Upfront

UPFRONT UPFRONT

HERE ARE ALL THE FILTHY RICH CLEVELANDERS GOING TO DEE AND JIMMY HASLAM’S HOUSE TO DONATE $25,000 TO J.D. VANCE

Jimmy Haslan, J.D. Vance booster.

ERIK DROST

YOU’VE HEARD OF DEE AND

Jimmy Haslam, surely.

The Browns owners?

Last seen vouching for the integrity and solemn remorsefulness of quarterback DeShaun Watson and lavishing upon him the largest contract in NFL history, shortly before Watson was suspended for 11 games for serial sexual misconduct with massage therapists.

Also seen accompanying their Tennessee charter-school buddy Jamie Woodson to a meeting with Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb. (If the Haslams can so easily exploit their political influence to reshape a Great Lakes lakefront with their private profit in mind, why not reshape a region’s education system for profit, too?)

And then of course seen at the Athletic Club of Columbus, cohosting a fundraiser for Republican U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance, America’s “most famous living hillbilly.” (See this week’s cover story for more detail.)

The Haslams are trying their damnedest to get Vance elected, never mind that he is regarded by Republican strategists as one of the worst candidates in living memory. One high-dollar event simply would not do the trick. A candidate this bad needs endless reserves of cash from his wealthy donors to finance his advertising and public relations efforts. The Haslams recognize that despite Democrat Tim Ryan’s appeals to the political center, big money and Donald Trump’s endorsement could be all the bearded bozo needs to succeed Rob Portman in Ohio.

And so the Haslams are inviting all their richest Cleveland friends to their house in Bratenahl on Oct. 12 for a big-ticket Vance event. (It is these executives and their cohort, not the mythic Appalachian working class, that represents Vance’s true constituency.)

Cleveland.com’s Andrew Tobias reported that all listed event chairs have committed to a $25,000 gift. Many of them are highly respected luminaries in the Cleveland business community. Here’s who they are:

MONTE & USHA AHUJA:

Monte Ahuja, big shot businessman, founder of Transtar Industries, global distributor of transmission parts. CSU’s School of Business and UH’s Beachwood Medical Center are named after him. Now a hobbyist golf course owner.

ART & CAROL ANTON: Art Anton, former president and CEO of Swagelok.

TERRY COYNE: Commercial real estate broker with his own goddang commercial.

ED & MARY CRAWFORD: Ed

Crawford, supposed “icon” of the Cleveland business community, former president and CEO of Park Ohio Holdings and Trump-appointed ambassador to Ireland. Famous victim of LeBron James. (Crawford say courtside during the 2018 playoffs in a MAGA hat, and LeBron refused to toss him his towel.)

MATT & DEBORAH

CRAWFORD: Matt is Ed’s son and the current chairman and CEO of Park Ohio.

FRED DiSANTO: Chairman and CEO of Ancora, a wealth management firm. Beloved banker of the GCP set.

UMBERTO & MARY ELLEN

FEDELI: Umberto is the uber rich insurance magnate, President and CEO of the Fedeli Group. Also a wildcat private investor and host of the famous Fat Cat Fundraiser for Frank Jackson at his palatial multiplot property in Gates Mills in 2017.

MIKE GIBBONS: Local bigmoney finance guy. Entrepreneur and investor. Most recently U.S. Senate Candidate who lost to Vance.

DAVID & REBECCA HELLER: David is the president, CEO and founder of the NRP Group, a development firm, and outgoing chairman of the Jewish Federation of Cleveland.

LORIE & NICK HOWLEY:

Nick Howley is the chairman of the aerospace parts manufacturer TransDigm, known in recent years for its recurring funny business with U.S. government contracts. He remains the most extravagantly compensated executive in Northeast Ohio by a wide margin, earning more than $60 million last year in total compensation.

DAVID JENKINS: Browns Chief Operating Officer.

BILL LENNON: Founder and CEO of Lokring Technologies, active Republican Party donor.

RON LEONHARDT: Founder and CEO of CrossCountry Mortgage, (a Browns partner.)

JAY LUCARELLI: Owner and CEO of MinuteMen Staffing and member of Cleveland’s Business Hall of Fame.

BERNIE & BRIDGET MORENO:

Bernie used to sell cars, still loves blockchain. Also hilariously ran for U.S. Senate.

