Narration, as voiced 337 lines · select a line to jump there
Act I 0:42
The Crime Enforcement Agency of Ashtabula County has a page on the county's website. Government, then Departments, then Sheriff. Four short paragraphs. The county wrote every word of it. It opens like this. The Crime Enforcement Agency of Ashtabula County is a multi-jurisdictional crime task force, consisting of officers from the Ashtabula County Sheriff's Office and the Conneaut and Geneva police departments. Then the mandate. Organized crime. Major offenders. Fugitive apprehension. Gangs. Drug trafficking. Homeland security. The page adds that the task force collects data on potential threat sites and threat groups, and that it is the point of contact for federal and state intelligence-gathering agencies. Arrest power. Intelligence capacity. A direct line to federal partners. And it has never appeared on a ballot. Not once. Nowhere in this county has anybody ever been asked to vote on it. Then the page ends with two sentences, and those two sentences are this episode. CEAAC is funded through grants. The task force began operations July 1st, 2019. Hold both of them. An agency with police powers over ninety-seven thousand people — and the county's account of who pays for it is four words. Funded through grants. Not a levy you voted on. But the state's audits of the county's own books say most of it was never grant money at all. Two dollars in three. Moved in from other county funds, across 2022, 2023 and 2024. And it is young. Whatever drug enforcement in this county was before July 2019, it was something else. Run some other way. Answering to someone else. Three episodes so far have been about money leaving. Buses at a dollar a vehicle a year. Invoices for burying the county's poorest dead. A zoning line moved so a private equity firm could build. Underneath every one of them was a question nobody in this county was asking out loud. Where is the part of this government whose job it is to notice? This is the answer. This is the machine. How it was assembled, who pays for it, who staffs it, and who is permitted to look at it. And at its centre, one marriage: a task force detective, and the county prosecutor whose office prosecutes his cases. Stay with the structure.
Act II 3:43
The roster, because the county publishes that too. The page is called CEAAC Officers. Two columns that matter — Officer, and Home Agency. Three rows. Lieutenant Cary Nelson, Commander. Ashtabula County Sheriff's Office. Detective Tom Perry. Ashtabula County Sheriff's Office. Detective Brett Grabman. Ashtabula County Sheriff's Office. Three officers. One agency, three times. Now go back one click, to the county's own description of the same body. A multi-jurisdictional task force, consisting of officers from the Sheriff's Office and the Conneaut and Geneva police departments. Three contributing departments. A roster is a snapshot. Officers rotate, assignments change, a web page lags a duty sheet. All true. But these two pages sit one click apart, the county's audited financial report gives a third answer, and no two of them agree about the most basic fact an agency has. Who is in it. Now — why the word multi-jurisdictional is worth the syllables. The county explains it itself, in its own words. The agencies involved recognize that individually, their jurisdictions are limited, and such limitations are detrimental in combating drug-related and gang-related crime within the county. The problem can be most effectively combated by the pooling of their resources and the joint exercise of their respective authorities. As policy that is defensible. Crime crosses a city line. A Conneaut officer whose case runs into Geneva is a real problem, and pooling authority is a real answer. But look at what is pooled. Not vehicles. Not radios. Authority. The joint exercise of their respective authorities. That is the county's phrase, and it is the correct one. An officer assigned to this task force carries powers that no longer stop where the city that hired him stops. And here is what travels with the authority, and what does not. The chief who could discipline him is not his commander. The council that funds his department does not set his assignment. The residents of the municipality he came from cannot reach him at all. Every unit of authority that crosses a boundary leaves its accountability behind on the other side. That is not an abuse of the arrangement. That is the arrangement, working exactly as designed. The officer commanding it is Lieutenant Cary Nelson. Hold his name. He comes back later in this episode — not as a suspect, but because he is one of the very few people in this county who worked inside the system that came before.
