It is a shocking and emblematic photograph that could be of New York City's Boss Tweed, 140 years later: Jimmy Dimora, the most powerful man in Cuyahoga County politics, led away in manacles to FBI headquarters, to federal court, and into infamy. Had a latter-day equivalent of Thomas Nast covering the guy from the beginning, did you?... Oh. You didn't.
But the picture painted by the 177 pages in indictments made public Wednesday against eight suspects -- including Cuyahoga County commissioner Dimora and two county judges -- is even more shocking, alleging what could be one of the biggest local political-machine corruption cases in recent U.S. history.
At least one of the biggest that anybody's done anything about. They're really distressingly common.
This guy wouldn't make page 3 in the Chicago papers ...
It also, for the first time, implicates a second commissioner, Peter Lawson Jones, in the broad pay-for-play scandal that has infected local government and garnered almost three dozen guilty pleas.
Three dozen? Tut tut. Surely you must be mistaken...
Jones is not charged, or named, but as "Public Official 9" he has now entered the alpha-numeric lexicon of those who are accused of trading jobs for bribes and campaign donations.
This is known as "splitting the boodle," or as "divvying the swag." Connections get to "wet their beaks," which is different. That's done daintily and from a distance. The beak wetters don't get indicted.
The focus of the grand jury indictments paints Dimora, the gruff, often crude commissioner, as a high-on-the-hog crook indulging himself in goodies at public expense as the boss of a complex corruption scheme in a county that is home to one of the poorest big cities in America.
But don't worry. They'll keep voting Democrat, year after year. You can't run a machine if there's a chance you'll get voted out of office.
According to the FBI investigation, Dimora, until last year the chairman of the local Democratic party, helped himself to:
- Sex on demand with top-dollar call girls, and with a woman who sought his help to get a job.
- Pricey lunches at fancy restaurants such as Delmonico's Steakhouse.
- A high-flying gambling junket to Las Vegas and more nights of partying at a Stonebridge condominium overlooking Cleveland's Flats.
- A four-figure discount on a Rolex watch.
- Free or deeply-discounted improvements to his $438,000 home, which the indictments seek to seize in forfeiture actions against Dimora and other defendants.
A union man? That's never happened before, has it?
Rybak wanted the county to hire a union worker. He reminded Dimora of the ice machine he had installed at the commissioner's home and then asked what else he needed.
There's more, of course. And I'm shocked, shocked that something like this would go on in the formerly great American metropolitan area that produced Dennis Kucinich.
