I think I speak for most of the Charlotte-area Kossacks when I say that one vote I find myself wishing I could have back is the one I cast last year for Patrick Cannon as mayor. For those who don't know, Cannon resigned on March 26 just hours after being arrested on federal charges that he took tens of thousands of dollars in bribes--including at least one case where he took a $20,000 payment in the mayor's office. The government's evidence looks absolutely damning. It reveals a level of arrogance I haven't seen since John Edwards ran for president in 2008 knowing his affair with Rielle Hunter could blow into the open.
Well, a front-page story in today's Charlotte Observer suggests that the whistle could have been blown on Cannon a lot sooner than now. Federal investigators are taking a close look at Cannon's campaign finance records as part of their continuing probe. However, The Observer took a peek at its own, and found numerous irregularities in them dating as far as 1999, when Cannon was still on the city council.
An Observer review of Cannon’s campaign records since 1999 found reports with misleading, inaccurate and missing information that makes it difficult to tell where the former mayor got much of his money. State law requires that candidates disclose the name, address, occupation and employer of any donor who gives at least $50.
In about 100 cases since 2011, no job title was listed for donors to Cannon’s campaigns. In about 250 cases, no employer is listed.
Even when that information is contained in reports, it’s often hard to tell how the donor makes money – or why the person might be interested in supporting his candidacy.
The biggest red flags so far are donations from the owners of Yellow Cab. In 2011, that company won a contract making it one of only three taxi companies that can operate at Charlotte Douglas International Airport, triggering complaints that the bidding process was rigged. Cannon was chairman of the city council's public safety committee, and since his arrest people have wondered if he was being impartial. According to
a story from yesterday's paper, four people associated with Yellow Cab, including three of its partners, gave the maximum legally permitted donation to Cannon's mayoral campaign. However, Yellow Cab doesn't appear anywhere on the forms. For instance, part-owner William Bodenhamer's job title is listed on various disclosure forms as "real estate," business man," "business owner" and "property development." And another part-owner, Neal Nichols, is listed as the manager of a foundation in northern Virginia--but his financial interests appear to be larger than that.
George Free, the treasurer of Cannon's mayoral campaign, says that his campaign works with what donors provide. Whenever they didn't list their employers, he either called them or searched the Internet to find them. But that doesn't seem believable when you consider a donation Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson made to Cannon's mayoral campaign. He's listed as the CEO of Flagstar, the food services company that he founded in 1959 and from which he retired in 1995. Free said he didn't know it was the same Jerry Richardson--a claim that seems downright laughable to anyone who's lived in Charlotte for any period of time.
This revelation comes as no shock to the man Cannon beat in the mayor's race, Edwin Peacock. He said that he could never make any sense of where Cannon was getting his money or how he was spending it. But if he complained to the state, it would have been awhile before anything was done about it. The North Carolina Board of Elections has only two staffers assigned to do investigations, and faces a backlog dating back to 2004.
Seen in this light, I have to wonder--could Cannon have been derailed sooner than 2014? It's hard not to conclude that he could have been. After all, the last few years have seen massive cuts to local newspapers, radio stations and television stations to the point that they can't cover local and state issues adequately. I find myself thinking about the Texas Senate primary, in which Kesha Rogers somehow made the Democratic runoff despite being a loud-and-proud supporter of Lyndon LaRouche. And about the 2010 South Carolina Senate primary, in which Alvin Greene won the nomination despite facing felony obscenity charges for showing a pornographic image to a female student at the University of South Carolina and then propositioning her.
When I was at Carolina, I attended a lecture given by former Philadelphia Inquirer executive editor Gene Roberts. He said something about coverage of local and state government that still sticks with me today--"If you don't cover it incrementally, you don't cover it at all." Sounds to me like we have yet another case of what happens when you don't cover local government incrementally. If there is anything at all to this, Cannon needs to have the library thrown at him. It cannot be stated enough--as Democrats, we don't care what your party label is if you're corrupt.