Great Moments in Columbus Corruption: Career Crook Avoids Prison
There is perhaps nobody dirtier in Columbus politics than a guy who looks the part.
What infuriates me most about Columbus mayor Andy Ginther, other than him living in the suburbs and sending his kids to private school, is the man is not even interesting in his naked corruption.
There was no better example of Ginther’s duplicity than when, as the president of City Council, he got caught taking bribes from a red-light-camera company from an industry so revolting the famously reactionary Ohio Supreme Court booted them into the unemployment lines.
A quick refresher from Lucas Sullivan back in 2015 on the pages of dispatch.com:
Since then, two former red-light-camera company officials and Ginther’s close friend and lobbyist John Raphael have pleaded guilty for their roles in a bribery scandal that the U.S. Department of Justice said also involves several Columbus elected officials.
Federal prosecutors implicated Ginther in court records, saying he had received $20,000 that went from Redflex to Raphael to the Ohio Democratic Party and then to the city council president’s campaign account.
Ginther is also one of three council members that the Ohio Ethics Commission is investigating after they attended the Big Ten championship football game with Raphael in December.
Ginther has said he did nothing wrong in either case and he has not been charged with any crime or violation.
Fun fact: Current City Council member Elizabeth Brown was the Finance Director of the Ohio Democratic Party when that money got funneled through the state party and into Ginther’s coffers. (Hard to believe these freaks have lost almost every statewide election in my lifetime.)
Ginther got away with claiming he did nothing wrong because he knew that Raphael would not flip on him, which was the only way the feds would be able to pinch him thanks to Ohio’s ridiculously lax campaign finance laws. You gotta wonder what price Raphael extracted from Ginther for that silence since prid quo pro is the only language hobgoblins understand.
Of course Ginther’s arrogance propelled him to run for mayor, and the property value voters of Columbus co-signed his promotion at the first opportunity. Unfortunately that means the corruption case is settled and Mayor Suburbs can go out in public without being bullied back into the sewer from which he came.
It turns out, however, that Raphael didn’t just wake up one day and decide to commit a felony with a city council president. Before that, he was defrauding taxpayers while serving on the Franklin County Convention Facilities Authority.
He found himself in front of a judge last week, and I’m sorry if you came here hoping to read about a career crook getting sentenced to federal prison where he would most likely die.
From Bill Bush of dispatch.com:
Deviating severely from federal sentencing guidelines, a federal judge Thursday gave two-time convicted public corruption figure John Raphael — once an influential Columbus City Hall lobbyist — no prison time in a bribery case.
Raphael could have faced up to 20 years in prison for his guilty plea in February to federal corruption charges for essentially taking bribes to help a national food services company win a public food-service contract from the Franklin County Convention Facilities Authority, on whose board he served at the time.
But U.S. District Judge Michael H. Watson, who acknowledged that he grew up in the same neighborhood as the defendant and knew members of his family, sentenced Raphael to one day of prison, waived in advance, and placed him on three years of probation.
The United States penal system is an abomination, and the worst part is the biggest crooks among us never have to be visited by its horrors because some George W. Bush-appointed reptile who wears robes to work grew up in the same neighborhood of the defendant and knows members of his family. I guess it’s a good thing Raphael wasn’t a poor black man from the other side of town who stood accused of robbing a convenient store for $43 with an airsoft gun, because he most likely would have received the business end of that 20-year sentence.
Meanwhile, the beat goes on in Columbus. The corruption will never stop because there have never been any consequences for anyone involved other than that time former Columbus mayor Michael Coleman got outed for banging a Chinese spy in his car like some horny teenager.
If you listen closely at night, you can hear them clinking chardonnay glasses and laughing at us from their manses. Can’t say I blame them at this point. It’s only a crime if you get caught. And if you’re rich, white and politically connected, sometimes not even then.
THOSE WMDs. How to make the building trades work for women… White colleges owe black colleges… Ian Freeman, facing prison in Bitcoin case, regrets nothing… Zoom dysmorphia is following us into the real world… If something’s out of your control, should you still worry about it?