committee submitted its “Final Report,” Ordinance 2005-20 was included, with the provision that “said property to be used for city-related purposes for a minimum of 10 years.”

That March 14, 2005, vote was not the only important one in which Mearan did not abstain from voting on matters related to Dr. Singer’s “donation.” According to official minutes, on June 9, 2008, the City Council gave a first reading to “An ordinance to submit to the electors of the City of Portsmouth, Ohio at the next General Election to be held the 4^th day of November 2008, the question of whether to construct a new facility to be known as the Justice Center at the Washington Street Site (former Adelphia Building) to house the Police Department, Municipal Courts, Clerk of Courts, Probation Department and Solicitor’s Office . . .” The vote of the Council on the ordinance (which also included the Marting building) was 4 in the affirmative and 2 in the negative, with Mr. Mearan voting in the affirmative. In spite of the documented provisional quid pro quo nature of the property transfer from Dr. Singer to the city, Mr. Mearan served on the City Building Committee where he could help Dr. Singer receive his tax break.

Toxic Black Mold

The property Mr. Singer “donated” to the city was reportedly infected with toxic black mold (S. chartarum), which rendered the building less than worthless, as Mearan should have known. “Depending on the length of exposure and volume of spores inhaled or ingested,” an entry in Wikipedia states, “symptoms [of toxic black mold] can manifest as chronic fatigue or headaches, fever, irritation to the eyes, mucous membranes of the mouth, nose and throat, sneezing, rashes, and chronic coughing. In severe cases of exposure or cases exacerbated by allergic reaction, symptoms can be extreme including nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and bleeding in the lungs, and nose.” Dr. Singer’s building had toxic black mold when the city took title from him, as Portsmouth Police Chief Charles Horner told Mearan at a City Building Committee on Nov. 20, 2006. So Dr. Singer did not so much donate as he foisted the building off on the city, with Mr. Mearan’s assistance. As a member of the City Building Committee had said at its Nov. 20, 2006, meeting, if the Washington St. building has black mold, “that building’s no good anymore” and “has to go.”

The rent Adelphia Cable and its predecessors paid to Dr. Singer over the period of the 20-year lease (which lasted only 19) amounted to just under $1,400,000. I have been told by people who worked in the old Adelphia building that it had deteriorated during the period of the lease, and while Adelphia would have liked to remain at 807 Washington St., paying high rent on a deteriorating building under a new lease made no business sense. Singer had wrung what profit he could from Adelphia Cable, and when no one else showed any interest in buying the property, (and what businessman in his right mind would?) he unloaded it on the taxpayers of Portsmouth in the deal Mearan helped negotiate, or perpetrate. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” does not apply to Dr. Singer’s gift, because the horse he offered the city was dead and infected with black mold and never should have been accepted. Mearan had the chutzpah to publicly suggest that a plaque or something be put on the new Justice Center at the Washington St. property to commemorate D. Singer's philanthropy. Dr. Singer's philanthropy is of the kind shown by the Marting Foundation, the kind that the poor people of Portsmouth can not afford any more of.

The so-called Adelphia building was an environmental and financial liability that its deadbeat absentee landlord foisted off on the city with the assistance of his attorney Michael Mearan. In the nineteen-years Adelphia Cable and it predecessors occupied Dr. Singer’s building, he reportedly never once was in Portsmouth. He came only afterwards. Who was representing Dr. Singer’s interests in Portsmouth all that time? Mearan needs to document when he began serving as Singer’s attorney in Portsmouth and when he stopped serving in that capacity. But exactly when Mearan formally stopped being Dr. Singer’s attorney is not the crucial point. The crucial point, from the viewpoint of the law, is that Mearan as councilman and as chairman of the City Building Committee put himself in a position to continue to represent Singer’s interests and push for using the 807 Washington St. property for public purposes so that Dr. Singer could get his tax break. Acting in “a representative capacity,” Mearan was guilty of a conflict of interest that calls into question the legality of the whole “Adelphia” deal and the ordinance that the city is trying to put on next November’s ballot. The Marting scam was declared null and void and so should the whole “Adelphia” scam. Following up on the City Building Committee member who said the black mold-infested “Adelphia” building “has to go,” I would add, “so does Mearan.”

