We'd Rather Not Hear from Last Year's Bad Newsmakers
The Pitch
A new year should be a new beginning. But 2014's baggage weighs heavy as we try to push into 2015. So we've made a list a special list, a wish list of the people and organizations we'd love to leave in the past. It's not that the inept, the perverse and the just plain mean don't sometimes amuse us. And we aren't saying we'll never forgive certain corrupt or morally suspect people. It's just that we'd rather they went away and let the healing begin. We know that most of them won't oblige us, but we're determined to start 2015 fresh anyway by saying our own goodbyes to these 2014 bums and bummers. Bishop Robert Finn If you work for a Catholic institution in northwest Missouri, you report to the highest-ranking U.S. Catholic official to be convicted in a sex-abuse scandal: Bishop Robert Finn. This is a man who, when presented with evidence that a priest in his diocese had a laptop containing hundreds of pornographic images of underage girls, elected to reassign the priest to a convent rather than report his criminal behavior to authorities. When the truth came out, Finn was found guilty of a misdemeanor for failing to report child abuse and was sentenced to two years' probation. It's shocking enough that a man who shielded a pedophile from the law could be in charge of any organization. But for Finn to still be leading the Diocese of Kansas CitySt. Joseph an entity already stained by decades of sexual-abuse allegations, for which it has paid out millions of dollars in settlements to victims is mind-boggling. And Finn is still doing terrible things. He fired Colleen Simon, a food-pantry coordinator at St. Francis Xavier Church, after a Kansas City Star story about Troost's revitalization mentioned in passing that Simon is a lesbian. (Simon has since filed a lawsuit against Finn and the diocese.) There are indications that Finn may not last much longer at his post. The Vatican is reportedly conducting an internal investigation of Finn. Cardinal Sean O'Malley, a close aide to Pope Francis, appeared on 60 Minutes in November and declared that the Finn situation was something the Pope needed to "address urgently." Meanwhile, our hands are hovering over our keyboards, waiting to type the word "former" in front of "Bishop Robert Finn" someday.
George Lombardi It's hard to polish your image while running a state agency that imprisons and kills people. It's even harder when your department gets caught obfuscating fact after fact about how it executes prisoners. In 2014, Missouri Department of Corrections Director George Lombardi complained to lawmakers that the media was beating up on him and his staff for its execution protocol. But he should have expected scrutiny from the Fourth Estate after Missouri made a mess of its lethal-injection system while matching Texas for its number of executed inmates in 2014. That scrutiny yielded a number of embarrassing stories about Lombardi's department, notably that one of his staffers drove to Oklahoma with a bag of cash (like a drug mule, except one getting paid by taxpayers to make drops) to make an off-the-books purchase of lethal-injection drugs from a shady pharmacy. Lombardi tried to shut off the news spigot by refusing open-records requests. Now, Lombardi and the DOC are being sued by a number of media outlets. That case will probably be decided in 2015 meaning that the new year won't be a great one for Lombardi, either.
Jay Nixon It's hard to imagine a lonelier politician than Jay Nixon, a two-term Democratic governor in a state that's trending increasingly red. National media which didn't really know any better touted Nixon as a hot item on various 2016 vice-presidential short lists. But those folks must not have bothered consulting Show-Me Democrats, who could have described the corrosive effects of Nixon's me-first attitude toward politicking. Of course, Republicans don't care for Nixon, either, and the party spent much of 2014 outmaneuvering the governor on pressing fiscal matters. That effort was helped along by Nixon's lack of loyalty from the state's Democrats, one of whom cast the decisive vote that delivered a GOP-inspired override of Kansas-style tax cuts (which Nixon vetoed). When Nixon wasn't annoying members of the Missouri General Assembly, he was shooting himself in the foot. Nixon believed that hanging out in Joplin was a better use of his time than showing leadership in Ferguson, as that city endured riots in August after police officer Darren Wilson shot an unarmed black man there. Why did anyone think this guy could be White House material? Paul Davis There wasn't a more winnable election for Democrats in GOPdominated middle America than the 2014 Kansas gubernatorial race unless the candidate was Paul Davis. Davis had nearly every advantage that an upstart Democrat could have wanted against Gov. Sam Brownback, whose self-inflicted wounds ranged from an FBI investigation zeroing in on one of his closest aides (for legislative payola) to missteps in the launch of his privatized Medicaid program (KanCare) to the steep income-tax cuts that blew up the state's ledger. Davis managed to pick up precious few of these threads, and when he did challenge his opponent, he did so like a timid observer rather than like a convincing candidate. Take his meek counterproposal to Brownback's tax cuts: Davis wanted to freeze the cuts at 2015 levels and then convene a task force to make recommendations on what step to take next. Uh ... and? Hey, Davis, if you believed that the tax cuts constitute bad policy, you should have campaigned on getting rid of them. Davis sounded like a wounded dog throughout the campaign as Brownback's staff dug up a lame, 