When investigative reporting by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch knocked the wheels wobbly on Chief Joe Mokwa’s St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, a long letter written by a former department staffer began to circulate. Surely Joe Mahr and Jeremy Kohler, who did the Post’s remarkable investigative work on the police, saw this letter. The regional FBI saw the letter. It also was sent to The American.
It was enough to draw a reporter to a meeting with this bitter former police staffer. His news was all old news and, though very damaging, also very difficult to substantiate, so his allegations haven’t really gone anywhere. They were, however, shocking enough to merit asking him the question: “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I want people who have stories about me to know I have stories about them,” the guy said. With a little encouragement, he continued, “When all this (stuff) started to go down, I called my guy who is still down at the department. He said he couldn’t help me anymore. He told me, ‘It’s every man for himself.’”
This man’s desperation and paranoia provide a useful backdrop to events of the past week, when the Post once again knocked this police department’s wheels wobbly. This time, what surfaced was not a wildly mismanaged and quite possibly corrupt police department led by a chief (Mokwa) who apparently had the backing of the town fathers – until, suddenly, he couldn’t possibly be propped up any longer. This time, the Post found a crack in the cement between one of the good old boy police commissioners who went along with the Mokwa joyride (Vincent J. Bommarito) and Mokwa’s successor, Police Chief Daniel Isom.
The rival forces at play here are still emerging from the shadows and may never be understood completely outside of the department’s own Byzantine cell structure of secrets, alliances and career assassinations. But we can date the crack in the cement from January 20 of this year, when a two-plus page letter went out over Bommarito’s signature, addressed to his fellow police commissioners: Mayor Francis G. Slay, board president Todd Epsten, Julius K. Hunter and Bettye Battle-Turner. Those who have seen Bommarito’s work at police board meetings know that eloquence and consecutive thought are not his strong suits. This long, sharply worded document almost certainly is the work of a committee or faction with Bommarito only serving as its face.
Table-setting for a beheading
Anyone familiar with bureaucratic behavior – for example, Chief Isom – will hear in this letter the saber rattling that comes before a beheading. Bommarito (or his ghostwriter) writes, “This is the second year of the Chief’s contract. I am interested in how the Chief sees his administration. I also think it is important to remind him that he reports to the Board of Police Commissioners.”
A loose translation of this might read: “What part of the board being his boss does the chief not understand?” Just in case Isom didn’t get the point – that he serves at the mercy of the citizen colonels – included in a list of updates Bommarito is demanding we find: “What is the Chief’s assessment of his senior team and are they being prepared for candidacy for succession?” In other words, have you found the man to catch your head when we chop it off?
In the last paragraph of the letter, Isom is quite explicitly cut out of the picture. Bommarito (or his faction) writes, “I would like to have an opportunity at each executive session for just the members of the Board, excusing all others, to talk about their concerns.” Just the members of the Board. Excusing all others. Including Isom.
Chief Isom was handed a copy of this letter by board staff on the day it was dated, before the January 20 police board meeting, so he was actually invited into the conversation about cutting him out of the conversation.
We can hear how the chief must have felt about this table-setting for his beheading in a letter Isom addressed less than a month later to board president Epsten. The subject is Bommarito allegedly leaning directly on a sergeant he had known for years to release a Bommarito nephew from police custody without charging him for drunken driving. Bommarito denies he did this, and some of Isom’s expressions are weak, saying “it is likely” that Bommarito obstructed justice by “all preliminary accounts.”
Isom takes the moral high ground, saying this kind of old-school hookup behavior from a police commissioner only brings the “integrity and impartiality” of the department into question.
But Isom also is intent on slashing Bommarito back for the lecture on who is boss here. In calling the sergeant directly – which Bommarito admits doing – he violated the chain of command, and Isom isn’t having any of that. He tells Epsten, knowing full well Bommarito will hear it, “Direct contact with a patrol sergeant circumvents our structure of decision-making responsibility. Instructions flow downward along the chain of command and accountability inevitably flows upward.”
Instructions flow downward. There is an old folk saying about an unpleasant proverbial substance that floats downstream. It has been floating downstream ever since Post reporters got wind of Uncle Bommarito’s call to the sergeant and, eventually, these nasty letters – which were not quite exchanged, since Bommarito was talking to Isom in a letter to the board, and Isom was responding to Bommarito in a letter to Epsten. If this sounds like adolescent behavior, then welcome to bureaucratic in-fighting in an authority structure as diffuse and downright weird as the St. Louis police department.
‘Typical’ Tony
No one seems to have bought Uncle Bommarito’s repeated assertions that he didn’t do anything wrong (or didn’t know he was doing anything wrong). The beat cops all laughed into their hats over his denials. Someone posting as “Old 4th” on the Cop Talk discussion board alleged of Bommarito, “When the old Tony’s was on Broadway across from the bus station, he would regularly come out the backdoor and berate, curse out, and threaten any copper who dared to write tickets in the alley behind the restaurant.”
Not that Bommarito is singled out as behaving unusually badly in this regard. Indeed, in the cop chatter, town fathers who act like they own the place and can punk any beat copper at will are seen as just another depressing aspect of police work. As Old 4th added of Bommarito, “He’s the typical ‘Don’t you know who I am’ a-hole that all of us hate to deal with.”
Typical. That is the street cop talking. For a police commissioner, or any grand poobah, to intervene personally in police work to help a friend or family member is “typical.”
So why is everybody talking about this incident? Because Chief Isom had the guts and spunk to call Bommarito out for it. And why did he do that? Because Bommarito was sharpening the sword and asking for a list of names for people who could catch Isom’s head once he cut it off. After all, there is a chief’s hat on that head – and you had better believe Bommarito and his faction know who they want on that list to wear the big hat next.
Instead, it is police commissioner Bommarito’s head that is bleeding into the sand. He admitted no wrongdoing on the way out the door, however. In his February 22 resignation letter to Gov. Jay Nixon – who appointed him and the other police commissioners (other than the mayor) – Bommarito concludes by saying, “I value integrity and commitment to community and will always do so.”
This letter to Nixon, of course, is intended for Isom’s ears and contains a veiled threat to haunt the chief from the grave: “I will continue to support the Department and this City in every way I can for as long as God allows me.”
Whatever faction Bommarito was fronting for remains in play. Chief Isom should remain just as attached to his head and just as concerned for its well being as he was when he went to war against Uncle Bommarito.
In the meantime, Nixon has not one but two citizen colonels to replace on this fractious police board, which – like the current structure of St. Louis city government – is on the list of endangered species. Bommarito’s seat suddenly became available on Monday, and Julius Hunter’s term expired on January 21 – the day after the letter that spawned the latest bloodbath.
It won’t be the last. It’s every man for himself.
