Bow down before him, Paul Mifsud, spin-master. The Governor's Chief of Staff recently announced his resignation from the Governor's office as of June 26 to spend more time with his family and reopen a political consulting business.
Some suspect he may be retiring to spend more time in prison pinstripes than in pinstripe suits. Why? Family values verbiage aside, Mifsud must defend a very bizarre construction deal with the Banks Carbone Construction Company.
Again, just the facts. Tommy G. Banks, former meter reader but now the main "self-taught" construction man to the rich and famous took out two Union County building permits totaling $210,000: one for $150,000; another for $60,000. Tommy promised to build a plush two-story addition -- including a library, office, breakfast nook, 2 1/2 baths, three bedrooms -- and a three-bay freestanding 1450 square foot garage for boat and car storage for Dr. Kathy Bartunek. Now Kathy was engaged to Pauly, the guv's main man. So, while Mr. Banks labored away on the lavish addition and gorgeous garage, Mifsud and Bartunek were married and moved into the abode still under renovation.
Now the facts get a little muddy. Mifsud and Bartunek claim that Tommy promised to build all that wonderful construction for just the bargain basement price of $35,000 and Tommy, being an incompetent idiot, overran the project by almost three times the amount. Bartunek settled up with Banks by paying him $109,000, or so she says. And poor Mr. Banks, after his purported display of ineptitude to perhaps the state's second most powerful man, Mifsud, is rewarded with nine of sixteen unbid state minority construction contracts.
Count'em folks. The man that miffed Mifsud, the self-taught construction guy, got three times as many contracts as any other minority firm: he got a piece of the $65 million Schottenstein arena and the $52.3 million Max Fisher College of Business at OSU. A miracle, you say? The American dream! Perhaps, but not likely.
Seems Mifsud and the new misses can't produce any checks to show they paid a dime for the swank new additions. Appears Tommy got his political juice by fronting for the Carbone Construction family out of Cleveland. Inspector General David Sturtz was looking at Tommy's relationship to the Carbone family when he was suddenly forced out by Governor Voinovich, whose Chief of Staff was Pauly, who recently married Kathy, who can't produce any checks for Tommy's work. Does this begin to parse? Capice?
Now, a well-informed source says the FBI is looking at Tommy and Pauly. When Mifsud came to work for the Governor Voinovich from Voinovich Construction Company (run by the Governor's brother, Paul), he took charge and reorganized of three key state departments: the Department of Administrative Services (DAS), the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) and the Ohio Department of Development. Curiously, but not surprisingly, Mifsud oversaw he drafting of new rules that would allow relative unknowns like Tommy Banks to receive large unbid minority set-aside contracts.
Thus, the man that wrote the rules, Mifsud, may be delivering for the man who benefited from the rule changes, Banks. Even more curious, someone snuck back to Union County, when Andy Zajac of the Akron Beacon-Journal began to ask around about the Bartunek home improvement project, and attempted to crudely forge a different price on the permit. The $150,000 permit was changed to a $50,000 permit. See, this totals $110,000. Strangely, the exact number Tommy told the Cleveland Plain Dealer the permits totaled before anyone knew that they had been illegally altered.
How did Tommy know the permits had been altered when it hadn't been reported yet in the Akron Beacon-Journal? But wasn't it lucky -- even though Mifsud and Bartunek can't produce any checks -- that all the math is within $1000.
After all, if we in Ohio weren't fortunate enough to have somebody go in and forge the numbers, we might be faced with a mega-political scandal. You know, the awful type that happens in other states where the Governor's Chief of Staff is a dirty, filthy sleazebag steering contracts to fly-by-night fronts for pseudo-minority contractors.
I'm just glad we live in the state where the Columbus Dispatch has the good sense to cover-up such awful allegations. If it didn't, people might start asking "Did Banks build for the Wolfe family?" "Did he build for former editor Bob Smith, or Dispatch executive Dick Franks?"
And most of all, I thank God for the Dispatch's coverage of the new shiny clean renovated facade on our new statehouse. Because in a democracy, it's far more important to focus on the facade than the Dispatch's political buddies stinking the place up inside.