ambassador bridge

Faced with orders to appear before a vindictive and unconstrained county judge - 'Jailin Judge' Prentis Edwards - tomorrow (Thursday) the Ambassador Bridge company (DIBC) had a morning, Wednesday, of emergency meetings of its board of directors, senior executives, and lawyers.

The widely accepted narrative on the Ambassador Bridge Gateway legal battle repeated endlessly in the bridge company-hating Detroit media is that the details of the contested contract were clear, simple, and well understood, and that the bridge company has stubbornly refused for years now to stick to the contract or to obey a judge's order to rebuild to contract specs. And not just the local media.

A state court of appeals has overthrown the jailing of two top officials of the Ambassador Bridge, Matty Moroun and Dan Stamper by Wayne County Court judge last month.

Secret reports on the bridge company's activities at the Gateway Plaza that were the main basis for Judge Prentis Edwards jailings of two top bridge officers January 12-13 will be released after all - a partial acknowledgment of the company's complaint about abuses of procedure and lack due process.

The depth of Michigan DOT senior officials' determination to destroy the reputation of the Ambassador Bridge company (DIBC) people, and their animus, is reported in a lawyer's letter from 2009. The lawyer Kenneth C Harrison was working at the time for Walter Lubienski who owned strategically located land in the middle of the planned expanded plaza area and ramps of the Gateway project.

Now exposed as a principal obstructionist in the Gateway Project, Michigan Department of Transportation is at last moving to build the  S32 missing ramp that the local press had previously hung on the bridge company. MDOT says in a statement that it will begin work on the ramp "within several weeks" and it should be completed before Memorial Day holiday weekend.

The state is "expediting a contract for the work," the statement says.

The Jailin Judge of Wayne County Michigan says that a request by the Ambassador Bridge company to see reports used to jail two of its top people January 12 is "designed to annoy, harass, and intimidate" the author of the report Charles Scales, who the judge titles Monitor with a capital 'M.' Piling on, the county judge, Prentis Edwards says the company's request is "overly broad, confusing and unduly burdensome" and in a one-page order issued today he "quashes" th

It is one of the most fundamental tenets of English common law and of American justice that the accused have the right to know the evidence against them, and to dispute it - but not in the court being conducted by Judge Prentis Edwards in Wayne County District Court in Detroit. Two Ambassador Bridge men Manuel 'Matty' Moroun and Dan Stamper were sent to jail January 12 on the basis of a secret report.

Virtually without exception reporters, columnists and editorial writers in Detroit are big fans of Jailin Judge Prentis Edwards and insist he did the right thing to send Manuel 'Matty' Moroun  and Dan Stamper of the Ambassador Bridge company to the Wayne County lockup last Thursday. For the local press it's a simple morality play in which the state and the law are the white knights of virtue and the capitalist bridge tollers are the dark villains.

The legal soap opera over the Ambassador Bridge Gateway project in Detroit goes on. After about 30 hours in the Wayne County lockup for supposed contempt of court Manuel 'Matty' Moroun, 84, head of the bridge-owning family, and bridge company president Dan Stamper, 62, are being released this evening pending hearing of appeals February 2.