Narration, as voiced 185 lines · select a line to jump there
Act I 0:42
Start with something that is not a crime. Two people live in the same house. They share a kitchen table, a bank account, a mortgage. Maybe they share a surname and maybe they do not. One of them holds a public office. So does the other. That is the entire subject of this episode. What this episode is about is what happens when you lay two maps over each other. One map is an organisational chart: the offices of an American county, drawn deliberately so that each one can check the others. A detective is checked by a prosecutor. A legislature is checked by a court. That design is old and it is not decorative. It assumes the people in those chairs will not be inclined to protect each other, and builds the county so their interests pull apart. The other map is a family. Nobody drew it. It follows no plan, answers to no statute, and took decades to form. In Ashtabula County, those two maps have converged until they are very nearly the same picture. Five pairs of people, and one man in two chairs, sitting in the control points of one county. They are not all marriages. Some are. One is a mother and her son. And one is not a pair at all, but one man holding two offices. Two are relatives. Every pair, stated at exactly the relationship the record supports. Where the record says spouses, we say spouses, and show you the page it is written on. Five pairs, and one man in two chairs. Walk them one at a time.
Act II 2:43
Begin with the pair that is documented from both ends. Brett Grabman is a detective with the county's drug task force — the Crime Enforcement Agency of Ashtabula County, the unit that runs informants, executes search warrants and makes narcotics arrests here. He appears on the agency's own officer listing, and he has stood in front of the Board of Commissioners in open session, on the record, asking for public money to fund its work. April Grabman is the Ashtabula County Prosecuting Attorney. She was elected in November 2024 with no opponent, after Colleen O'Toole was forced out; her term runs to the end of 2028. They are married. All three of those facts — the marriage and the two offices — sit independently on the public record. Now look at what those two offices are for. A detective decides who gets arrested. A prosecutor decides who gets charged, with what, and whether the case is pleaded down, taken to trial, or dropped. Everywhere in the United States those are meant to be two separate judgments made in two separate offices, and the reason is not that police are dishonest. It is that the second judgment is the only check on the first — the one point in the process where somebody who did not make the arrest looks at it and asks whether it holds. In Ashtabula County, those two offices are held by two people married to each other. The court record shows exactly where his cases land. He joined the county sheriff's office in March 2024. In the ten months before she took office, not one felony case in this county named him as a witness for the prosecution. In the twenty months since, twenty-two have. Every one was prosecuted by her office. Thirteen of them were serious felonies that reached sentencing, and all thirteen went to prison — eight of them people with no earlier case in this county. So the only check on his cases is the office his wife runs. The known answer is an outside prosecutor. The three prosecutors before her sought one in eleven cases. She has asked for one once. The court record shows none where her husband is the witness. His cases never leave her office. And there is one more turn. A citizen who believes that detective broke the law has one county office that can charge him: the prosecutor's. His wife's.
Act III 5:32
The second pair is not a marriage, and the difference does real work. Sandra O'Brien is an Ohio State Senator. Casey O'Brien is the judge of the Western County Court — a county bench, handling the ordinary criminal and civil business of this county's western half. She is his mother. Not his wife. Not his partner. Look at what sits on the two ends. A legislature and a court. One writes the law and votes the money that funds the machinery applying it. The other applies it, here, to people who live here. Both offices are on the public record — the Ohio Senate's roster, the county directory, the certified results of November 2022. The next pair is where precision does the most work of all. Nicholas Iarocci was this county's elected prosecutor from 2013 to 2019, and since January 2020 he has been the judge of Conneaut Municipal Court. Among the matters a municipal court hears are property disputes — evictions, titles, the legal standing of who owns what. Alex Iarocci ran the Ashtabula County Land Bank. A land bank is the public body that takes possession of distressed, foreclosed and tax-delinquent property, holds it, and decides what becomes of it: who gets to buy it, at what price, and who does not. They are related. Ohio law lets a county land bank sell property with no bidding and no floor — the statute exempts it, by name, from the fair-market-value rule. Four of its seven directors are county officials, the three commissioners who renew the bus lease are three of them, and Casey Kozlowski is its vice-chairman. It publishes no minutes and no agendas. Its own rules say agendas go up a day ahead. Ninety-six deeds, and not one states a price. None of those ninety-six went to a name in this series. The job that did left no deed at all. For a citizen in a property dispute here, the man who rules on who has legal standing and the man who ran the county's inventory of seized and foreclosed property come from the same family. Alex Iarocci took over the land bank in March 2022. That year a company Jonathan Ehrenfeld signs for paid two point two million dollars for a row of old lakefront cottages in Geneva-on-the-Lake. In October 2024 the state's demolition list for this county carried that land three times, and the land bank cleared the cottages off it — land it never owned. In December 2025 the village hired Iarocci as its administrator. And in July 2026 he stood in front of its council and reported that the planning commission had approved the final plat for the homes on that ground. You do not need the family tree to see the problem.