16-year-old tale of the Lawrence lawyer being present at a strip-club during a drug raid. He couldn't even come up with a loud-and-clear rebuttal to his opponent's dubious attempt to link him to the Kansas Supreme Court's overturning of the Carr brothers' death sentences. Instead of whining about how unfair nasty politicking is, Davis should have fought back. His failure to come off like a decisive leader is a big reason that Kansas voters rubber-stamped Brownback for another four years. The Roeland Park City Council In March, Roeland Park City Council members Jennifer Gunby and Megan England introduced an ordinance that would have added sexual orientation and gender identity to the classes protected by the suburb's existing anti-discrimination law. In other words, the ordinance would have extended the same rights to LGBT residents as those enjoyed by all other residents. Simple, right? Wrong. Due to culture-war scaremongering from "family values" types, such as Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Dale Schowengerdt (who, at a May council meeting, warned that the ordinance could result in male-born transgendered people raping little girls in public restrooms), the effort devolved into a five-month parade of thinly veiled bigotry and borderline personality disorders elected officials included. When it came time for the vote, Marek Gliniecki quoted from a church document about the intrinsic dignity of all people and then voted against the ordinance. Mel Croston (who subsequently stepped down from the council) boasted of her many LGBT friends and then voted against the ordinance. Michael Rhodes, who also voted in opposition, said: "This has brought out the worst in people and has divided our city." Becky Fast, who behaved throughout as though the ordinance vote was some kind of vicious, unfair burden on her, did not even show up to vote; she later claimed that she had been in a car accident. As a result, the ordinance was defeated. When citizens demanded a full vote, with Fast present, the measure eventually passed. But by then, this motley group's cowardice and dysfunction had been illuminated for all to see.
Michael Brooks Michael Brooks has what it takes to be remembered for a long time as the worst member of Kansas City's City Council. Had Brooks finished his four years on the council without any high-profile embarrassment, he would have entered local history as just another unremarkable councilman, a man who occasionally showed up to meetings and spent most of his time there playing with his phone. Instead, the East Side pastor's legacy includes sending photos of his penis to a woman other than his wife, getting extorted over it, making $15,000 earmarked for boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. disappear, and facing charges that he choked his legislative aide all while taking taxpayer-financed trips to do who-knows-what in other cities. We aren't sure what 5th District voters saw in Brooks, but now they'll have to find someone new to represent them. Brooks delivered a woe-is-me resignation in December, citing none of these embarrassments as the cause of his departure.
Steve Dennis There's no bigger walk of shame for disgraced local politicians than exiting the federal courthouse in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. They must hide behind the security checkpoint and cower from staked-out news reporters, wishing that the architects had thought to include some other way out of the building. (Thanks, architects.) Steve Dennis, the former mayor of Grandview, walked that walk on the morning of February 11, after cutting a deal with federal prosecutors to avoid trial over corruption-related charges. The man whom many considered an effective booster for the south Kansas City suburb apparently never expected to be caught setting up a phony charity in order to launder $35,000 for himself. Perhaps he knew that the Grandview-based International House of Prayer would be oddly complacent about his misusing its charitable donation. But it was the ex-mayor's taste for greasy-spoon food that undid him. Dennis falsified city reimbursement forms for meals at Denny's (claiming to have dined with Jackson County Executive Mike Sanders; he didn't), sealing his fate. There's no Grand Slam Breakfast in the federal prison in Florence, Colorado. Charles Macheers What's worse for a state-level politician than getting blasted all across the country for writing and introducing a stupid, hateful piece of legislation? Getting blasted for fronting said legislation for a lawmaker who dropped that hot potato on his lap. That's destined to be the political legacy of Charles Macheers. He represents Shawnee in the Kansas House, but few people in Shawnee know much about him. Macheers owes his election to his Republican affiliation in GOP-heavy western Johnson County and to the fact that his predecessor, Owen Donohoe, pulled out of a supposed re-election bid at the last minute, allowing Macheers to slide onto the ballot. Macheers leapt from anonymity to national headlines when he spoke in favor of a bill that would allow businesses to turn away gay customers. With a straight face, he described it as a measure to protect against discrimination that is, discrimination against oppressed Christians in Kansas. After the bill was flayed by more levelheaded Kansas lawmakers, it was revealed that it wasn't even Macheers' idea. The thing had been bounced to him by Olathe House Republican Lance Kinzer, who had himself taken the draft language from a national religious group. Macheers took all the heat for someone else's idea, so perhaps he believes himself to be a politician with conviction. And Shawnee voters re-elected the eager mouthpiece anyway.
