By Joel Thurtell
I’m not sure what category to put this in — investigative reporter investigates investigative reporter?
But I know powerful writing when I read it. Powerful writing propelled by hard-nosed detective work. That’s what Curt Guyette of MetroTimes turned in with his report on the report of the Detroit News’ Charlie LeDuff on a homeless man’s dead body found in one of Manuel “Matty’s Moroun’s Detroit warehouses.
Rather than try to wax eloquent, I’ll link you to Curt Guyette’s story.
Sure our banks should be nationalized. Not temporarily, but for all time. See my take on fixing U.S. banks… and my new blog, www.howtostopabankrun.com
By Joel Thurtell
I’m happy to see that finally the Detroit Free Press in its February 12, 2009 version of the David Ashenfelter and Richard Convertino saga has started referring to lawyers on the paper’s side as “Free Press attorneys” and not “Ashenfelter’s lawyers.”
I pointed this bit of pulp fiction out in a previous column, noting that if the Free Press pays the lawyers’ bills, they’re representing the interests of the newspaper and not necessarily those of Ashenfelter, an employee of the newspaper.
Okay, so the Free Press got up to speed on one fairly minor issue.
But I’m puzzled by a huge hole in what I believe the Free Press’ managers from Gannett call a “moving part” — the beige-colored sidebar by reporter Mike Elrick entitled “Events in the case” on Page One of the Local News section of the February 12, 2008 paper.
The most crucial event in this chronology is missing from the Free Press list: that a federal jury acquitted Convertino, a former assistant U.S. attorney, of misconduct in a terrorism trial.
It was his acquittal by a jury that empowered Convertino to sue his former bosses at the Department of Justice, claiming they maligned him by illegally leaking inflammatory material about him to the Free Press reporter, Ashenfelter, before Convertino was even charged.
It was Convertino’s acquittal and subsequent campaign to bring his Justice Department tormenters to some semblance of justice that embroiled the Free Press in a lawsuit that has caused me to question the paper’s honesty in reporting about itself.
The government leak to a reporter is not an uncommon practice. Prosecutors love to leak inside goods to compliant reporters. It’s part of the good ol’ quid pro quo that keeps sources and reporters happy with each other.
The February 12 story itself fleetingly mentions in the jump inside the newspaper that Convertino was acquitted. But on the first section page, where most readers will stop perusing the story, no mention of the acquittal.
Big hole there, guys. Too late to fix.
Maybe the staff was too busy massaging their Pulitzer entries to pay attention to that “minor” detail.
What I find really weird about this story, though, is that it presents a very different report than the article the paper tossed up onto the Internet less than a day earlier, right after the February 11, 2009 hearing in U.S. District Judge Robert Cleland’s court.
In the early version, the Free Press reported Convertino was asking the judge to impose an escalating fine up to $5,000-a-day on Ashenfelter personally, meaning the newspaper could not step in and pay the fine. Now, on February 24, 2009 as I call up that earlier February 11 story, there is no mention of the $5,000 fine. More massaging? Guess we can’t trust the Freep to keep from re-writing its posts. So much for preserving historical record. But I know what I read on the eleventh, and it doesn’t gibe with what’s there today. By now, the fine is gone entirely.
In the February 12 story, a day after the first Web post, there is no mention of the fine, either. Instead, a subhead states: “He faces jail for protecting his sources.”
A caption under a photo of Ashenfelter and two attorneys also states: “Ashenfelter faces jail time for refusing to reveal his sources on a story.”
But the story itself is silent on sanctions. Where’s the fine? Where’s the jail time?
Whoever wrote the subhead and the caption didn’t coordinate with the flock of reporters, editors and (I bet) lawyers who honed the article.
What’s going on?
This story is more than four years old. For most of that time, the Free Press was content to play it as a First Amendment case where a valiant reporter supposedly was willing to spend time in jail to protect his sources. It’s a song that plays well in academia and places where orthodox American journalism blames prosecutors for hemming reporters’ ability to use anonymous sources.