JON PINNEY: Managing Partner of Kohrman Jackson & Krantz law firm. Famously delivered the 2018 speech at the City Club trashing the region’s economic development ecosystem, a speech that paved the way for such glistening local efforts as Blockland and Cleveland Rising.

FRANK SINITO: Founder and CEO of the Millennia Companies, developers and property managers that own Key Tower, among others.

KEVIN & KRISTEN STEIN:

Kevin is the current President and CEO of TransDigm, though still compensated vastly less than his chairman Nick Howley.

FRANK SULLIVAN: Chairman and CEO of RPM International, brother of Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan.

JANE & TIM TIMKEN: Jane is the former chair of the Ohio Republican Party and another U.S. Senate Candidate who lost to Vance.

RON WEINBERG: Director and Principal of the Weinberg Capital Group, big Cleveland Clinic donor.

JIM & DEBBIE WERT: Jim is the chairman of CM Wealth Advisors.

-Sam Allard DAVID & REBECCA HELLER:

Both Cuyahoga County Executive Candidates Strenuously Oppose New Jail Project

Both candidates for Cuyahoga County Executive, Democrat Chris Ronayne and Republican Lee Weingart, sent strongly worded letters to Cuyahoga County Council last week urging them to heed public opinion and pump the brakes on the county jail project.

That project, if you hadn’t heard, is now estimated to cost in the neighborhood of $750 million, (which corresponds to a taxpayer bill of roughly $2 billion, with interest included). Council proposes financing the project with county bonds and repaying them with proceeds from a quarter-percent sales tax. That tax is currently set to expire in 2027 — it was originally used for the Huntington Convention Center complex and now funds a portion of the Q Deal — but council wants to extend it for an additional 40 years. (Extending a sunsetting tax by 40 years, instead of extending it indefinitely, is this clown council’s version of responsible government.)

The Justice Center Steering Committee, an ad hoc advisory body, met Tuesday morning to vote on whether to approve the jail site council prefers, a former Standard Oil refinery at 2700 Transport Road. Council has made it abundantly clear that they intend to purchase that land for an inflated value of $20 million and begin building the jail as soon as possible.

They have been advised by consultant Jeff Applebaum that the project’s skyrocketing costs, which recently ballooned from $550 million, will only get higher the longer they wait.

But both Ronayne and Weingart are opposed. They have suggested that they’d change course if elected and are now echoing the majority of public commenters as they urge the council to see reason.

Ronanye correctly noted in his letter that the project would be among the costliest, if not the costliest, in the county’s history. He asked that the council not enter a purchase agreement for the site at Transport Road in October, citing the high cost of remediation and the county’s liability in future legal action due to the levels of contamination. He said, moreover, that the site was not sufficiently accessible to visitors via public transit and that the size of the jail should be reviewed in concert with increased diversion efforts.

“We owe it to the citizens and taxpayers of Cuyahoga County to get this right,” he wrote.

Weingart opposes the jail as well. In fact he has vocally opposed the high cost of the project since his campaign began. In his letter to council, he said it was “time to go back to the drawing board” on the project and offered a specific alternative that he said he would pursue if elected.

His plan includes renovating the current “Jail II” in the justice center complex and reducing its capacity from 770 to 650. He then wants to build new jail (what he calls Jail III) on the site of the old juvenile detention facility with a capacity of 600-700, putting the total capacity for both jails in the 1,250-1,300 range.

That’s a good deal less than the current 1,750 capacity, but Weingart, like Ronayne, believes that increased efforts should be made to bring down the jail population, including by more fully utilizing the diversion center. Weingart has repeatedly said that the new jail in Franklin County (Columbus) only has a capacity of roughly 1,000 and that Cuyahoga County should not be building a facility to hold 1,900.

“My approach will reduce the outrageous cost of the proposed new jail, protect the health of defendants and jail staff, and ensure public safety without compromising the County’s long-term financial health,” Weingart said.

Cuyahoga County Councilman Mike Gallagher sneered at the candidates in a recent meeting. He accused Ronayne and Weingart of having “opinions without information” on the jail project and advocated “putting blinders on” in order to charge full speed ahead.

-Sam Allard

Spotify.

New Kim Kardashian Podcast, Inspired by Scene’s 2017 Reporting, Examines Ohio’s Wrongful Conviction of Kevin Keith

A long-awaited podcast series on one of Ohio’s most dubious criminal convictions has just hit the airwaves.