Today it was reported in the New York Times that Steve Shaffer has been indicted by a Kentucky grand jury for his role in stealing Indian Head Rock. “These individuals have been playing fast and loose with the law, and it’s caught up with them finally,” Reginald Meeks, a Kentucky legislator, told the Times. “Clearly, there’s a different set of values in Kentucky than apparently exist in Portsmouth, Ohio,” he said. Mr. Meeks, you don’t know the half of it. Mr. Meeks, meet Mr. Mearan.

This is Portsmouth

This is the Municipal Building that houses the Portsmouth city government. It was erected in 1934, which makes it about 75 years old.

This is the Ramada Inn, "Queen of the Rust Belt," owned by the furtive land developer Jeffrey Albrecht who is now being investigated by the Attorney General’s office for bid rigging in an Athens land deal. Albrecht is said to be the developer behind the hotel/convention center that will be located on the land under the Municipal Building.

This is the lapdog mayor of Portsmouth who has said the Municipal Building is irreparable and should be torn down.

This is the U.S. Post Office, on Gay St., which was erected in 1935, and is about 74 years old. The Post Office is the architectural twin of the Municipal Building. It has been maintained over the years by the federal government and no one has ever suggested it be torn down.

This is the Marting building, which was erected in 1883, making it about 125 years old. An otherwise worthless and unmarketable building, the Marting Foundation foisted it off on the city for $2,000,000 for use as a replacement for the 75 year-old Municipal Building.

This is the Portsmouth City Council, which enabled the Marting Foundation to pull off its $2,000,000 fleecing of the taxpayers. Mayor Bauer, Ann Sydnor, and Carol Caudill were recalled from office for their part in the Marting Scam.

This is Bob and Teresa Mollette, the crusading couple who successfully challenged the legality of the sale of the Marting building to the city.

This is the former city councilman Marty Mohr who, along with Mayor Kalb, sold out the citizens of Portsmouth by working out a deal with the Marting Foundation that took the Marting building off the hands of the Foundation, once again, and placed it back in the lap of the taxpayers.

After the voters rejected using the Marting Building as a home for city offices, this is the property, the so-called Adelphia building, that the City Building Committee recommended for new city buildings.

This is the $12,000 study Tanner Stone did for the renovation of the Adelphia building, which was a waste of money because the Adelphia building proved beyond repair.

This is Mike Mearan, the crooked lawyer who served as the chair of the City Building Committee at the same time that he represented the landlord of the Adelphia property, which the City Building Committee recommended as the site for a new city building.

This is the phantasmagorical, Art-Dreco Hotel/Convention Center, the building on which Portsmouth is gambling its future and for which it is selling its soul.

Land Scams

In 2001 the city of Portsmouth sold almost 8 acres of land next to Route 23 to Portsmouth developer Elmer Mullins for the minimum asking price of $60,000. The price Mullins paid per acre, therefore, was about $7,500.

In 2006, the county of Athens sold a little over 4 acres of comparable land on East State St. to developers for $2.3 million. The price per acre the developers paid in Athens, therefore, was about $510,000. In other words, the county and therefore the taxpayers of Athens county received a half a million dollars more per acre for public land on East State St. than the city of Portsmouth received per acre for public land on Route 23.

The land in Portsmouth and the land in Athens are similar. Both the nearly 8 acres in Portsmouth and the 4 plus acres in Athens were vacant and suitable for commercial development. The city of Portsmouth and the city of Athens also appear to be similar. Both are university towns and county seats and of similar population and per capita income. In 2000, the population of Athens was 21,342; Portsmouth was 20,909. Both cities are among the poorest in Ohio: Portsmouth ranks 809, Athens ranks 1043. The per capita income in Portsmouth is $15,078; in Athens it is $11,061, so both cities appear to be, municipally speaking, poor cousins.