Act IV 8:46
Next: a city's bench, and its council. Laura DiGiacomo is the judge of the Ashtabula Municipal Court — the court's own website names her. Jane DiGiacomo sits on Ashtabula City Council, for Ward Five. One family, a city's bench and a seat on its council. They are related. So pair four is two named women, two public offices, one family. There is one gap, and it matters, because something used to be in it. The original set included a sheriff's deputy, Scott Daniels, and the county's clerk of courts, April Daniels — presented as one household, seizures going in at one end and property titles coming out at the other. No document ever established any relationship between them. It was struck. No such relationship exists. The offices are real; the line drawn between them was not. Then the man in two chairs. Terry A. Moisio Junior. His offices are on the public record. He is the Chief Deputy Sheriff, the second-ranking officer in county law enforcement — and the county's own staff page names him Project Director of its drug task force. He is also the President of Conneaut City Council. A chief deputy commands an agency. A council president runs a city's legislature. One man is second in command of county law enforcement and runs a city council. And one more family, one seat. JP Ducro the Fourth — fifth generation of a funeral dynasty that has buried this county's dead since 1853 — sits on the Ashtabula County Board of Commissioners; in 2025 he was its president. Since 2021, the county has paid his family's funeral firms for eleven of its twenty-nine thousand-dollar burials — and four times, he moved or seconded the bills that paid them. It is worth saying because a county where the same names keep returning to the same chairs is telling you something about how its offices get filled.
Act V 11:14
The Grabmans are wife and husband on a county deed. Here is another relationship that a government wrote down. Ashtabula County Recorder. File number 2025-00006666. Book 848, page 827. A commercial mortgage — stamped, numbered, indexed, sitting in the county's own office, open to anyone who walks in. Page one names the borrowers. It reads: David McGrath and Kathryn D. Ward, husband and wife. That is not a transcript. It is not a recollection, and it is not an inference from a shared surname — the two people on that page do not share one. It is a recital in an instrument they both signed, recorded with the county, under a number the county itself assigned. You met David McGrath in the first episode. He is a sitting township trustee, and he owns Sunset Transportation Partners — the private company that took control of Ashtabula County's public buses in January 2024, at one dollar per vehicle per year, renewed on Christmas Eve 2024 and every year since, while the county went on paying his two companies: seven million dollars in five years. Now set the campaign contribution file beside the mortgage. Casey Kozlowski moved the Christmas Eve renewal and signed the lease — and in January 2026, as the board's president, voted to renew it again. The two biggest donors in the entire file of his committee, Friends of Casey Kozlowski: David McGrath, twelve thousand dollars, and Kathryn Ward, twelve thousand five hundred. Together, nearly five times what the largest donor outside their household gave. And those records show the two of them filing from the same household. Two documents, created for different purposes by different offices, saying the same thing about the same two people. That is what a documented relationship looks like, and it is the standard every other pair in this episode is measured against. And that is where this act would have ended, if the document had not turned out to have a second half.
Act VI 13:37
Now look at what secures that mortgage. A mortgage is a debt attached to specific ground. This one names three county parcels — and those three have a history, recorded in the same office, under a different number. Ashtabula County Recorder. File number 2023-00004506. Book 796, page 89. Recorded the twenty-third of May, 2023. A Sheriff's Deed, issued under section 2329.36 of the Ohio Revised Code, and it opens in the first person: I, William R. Niemi, Sheriff of Ashtabula County, Ohio. It conveys three parcels to David McGrath for ninety-three thousand two hundred dollars. All three of them are the parcels that secure the mortgage you just heard read. That deed is the last page of a foreclosure. The Huntington National Bank, successor to FirstMerit, against a homeowner — Order of Sale entered the thirteenth of September, 2022, Confirmation of Sale the fourteenth of April, 2023, Ashtabula County Common Pleas case number 2022 CV 00274. The person who lost that property is a private individual with no part in anything this series describes. Understand what a sheriff's sale is. It is a public auction, ordered by a court and run by the county. Anyone with the money may bid. And look at the two numbers. Ninety-three thousand two hundred dollars is an auction price, paid. Six hundred and ninety thousand is the ceiling of an open-end mortgage — the most that same ground now stands behind. Here is what the two documents establish. The sheriff of Ashtabula County, acting on an order of the county's own court, conveyed three parcels to David McGrath. Twenty-six months later, those same three parcels secured a mortgage of up to six hundred and ninety thousand dollars, signed by David McGrath and Kathryn D. Ward, husband and wife. The page that proves the relationship is secured by ground the county's own sheriff conveyed to one of the two people who signed it. Go back to the mortgage one last time. There is a name on its first page that also appears on another. The lender is Lakeview Federal Credit Union. Six hundred and ninety thousand dollars on the 2025 instrument; four hundred and forty-five thousand five hundred on a mortgage recorded in 2023. Now the second half of that page. There is a donor in this story named Kathryn Ward: the largest giver to the commissioner who moved the transit lease's renewal. You heard that corner named in Episode One. Kathryn Ward. And on the first page of that mortgage, beside David McGrath: Kathryn D. Ward, husband and wife. The largest donor to the commissioner who moved the fleet lease's renewal. The man who received the fleet. Set those two pages side by side, and draw the line yourself.