You won’t read in the Free Press that the first story by Ashenfelter in January 2004 explained the use of anonymous federal sources by saying they feared “repercussions” if their identities were revealed.
But that line has vanished, at least outside the Free Press. Exasperated by the Free Press unwillingness to publish a coherent, accurate account, I posted my first column about the situation on Convertino December 8, 2008.
I felt it was important for readers to understand that Convertino made a very different version of these events clear through his lawsuit claiming that Ashenfelter and the Free Press are not protecting whistle-blowers in fear of retaliation from bosses seeking revenge for leaks. That is how Ashenfelter characterized the situation in his first 2004 story.
Rather, it appears that maybe the federal bosses were the leakers. And that the information about Convertino may have been illegally provided to the newspaper.
Suddenly, it’s not the First Amendment versus the All Powerful Government, but the newspaper as appendage of the government. It is one person, Richard Convertino, who was persecuted by government detractors, aided and abetted by the newspaper.
Newspaper as Persecutor: That doesn’t play well in the halls of J schools.
Nor does it look great in a Pulitzer hype letter.
For years, the Free Press kept this under wraps. The cat slipped out of the bag with Convertino’s lawsuit and last August with Judge Cleland’s ruling that the Free Press and Ashenfelter have no free speech rights because the First Amendment doesn’t protect people from having to give evidence in a criminal case, which this might turn out to be.
But you wouldn’t read those things in the Free Press.
Even now, the paper seems to be back-pedaling towards its former cards-to-the-chest mode.
One day, the reporter is to be fined.
Next day, he could go to jail.
Meanwhile, the fine is erased from the earlier post.
From free speech to harboring criminals to censorship.
Knee-jerk First Amendment buffs no doubt would like to see Dave go to jail, where he’d be a (false) martyr for free press rights.
Convertino understands that jail may not get him the names he needs to pursue his case.
Wonder why the Free Press is so sensitive about that fine?
That five grand a day would come out of Dave’s own pocket.
Now that might be enough to make a Pulitzer-winning Journalism Hall of Fame reporter sing.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
By Joel Thurtell
I wish I had the scoop on what Matty and the city of Detroit will be doing with that gem on the Detroit River known as Riverside Park.
I still have not heard back from city PR folk after I asked them whether, as rumor has it, the city is bargaining with Manuel “Matty” Moroun to sell him Riverside Park.
But I have been told by someone who knows the issues well that there are no dealings afoot regarding a possible sale of Riverside Park to Matty or anyone else.
I’m told that selling the park would be a bureaucratic nightmare, because there are trust restrictions connected to the park’s title. Unraveling the legalities would be complex.
Again, I was assured there are no talks going on about a sale of the park.
But I was also told that Matty would have a hard time achieving his plan to “twin” his beloved money-maker, the Ambassador Bridge, without owning the park. That’s because his plans reportedly show part of the new span occupying space in what is now the city-owned park.
I don’t doubt that Matty covets the park. Over the past few years, he’s treated the public park as if it already belonged to him. He fenced off a section of the park, posted phony “Homeland Security” no trespassing signs, and used a section of the park where once there were trees and basketball hoops as a private dumping ground for his construction junk.
He turned a shady park into Alley Cat Matty’s Litter Box.
In court back in December, Matty’s lawyer assured the court that the bridge tycoon had removed construction junk and cleaned up the area he’d been dumping in. But the lawyer claimed Matty needs parts of the park for security reasons, although there seem to be no such concerns about security on the Canadian side.
Several years ago, Matty padlocked the public boat launch and put up another of his bogus “Homeland Security” signs warning the public to stay our of “his” park.
Correction: The people’s park.
Now, the city is trying to evict Matty from a park that didn’t belong to him in the first place.
I reported on this situation back in September, after one of Matty’s shotgun-totin’ goons ordered me off public property in the name of the federal Border patrol. When I told him as a rent-a-cop he had no authority on public property, he chatted with somebody over his handie-talkie radio and told me he’d called the Border Patrol. Further, he ordered me to stay put till the Border patrol got there and when I took a hike, he tried to block my car with Matty’s pickup.