What can explain the startling difference in price between comparable land in Portsmouth and Athens? Why did Athens county and its taxpayers receive about a half million dollars per acre for the East State St. land, and the city of Portsmouth only $7500 per acre for the Route 23 land?

The short answer is that when it comes to political corruption and to selling out to developers, Athens cannot begin to compare to Portsmouth. Portsmouth is not only a drug dealer’s paradise, it is a developer’s heaven, a place where Neal Hatcher is making a fortune off the city and Shawnee State University, while taking virtually no risks, and where Elmer Mullins had to pay the city of Portsmouth only $7500 per acre for prime commercial real estate.

Route 23 Rip-Off

The longer answer is that Mullins paid a paltry $7500 per acre on Route 23 because the price was driven down because rumors circulated that the site was contaminated and even possibly toxic. Who was spreading those rumors? Portsmouth Police Chief Charles Horner did an inept investigation and accused former Mayor Bauer and the developer Mullins of criminally spreading the rumors to discourage potential bidders from coming forward. But Horner never produced evidence to prove his charges. He could not produce public statements by either Bauer and or Mullins spreading the rumors. Horner was no better at investigating land scams than he is at performing drug busts. And if there is anything to the rumor that Horner removed the hard drive from Mayor Bauer's computer and withheld that evidence from the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, then Horner may face charges that make land scamming look like a lark.

The city official who did publicly raise the specter of contamination at the Route 23 site was First Ward council woman Ann Sydnor. At one city council meeting she claimed water and soil from the site were being tested and that results would be forwarded to the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. The OEPA has denied that it ever received such tests or mandated any cleanup of the site. There probably was a rip-off on Route 23, but no one has ever been held accountable.

The Athens land deal was apparently also a scam, involving rigged bidding, according to recent news reports, but that is not surprising since a Portsmouth developer, Jeffrey Albrecht was involved. But that is the subject for another blog.

Horner's Last Botched Drug Bust

The bizarre events on the corner of 4th and Market Street on Wednesday May 14 and Chief Charles Horner’s equally bizarre account of those events in the Portsmouth Daily Times on May 22 tend to confirm the suspicion that we have as chief law enforcement officer in Portsmouth a man who appears to be not only incompetent, but to be psychologically as well as morally unfit for the important position he occupies. I was a witness to the events of May 14 and I spoke at that time to Lee Scott, who did not appear to me to be under the influence of anything but his own ebullient personality. I wonder what anybody who was not a witness to those events would think of Horner’s newspaper account, an account which, I believe, offers ample evidence that we have as chief of police an unstable individual who not only literally has his finger on the trigger but in addition wields broad powers, mainly the powers of search and seizure, and the powers of surveillance and arrest, which he abuses with alarming regularity.

J. Edgar Horner

The events of May 14 might serve as a reminder to us, and a warning, that Horner is a small-time, small-town J. Edgar Hoover (shown here), who for 45 years used his power as Director of the FBI to intimidate individuals whose “anti-government” politics and whose “anti-religion” beliefs and "anti-American" sentiments he did not approve of. But small-time or not, Horner is no less a threat to the constitutional rights of the citizens of Portsmouth than Hoover was a threat to the rights of Americans generally. Let us hope that Horner’s Botched Drug Bust of May 14, will be his last. I have previously posted an essay, “A Comedy of Terrors,” about what may have been Horner’s first botched drug bust, back in 1992, when members of the Portsmouth Police Department’s Emergency Response Team, under the command of then Sergeant Horner, broke into the wrong house and traumatized an elderly couple who had just returned home from an evening church service.

Scene of Horner's First Botched Drug Bust

Domestic Terrorists!