The first two episodes of Kim Kardashian’s The System: The Case of Kevin Keith are now available for streaming exclusively on Spotify. This eight-episode series will tell the in-depth story of how Kevin Keith came to be convicted of three murders in Bucyrus, Ohio, in 1994 — and sentenced to death. Implicit in the wrongful conviction narrative is also an examination of what this case means for the integrity of our criminal justice system in the U.S.

While Keith’s death sentence was commuted to life in prison at the eleventh hour in 2010, his story is illustrative of the many frustrating twists and turns a legal case can take even as the defendant at the heart of the matter remains stuck behind bars. New evidence has emerged, alternative explanations have been raised, damning affidavits have been signed, and yet the system does not allow for a reexamination of the case.

Most recently for Keith, Judge Solomon Oliver of the Northern District of Ohio’s federal court in 2021 dismissed his petition for writ of habeas corpus — a 2018 petition for the court to revisit his case in the light of newly obtained, potentially exculpatory evidence.

With little to no action expected from the courts at this point, we turn now to mass media.

Television producer Lori Rothschild Ansaldi first reached out to Scene following our 2017 feature on Keith’s case. She was interested in exploring the case as part of a bigger project.

From there, Ansaldi’s team took on a tremendous amount of investigative work — probing the many strange questions raised by Keith’s conviction and uncovering

Rocky Horror Picture Show

Fri. Oct. 7 Ekoostik Hookah

Fri. Oct. 14 Dark Side of The Moon

Sat. Oct. 15

Hocus Pocus

Sun. Oct. 16 Koslen-Dobeck- Pecchio

Songs & stories from the first 3 Michael Stanley LP’s

Fri. & Sat. Oct 21 & 22 Martin Sexton

Sun. Oct. 23

ALSO COMING IN 2022

Thursday Oct. 27 | Jon McLaughlin with Kris Allen

Sunday Oct. 30 | The Wood Brothers Wednesday Nov. 2 | Sophie B. Hawkins

Thursday Nov. 3 | Tab Benoit Friday Nov. 4 | Tim O’Brien/Jan Fribicius/ Chris Smither

Saturday Nov. 5 | John McCutcheon

Sunday Nov. 6 | John McEuen and The Circle Band

Thursday Nov. 10 | JD Simo & Patrick Sweany

Saturday Nov. 19 | Firefall/Atlanta Rhythm Section

Saturday Nov. 12 | Lucy Kaplansky

Sunday Nov. 20 | Matt Kearny Acoustic Trio Tour AT THE GOODYEAR THEATER

Get tix at goodyeartheater.com or ticketmaster.com

The Sixties Show

A 1960s Musical Re-Creation Sat., Nov. 5 Emerson, Lake & Palmer

Keith & Greg on video screens playing alongside Carl and his band! Don’t miss! Sat., Dec. 3

UPFRONT

powerful new information that will likely come to light in this podcast series. Kardashian’s entrance to the project brought more resources and a level of celebrity support that would elevate Keith’s story to a degree not previously seen in other media channels. As Ansaldi wrote on Instagram yesterday, “Everyone will know your name.”

The series is slick and neatly produced, with courtroom audio and archival news media footage providing a close-up account of what happened in 1994. Interviews with Keith at Marion Correctional Institution, as well as with Ansaldi and Keith’s brother, Charles, round out the present-day narrative. Kardashian is present throughout as host, carefully walking the listener through otherwise complicated legal machinations.

Having her name in the podcast title is not a misnomer; the podcast thus far very much feels like Kardashian’s own foray into criminal justice reportage. Not for nothing, she passed California’s First-Year Law Students’ Examination in December 2021. Here, she introduces a massive audience to Keith himself and addresses the circuitous tale of his conviction as plainspoken narrative.

In this sense, The System appears to be a lens through which Kardashian and her team cast a critical eye on the very process (or lack thereof) of criminal justice in the U.S. This is likely not to be another boilerplate true-crime podcast series. Consider it an indictment against the underlying structure that purports to hold together our conception of “justice” in America. For anyone living in these times of civic duress, the basic plot points will sound distressingly familiar — even as they’re conveying a unique story about a single individual.

“I’m really hopeful with this podcast, just to get your story out there,” Kardashian tells Keith in the first episode, “because I think it’s so important for people to understand that our system is so fucked up.”

She’s not wrong.

New episodes of The System will hit Spotify every Monday. -Eric Sandy

Opinion: Cleveland City Council Must Cancel ShotSpotter

Cleveland neighborhoods, leaving elected officials scrambling for answers. This desire to save lives and end community violence has unfortunately led to desperate attempts to find a solution.