Russ Johnson After eight years on the Kansas City, Missouri, City Council, Russ Johnson is finally out to pasture, capping a tenure that makes a great case for term limits. Johnson, who lived near Tiffany Springs Park in Platte County during a chunk of his term, was obsessed with starting the downtown streetcar project. When reporters asked just what a 2-mile downtown starter line, and later an expanded version, would accomplish, Johnson didn't hear fair questions. He heard conspiracies against his pet project. When seemingly balanced news stories were written or aired about the streetcar, Johnson raged about injustices if the stories weren't openly in favor of the idea. Having picked a bunch of fights while trying to be a streetcar ambassador, Johnson lost crucial support and couldn't get the expansion line passed. Unbowed, he continues to whine about the excesses of an automobile culture and the city's lack of density two arguments that might sound more convincing from someone who hadn't chosen to live in the farthest reaches of the city's suburban sprawl. In a city beset by divisions real and perceived, Johnson makes the worst type of leader: an us-versus-them blowhard who can't clearly articulate his position but rages against those who don't agree with him. Given his support of rail transit, Johnson should know that Amtrak can take him back to his home state of Nebraska. One-way tickets from Kansas City to Omaha cost $128. Tim Coppinger and Richard Moseley As we've been reporting for more than a year, Kansas City is a national hub for predatory online-lending businesses. Tim Coppinger and Richard Moseley are the most recent poster boys for this shameful distinction. Their local operations CWB Services and the Hydra Group, respectively were busted by federal agencies on the same September morning in 2014. Why? In addition to the usual sleazy business practices charging interest of several hundred percentage points as well as other excessive fees on loans (and hiding behind Indian tribes and offshore shell companies in order to deflect the state usury laws that such businesses can be prosecuted for violating) both parties stand accused of "autofunding." That's a term in the online-lending industry for depositing unauthorized loans into unsuspecting consumers' bank accounts, and then charging those consumers interest and fees on the phantom loans. In other words, a scam. These men may never go to jail the charges are civil, at least for now but it looks increasingly likely that they'll have to sell their million-dollar Mission Hills homes. That's imperfect karma, but it's good enough for government work.
Bryan Round Judge Bryan Round of the 16th Circuit Court of Jackson County loves cops. Of course, it's always easier to love those who once wrote your paychecks, even if that means stepping over several ethical boundaries. In 2014, Round had a young man named Nicholas Rose in his courtroom on charges of imprudent driving. Rose had slammed into the back of a police cruiser while speeding down U.S. Highway 40 with other stunt-bike riders. That police car was occupied by Kansas City Police Department officer Donald Hubbard, who roughed up Rose and claimed that the biker had tried to strike him with his helmet. (Video evidence shows otherwise.) Round learned that Rose wanted to sue the KCPD for using excessive force. That information made Round so angry that he forgot he was a judge and had a flashback to when he was the KCPD's attorney. He called Rose a "vulture" and said he would testify against him if his old client called on him for the civil case. Not so ethical. If Round wanted to keep doing the police department's bidding, he should never have interviewed to become a judge. We hope that the court's presiding judge keeps a close watch on Round in 2015, with an eye on any criminal cases he takes up that involve the KCPD. Rodney Sanell On March 8, an employee of Nu Troost Tattoo (4101 Troost), who also lived in an apartment above the tattoo shop, discovered a fake-looking smoke detector. It was actually a hidden camera. A subsequent police search found 11 hidden cameras in the woman's apartment including four in the bathroom, one facing the shower and another facing the toilet. The cameras' various wires led to the basement of the building, where they plugged into a desktop computer sending video feeds. The person allegedly responsible for this nightmarish invasion of privacy is Rodney Sanell. In addition to owning three Freaks Tattoo locations (two of which have since shut down), Sanell was the owner of Nu Troost Tattoo and the woman's landlord. She told the cops that Sanell had sexually propositioned her several times in the past, and that he had installed the smoke detectors while she was out of town six months before. Sanell has not yet been convicted in the criminal case, but he's the defendant in two lawsuits stemming from the discovery of the cameras. May we suggest a "SEX OFFENDER" forehead tattoo as part of the punishment if he's found guilty?