I am presumably one of the elderly gents Horner accused in his statement in the May 22 Portsmouth Times of trying to intimidate him and his armed men by filming them with a video camera. I had a digital, not a video camera. I’ll admit I tried to include Horner in the few photos I took, but I failed. He was always behind a car (as he is in the photo below) or behind one of the team he had on hand to facilitate his 4th Street Fiasco. Someone else who had tried to include him in a photo told me he had beenavoiding being photographed all afternoon. It may be that Horner sincerely does think I and Austin Leedom (a former deputy sheriff in Chillicothe) whose ages combined add up to about 150, are “domestic terrorists” who are trying to intimidate armed police with our cameras. But the rest of the crew around Horner, in the photo below, don’t look intimidated. They look bored, having stood around for hours waiting for a search warrant, and they look embarrassed to be part of such a stupid fiasco.

Ho-hum. How long has this drug bust been going on?


"Mutated Forms"

Over the course of the six hours or so that Horner's botched protracted drug bust was taking place, spectators gathered across the street to see what was going on. People came and went, and there were probably no more than a dozen at any given time. It was like the circus had come to town and Horner was the chief clown. In his Captain Queeg-like May 22 statement to the PDT, Horner referred to the spectators variously as the “small group of individuals,” “the group,” “associated individuals,” “associates of Scott’s,” all of which descriptions he tried to sum up in the paranoid phrase “this association of individuals, in a variety of mutated forms . . .” Horner in his statement went on to warn, “Of special concern is the known association, either directly or indirectly, of several individuals with known convicted felons and potentially those with anti-religion, anti-government, anti-American, and/or anti-nuclear interests, which may be affiliated with the uranium enrichment plant.”

Horner is obsessed with the internet and local bloggers, and what may be written about him. His case could serve as a warning of how psychologically unhealthy it is to spend too much time on the internet and in chatrooms. People who spend too much time in cyberspace start seeing not spots but “mutated forms.” If Horner had spent less time surfing the internet and checking out chatrooms, if he had spent more time fighting crime and less fighting farting, he and the city would be better off.

Marc Dann: Marked Man

Once again, Gov. Ted Strickland (shown here) is in the ironic situation of insisting on high ethical standards for others while the standards that prevail in Scioto County, now called Strickland Country, are scandalously low. It is as if he has trouble seeing Strickland Country clearly. It is as if he has double vision. Earlier in the Democratic primary campaign, Strickland criticized Iowa’s caucuses as being undemocratic, though he should have known as well as anybody that no county or city in Iowa is as undemocratic as Scioto County and its county seat, the city of Portsmouth. Now Strickland is threatening Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann with impeachment if he does not resign. It is as if Dann is a marked man. No Ohio state officeholder has been impeached since the early 1800s. “Short of being voted out of office,” a Columbus Dispatch editorial warned on May 11, 2008, “impeachment is the maximum political penalty that can be imposed on an elected official and should be reserved for the gravest offenses.” What was Dann’s grave offense? Another way of putting the question is, “What is Danngate?”

Danngate

Daniel Gutierrez, Dann’s director of general services, reportedly sexually harassed two female employees. The investigation of Gutierrez was reportedly obstructed by another aide to the Attorney General, communications director Leo Jennings III. To make a bad situation worse, Dann, 46 (shown here) subsequently admitted to having an extra-marital affair with another member of his staff, the scheduler Jessica Utovich, 28, who spent nights in the condo Dann shared with Gutierrez. Gutierrez and Jennings have been fired and Ms. Utovich has resigned as has another of Dann’s assistants, Edgar C. Simpson, who had failed to act promptly when the harassment complaints were first made. More may surface, but up to now two have been fired and two have resigned, but no one has been convicted of anything except acting like idiots, and since when is that enough to impeach or indict any politician?

