The Needle and the Lobbyist
Good news has a short shelf life in Ohio politics.
Yesterday, Governor Mike DeWine uncharacteristically announced weeks in advance that all Ohioans 16+ would be eligible for the coronavirus vaccine on March 29th.
The news sent shockwaves through the state, and rightfully so, as for once we would have a start date towards the mass vaccinations that would be required to end the pandemic that has ravaged the world and killed nearly 18,000 Ohioans in the last 15 months.
It turned out to be fortuitous timing for Governor DeWine as an hour later Laura Bischoff of Dayton Daily News reported disgraced lobbyist Neil Clark, to whom the connections to DeWine run deep, was found dead by a bicyclist near a retention pond in Florida, where he spent his spare time while not fucking over regular people in Ohio.
Police recovered a handgun from the scene.
A lot of Americans think term limits on politicians are a good thing, and a lot of Americans are dead wrong on the issue. For evidence of what a bad idea term limits are, we have to look no further than how they empower sewer creatures like Clark.
Clark left the halls of power in 1984 as a “budget whiz kid Senate staffer” to start State Street Consultants with Paul Tipps, the former Ohio Democratic Chairman who ran the party when it last controlled all statewide offices. (It was grim foreshadowing for what would happen to the ODP in that Tipps wanted to team-up with Clark, but the two would later have a falling out as Republicans consolidated their power in the state.)
The duo dissolved their firm after a protracted court battle in 2008.
From Dave Ghose of columbusmonthly.com in 2014:
Indeed, Clark isn’t going away. Friends call him the ultimate survivor. He overcame poverty and a reading disability to rise to the top of the Ohio political world. Heck, a broken neck couldn’t stop him in his tracks, so why should a lawsuit and some embarrassing headlines? “If you are looking at this thing and saying, ‘Gosh, he’s down and almost out,’ I think you are underestimating Neil’s tenacity,” says James, the political consultant. “Neil is a fighter. He’s not going to give up. And for those folks who are trying to go out and take his clients away, there is one guy who keeps a pretty long list and has a long memory, and that guy is one tough son of a bitch.”
What some would credit to tenacity and others would credit to unrepentant greed, Clark struck out on his own a year later and founded his own firm, Grant Street Consultants, shortly thereafter. He would not stay away from the action for long.
Clark told Hidden Talent in a 2013 video about his hobby of making mosaic art that, “A lot of people in town think my reputation is of high intensity and ‘take no prisoners.’” This is the politically correct way of saying, “A lot of people in town think I’m an asshole.”
But hey, Clark didn’t build a multimillion dollar lobbying firm by looking for other people’s approval. The corporations lining his pockets did not care about his methods, only his results.
Have you ever wondered why Ohio has never legalized weed or sports betting? Clark helped defeat a statewide initiative of the former in 2015 and played a big role in stalling efforts of the latter when he and Larry Householder tried to direct sports betting into the coffers of the Ohio Lottery Commission with HB-194, a 141-page bill that also included a clause requiring Ohio to purchase 2,500 self-service kiosks within six months of its passage from Intralot, which holds the technology contract with the Lottery Commission, and which is represented by — you guessed it! — Clark himself.
When you are playing Kingmaker in returning a disgraced former Ohio House Speaker like Larry Householder to the Lincoln Chair, it’s easy to think you can get away with doing crime in broad daylight for the rest of your life.
And he would have, if it wasn’t for the meddling FBI, which wiretapped Clark’s phone hours after Householder stormed back to power. Clark was already the public face of two other federal investigations into the payday loan industry and the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, so he had a reason to suspect the FBI would be poking around his firm.
Did this make him any more cautious? Absolutely not.
From Andrew J. Tobias of cleveland.com in October 2020:
“When they came to my office, the plan they had was really weak. They didn’t have schematics. They couldn’t describe the size of the hotel,” he said.
After a meeting with the developers, Clark said he told a partner in his office he suspected the prospective clients could be associated with the FBI. That partner declined to comment, although, Sam Moore, Clark’s driver, in an interview said he recalled overhearing the conversation.
Despite the lack of details, Clark said the references the developers provided seemed legitimate, and Clark ended up taking them on as a client, getting paid $5,000 a month.
Clark’s career of fucking over the public came to an end last summer, when the FBI indicted him and his protégés like Juan Cespedes and Jeffrey Longstreth, along with former House Speaker Larry Householder, in a RICO scheme that state authorities say is the largest bribery scandal in state history. Cespedes and Longstreth have already plead guilty.
