The Political Whore

Credit: Arlen Redekop, Vancouver Province

1. Craig Pittman of the Times details how Tampa Bay Water was too inexperienced and rushed its massive public works projects, notably the cracked-and-expensive-to-repair CW Bill Young Reservoir. Public officials such as Ed Turanchik lauded its construction at the time, Pittman writes, but put an inexperienced 29-year-old in charge of managing the project and hired an engineering firm that had never built such a large reservoir.

2. Florida’s funniest newspaper columnist-turned-novelist Carl Hiaasen blasts Charlie Crist’s growing turn to political whoredom: “Unlike Sarah Palin, Charlie Crist has chosen not to quit his governorship early. Florida’s own one-term wonder is using his remaining time to ingratiate himself with as many deep-pocket interest groups as possible. The governor’s unseemly burst of groveling is directly connected to his upcoming run for the U.S. Senate. Sucking up to the National Rifle Association and the Christian right, Crist last week declared his opposition to the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, whose confirmation is already a done deal.”

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If you’re former Ill. Gov. Rod Blagojevich, you’re going to Disney World. Or at least that is where Blago and family were reported to be in Orlando when his indictment was announced in Chicago.

From the NYT:

Rod R. Blagojevich, this state’s ousted governor, was charged on Thursday with 16 felony counts, among them racketeering conspiracy, wire fraud and extortion conspiracy in a wide-ranging scheme to deprive residents of “honest government,” prosecutors said, including trying to leverage his authority to pick someone to fill President Obama’s former Senate seat.

Five of his closest advisers, including his brother, Robert, a top fundraiser, and two former chiefs of staff, were also charged in the 19-count indictment.

Prosecutors said Mr. Blagojevich used numerous elements of his state work – including appointing people to state boards, investing state money and signing legislation – as a way to seek money, campaign contributions and jobs for himself and others.

One of those indicted with Blago was his brother, Robert, a distinguished alum of the University of Tampa and a commencement speaker in recent years. Here’s my story on the Blago-Tampa connection from earlier this year.

From Bay News 9:

Trouble does not seem to be going away for former Hillsborough elections chief Buddy Johnson.

The FBI is already digging around the finances during his time in office. Now his personal real estate dealings are gaining scrutiny.

Johnson is facing a lawsuit filed by a retired couple accusing him of swindling them in a land deal completed in 2007. But now, according to Bay News 9’s partner newspaper the St. Petersburg Times, federal agents are investigating the deal.

A Plant City property appraiser who looked at the land deal confirms the FBI contacted him this month.

Call it political envy. Call it racism. Call it stereotyping. Call it the truth.

No matter what angle you take on the latest allegations against Hillsborough County Commission Kevin White — that he accepted thousands of dollars in campaign contributions with the promise that he would vote for land deals for the swindler who arranged them — you have to acknowledge that rumors of White’s darker side of politics have swirled for years. Maybe it was the expensive suits he wore. Or the sexual harassment complaint he faces. Or his ties to the late GOP power broker Ralph Hughes.

Giving White more than the benefit of the doubt and putting rumors aside as rumors, however, this is a very tough bit of bad PR for him to defend against. A convicted swindler, Matthew Cox, agrees to cooperate with the feds to get a break on his sentence and gives up White. He says he funneled lots of money to White (not illegal) and later reimbursed some of the straw contributors out of his own money (possibly without White’s knowledge and, as the Kuhn case illustrates, probably not even illegal). Cox was on the lam on federal charges before he could ever put a zoning case in front of White, so there was no quid pro quo that can be proven. Cox certainly didn’t wear a wire at that time.

The only issue raised in the story that could end up in legal troubles for White is the allegation that Cox gave him $7,000 in cash after one election. How do you prove that happened? Cash?? Unless White were dumb enough (allegedly) to accept the money and put it into his personal checking account.

White is reckless about his fundraising. He provided the lead to my “Money Men” investigation about local power brokers when, while giving me an interview for a campaign story, we were interrupted by an associate of Tampa lawyer and lobbyist Steve Anderson, who handed White an envelope bearing a check from one of Anderson’s corporate clients. There aren’t too many politicians out there who will knowingly schedule the delivery of a campaign check from a lobbyist at the same time and place they are giving a media interview. At best, it’s chutzpah. At worst, stupidity.

If Kevin White is dirty, he should go to jail. And God knows there is enough smoke out there to believe that there must be a fire. But if (and it’s a big if) he is innocent of crimes, he is certainly guilty of taking money from just about anybody out there with a greasy reputation and an agenda to pursue that isn’t always in the public interest. For a former cop, White certainly has no radar whatsoever about the motives of the people who are funding his races.

Or, more likely, he just chooses to ignore it.

New York Gov. Elliot Spitzer is only the latest in a long line of politicians undone by their sexual urges (or demons), including many in Tampa Bay. My former political partner Mary Repper once described it to me as a “rich history of lust in politics.” Here’s a partial list of the juiciest stories of the bunch:

• Gary Hart was busted by two enterprising Miami Herald reporters in May 1987 during his presidential primary campaign after the reporters staked out his D.C. apartment and observed Donna Rice leaving one evening. It didn’t help that he had dared the media to put to rest rumors of his marital infidelity by saying, “”Follow me around. I don’t care. I’m serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’ll be very bored.”
  (for the serious journalism junkies out there, here is in the inside account by the Herald of how it got the story, in part 1 and part 2.)
• Circuit Judge Gasper Ficarrotta sees his judicial career in Tampa come to an end after it is discovered that he was having an ongoing affair with one of his bailiffs — in his own chambers. They broke up and bailiff Tara Pisano (at the urging of her attorney) wrote a journal about the affair, which later become public during a courthouse corruption probe: “He used his office like it was his private apartment. He had a couch, a blanket, another blanket that folded into a pillow, two small pillows, a radio boom box, many candles, a TV/VCR combo, a microwave, a small refrigerator, a coffee maker, eating utensils, snacks, cold drinks, beer, wine, piña colada, margarita mix, all the comforts of a home. He wanted to have sex on his couch, in the dark, in the light, with candles burning, in his desk chair, in his hearing room, in his closet, on the floor, sitting, standing…. The sexual encounters in his judicial office were countless.”
• Pinellas Circuit Judge Charles Cope was busted in California in 2001, trying to break into a hotel room to hook up with a woman he met while at a judicial conference. The details of his two days of public intoxication and damned-near stalking of the woman and her mother can be found in the Supreme Court of Florida’s condemnation of his actions (download .pdf here.)

Bill Clinton. Wilbur Mills. Jim McGreevey. Larry Craig. Mark Foley. There’s so many more that even the unlimited space of the Internet prohibits listing them all.

Who’s your favorite? And is wanting sex really so bad, or is it the way they wanted sex?