I had a few objections to his behavior.
What was a private guard doing with a shotgun in the cab of a pickup truck?
What authority did this rent-a-cop have over a citizen in a public park?
What right did this slug have to run a pickup truck over the lawn of a public park, anyway? If he did that in Hines park, Wayne County police would hand him a ticket.
What right did this knot-head have to detain me in the name of the Border Patrol,given that he is not an officer of the federal government but a privately-hired, privately paid security guard?
When I tried to report these matters, a Detroit police desk officer told me to get lost.
“Take it up with the Morouns,” the cop told me.
The hearing into Matty’s squatter’s possession of Riverside Park was postponed last year and was scheduled for last week. It was postponed again and I’m told it will take place in Detroit’s 36th District Court on May 6.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmal.com
The Detroit 36th District Court hearing into the city’s attempt to evict Manuel “Matty” Moroun and his International Bridge Co., aka Ambassador Bridge, from Detroit’s Riverside Park has been postponed until May and could take place on May 6. It was supposed to be Wednesday, February 18, 2009.
By Joel Thurtell
Amazing what one beaver can do.
This lone paddle-tail isn’t just damming Conner Creek.
A beaver’s image, captured by a DTE Energy camera as it worked some timber along the Detroit River, has inspired claims by a federal agency that its presence means the river has been cleaned enough to sustain wildlife.
Baloney.
I’ll say it again: One beaver on the banks of the Detroit River does not prove all is well with this once highly-polluted river.
Here’s what it signifies: A beaver is living on the Detroit River.
Nothing more.
I’m not questioning that the the river has vastly improved in the past few decades due to major efforts by some hardworking humans to stop other humans from polluting it.
But the beaver isn’t logically connected to whatever success there’s been.
It reminds me of the claim I once heard from an environmentalist who said a gyrfalcon’s brief sojourn alongside the Rouge River in metropolitan Detroit somehow proved that stream’s water quality was better.
No, no — it just meant the arctic-loving raptor took a break beside the water.
I first saw the beaver story in the February 16, 2009 Detroit Free Press: “Their return,” the newspaper said, “signals that a multiyear effort to clean up the river has paid off.”
“Leave it to beaver,” the Free Press Page One headline said, “To prove river cleaner.”
Wonder how much that beaver weighs?
The Windsor Star swallowed this whopper, too, quoting a U.S. Fish and Wildlife staffer declaiming that “it’s part of a larger story of recovery. What a dramatic ecological recovery of one of the most polluted river systems in North America.”
The recovery may well be real. But the beaver doesn’t prove it.
By the way, I think it’s great that there’s a beaver in Detroit, and I applaud the enterprising DTE Energy folk who followed their hunch and planted the video camera that captured footage of a beaver working on a tree.
But I wonder, how did the beaver learn the water is okay?
From the newspapers?
I don’t think it tested the river. If it did, it was more environmentally proactive than its homo sapiens neighbors. Water quality monitoring by humans is, like Detroit’s beaver of yesteryear, heading for extinction. In recent years, there have been monstrous cutbacks in funding for monitoring.
I also wonder about the claim that the last time a beaver was seen in Detroit was “at least 75 years ago, possibly as long ago as a century.”
Really? Which is it? Seventy five years? More than 75 years? “Possibly” 100 years ago? Why so fuzzy on the timing? Because the statement can’t be substantiated?
Nobody knows why this beaver moved to Detroit, other than that it must have found food, shelter and work. If the beaver, as claimed, returned because the pollution is gone, then it follows that its reason for decamping 75 or 100 or however many years ago must have been because the place was too contaminated.
That would be logical. But it seems not to be the case.
It seems more likely that beaver, being shy, hard-chewing engineers accustomed to working night shifts, might have departed for the same reason many human city-dwellers left — in quest of quieter, more sedate places. Or, as the Free Press suggests, maybe they were “wiped out” by trapping.
The fur trade, not pollution, may have done the beaver in.
