On July 28, 2008, more than one hundred federal agents blanketed Cuyahoga County, Ohio, with search warrants as they raided homes, businesses, and government offices. The targets of the investigation were county commissioner, Jimmy Dimora, and county auditor, Frank Russo.
When I lived and worked in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, both men were mythical figures. Russo’s name was on my real estate tax notices. Dimora was one of the county commissioners and the defacto head of the county’s Democratic party.
It was virtually a single-party county, so everyone who aspired to or held elective office had to interact with him. That includes all forty-nine trial judges, twelve appellate judges, the prosecutor, and many other offices for various government functions.
Over the next several years more than seventy people were indicted in the corruption scandal. In many ways I felt vindicated because I’d moved to Cleveland, noticed so many issues, when everyone else acted like it was normal, or this was just the way things were done. It was like the emperor had no clothes, but I was alone in noticing he was naked.
When I conceived of this story, it fit in exactly with what was going on at the time. I knew that Lori Pope could get away with a lot, and in the face of everything else that was going on, would go unnoticed.
By 2016, all of the matters were concluded. Before that, though, the county went through huge changes. As mentioned in the book, the county commissioner structure was abandoned when a new charter was adopted.
Lord John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton is famous for the quote, “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
While many different safeguards were put into place to avoid something of this magnitude happening again, only time will tell if the county can remain corruption-free.