To at least some of us in Strickland Country, Danngate is very ironic, for we have been trying for years, and especially since Strickland was elected governor, to get advice and assistance from state agencies, and especially from the office of the Attorney General. We have been told by the Attorney General’s office more than once that the state cannot interfere in any way because Ohio is a “home rule” state, and therefore Portsmouth is a home rule city, which apparently means we are at the mercy of the crooks who control the city. The only advice the Attorney General’s office has offered us is to get ourselves a lawyer, but lawyers in Portsmouth don’t dare represent clients who want to take legal action against those who control the city and in particular against those associated with the Southern Ohio Growth Partnership (SOGP). A former managing editor of the Portsmouth Daily Times complained that the SOGP had organized a boycott among the paper’s advertisers because of its reporting on the so-called Marting Scam, and more recently a reporter for the Daily Times was fired for doing no more than reporting that someone busted for drugs was an employee of Glockner Motors, a business owned by an influential member of the SOGP. How dare any reporter reveal such an embarrassing detail! Not only reporters but Portsmouth lawyers too must be wary. Any Portsmouth lawyer who dares to embarrass the SOGP would find himself blackballed in Portsmouth. As a result, concerned citizens of Portsmouth have had to look outside Scioto County to find lawyers willing to represent them.

The Mayor

Ted Strickland Giving Oath of Office to Mayor Kalb

When it comes to shady characters and unethical behavior, Portsmouth can more than match Marc Dann or any one else in the Attorney General’s office. Let’s start with the head of local government, Mayor James Kalb, whom Strickland did the honor of swearing into office. Kalb attended vocational school, but if he learned a trade there, he hid whatever skills he might have learned under a basket, a grocery basket, you could say, for he went to work as a grocery clerk at Kroger’s supermarket. He never rose above being a clerk and twice would have been fired, I was told, if he had not been a member of the Teamsters union.

Until he got involved in politics, Kalb never amounted to much, not at Kroger’s or anywhere else. But as a perennial member of city council, Kalb eventually became President of City Council, and in that position he was a key supporter of the purchase of the decrepit 125-year-old Marting department store building, in what is known as the Marting Scam. Not only Mayor Gregory Bauer, but two other members of city council were recalled by outraged voters for their roles in the Marting Scam. Kalb should have been recalled but he saved his hide by claiming he had been duped into voting for the purchase of the Marting building. He blamed Mayor Bauer, among others, for having duped him, and he encouraged the chief of police to investigate the mayor’s role in the Marting Scam. Bauer was never indicted for anything, but he was recalled from office and Kalb, conveniently, was next in line of succession, and became mayor.

After Bob and Teresa Mollette had hired an outside lawyer and got the Marting purchase invalidated in the courts, the self-confessed dupe Kalb turned around and negotiated another scandalous deal with the Marting Foundation, in spite of the voters’ clear indication they wanted the city to have no part of the Marting building. What Attorney General Marc Dann did was get involved sexually with a consenting adult, a woman who worked in his office. What Mayor Kalb did was screw thousands of Portsmouth citizens, without their consent, by conspiring a second time with the Marting Foundation and the SOGP.

But Kalb didn’t stop there. In a blatant rejection of democratic government, Kalb went on to ignore the will of the people as expressed by an almost 3 to 1 margin in a referendum on May 2, 2006, a referendum that specifically called for the city not to renovate the Marting building. Kalb proceeded as if that referendum never happened, and the city council is on the verge of passing an ordinance that calls for the renovation of the Marting building. But even before that ordinance is passed, in defiance of the May 2, 2006 referendum, the Marting Annex is now being renovated. Kalb’s misdeeds are far worse than Attorney General Dann’s, but who is going to prosecute him? This is, after all, Strickland Country, where the Attorney General’s office cannot act because Portsmouth is a home rule city. Is the price of “home rule” the loss of self-government?