Tom Valenti You have to admire Tom Valenti for one thing: It takes balls to keep returning to the scene of your biggest failure and continuing to promise that you will make things right. Valenti the owner of 26 acres of prime real estate in Mission, where Roe Avenue hooks up with Shawnee Mission Parkway has spent nine years making visits to Mission City Hall, singing and dancing his claims about all he will accomplish at the former Mission Mall site. See if you can recall these tunes: a giant aquarium, an office building, a hotel, a luxury apartment complex, a college campus extension, a retail center. His latest song about his Gateway project is pretty dull: He now says the best that Mission can hope to have on his land is a plain old Wal-Mart. That's the same hulking entity jettisoned by the public and its elected representatives in 2004 because there's already one less than a mile away, in Roeland Park. (And because, you know, it's Wal-Mart.) Though Valenti has made a habit of coming back to Mission with increasingly smaller configurations of his project and acting like no one would care, Mission's city leaders appear to be growing tired of his crap. A Mission council committee recommended slapping a $600,000 annual assessment on the property either to get Valenti to act or to recoup some of the $12 million in stormwater improvements that the city made. If the city wants its money back, it may have to stand in line. Valenti is being sued by a local engineering firm that claims it performed $405,000 worth of work but never got paid. Sprint In August, Sprint abandoned its long-rumored plan to merge with T-Mobile amid antitrust concerns expressed by the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice. But that was far from the only disappointment that the Overland Park-headquartered company endured in 2014. Its Framily Plan, featuring an Andrew Dice Clayvoiced talking hamster as its spokesrodent, was met with confusion and ultimately scrapped. And Sprint, which has lost money every year since 2007, bled 270,000 subscribers in just the third fiscal quarter. (T-Mobile, on the other hand, reported rapid subscriber growth in 2014.) These failures are bad news, not just for the telecom company but also for the Kansas City metro, where Sprint has long been one of the largest private employers. The company's Overland Park campus, designed to accommodate 15,000 employees, houses just 6,000 Sprint workers today, and 1,400 local jobs were cut in 2014. Out of a sense of civic pride, many folks in town have stuck with Sprint through the years, despite its lousy customer service (which has improved) and its slow, spotty network (which hasn't). At a certain point, that goodwill dries up and if Sprint can't right itself, that moment may arrive soon.
The American Royal The American Royal spent 2014 demanding $30 million from Kansas City taxpayers, plus an annual operating subsidy of $1 million for 25 years, so it could tear down Kemper Arena (which the city owns) and replace it with a smaller structure better suited to the American Royal's interests. To which many Kansas City taxpayers responded: What the fuck is the American Royal? That barbecue thing? Why does the barbecue thing need $55 million? The Royal once put on successful livestock and horse shows, rodeos and country-music concerts a slate of events that the general public was interested in attending. Today, it's a shadow of its former self. The World Series of Barbecue is what the Royal is now best-known for, but it's held just one weekend a year in the parking lots outside Kemper Arena. The rest of its events cater to wealthy equestrian types who can afford to pay trainers to ride their $60,000 horses in Saddlebred competitions. Well, fine times change. But for reasons possibly related to unexamined privilege, the Royal, its representatives and its lawyers believe that their horsey club which they do not market, which has experienced a staggering drop in attendance over the past two decades, and which already enjoys a sweetheart lease deal with the city is something the rest of us should subsidize. In their attempts to push their plan through the City Council, they have acted like bullies, threatening to relocate the Royal to another city (cool, go for it!) and to sue a developer that proposed an alternative to tearing down Kemper Arena. All the while, they've held themselves out as "civic leaders." Maybe it's time for them to look for a different city to try to lead.
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