But if the beaver didn’t leave because of pollution, what would motivate them to return because it’s gone?
The idea that people and animals will leave a place because of pollution is an illusion, anyway. If it were true, no animal or human would live in Southwest Detroit, where water and air are terribly contaminated.
Pollution doesn’t keep animals away. Fish, for instance, will live in water contaminated with human and industrial waste. That’s why the Michigan Department of Community Health advises limited eating of fish from all Michigan waterways on account of mercury contamination, and warns of eating fish caught in many other places due to chemicals like PCB.
There’s another reason besides pollution why beaver might not like this area. Take the Rouge River, for example. It might be too “flashy” for beaver. Flashiness — the tendency of the river to rise or fall suddenly — is caused by human misuse of land surrounding the waterway. Storm runoff from streets, parking lots, roofs and other hard surfaces no longer percolates through the ground, but rushes through gutters and drains and storm sewers to rapidly fill the river. Fast rising and falling water levels blow out wildlife habitat. Also, beaver might not like the four miles of concrete pavement underlying the Lower Rouge, just as fish find it inconvenient for forage and reproduction.
Still, I would not be surprised to learn there are beaver in the Rouge. What do they care if the water has crap in it? I once counted nearly two dozen mallards paddling in the Rouge, the biggest tributary of the Detroit River. Where were the ducks? Below a huge sewer outfall. The stink of sewage didn’t faze them.
I would not claim that the presence of ducks or mergansers or green herons or snapping turtles proves the Rouge is clean enough for human contact when analysis of E. coli testing tells us that this river is safe for us to swim in no more than 5 percent of the time.
The claim that a beaver in Detroit proves the river is clean is not scientific. It is a policy statement. It is meant to justify money spent on reducing pollution. It is meant to rationalize the means humans chose to alleviate pollution and, by extension, it approves the individual humans and agencies that chose those means.
It is about politics.
True, the intent partly may be to cheer people up about the state of water quality. But these phony statements also make people complacent and too trustful of environmental agents who make logic-defying claims.
The beaver’s presence is interesting, but false deductions about what it means about the environment tell us more about the humans who issue them than they enlighten us about the beaver.
Science?
Nah. Sheer propaganda.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
By Joel Thurtell
That photo of reporter David Ashenfelter and attorney Herschel Fink in the February 11, 2009 online Detroit Free Press said it all.
They look like they dodged a big fat bullet.
Well, it was Dave who dodged the big one, since it’s the reporter and not the newspaper attorney who could be jailed or fined if the lawyer’s plan goes awry.
But it may be that Fink’s tactic of having Ashenfelter plead the Fifth Amendment will permanently parry Richard Convertino’s legal attempt to force the reporter to spill the names of U.S. Justice Department employees who illegally leaked information to Ashenfelter. He wrote that contraband info into a 2004 article that was published before Convertino was indicted on charges of corruptly pursuing a federal prosecution.
Convertino was acquitted by a jury and turned the tables on the prosecutors. He sued the Justice Department, demanding money for the damage to his reputation. Problem: Convertino needs the names of the Justice officials who leaked illegally to Ashenfelter in order to pursue his case.
They ain’t talkin.
Ashenfelter ain’t talkin, either.
First, Dave took the First, but that didn’t work. U.S. District Judge Robert Cleland pointed out that Convertino’s persecutors may have broken the law by leaking to Ashenfelter and the First Amendment is no shield against giving evidence in a criminal case.
Next, he pleaded the Fifth — that his testimony might set him up to be charged by the feds.
Hmmm. Let’s see if I understand this: Dave, or rather, the paper’s lawyers, want us to believe that the same feds who leaked to Dave now are going to charge him?
Of course, the Reporters’ Committee on Freedom of Information is right there behind Dave, but to me, that is a bit too rich.
After listening to Justice Department honchos testify that they couldn’t say whether or not they might charge Dave, the judge postponed making a decision.
You read that right: Representatives of the same office where people leaked illegally to Dave and could themselves be charged for so doing sat in court, raised their right pinkies and swore they couldn’t say for sure whether or not after four years of doing squat they might charge Dave with something that would no doubt involve one or more of them also being charged.