Kalb is not done screwing the citizens of Portsmouth. For example, he continues to work part-time at Kroger’s as a grocery clerk. No one would object if Kalb was working evenings or weekends at Kroger’s, but he is working Thursday mornings. He is not "moonlighting," he is "daylighting." There are probably no provisions in Portsmouth city charter prohibiting him from setting his own hours as mayor, but there are laws against public officials using public vehicles for their personal use. Not only has Kalb been known to drive an official car over to Kentucky to buy cigarettes and lottery tickets, he even drives a public vehicle to his daytime job at Kroger’s. So the city is not only paying him for the time he is working at Kroger’s, it is also paying for the gas and mileage that he uses to get there. And he managed to slip a $6,138 raise for himself in the 2008 budget, bringing his salary of $$51,870 up to $58,008, a 12% raise. The legality of the raises for the mayor and the new city solicitor has been questioned by Teresa Mollette, but of course no state agency or official, including the Attorney General, can advise or help her out because Portsmouth is a home rule city. She would have to hire an out-of-town lawyer, but since she has already incurred legal costs of over $40,000 challenging the purchase of the Marting building, she cannot afford to individually challenge Kalb every time he flouts the law.

The notorious Portsmouth developer Neal Hatcher was Kalb’s chief backer during Kalb’s campaign for mayor. Hatcher is a Republican, but in Strickland Country corruption is bipartisan. Hatcher made one of the many buildings he owns available to the Democratic Party during Strickland’s campaign for governor. Strickland at a public rally in front of that building thanked Hatcher for making the building available to the Democratic Party. Strickland is a product of the corrupt political culture that prevails in Portsmouth, and he could not have advanced politically without winking at a least some wickedness. While he has always come off as an upright man, Strickland, an ordained minister, has not as far as I know ever done anything but accept the corrupt status quo in Portsmouth. Teaching part time at Shawnee State University was among the honorable but low-paying odd jobs he cobbled together to make a living prior to being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Part-time instructors are the educated slaves who make the academic plantation system possible. They are like the educated Greek slaves who taught the Romans to be civilized. Shawnee State could not have survived economically without them. I’m sure Strickland was a conscientious instructor, but as the president of the Shawnee Education Association, the faculty union, I was in a position to know he accepted the plantation system as he found it and did nothing to improve the working conditions or pay of the many part-time instructors. One part-time instructor was fired for trying to organize part-time instructors. Strickland was a strong supporter of the Ohio Education Association, as that powerful organization was of him, but he had nothing to do with improving the lot of part-time instructors at SSU. That would have put him at odds with those who control Portsmouth and dominated the Board of Trustees of SSU. Ohio law prohibits part-time instructors from belonging to unions, and Strickland was not about to challenge that law.

The Chief of Police

Chief Keeps Eye on Concerned Citizens

Mayor Kalb is not the most powerful and corrupt politician in Portsmouth. Charles Horner, the Chief of Police is. When it comes to abuse of authority, no one in Danngate can compare with Horner. Any mayor who thinks he is higher on the political totem pole than Horner soon learns otherwise. Former mayor Bauer was widely reported to be planning to fire Horner once Bauer won reelection. But Bauer never made it to election day because he was recalled from office. Bauer was recalled from office in part because Chief Horner publicly accused him of criminal behavior, first in connection with the sale of city property located on Route 23 and then in connection with the purchase by the city of the Marting building. Mayor Bauer was not indicted for either of the crimes Horner accused him of. When Bauer was recalled, Horner had what he wanted, which was not so much an indictment of Bauer as job security.

Horner is much better at politicking than he is at stopping drug trafficking, for which Strickland Country is notorious. Horner’s own son was dealing drugs in the Ramada Inn, directly across the street from the Police Station. A one-stop chop shop and Oxycontin operation was going full blast a quarter of a mile from the Portsmouth Police Station, but Horner was among the last to know about it. Horner is also much better at harassing community activists than he is at stopping drug trafficking. He has publicly labeled as “domestic terrorists” concerned citizens, many of them senior citizens, who dare to criticize and recall elected officials. He serves as a bouncer at city council meetings, always prepared to eject any citizen who criticizes a public official by name. He videotapes citizens who attend council meetings and speak to the council from the podium. When asked in a public records request to make those tapes available, he claimed he was not bound to because the camera is his personal property. That may be his way of evading public records requests. If the chief law enforcement in Ohio qualifies for impeachment, what does this chief of police in Strickland Country qualify for?