Clark had told reporters that he had written a tell-all book which would “help set the record straight” that was currently being shopped to publishers. If that book ever sees the light of day, it would be an intriguing read albeit one with an unreliable narrator looking to paint himself in the best possible light.
If I had to wager, Clark died by suicide rather than face the consequences for his long career of misdeeds. His arrogance knew no bounds. He ridiculously claimed he didn’t even know his participation in the HB-6 scandal would amount to a crime, as if federal investigators wouldn’t have a handful of other scandals that we know about to go after him on.
His former partner once sued him, alleging he had swindled money to support an “extravagant lifestyle,” so it must have been hard to see that stripped away from him so close to the finish line of life. At least this way he went out on his own terms, which is all he ever lived by, in a way that his wife wouldn’t be the one to find him. He could also go out as “not guilty,” which his lawyer was quick to note.
His third wife, a former employee of Grant Street Consulting, told the Naples Daily News, that the two were having financial problems, which is unsurprising considering RICO charges have a way of turning off the lobbyist money spigot when prominent companies flee your service.
Clark’s death could be more nefarious than that. Clark knew where the bodies were buried in Ohio because he spent decades doing the burying for prominent people, the kind of people that would be willing to bump off some old man in the Florida wilderness to keep their secrets from ever appearing in court documents or a tell-all book. Anything is possible in Ohio and Florida, after all.
But one thing is for certain, the coronavirus vaccine announcement helped Governor DeWine keep Clark’s death from becoming the headline of the day’s news cycle. As of this writing, vaccine enrollment expansion is currently the No. 1 story on the front page of the four biggest newspapers in the state.
DeWine certainly won’t mind that after Laura Bischoff of The Dayton Daily News reported last week that FirstEnergy, the main corporate beneficiary of HB-6, funneled $1,000,000 to pro-DeWine ventures, even going as far as spending $175,500 in a failed attempt to get his daughter, Alice, elected as Greene County Prosecutor.
Three days ago, Mark Gillispie and Julie Carr Smyth of the Associated Press reported that calendars obtained through a public records request show that DeWine, Householder and then-Public Utilities Commissioner of Ohio Sam Randazzo met at the governor’s mansion in April 2019 for an “energy discussion.”
The timing is significant because it occurred two weeks after DeWine had hand-picked Randazzo to oversee the regulation of an industry from which he had taken a $4.5 million bribe before being appointed.
When the FBI raided Randazzo’s house in German Village last November, DeWine hilariously said there was no reason to suspect he was under federal investigation. Randazzo has since resigned while FirstEnergy admitted in court filings that a $4.5 million payment to Randazzo “may have been for purposes other than those represented.”
Perhaps the feds didn’t enlighten DeWine because they remember when DeWine, then the Attorney General of Ohio, tipped off former House Speaker Cliff Rosenberger back in 2018 about an FBI investigation into his corruption with the payday loan industry.
Rosenberger should resign shortly thereafter. That investigation is still ongoing, though the FBI alleged in a warrant to search Rosenberger’s house that it related to extortion and bribery.
We are living through a golden age of white collar crime, which is added on top of things like historic wealth inequality, lack of universal healthcare, the pandemic and two Great Recessions. “These uncertain times,” indeed.
But this is what one-party rule has wrought on Ohio. None of these guys tried very hard to hide their corruption because they had been getting away with it for years. Hell, guys like Juan Cespedes were running scams as far back as his days in Student Government at Ohio State. This is who they are. It’s in their blood.
Part of the problem is the Ohio Republican Party can’t police their own. They all have their hand in the till in some way, which is why guys like Householder are allowed to retain their positions in the House despite being federally indicted. State Rep. Tom Brinkman said yesterday that removing Householder from office would be engaging in cancel culture.
No point in angering that guy before the Sword of Damocles falls on his head and he’s forced to spill the beans to federal investigators in a bid to negotiate what type of lunch he eats every Tuesday in the penitentiary.
The other problem with the brazen corruption is you sound insane explaining it to anyone who doesn’t routinely follow state politics. Who has time to pay attention to the Neil Clarks and Jeff Longstreths of the world when you come home from your job in which you’re underpaid and overworked? Of course politicians and powerful corporations are fucking us over. What are we going to do about it other than get mad and say mean things about them on the internet? Cool story, nerd.
So, we’re in a position where the FBI and federal prosecutors are our only hope in a system where the rich and powerful rarely, if ever face any consequences for their crimes. It’s pretty clear to anyone even remotely paying attention that the FirstEnergy scandal goes all the way to the governor’s office. But will we ever seen Orville Redenbacher frog-marched to prison?
I’m not holding my breath.
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