More often than regular readers of the EYE might imagine, The American and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch agree on matters of policy. To take a few recent examples, this paper would whole-heartedly second Post editorials on the Midwest China Cargo Hub, poverty in Missouri, the need for Medicaid expansion and the Post’s prodding Mayor Francis G. Slay and County Executive Charlie A. Dooley to make public their discussion of possible ways to merge St. Louis city and county government. St. Louis needs a strong daily newspaper, and on many issues of substance it has one.
It also has a daily newspaper with some major blind spots. Last week Post business reporter Tim Logan encouraged his 3,800-plus Twitter readers to check out the EYE’s analysis of a possible city/county merger – only adding the caveat “standard P-D pot shots aside.” The EYE assumes that Logan wanted to distance himself and his readers from this aspect of our analysis:
“The EYE can’t resist pointing out the usual blind spot in the Post’s otherwise thoughtful editorial. ‘Getting this done will be excruciatingly difficult,’ the Post opines. ‘Mr. [Rex] Sinquefield is a polarizing figure. There will be people offended by the thought of working with Mr. Dooley and his top campaign aide, John Temporiti, while the FBI is investigating county government corruption.’ You will never read this in the Post, but Slay also is a polarizing figure, and there will be people aggravated and offended by working with Slay’s John Temporiti, Jeff Rainford. The Post also seems to have lapsed into amnesia about the many federal investigations of the city in the Slay and Rainford years: city cops towing cars and flipping titles, city jailors smuggling drugs into jails, city park rangers siphoning off funds. Need the EYE continue?”
The facts bear out that this is not a trivial “pot shot” but a cogent criticism of an enduring flaw in the Post’s political coverage of the region. The paper never tires of covering even a hint of corruption by a county official – or a black official – yet buries and apologizes for evident and confessed corruption in the Slay administration. In fact, the point was made again almost immediately after Logan dismissed this criticism as a “standard pot shot.”
On Monday, two senior members of the Slay administration pled guilty to charges that they defrauded the city of approximately one-half million dollars by submitting false invoices for materials and services supplied to the Parks Division. When they committed these crimes that bilked the city of a cool half mill, Joseph Vacca was deputy commissioner of the St. Louis Parks Division and Thomas Stritzel was chief of the St. Louis Park Rangers. Both reported, ultimately, to Mayor Slay.
This is not a “swirling rumor” of corruption, like the “swirling rumors” of corruption in St. Louis County government that repeatedly made Post front pages in alarmist terms without one named source. This is not alleged corruption in county contracting allegedly committed by a volunteer board member appointed by the county executive, which has dominated Post front pages – without a single charge being filed to date or a single named source making a single concrete accusation of any single act of corruption. This is bona-fide, real-deal, caught-the-culprits-in-the-act-and-obtained-confessions corruption.
The difference between the “swirling rumors” of corruption and whispers of contracting scandals that make Post front pages is these actual, confessed culprits worked for the mayor. Here is what actual corruption in the Slay administration looks like. No need to swirl up any rumors on this one or hide any anonymous sources. Let the feds tell the story.
“From January 1, 2005 to December 31, 2012, Vacca and Stritzel embezzled funds of the City of St. Louis based upon the submission of sham and false invoices which included false charges of approximately $464,722,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office states. “They used the funds for their own personal use, including lease payments on personal vehicles, fuel costs, the payment of personal credit card charges, and other personal living expenses.”
Again, this is not the case of maybe a volunteer county police board member maybe obtaining a subcontract on a police construction contract maybe via fraudulent means. This is two senior Slay staffers admittedly setting up sham companies right under the mayor’s nose and making off with the taxpayer’s dough.
“Vacca and Stritzel set up a sham company called Dynamic Management and then funneled city funds received through the submission of false and sham invoices to Dynamic Management’s bank account,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office (not some unnamed source) states. “Vacca and Stritzel then used those fraudulently obtained funds for their own personal use.”
And the outcome is not merely a matter of being shamed in your hometown by aggressively hostile coverage by the region’s only daily newspaper. These are confessed crimes that will cost the confessed culprits from the Slay administration real time and money. These charges carry a penalty range of 20 years in prison and/or fines up to $250,000.
That is a big news for a newspaper like the Post that feasts on covering political corruption (at least when it allegedly happens in the county or by a black official). Right? So surely they parked four reporters on the story, like they did when St. Louis Community College Chancellor Myrtle Dorsey (an African American) did not have her contract renewed recently. (She didn’t break the law, she wasn’t even fired. She simply did not have her contract renewed.) Surely the Post devoted more than 2,000 words in two front page stories to Stritzel and Vacca’s crimes, as they did when Dorsey received her vote of “no confidence.” Right?
Wrong. The Post ran a quiet 405-word squib by political reporter Nicholas J.C. Pistor with the yawner, low-temperature headline “former St. Louis officials indicted on theft charges.” In fact, these were current Slay administration officials when they committed their crimes, but the headline doubly distances Slay from their actions. The deck running below the headline introduces the Slay administration’s alibi before the reader even encounters the report: “Years of audits failed to turn up the complex theft.”
For perspective: the county subcontracting scandal whipped up by the Post could have come packaged with a similar explanation from the county. For decades, not years, county government has interpreted its charter to permit appointed board members to benefit from subcontracts, which are bid and let by the contractors, not by the county board. Plainly, this system could be exploited if a board member fraudulently arranged a quid pro quo deal with a contractor to receive a subcontract in return if the board member helps push through the contract award. The Post is making a lot of noise that the FBI is investigating that this might have happened, which is different from there being any evidence or specific allegation that it actually has happened.
The Post is not finished furnishing alibis for the Slay administration once the reader gets past the tepid headline and the “we did due diligence” deck beneath it. The reporter notes, “Maggie Crane, a spokeswoman for Mayor Francis Slay, said federal authorities told them there was no way the embezzlement could have been prevented because the scheme avoided taking money directly from city coffers.”
See how they did that? This is a mayoral spokesperson quoting unnamed “federal authorities” who allegedly absolved Slay of any and all shared guilt via lack of oversight. The problem with this reporting, as Slay and the Post know, is it can not be verified. Federal authorities never confirm or deny such claims. Just to check, the EYE called Hal Goldsmith, who prosecuted the Stritzel and Vacca caper. Goldsmith said he could not comment on the record about that claim made by the mayor’s staffer.
So, maybe “federal authorities” really were stupid enough to tell a mayor it was impossible for him to detect one of his senior employees embezzling directly from city government. And maybe the Post let Slay slip in a convenient untruth to further contribute to the overwhelming message here of: “move along, nothing to see here, nothing we could have done, problem taken care of.”
The point is, the Post is an organ of advocacy journalism. It is the Slay administration’s newspaper of record. This is not a “standard P-D pot shot,” but a well-supported statement of fact. See you on Twitter, Tim.