Act III 7:00
Funded through grants. Watch what those four words look like from inside the commissioners' room. New Year's Eve, 2024. The evening before, at the commissioners' office, April Grabman took her oath as county prosecutor. Commissioner Casey Kozlowski was master of ceremonies, and the sheriff took his own oath at the same event. The next morning her husband, Detective Brett Grabman, is in front of those commissioners with two grant proposals for the task force — and the sheriff comes with him. The Star Beacon covers it. The reporter is Warren Dillaway. The first proposal is a hundred and eighty-eight thousand dollars. A full-time investigator, a coordinator's salary, a vehicle, computer software. Award period May 1st, 2025 through April 30th, 2026. The application deadline is January 6th — the day his wife takes office. The second is around ten thousand, for equipment. Now move forward sixteen months, into the county's own record. April 28th, 2026. One o'clock in the afternoon. A commissioners' work session. In the room: all three commissioners — Casey Kozlowski, Kathryn Whittington, JP Ducro the Fourth — the County Administrator, Janet Discher, one member of staff, one reporter, and one member of the public. Detective Brett Grabman presents a CEAAC grant of one hundred and forty thousand, five hundred and nineteen dollars and three cents. It pays for a full-time detective and a community outreach and public information officer. About eleven thousand goes toward part of a second detective's salary. Five hundred dollars for supplies. Twelve months from May 1st. And then the minutes record one more clause, and it is the one nobody quotes. About five hundred dollars more than last year. Sit with that clause. Last year is May 2025 to April 2026 — the same twelve months the hundred-and-eighty-eight-thousand-dollar application was written for. And the county's own work-session record puts what that year actually paid at roughly a hundred and forty thousand. One is what this task force asked for. The other is what it got. The county's own record of that morning itemises the request: a hundred and forty-six thousand dollars in salaries, thirty-five thousand for a vehicle, seventy-two hundred for software. The award read out sixteen months later buys a detective and a public information officer. And one more line from those same minutes. The grant does not cover PERS, and it does not cover the Medicare match. Translate that. The grant buys the officer. You buy his pension contribution and his payroll tax. You have seen this shape already. On Christmas Eve the county renewed it: the public bought the buses, and a private company drives them. Here, outside money buys part of the headcount and the public pays the rest — two dollars in three, by the state's audits — the cost that never appears inside the phrase funded through grants. Two further grants the same afternoon. A JAG award of about twenty thousand for equipment. A Drug Law grant of about eleven thousand for CEAAC operations. And beside the CEAAC item, the county's record of what was decided. On today's agenda. You have been in this room before. Two episodes ago it was where a conflicted invoice went to become routine. Here it is where an enforcement budget becomes final — the same day it is spoken aloud, in front of one reporter and one member of the public. One last line from that record, and it may be the most consequential sentence in this episode. The grant is going away. The new Governor may have something similar. Advocacy has begun. An agency whose funding is ending — months after the county moved opioid settlement money into its salaries. And which has already begun advocating for its replacement. Which means the people who decide where enforcement goes in this county carry a standing institutional interest in demonstrating that it is needed.
Act IV 11:35
Name the detective properly now. He has appeared twice — once on the county's published roster, and again standing in front of the commissioners as the man who presents its budget. Brett Grabman. Detective. He works for the Ashtabula County Sheriff's Office. Now name the other office. April Grabman is the county prosecutor. She decides who gets charged. She had been a magistrate for one of this county's judges — the judges Colleen O'Toole took to the Ohio Supreme Court in December 2023. That same week, the newspaper reported she had filed to run for the chair O'Toole was being forced out of. Nobody ran against her. Her term runs to the end of 2028. They are married. The Vindicator carried their engagement in 2013; that December, a recorded deed named them wife and husband. Every defendant in this county is entitled to assume one thing. That the officer who builds the case against them and the lawyer who decides whether to bring it are two different people. Two offices. Checking each other. That is the whole system. In twenty-two of this county's felony cases, a witness for the prosecution is the prosecutor's husband. The check is broken before anybody does anything at all. In 2016 Ohio's Board of Professional Conduct, which advises the state's lawyers on ethics, was asked about a marriage like this from the other side: a defence lawyer married to a detective at the agency that made the arrest — a detective 'not involved in the case'. The Board said such a marriage can be a conflict that needs the client's written consent, and recommended the case 'be avoided when possible'. And in that marriage the two are on opposite sides: if either one bends for the other, one of them pays for it. In this marriage they are on the same side. He is the State's witness. Her office is the State's lawyer. A conviction is a win for both. And this county's own court has shown what the answer is. In 2017 the elected prosecutor asked the court to take two cases off his hands. The court appointed prosecutors from Trumbull County — the docket says why: 'because of a conflict of interest.' That is the known answer: an outside prosecutor. We went through eleven thousand, two hundred and seventeen of this county's criminal cases, from 2015 to 2026. In her husband's twenty-two, the docket shows no outside prosecutor and no conflict notice. No order keeping her away from his cases. No record of her ever stepping aside. Until March 2024 Brett Grabman ran the drug task force in Columbiana County. He left that command for the Ashtabula County Sheriff's Office the month his wife stood alone on the primary ballot for prosecutor here. For ten months, not one felony case in this county named him as a witness for the prosecution. Then his wife took office. Three months later came the first. There are twenty-two now, and every one was prosecuted by her office. Not one was handed to an outside prosecutor. The three prosecutors before her sought one in eleven cases. She has asked for one once, in August 2025 — and not for a case of her husband's. When the witness is the boss's husband, the office prosecuting the case has about as plain a conflict of interest as there is. For his cases, the court record shows she has never asked. Not once. Thirteen of those cases were serious felonies that reached sentencing. All thirteen defendants went to prison. Nine were drug cases — and in the same court, in the same years, comparable drug cases sent fifty-eight percent to prison. Even people with no earlier case in this county: eight out of eight went to prison. The marriage is not the finding. The finding is that his cases never leave her office. And of the thirteen people who reached sentencing on a serious felony, not one walked out of that courthouse free.
