Just because it's normal, doesn't make it legal

It's a hard lesson that former Ohio Democratic Party starboy P.G. Sittenfeld should learn on Tuesday.

For the uninitiated, I grew up in Marion, Ohio.

“The City of Kings,” as locals call it, lies about 44 miles north of Columbus as the crow flies. It’s the typical mid-sized Ohio town that never envisioned what a post-industrialized America might mean for its future.

Thankfully, as a youth in the late 1990s and early Aughts, high-speed internet hadn’t exploded in the form of smartphones. Facebook and other social media didn’t exist, either.

But there wasn’t much constructive to do as a teenager in Marion after sports. Like many American youth, My friends and I began experimenting with alcohol and drugs around 16.

Longtime followers know how that story ended for me: As the type of alcoholic who knew the other alcoholics and their orders as we waited for the Kroger liquor store on Parson’s Avenue to open so we could shuffle in and cure our hangovers with cancer juice.

I got off that road to destruction in August 2022. Eight months later, I kicked my 20-year addiction to military-grade marijuana, which had been my secret to staying off the sauce

No Marionaire friend ever put a gun to my head and forced booze down my throat. Just like not every Marionaire friend developed a two-pint-a-day habit of Tito’s Handmade Vodka.

But looking back, there were plenty of incidents where the Good Lord tried to tell me to put down the bottle. Incidents that I laughed off with my friends.

I now realize nothing was “normal” about how we abused substances. But none of us knew that as we continued to feed off each other. It’s somewhat remarkable that more of us didn’t end up dead.

But that’s the power of culture. The consequences can be a slow boil. Until one day, you look in the mirror and wonder how you got to that point in the first place.

Drinking was fun for me, right until it wasn’t.

Like disgraced former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, former Cincinnati council president P.G. Sittenfeld failed to defend themselves from a bribery conviction with the novel legal defense of “that’s how Ohio politics works, baby!”

They’re right, of course. Ohio politics is transactional, and that’s an ethos that trickles down from State Senate President Matt Huffman (R-Lima) to any of the Democratic machines that control Ohio’s big cities.

There is nobody who embodies the latter half of that equation more than Sittenfeld, who would be the mayor of Cincinnati right now if the meddling FBI hadn’t intervened in his lifelong plan of political ambition after failing to pinch the investigation’s original target: then-mayor John Cranley.

During the trial, former Cincinnati Bengals safety Chinedum “Nedu” Ndukwe detailed how he funneled illegal money to Sittenfeld and Cranley before introducing Sittenfeld to two FBI agents who tried their hardest to blow the case.

As I wrote about Sittenfeld’s hilariously predictable downfall in June 2022:

Ndukwe, who made $27,000 by working with the FBI, then introduced Sittenfeld two undercover FBI agents posing as real estate developers named Rob and Dave. One agent testified they got to shop at “the FBI store” for their roles, which likely means they were rolling around in cars and clothes seized from interstate cocaine traffickers and the like.

Their ostentatiousness should have been enough to blow the entire operation, because, as Sittenfeld’s inner circle realized, the rich people they knew didn’t flaunt their wealth like some yahoo who just won the Mega Millions. It’s not like they were raising concerns because they were devout public servants, either.

One member was Jay Kincaid, the former chief of staff of former Mayor Cranley who coincidentally left his role in government to lobby on behalf of the developers with business in front of the city. He said the behavior of Rob and Dave was “peculiar,” which, again, he would know.

Again, the feds were so wild with their act that they put off John Cranley’s dark money wizard. And yet Sittenfeld was too horny to do anything other than ignore the warning and run right into their handcuffs.

It’s a wild case even by the fabulously corrupt historical standards of Cincinnati,

Unfortunately for Sittenfeld, a jury of his peers saw through Sittenfeld’s sob story. They convicted him of bribery and attempted extortion despite letting him off on four other counts.

Sittenfeld is set to be sentenced on Tuesday, Oct. 8th (tomorrow).

