Narration, as voiced 172 lines · select a line to jump there
Act I 0:42
When someone dies in Ashtabula County with no money and no family able to pay, the county buries them. It is one of the oldest obligations a local government has, and one of the quietest. There is a fund for it. There is a program. There is a line in the budget called indigent burial. It is a small amount of money by county standards. It is not a small thing to the people who need it. This is the last service a government performs for a person who had nothing — and the county performs it, as it should. The program is overseen by JP Ducro the Fourth — county commissioner, and president of the board in 2025. The county pays a funeral home a flat thousand dollars for each of those burials — and since 2021, no funeral home in the county has been paid for more of them than his. Founded in 1853 — five generations of funeral directors. It is called Ducro Funeral Services. It is his family's company — and one of the two firms the county pays lists him, J.P. Ducro the Fourth, as its agent with the state. Now watch what happens when the bill arrives. The bill goes to the Board of Commissioners with every other bill that week — as a schedule number. Nothing on the page says whose money it is. He does not abstain. On the twenty-third of March, 2021 — the day the county paid his family's firm — he moved the resolution that approved the week's bills. On the seventh of June, 2022, with Kathryn Whittington absent, he seconded it — and his vote was one of the two that carried it. The money moves. Eleven thousand, five hundred and forty-eight dollars since 2021 — public money, most of it for the county's poorest dead, into the business of a sitting commissioner. And under Ohio's own ethics law, stepping aside alone does not make that clean. He did not even step aside. Understand what the indigent burial program is before you decide how you feel about that. It exists for the person who dies in a rented room with no next of kin who can be found, or with family who simply cannot raise the money. Without it, that person is a problem for the coroner and nothing more. With it, they get a casket, a plot, a name recorded somewhere. It is the floor beneath which a society agrees not to let a human being fall. Ashtabula County is one of the poorer counties in Ohio. That floor gets used here. And the family business collecting on it has been burying this county's dead since 1853 — and its fifth generation now sits on the Board of Commissioners that pays it. This is not a business that stumbled into county work. It is a dynasty that goes back nearly as far as this county does — and now it sits on both sides of the bill. That move — step aside, say nothing, let the other two carry it — is the subject of this episode. Not the burial fund. The move. Because that move is written into this county's own minutes — a name, one word, and never a reason — and it is the single most important thing to understand about how this county is governed.
Act II 4:31
Ohio law is not naive about this. An elected official cannot vote to hand public money to their own business. That is a straightforward ethics violation and everyone in county government knows it. So on paper, nobody does. Here is what they do instead. The conflicted official abstains. Not a yes. Not a no. Not an objection, not an explanation, not a statement of interest read into the record for the public to hear. Just a name in the minutes beside the word abstain. And on a three-member board, that is enough. Because two votes carry a motion. The abstention removes the conflicted official from the tally without removing the money from their pocket. The transaction completes. The minutes record no dissent. In April 2020 they went further: 'Abstained: Kozlowski' — and then, 'the resolution was declared passed unanimously.' And the official who benefits is, on paper, absent from the decision that benefited them. That is the whole trick. It is not complicated, it is not hidden, and it is not — as far as anyone has ever ruled — illegal. Now hear what Ohio's own ethics commission says. A public contract exists whenever the county buys anything from anyone — and an official with a conflict must stay out of it completely: no vote, no discussion, no recommendation. And when the contract pays his own business, Ohio's law sets four conditions, and all four must hold — stepping aside is only part of the last one, which also demands that the county know exactly what his interest is. And here is what this county's record shows: when it happens, the minutes give a name and one word and never the interest; it moves public money into private hands belonging to the people voting; and in Ashtabula County it has been challenged once. In December 2016 two commissioners, on their way out of office, refused a contract to the company of the man just elected to join the board. They are gone. He is still there. Call it what it is. It is a system for making self-dealing survive contact with an ethics review. It has a rhythm, it has participants, and it runs on a schedule.