Act V 16:36
So who oversees the machine? There is an answer, and the county publishes it. One click from the officers page sits a page headed Advisory Board. A table. Four rows. Sheriff William Niemi — Ashtabula County Sheriff's Office. Colleen O'Toole — Ashtabula County Prosecutor's Office. Chief Michael Colby — Conneaut Police Department. Chief John Camper — Geneva Police Department. Four names. Now check each one against who holds that job today. Sheriff William Niemi still holds his — and his office houses the task force and employs every officer on its roster. The first seat oversees its own men. Colleen O'Toole — forced out, as you saw in Episode Two — left the office in January 2025. In May 2023 two police unions had voted no confidence in her: Conneaut's officers, and the sheriff's deputies. Look at the table again. Their bosses hold two of its other three seats. The prosecutor today is April Grabman. Nobody ran against her, and she is married to one of the task force's three officers. One difference between them is already on paper. In December 2023 O'Toole sat in Harpersfield's township meeting, offered to help its zoning appeals board, and said she would represent the township if its fight with the City of Geneva went to court. In April 2026, when Spire took that zoning board to court, Grabman's office 'declined to represent Harpersfield Township' — co-counsel only — and the township hired, and helps pay, a lawyer of its own. Chief Michael Colby was placed on administrative leave in April 2025, pending an internal investigation, and then retired. Conneaut swore in Michael Bertolasio in December. Chief John Camper does run Geneva's. But the task force the county calls multi-jurisdictional lists no officer from Geneva, and none from Conneaut. All three work for the sheriff. Four seats. Two name people who are gone, one is the sheriff overseeing his own officers, and the last speaks for a department with no one on the task force. Bring that page up to date, and the prosecutor's chair goes to the wife of one of its three officers. And there is no commissioner on that board. Nobody from the three-member body that appropriates county money and accepts the grants. No mayor — none of the municipalities whose officers are pooled and whose residents are policed by the result. There is no one on it who is not police or prosecution. And one of those four names deserves a second look, though the full story belongs to Episode Nine. And the name still printed in the prosecutor's seat carries a story of its own: the state auditor has proposed findings for recovery over her office's spending of forfeiture and discretionary-fund money. The very category of money this task force's cases generate. Three fiscal years of them, and not one has ever been published. Under Ohio law only two officials can ever act on them: the state Attorney General, and the county's sitting prosecutor. The sitting prosecutor is married to one of this task force's detectives. Episode Nine closes the loop. And there is one more thing that advisory board page does not contain. Anything else. No meeting schedule. No minutes. No charter. No statement of what the board may decide, how often it sits, or who appoints the commander. That last one is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the precise question a drug task force in this corner of Ohio once broke apart over. Before CEAAC there was TAG — the Trumbull Ashtabula Group, a drug task force run out of Warren. On the investigation's account, three counties ran it jointly from 2002, and it had an advisory board with real shared governance. Ashtabula walked out. And the reason it withdrew is the whole point. The dispute was about the advisory board's power. Ashtabula's position was that the board held the authority to appoint the task force commander. Trumbull's sheriff held that the appointment was his alone. And on July 1st, 2019, CEAAC began operations. Filed, on the county's own website, under the Sheriff. Read that sequence slowly. This county left a multi-county task force in a fight over whether an oversight board could choose the commander. Then it built its own. And put the commander inside a single sheriff's office. Lieutenant Cary Nelson commands CEAAC now. The court files list him as a TAG detective as far back as 2015. He is one of the very few people alive who can say, from inside, whether the oversight was improved — or simply relocated.
