Corruption investigations grind along

The public corruption investigations of Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon and state Sen. Ulysses Currie remind me of the offense run by former Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes. 

Coach Hayes was very conservative. He used a slow, grinding, run-dominated offense known as “three yards and a cloud of dust.” He hardly ever called for a pass as his offense pounded the opposition and gradually moved the ball downfield. 

Public corruption cases work much the same way. These investigations are the slow, grinding wheels of justice. They are moving relentlessly, but you often don’t see the progress.

The goal for investigators in these cases is to demonstrate that a public official is using his or her public office for personal gain. This usually requires that investigators link an official act benefiting a private company or person to the public official. It also requires the public official to have received something of value—cash, check, gifts, jewelry, trips—from the private individual or company. 

In Mayor Dixon’s case, investigators seem to be probing whether she received a number of gifts from a developer whose projects benefited from actions she took as City Council president. In Sen. Currie’s case, the investigation appears to be focusing on unreported services he performed for Shoppers Food Warehouse.

Why do public corruption cases like these take so much time? The main reason is that investigative agencies are dealing with high-level government officials. The investigators respect the voters’ choices. They don’t want to be seen as usurping the voters’ decision to put these people in office.

The investigators also don’t want to appear to be taking sides among the political parties and factions in Maryland. So, prosecutors and investigators tread slowly and carefully and don’t throw any passes.

The investigations of Dixon and Currie seem to be historical investigations. In both cases the events being investigated appear to have occurred over the last several years. The investigating agencies do not seem to have undercover operations or informants recording conversations of people involved in current criminal activity.

Historical investigations are especially time-consuming. Reaching back over years of financial transactions involving numerous individuals and companies requires a lot of painstaking knitting together of details.

Investigative knitting includes interviewing witnesses. These interviews can run into the hundreds. Interviewing and reinterviewing witnesses takes many hours and requires travel, conversation and report writing.

Meanwhile, the clock keeps ticking.

Witnesses are often loyal political backers of the public official under investigation.  They often see it as their duty to obstruct the investigation. Sometimes the witnesses are co-conspirators with the public official in the criminal activity.

The prosecutors and investigators then use the tactic of opening an investigation of a potential witness. The idea is to charge a witness for his or her part in the conspiracy or some other crime.

The witness/co-conspirator is then offered a deal: testify against the political figure and provide information to the investigators in return for a reduced sentence. This has the effect of generating new criminal cases spinning out of the original investigation. And again, all of this takes time.

Public corruption cases often revolve around government transactions involving real estate, construction, financing, tax breaks for investments and payments to vendors providing services to government. These government transactions can be influenced or controlled by the public official involved in the investigation. 

The key to this part of the investigation is to follow the money from the private company or business person to the public official. This takes time and patience.  Subpoenas in large numbers are needed for bank accounts, credit card accounts, company accounting records, hotel bills, and a host of other records.

Once the records are obtained, investigators and accountants must review them for potential evidence or leads to evidence. Often investigators find they need to subpoena more records and conduct more witness interviews or reinterviews based on their review. Records in these cases can fill entire rooms. 

There is much we don’t know about the investigations of Dixon and Currie. Search warrants have been served on Dixon’s home by the State Special Prosecutor Office and on Currie’s home by the FBI.

For those warrants to be served, a judge or magistrate had to agree with the investigating agencies that probable cause existed that someone had committed a crime.  The judges also agreed that probable cause existed that evidence was contained in the homes of Dixon and Currie. 

We don’t know what will happen next or when it will happen. But if you look closely, you can see a cloud dust that will possibly lead to a courtroom. But it will take time. It always does.  {EXA}

Dan Dreibelbis is a retired Special Agent of the FBI who is teaching fraud investigation and investigative interviewing in Stevenson University’s graduate forensic program.