Ohio Pike: Cleveland Dealer

Dealer’s plain flimflam

Ohio’s largest newspaper the CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER has been running a heap of reports and editorials attacking Umberto Fedeli, chairman of the Ohio Turnpike Commission. Fedeli like other turnpike commissioners in Ohio gets $5,000 a year from that job, a part-time thing, and his main livelihood is an insurance brokerage with about 3,000 business clients. The DEALER paper says there are “serious questions” about Fedeli’s business connections with companies doing work for the Turnpike. Of course there’s a lot of big work coming out of the turnpike at present because of its $650m widening project (see TR#2, April 1996, p8). One company S E Johnson got a $32m contract for turnpike work and later put insurance business through Fedeli. S E Johnson insists that it put its insurance up to bid with several brokers and Fedeli gave them the best deal and so they went with him, while the turnpike says that it has strict rules about public bidding and selection of the lowest price tender. The DEALER hasn’t run anything to refute those answers to its “questions.” Nothing on Fedeli there.

Two other clients of Fedeli’s insurance business mentioned by the DEALER are Banks Carbone and Ralph C. Tyler PEPs. The DEALER points out these two engineering companies are subcontractors to URS, the engineering firm that is doing the major design work for the Turnpike. If the DEALER could show that Fedeli surreptitiously used influence with URS to get Banks Carbone and Tyler PEPS sub contract work against its better judgment, then it would have something on him. But URS says it chose its own sub-contractors. Nothing on Fedeli there either.

The DEALER also reports that Great Lakes Construction recently got a $27m contract from the turnpike and that their health insurance is handled by Fedeli’s brokerage. But the DEALER reported that Fedeli abstained from voting at the Commission meeting that awarded them the contract. No charge he leant on other commissioners. So again there’s nothing on Fedeli.

Now for all I know Umberto Fedeli may be a terrible rogue, enriching himself at the expense of the taxpayers of Ohio, defrauding old ladies, running dope...who knows? However I can’t see anything that the DEALER newspaper has published about Fedeli that amounts to a single plausible charge of even the most minor wrongdoing. No participant in any tendering has alleged any wrongdoing. Noone has said that Fedeli used power improperly, or that they could have done work for the turnpike cheaper than the guys who got the contracts, the kinds of things which would raise legitimate questions. No other commissioner is making allegations. There’s no whistleblower on the staff. No secretary charging she was ordered to shred documents. All the DEALER’s scenarios of possible wrongdoing that the paper has alluded to fall apart once you get into the details. There’s nothing left but the DEALER’s own suspicions.

Of course when you read their editorials — one was aptly headlined “The road to suspicion” — they don’t come out and say plainly that Fedeli has done anything wrong, they just write airily that “Serious questions continue to arise...” that there is an “appearance of conflict,” that he should not be surprised that “such connections would raise eyebrows.” They use fudge words and smarm phrases. Innuendo piled upon insinuation. And then righteous sermons about how Fedeli should “welcome the chance to clear his name.” Of precisely what? How can anyone clear their name when there are no clear charges, just a lot of vague blather about connections, appearances and suspicions.

It is sanctimonious nonsense on the part of a newspaper to editorialize in worried tones about questions continuing to arise when it is the newspaper itself that is the main one raising the questions and to report anxiously about the awful appearance of wrongdoing when the newspaper’s own reporting is the major source of such an appearance. And when appearance is all we get. Talk about publisher’s incest!

There must be something substantial to write about in Cleveland. It can’t be such a boring place they have to waste good ink and paper on such flimflam.