In my previous blog, “Fart-Free Portsmouth,” I pointed out that Horner’s control has reached the tyrannical point where he won’t tolerate farting in council chambers, even by someone recovering from colon surgery. When the farter complained in an email to the Attorney General’s office about Horner’s threats, he got a reply that contains the following paragraph: “To have your concern appropriately addressed, I recommend you contact the mayor of the area. It is important to note that Ohio is a home rule state; meaning no state-elected official has the authority to oversee the day-to-day operations of a local elected official (i.e. mayor). Therefore, the mayor has the authority to address issues within the police department.” But what if the mayor is in cahoots with the chief and defies the principles of self-government? What we would hope is not that state authorities would “oversee the day-to-day operations of a local official,” but that outrageous acts of a local officials or systemic local tyranny would not be beyond the jurisdiction of the state.

First Ward Councilman

Mearan and stenographer at work

I have saved the worst for last. Michael Mearan is a lawyer and the councilman for Portsmouth’s First Ward. He was not elected to city council; he was appointed after I successfully challenged the elected First Ward councilman’s residency requirement for the office. Mearan has lived in Portsmouth for many years, but he has never run for public office and for good reason: he is one of the most notorious characters in Portsmouth, long rumored to have criminal ties, linked specifically to drugs and prostitution. With his sordid reputation, he could not have been elected to office, even in a city whose ethical standards are lower than President Bush’s approval ratings. Mearan was no sooner appointed to the city council than the mayor appointed him chair of the Advisory Building Committee, a committee whose mission was to find a suitable site for a new city hall, or municipal building, as it is called in Portsmouth.

Mearan’s appointment to chair the Building Committee involved him in a clear conflict of interest, because he was the lawyer for Dr. Herbert Singer, the absentee Los Angeles landlord of the so-called Adelphia property, on Washington St. In Portsmouth’s chronically depressed real estate market, Singer’s property was worthless. The property had been on the market for years, and Singer was behind in paying his taxes on it. Prior to being appointed to city council, Mearan had appeared before that body to offer Singer’s property as a gift to the city, provided the city used the property for some public purpose, such as the site for a police station or city hall. Mearan admitted in offering the building to the city that his client’s aim was to qualify for a tax break from the IRS. Mearan continued to represent Singer even after Kalb appointed Mearan chair of the building committee that was to consider sites for new city buildings. To no one’s surprise, Singer’s property was chosen by the ABC as the site for a complex of city buildings. An interesting footnote to this story is that Mearan was the one who originally sold the Washington St. property to Singer, making a profit of $90,000 after owning it himself for only about nine months.

Rumors about Mearan’s links to drugs and prostitution were reactivated when he chose as stenographer to the Advisory Building Committee a young woman who was not long afterwards arrested for transferring Oxycontin from Columbus to Portsmouth in a vehicle Mearan had rented for her. Mearan claimed he was led to believe she needed the vehicle to visit her sick mother. The young woman was living at the time in an apartment of the Portsmouth Municipal Housing Authority, where Mearan is on the Board of Commissioners. Mearan was known to visit the building in which she lived and was photographed with her at the Scioto County Fair. In addition to being a possible drug runner, the young woman was not so much a trophy wife as a trophy stenographer, being much younger, slimmer, and more attractive than Mearan himself. She was subsequently arrested for purse snatching and admitted to authorities that she was a drug addict, something Mearan, we are supposed to believe, was unaware of. There is no evidence Chief Horner or a reporter with the Daily Times ever investigated Mearan’s relationship with the young woman. Chief Horner’s preoccupation is with “domestic terrorists” of the geriatric variety. Jessica Utovich’s sleep-overs at Dann’s condo led to her resignation and fueled the fires that were being lit under Dann. But meanwhile, in Strickland Country, mountains appear to be mole hills, and lawyers get away, figuratively at least, with murder. It is as if the governor sees Strickland Country "through a glass darkly" rather than clearly, face to face.