The city recently unveiled plans to spend $2,758,500 of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) money on expanding its partnership with ShotSpotter, a company whose business model is reliant on this desperation. ShotSpotter claims that it is hyper-accurate, reduces gun violence, and increases police efficiency, but research and data show the opposite.

ShotSpotter is paid by the city to place microphones in secret locations (currently in Ward 4), and uses triangulation technology to locate loud, impulsive noises. When ShotSpotter sensors detect a loud noise, a recording is sent to a ShotSpotter technician who determines if it was a gunshot. If they believe it to be, then the general location of the sound is published to a local dispatch.

ShotSpotter claims to be 97% accurate, with a false positive rate of 0.5%. However, ShotSpotter has never published results of validation testing. These rates are based on the assumption that every alert is a gunshot. ShotSpotter gives itself a starting grade of 100% and only decreases this number as police report mistakes, something they often aren’t told to do and cannot properly evaluate. Of departments that self-report, false positive rates are as high as 48%. When subpoenaed for proof showing how their system works, ShotSpotter requested to be held in contempt of court rather than respond. No tool used in our criminal legal system should be used to arrest, incarcerate, and convict without proving it works.

Does ShotSpotter prevent gun violence? Their own contracts say no. From the ShotSpotter Respond Services Agreement: “ShotSpotter does not warrant or represent, expressly or implicitly, that the Software or Subscription Services or its use will: result in the prevention of crime, apprehension or conviction of any perpetrator of any crime, or detection of any criminal.” Research studies confirm that ShotSpotter has no significant impact on violent crime — it’s not a crime-fighting tool.

Further, a recent study shows that ShotSpotter has no impact in cities with high call volumes and limited resources. Cleveland police are already stretched thin and slow to respond. Introducing a tool that inflates alert numbers in certain neighborhoods, leading to increased police presence in those areas, only slows service to the rest of the city.

Lastly, our city leaders should be aware that this technology opens Cleveland to lawsuits and liability. Even when ShotSpotter correctly labels a noise, there’s a delay between gunshot and police response. People don’t stay in place after shooting, causing police to arrest the wrong people in the area. ShotSpotter waives this liability in its contract, leaving citizens to sue the city. One Cleveland resident wrongfully arrested is too many — this technology provides the likelihood that this will happen at scale.

Cleveland’s contract with ShotSpotter expires November 2, 2022. Rather than renew this failed partnership, our city needs to invest in initiatives that reduce violent crime. Mental health & substance abuse services, recreational activities for the youth, job training, affordable housing, and access to higher education are all proven to make communities safer.

Cleveland has the opportunity to transform how we view community violence, and the ways in which we address prevention. Without putting a focus on the underlying cause of community violence, we continue to fail those impacted. Surveillance technology is not the solution to preventing gun violence. We must divest from ShotSpotter and invest in community-based solutions. Invest in people, not private corporations.

-Latonya Goldsby

ShotSpotter claims to be 97% accurate, with a false positive rate of 0.5%. However, ShotSpotter has never published results of validation testing. ShotSpotter gives itself a starting grade of 100% and only decreases this number as police report mistakes, something they often aren’t told to do and cannot properly evaluate. Of departments that self-report, false positive rates are as high as 48%.

Latonya Goldsby is a Cleveland

scene@clevescene.com @clevelandscene

activist and the chapter president of BLM Cleveland.

DIGIT WIDGET

5/19/2023

Date on which Aer Lingus will begin operating its nonstop Cleveland to Dublin flight from Hopkins four times per week, thanks to at least $2.4 million in subsidies from the City of Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, the Greater Cleveland Partnership, Destination Cleveland, TeamNEO and JobsOhio.

$26

Dollars per hour, new wage that Cuyahoga County intends to pay social workers to attract top talent in the aftermath of the Department of Child and Family Services scandal at the Jane Edna Hunter building.

35

RTA buses now equipped with Ezfare validators so that riders who purchase their tickets on the Transit App can scan their digital tickets as they board. (The entire fleet should have the validators by the first quarter of 2023.)

34

Minutes, length of the walk from RTA’s Tri-C Rapid Station to the proposed county jail site at Transport Road. The pedestrian experience along a high-traffic truck route is unpleasant, with cracked sidewalks and overgrowth. It would be virtually impossible for anyone with a mobility impairment.