Act III 7:03
Let's stop describing it and look at one. Resolution 2018-107. The Ashtabula County Board of Commissioners purchases a Ford Explorer. The price is twenty-eight thousand, four hundred and fifty dollars. The vehicle is bought from Nassief Automotive. Casey Kozlowski sits on the Board of Commissioners. Casey Kozlowski is also employed as a business manager at Nassief Automotive. The board approves the purchase. Twenty-eight thousand dollars of public money moves to the company that employs a sitting member of the board that authorised it. One resolution. One vehicle. Twenty-eight thousand dollars. And a county does not buy one vehicle. It buys them every year. Resolution 2018-107 is in the county's own minutes of the third of April, 2018 — minutes the county has since taken off its website. And below the bidding threshold, nobody here seals a bid. In the county's own words: 'three quotes were requested.' In April 2020 the minutes name the three dealers it asked: Greg Sweet Ford, Great Lakes, and Nassief — his employer. That order went to Greg Sweet. His employer is on a list of three, and he sits on the board that signs the order. The dealership is the small one. The larger one has his family's name on it.
Act IV 8:45
Now put the three of them together, because separately these look like three unfortunate coincidences and together they look like a design. The county pays Ducro's family firms for its burials. He votes the bills through. Three times, in the week the check went out, he made the motion himself. Kozlowski worked for the dealership; the county bought vehicles from it. The county asked his employer for quotes. When he does step aside, the minutes never say why. And Whittington votes on both. Watch what that produces. Not one of those purchases, not one of those bills, has ever met a no. The abstention is not a sacrifice. It is optional. Each of them steps aside now and then, and never says why. Each of them votes his own family's money through, and the page never names it. Everybody always votes for each other's. You do not need a meeting to arrange that. You do not need an agreement, a phone call, or a single incriminating word. You need three people who each understand that the yes they give today is the yes they get back tomorrow. It is self-executing. That is why it is durable, and that is why it has survived years of public meetings held in an open room. And there is a fact about this board that makes the abstention matter far more than it first appears. Every resolution the commissioners pass carries a page recording how each of them voted, by name. Those pages are public. Nobody had ever counted them, so we did — more than three thousand resolutions, more than nine thousand individual votes, five and a half years. In all of it, a commissioner was recorded voting no four times. Four. And every one of those resolutions passed anyway. On four hundred and eighty-five roll calls, the record shows a commissioner absent. Twenty-one times it shows one abstaining. The form has a column for a no vote. In nine thousand votes it has been used four times. So on this board, stepping back from a vote is almost the only move a commissioner ever makes that isn't yes — which means every abstention in this county is a deliberate act: visible, rare, and chosen. Nearly all of those abstentions belong to two men, and each man has a subject. Casey Kozlowski's is an excavating firm: Northeast Site Development. When this board licenses it, he steps aside. The state lists its owner. Warren Kozlowski. His younger brother. The firm's address is their parents' farm, and the brother and the mother both give to his campaign from it. The county has paid that firm two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. On twenty-five of the days it was paid, Casey Kozlowski voted yes on the county's bills. Twelve times he made the motion himself. JP Ducro's subject is one contract: carrying the coroner's dead. For six years that work was his own company's, at twenty-one thousand dollars a year, and for the last five there was no contract at all. It came out weeks after he was elected. The outgoing board refused his company a new deal. One commissioner tried to keep it alive for three months: Casey Kozlowski. The work went to a funeral home in Conneaut, and Ducro has sat out its contract ever since. Except once. In 2020 he made the motion himself. And it goes further than the room. Campaign finance records show Casey Kozlowski paying into Citizens for Ducro — three hundred and thirty-five dollars in January 2022, the only money that committee took in that half-year. Then look at who funds Kozlowski. The committee is called Friends of Casey Kozlowski, and the contribution record is public. The two largest individual donors in that file are David McGrath — twelve thousand dollars — and Kathryn Ward, twelve thousand five hundred. Together, twenty-four and a half thousand dollars — more than a third of every dollar the committee has reported, and nearly five times what the largest donor outside their household gave. You met David McGrath last episode. He owns Sunset Transportation Partners, the company that received Ashtabula County's public bus fleet at a dollar a vehicle a year. Kathryn Ward — the third corner from Episode One — is named with him as husband and wife on a recorded county mortgage, and the contribution records show the two of them filing from the same household. Fourth on that list, at just over three thousand dollars: Jonathan Ehrenfeld, the private equity developer whose complex those subsidised buses are described as serving. You will meet him properly next episode. So the three private parties standing on the receiving end of a public bus fleet leased at a dollar a vehicle are three of the four largest individual donors to one of the commissioners who approved it. And McGrath's money did not stop at one commissioner. Citizens for Ducro: four thousand dollars in July 2023, five hundred more the next June — no one in that committee's file gave more. Jonathan Ehrenfeld gave it a thousand. Every one of those gifts was disclosed, which is the only reason we can read them to you. What the record shows is the sequence. McGrath's money goes in through 2023 and 2024. The Christmas Eve renewal is December 2024. Ward's final twenty-five hundred dollars arrives in March 2025, three months after the renewal — and her first five thousand had come three weeks before the original lease. Money before the vote. Money after the vote. Kozlowski moved that renewal. Ducro seconded it. David McGrath had funded them both.