Act VI 22:39
Everything so far describes a structure. Here is what a structure means to one person. You live in Ashtabula County. You believe a law enforcement officer has committed a crime against you. Not a rudeness. Not a bad day. A crime. You want it reported. Where do you take it? Start with the obvious door. The agency the officer works for. On the county's published roster, all three of the task force's officers work for the same place: the Ashtabula County Sheriff's Office. And the task force itself sits inside that office. The county's own navigation puts it there, under the Sheriff, three clicks from the front page. So the first door leads to the agency the officer belongs to. Try the second. The task force has an oversight board, and the county publishes who sits on it. Four seats. The Sheriff, the Prosecutor's Office, and two municipal police chiefs. You already know what is wrong with that table, because you read it five minutes ago. Every seat belongs to an agency inside the arrangement. No commissioner. No mayor. No seat answering to anybody outside law enforcement. And you have seen who that table really seats: two people who are gone, and a sheriff overseeing his own officers. So the second door leads inside as well — and the page telling you so has not been updated in nearly two years. Now the third door. And this one is not a matter of custom. It is written into Ohio law. Ohio law lets an ordinary citizen who knows of a crime file a sworn complaint. That is the state's answer for exactly your situation: the citizen who cannot get anyone else to act. But the complaint does not start a case by itself. It goes to someone the law allows to review it. A judge. A magistrate. Or the county prosecutor. And since 2006, they do not have to act on it. Your complaint is considered. It does not have to become anything. And the law is plainer still about who brings charges. The county prosecutor investigates crimes in the county. The county prosecutor brings the charges. Put those together and it is simple. In an Ohio county, whether a police officer is charged with a crime is decided by the county prosecutor. There is no second county official who can do it instead. In Ashtabula County, that prosecutor is married to a detective on the county's narcotics task force. So follow that complaint to the end of every road. It lands on the desk of a prosecutor who goes home every night to one of the task force's three officers. The law allows that. The last prosecutor to sit at that desk asked, in writing, what the commissioners had to hide. She was forced out. This one ran unopposed. A month into the job she told the Star Beacon: 'We're working very well with the commissioners. We're working well with Sheriff Niemi.' The law also gives her every way to prove the marriage changes nothing: a rule keeping her away from his cases, a promise to step aside, an outside prosecutor. In twenty-two of her husband's cases, the court record shows none of them. Not once. None of this required anybody to break a rule. That is what should frighten you. That is the finding. If you believe an officer committed a crime against you, every road you can take in this county ends in the same household as the task force. So the honest answer is that there is no one in this county to take it to. The only road left runs to the federal government. A United States Attorney. The Federal Bureau of Investigation — which the county's own financial report lists as a partner in this very task force. Neither of which Ashtabula County appoints, funds, or reviews. That is what it costs you when every check on a thing is also part of it. That is how far you would have to drive.
Act VII 27:20
Everything so far is Ashtabula County's arrangement. Assembled quietly, over years, out of ordinary administrative choices no voter was ever asked to make. Now watch a neighbouring county do the same thing on paper. In a single act. With a date on it. Lake County is one county west along the lake shore. Its narcotics agency answers to an executive board. Eight seats. The county prosecutor. A county commissioner. A mayor. Four police chiefs. And, since 2023, the sheriff. It meets the first Wednesday of every month, on public notice, and the agency has answered to a board since 1979. Forty-seven years of distributed oversight. Elected officials at the table. Municipal police at the table. Meetings the public can walk into. Lake County's commissioners want that agency folded into the sheriff's office and the board dissolved — so their prosecutor, Charles Coulson, asked the Attorney General of Ohio one question: can the voters' drug levy follow it there? On March 20th, 2026, Attorney General Dave Yost said yes. What the commissioners want gone is the board. The prosecutor's seat. The commissioner's seat. The mayor's seat. The four chiefs' seats. All of it. Folded into the sheriff's office — where, the prosecutor's own staff told the State, the agency already works as a unit. Be precise about jurisdiction. The agency is Lake County's. The board on the block is Lake County's. Nothing in that opinion moved a chair in Ashtabula County. That is exactly why it matters here. Because Ashtabula County had already arrived. What Lake County is still working toward in 2026 — a prosecutor's request, an Attorney General's opinion, a board to dissolve — Ashtabula County had in 2019, by the simpler method of building a new agency and never seating a board like that one on top of it. And when the State of Ohio was asked whether the voters' drug money could follow an agency into a single sheriff's office, it said yes. Look at the sequence. Ashtabula, 2019. Lake, 2026. Two neighbouring counties on the same lake shore, one direction of travel. Call it what it is: a blueprint. This is not a local defect. It is a design, it is spreading, and on March 20th the State told the county next door that the voters' money can follow it. So assemble the machine. A task force whose own page promises to take on gangs and threat groups, and to serve as the point of contact for federal intelligence. Funded through grants, the county says. The state's own audits say two of every three dollars were yours — six hundred and thirty-four thousand of them in three years. Then, last December, three hundred and four thousand more — money paid to this county to help abate the opioid crisis — for the salaries of two and a half officers, on a roster of three. A board whose page names two people who are gone, and the sheriff who employs every officer on it. A prosecutor's chair that passed from the woman who said no to the wife of one of those three officers. And twenty-two of his cases, every one prosecuted by her office, not one handed to anyone else. And out of the six hundred felony cases this county files in a year, the ones that carry its name come to about two dozen. Not one part of that is hidden. All of it is on a county website, in the state's own audits, in the court's own files, and in a state opinion with a date on it. That is what an enforcement engine is. Not a conspiracy. A set of ordinary administrative choices, each defensible on the morning it was made — which together produce a body with police powers, and no check on it that is not part of it.