Act VII 17:16
One conflict is left. It is the one that should worry you most, because it needs no vote to switch it on. David McGrath sits on the Geneva-on-the-Lake Planning Commission — the board that decides what can be built in Geneva-on-the-Lake. His two Sunset companies are on thirty-two recorded instruments in this county since October 2019. Fourteen of them are in Geneva-on-the-Lake. He is assembling property inside the jurisdiction he regulates. Half of that portfolio is financed by a single family: the Andruses, his mother's family. Nineteen mortgages since 2016: two million, eight hundred and fourteen thousand dollars. And he is one borrower among many. The county's records hold a hundred and one Andrus loans, seventeen million dollars — forty-two of them in this one village. Forty-five times, the family was the seller and the bank on the same day. Under Ohio's ethics rules, an uncle is only family if he lives in your house. This uncle holds McGrath's mortgages, and they own land together so that whichever of them dies first, the other inherits it. Understand why this one differs in kind. Every other pair needs an event to switch it on: a vote, a foreclosure, an arrest. Between those moments, the conflict sleeps. This one never sleeps. Every parcel he buys in that village sits under the commission he serves on. By Ohio law the mayor appoints its citizen members. McGrath's name went onto it between the thirteenth of April and the eighteenth of June, 2021. On the twenty-eighth of May the mayor's deeds were recorded: five acres on Route 534, half to McGrath, half to his uncle, twenty-five thousand dollars each. The mayor had paid eight thousand for all of it. Nine years earlier the Andruses had sold him a condominium in the village and lent him a hundred and forty thousand dollars of the price. And one project has already come through that commission: Overlook Villas. Twenty-six gated lakefront homes, six hundred and fifty to eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars each, on the ground Alex Iarocci's land bank cleared. The tax bills for that land go to Spire's own address. The commission has five members. The mayor chairs it. A councilman whose company borrowed two hundred and thirty thousand dollars from the Andruses sits on it. So does McGrath. Three of five, in one family's loan book. Under the village's code, that commission's approval is what sends a plat to be recorded, and the mayor keeps its minutes. None are published. In the township, McGrath is a trustee. In February 2026 he made two motions. One seated Ed Andrus, of his mother's family, on the zoning appeals board. The other seated, on the zoning board, a man who had bought his land from McGrath with a hundred and eighty-eight thousand dollars of Andrus money. Both passed three to nothing. The chairman's eighty-thousand-dollar mortgage to the Andruses had been recorded that December. McGrath's own, three hundred and eleven thousand, six days after it. No abstention. No disclosure. A month later the township gave a thousand dollars to the bus service McGrath's company runs. On that, he abstained. So here is the count. Five pairs, and one man in two chairs. Two spouses holding the arrest and the charge. A mother in the state senate and a son on the county bench. A judge, and the man who ran the county's land bank. A judge and a councilwoman. And, on a recorded page, a township trustee who received the county's buses and the woman named beside him as husband and wife. A chief deputy who is also a council president: one man, both chairs. Every one of those offices is on a public record. And this is not a coincidence of surnames. It is how the county is staffed. And the count was never the point. The point is what a county looks like when the offices built to check each other are held by people who go home to each other. There is no meeting. No order is given. There is no moment at which anybody has to decide to be corrupt — because the coordination a conspiracy would have to arrange has already been done, at no cost to anyone, by ordinary life. Which leaves the question this series has been walking toward. If nobody is running it, what is holding it together — and who, exactly, would you remove? That is Episode Nine.