Act V 15:11
Everything so far has been transactional. A vehicle. An invoice. Something happens, a vote occurs, money moves. Those you can at least count. And there is a door all of this comes through. Before a resolution reaches a vote, it goes through the work session — the three commissioners, the County Administrator, Janet Discher, and the clerk — and the notes on each item end with one word: Decision. On a board that all but never votes no, that is not a clerical function. Whoever shapes the agenda decides what the public ever gets to see being decided. And in June 2020 the minutes have Janet Discher requesting the quotes for the dog warden's truck herself — Nassief's came in at twenty-seven thousand, four hundred and ninety-nine dollars, and the decision was: Janet will contact Nassief. And understand what the bills resolution does. It is a single vote that approves every voucher the departments submit that day — and the resolution names a schedule, not a single payee. It is also the ideal place to put something you would rather nobody read aloud. In the spring of 2026 the county's bills began to arrive in two piles, and one of them carries a letter. Schedule Seventeen A. Schedule Nineteen A. On the lettered pile, Casey Kozlowski steps aside. The county's own page says so — 'Commissioner Kozlowski abstained from voting on this schedule' — and never says what is on it. Three weeks before the first one, the board's own notes on emergency sewer work read: 'Casey must abstain from that process.' And the week it appeared, the state's ledger shows what the county paid his brother's firm: more than forty thousand dollars. In the minutes, the debate gets two words: 'Discussion: none.' In this county, the frame has been remarkably quiet.
Act VI 17:23
One last question. It tells you whether a system is merely convenient or actually enforced. What happens to someone who challenges it? In June 2023, someone inside did — the county's own prosecutor, Colleen O'Toole. She told the county's data board that the contracts for its new court-records system left the county, in her words, 'exposed, to the point of data breach' — and she sent the commissioners a cease-and-desist. She was overruled, six to two. Casey Kozlowski said the commissioners 'receive threats on a daily basis from the prosecutor's office.' The county auditor, David Thomas, wrote that she was 'lying and fabricating a story.' Her answer, in writing: 'What do they have to hide?' They forced it through anyway. In August 2025, while the county was updating that same system, images of court documents went online with people's personal information still on them. The court's notice says the county will notify everyone it knows was affected, and anyone else can fill out a form to find out. It calls the privacy of the court's files 'a top priority.' One warning. One overruling. Two years later, the thing she warned about. And the record shows what she was up against. In 2020 the house she listed as her home belonged to J.P. Ducro's family, and Ducro testified he saw her arrive with a moving truck. In 2023 his party — her own — demanded she resign, and said she 'does not live in Ashtabula County.' Two police unions voted no confidence — one of them the sheriff's deputies', for the first time in its recorded history. Sheriff's deputies walked her out of a commissioners' meeting. The commissioners hired a law firm, and their own resolution says how it was paid: 'out of funds retained from the budget of the Ashtabula County Prosecutor.' The firm was paid eighty-two thousand dollars in two years. They forced her out. The woman who took her chair, April Grabman, ran unopposed. Her husband is a detective at that sheriff's office, on its drug task force. He joined it the month she stood alone on the primary ballot. Her office now prosecutes his cases. Not one goes to an outside prosecutor. And how they end is not luck. That is Episode Four. Public money flows outward to the businesses of the people who govern, and of their families — a funeral home, a dealership, a brother's excavating firm — and to a transit company whose owner has funded two of the three. When a commissioner's own stake comes up, the minutes give one word and never a reason — and for the funeral home, not even the word. The bus award, the contract, the lease and every renewal since — each one moved or seconded by a commissioner the bus company's owner had funded. The county's bills pass as a schedule number, with no payee named. And the one official who stood in their way was overruled, and then forced out. Nobody in this story has ever been made to answer for any of it. That is not the defence of it. That is the indictment. A system in which the theft never has to be explained is not a healthier system than one in which it must. It is a more advanced one. If this is how three people handle a county's money — what happens when someone from outside arrives, with real capital, wanting something much larger than a Ford Explorer? That is Episode Three.