In other words, bullshit.
Convertino wants the judge to find Dave in contempt and fine him personally up to $5,000 a day till he coughs up the names, according to the Feb. 11 Free Press online. That’s tough stuff — it means Dave would have to pay out of his own pocket. The Free Press couldn’t bail him out.
Last year, a federal judge fined a reporter, USA Today’s Toni Loci, the same amount, only to have the fine set aside by an appeals court.
Well, if Dave skates, I’ll gladly give Convertino some names.
Because Dave isn’t the only one who knows who his sources were. At least, that would be true if he followed the Free Press ethical guidelines in force when he wrote his story. Then, the Free Press was still owned by Knight-Ridder, and the guidelines required that reporters quoting anonymous sources reveal the sources to management and get bosses’ permission before running the story.
Look at the masthead for any Free Press in 2004 and you’ll get an idea of whom Convertino might subpoena if Dave slips through his hands.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
By Joel Thurtell
Before a Detroit City Council staffer and a security guard restrained her from physically going after fellow council member Kwame Kenyatta, Monica Conyers ran down a list of God-given gifts that, in the Mon’s opinion, Kenyatta lacks.
They include ability to hear, basic intelligence, failure to finish college and for good measure that claim, apparently false, that Kenyatta has cancer.
In other words, she called him deaf, stupid, uneducated and, well, sick.
Kenyatta said the Mon lacks sensitivity.
That’s an understatement.
She lacks other things as well.
But nobody can accuse the Mon of not getting her college degrees.
Fat lot of good her law degree got her, though.
I would not follow Monica down the path of personal insults by suggesting that she might lack some of the native gifts she accused Kenyatta of not having.
Why, hey, it could be that the Mon was stressed out when she took the Michigan bar exam on four separate occasions, failing it cold each time.
Monica’s resume on the city of Detroit website notes that she earned a Juris Doctor degree from the University of District of Columbia School of Law.
She went to law school in DC, I guess, because hubby is John Conyers Jr., a member of Congress from Detroit. Maybe it was more convenient, somehow, to commute to DC for law classes than to attend one of Michigan’s law schools, such as the ones at Wayne State University and University of Detroit-Mercy.
I understand she got some free tutoring at taxpayer expense, too, which happened in the congressman’s Detroit office. Sydney Rooks, a lawyer and former member of U.S. Representative Conyers’ staff, told me she was ordered by the congressman to tutor the Mon in hubby’s Detroit congressional office, on government time.
Guess it didn’t help with the bar exam, though. Too bad for the Mon: If you’re not a member of your state’s bar, you can’t practice law. Can’t give legal advice, can’t appear in court, can’t prepare legal documents that require a licensed lawyer’s signature and state bar number.
Back when I was a Detroit Free Press reporter, I was curious about this. I wrote on Feb. 7, 2006 to the Board of Law Examiners, an office in the Michigan Supreme Court.
“Esteemed members of the Board of Law Examiners,” I said. “This is a request under Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act. I am requesting the results (pass/fail) of any and all state bar examinations taken by Monica Conyers.”
A few days later, I found a letter dated Feb. 13, 2006 from the Board of Law Examiners. “In regards to your correspondence of February 7, 2006, I would like to inform you that the Board of Law Examiners is not controlled by the Freedom of Information Act.”
Uh-oh, I thought. My bad. I’m out of luck.
But the letter continued: “Ms. Monica Conyers sat for the February 2003, February 2004 and February 2005 Michigan bar examinations and failed those exams.”
Had she taken the bar exam since February 2005? I mailed off another letter to the Board of Law Examiners on June 6, 2008 and the response from the Board was was dated June 10, 2008.
According to the Board of Law Examiners, “Ms. Conyers subsequently sat for the July 2007 Michigan bar examination and failed that exam.”
Four times Monica Conyers flunked the bar exam.
A practicing lawyer she cannot be.
Kwame Kenyatta might wonder: What good is that law school diploma if the Mon can’t muster the moxie to pass the bar exam?