From Kevin Grasha and Sharon Coolidge of enquirer.com on Sept. 27th:

His actions "were part of a broader strategy to use his position of power within local government and his prospects for higher office to extract financial contributions out of individuals who regularly conducted city business," prosecutors said. "In doing so, Sittenfeld made clear that his support for their city business was tied directly to their contributions to him. This is not faithful public service or even 'politics as usual' − this is corruption."

Sittenfeld's attorneys, however, asked for a sentence of probation, with 2,000 hours of community service and/or home confinement for one year.

Sittenfeld's life, they said in a 61-page sentencing memorandum, "has been devoted to helping others and public service." They called the crimes he was charged with a "single aberrant act."

Sittenfeld’s lawyers are paid good money to present him in the best possible light. But Sittenfeld was only devoted to helping other people in a way that also helped himself. It’s like pretending a mob boss was handing out turkeys to poor people on Thanksgiving out of the kindness of his heart.

Sittenfeld had every advantage in life. He attended Seven Hills School, an elite private school in Cincinnati.

He graduated from Princeton, earned something called a Master of Studies at Oxford, and also a Master of Arts from the City University of London for good measure.

He was the youngest person ever elected to the Cincinnati council at 27-years-old, which is something that doesn’t happen by coincidence.

And that wasn’t good enough for him! He could have been the catalyst to change decades of political corruption in Cincinnati, and instead he used it to climb the political ladder.

Like Householder, it’s not like he just woke up one day and decided to do a crime. He had gotten away with so much dirt in his life that extorting two shady real estate developers seemed like another day at the office to him.

Sitten would say that’s how “things get done” in Cincinnati, which again is fine and true, but that doesn’t make it any more legal than when my friends and I used to joke about driving drunk. Just because we never killed anybody doesn’t make it any less reprehensible.

Somehow, Sittenfeld understood these principles when confronted with Trump:

It’s the perfect example of why so many Americans have become disillusioned with politics that they feel Democrats and Republicans are two sides of the same corrupt side. It also shows why voters need to look at candidates beyond what letter they have in parenthesis next to their name.

Corruption is a bipartisan trait, especially in Ohio!

I have infinitely more compassion for the drug addict who knocked over a corner store for $60 to get their next fix than I do for the white-collar crimes of Sittenfeld.

One crime is explained by material conditions and addiction.

The other is only explained through pure greed, which is even more pathetic when you come from a family that has money to send their kid to an elite private high school, Princeton, and prestigious international universities.

Politicians are always quick to raise the punishment for crimes—as if stoning every convicted murderer to death would stop people from murdering. It’s a quick way for them to pretend they care about an issue without having any policy ideas to solve the problem,

Well, let those standards exist for Sittenfeld, who would have taken his corruption all the way to Householder levels if Democratic voters would have kept rewarding him.

It’s not like he ever advocated for reducing America’s carceral state when he had some power to do so.

According to one odious area Republican operative, there will be at least 200 people planning to cheer the police convoy taking Sittenfeld to Butler County Jail, his first stop in the matriculation to federal prison:

Weird they didn’t have the same energy for Larry Householder, but I digress!

I normally wouldn’t promote an operation like this, but the game changes when it’s a case of public corruption. Corrupt politicians turn me into as much as a “law-and-order” freak as any Republican politician talking about a Black civil rights protest that resulted in a broken window in a city of three million people.

A corruption sentence should immediately result in a public holiday for residents in their jurisdiction. They should be cheered on their way to prison as apparently at least 200 Cincinnatians plan to do tomorrow.

If gremlins like Sittenfeld have deluded themselves into thinking their name will echo through the eons, we should do everything in our power to make sure it’s for all the wrong reasons.

Because whether we like it or not, we elect the government we deserve.

THOSE WMDs. The con, the con artist, and me… The D.A.R.E. snitches… Behind the scenes of James Harden and Daryl Morey’s ugly standoff… How Michael Lewis got a backstage pass for the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried… I mistrusted Sam Bankman-Fried after an hour; Michael Lewis had more than a year.