A law school alumna she is.
A lawyer she ain’t.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
By Joel Thurtell
Some questions are like a light switch.
Their answers are either on, or they’re off.
Yes or no.
Like my questions to Detroit Mayor Ken Cockrel through his press secretary, back on January 27, 2009:
1) Given Detroit’s dire financial plight, will the city ever build a proposed billion-dollar tunnel to deliver sewage to the city”s treatment plant in Delray, thus bypassing its normal rainy-time household and industrial waste dumping ground, namely the Rouge River?
2) Is the city negotiating with Ambassador bridge owner and billionaire trucking magnate Manuel “Matty” Moroun to sell Detroit’s public Riverside Park to Matty? This is the park that the billionaire seized partial control of a few years ago when he fenced off a section and padlocked the public boat launch.
So far, I’ve received polite notes back from the mayor’s PR people letting me know they’re looking into my questions.
More than a week has passed.
What is so difficult about answering these questions?
Either you’re gonna build that tunnel, or you’re not.
Either you’re dealing with Matty on the park, or you’re not.
On or off.
Yes or no.
I’m afraid in the case of Riverside Park, my answer will come in the form of a press release announcing the sale of a city gem to the trucking tycoon.
As for the tunnel, well, to admit that it won’t be built would steal the last best argument from those government and quasi-government environmentalists who trump any assertion that the Rouge River is too polluted for swimming, wading, boating or fishing by saying, “Just wait till we build that tunnel!”
Will the tunnel be built? Or will we keep using the Rouge as a sewer, as we’ve done since colonial times?
I’m waiting for answers.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
By Joel Thurtell
The buzz in the barbershop last week was all Monica and Jewel.
From reading the newspapers, you might think Detroit City Council President Monica Conyers was as good as behind bars.
And that Wayne County Commissioner Jewel Ware was nigh onto being convicted.
But headlines don’t, all by themselves, make criminal convictions.
If history is a bellwether, Jewel and Monica might lighten up.
Why did the FBI seize Jewel’s records?
Well, it seems maybe she assigned county employees to work in her restaurant while they were supposedly paid to do government work.
But hasn’t this been a hallowed tradition in Detroit since U.S. Rep. Charles Diggs assigned congressional workers from his Detroit district office to work in his family’s funeral home?
Actually, Diggs wound up convicted of fraud. He spent time in federal prison.
But there’s a more instructive example from recent history that should comfort Jewel and Monica, who’s being investigated in a Detroit City Hall pay-to-play, contracts-for-bribes scheme.
Ease of mind might come from the case of Monica’s husband, U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr., who ritually assigned federally-paid office workers both from Detroit and Washington, D.C., to work on his and other people’s campaigns in violation of federal ethics rules and federal laws. He also assigned staffers to babysit and tutor his kids, tutor Monica for law school and act as his personal chauffeur, all while the workers were being paid by the government.
Detroit Free Press reporter Chris Christoff and I outlined John Conyers’ long-ingrained habit of misusing congressional staffers in a set of Free Press stories on November 21, 2003. We described how Conyers was having staffers do campaign work, and in subsequent stories, I reported on Conyers’s penchant for assigning staffers to do his personal work on government time.
Six years later, I’m still waiting for the Justice Department to investigate John Conyers.
But the Justice Department with huge fanfare did investigate pay-to-play and illegal campaign work in the administration of Wayne County Executive Ed McNamara. True, Mac died, but he wasn’t the only big fish swimming in that cesspool.
The FBI raid on Mac’s office took place late in 2002. I’m still waiting for key players to be indicted.
Because McNamara died, apparently, the case was dropped.
Take it easy, Jewel.
John Conyers is still very much alive.
And he’s still in Congress.
He’s chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
That’s a congressional panel that oversees the Justice Department.
The Justice Department runs the FBI.
Take it easy, Monica.
Oh, by the way, doesn’t it seem like John Conyers ought to step down as chairman of Judiciary while there’s a federal cloud over his wife?
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
