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Act I 0:42
For eight episodes, this series has been looking for one person. That is the shape every story about corruption takes. Somebody is at the top. Somebody decides. Somebody's phone rings and a county does what it is told. Find that person, name them, the story ends. So we looked. The county gave us candidates. The commissioner who works for a dealership the county buys from — and who steps aside now and then, and never says why. The commissioner who votes through the bills that pay his family's funeral home. The commissioner who moved the bus company's first contract and its fleet lease, then signed the renewal as president of the board. The township trustee who owns the transportation company that received a public bus fleet at a dollar a vehicle a year. The developer who arrived with real capital and bought the complex those subsidised buses are described as serving. A sheriff. A prosecutor. A municipal judge, a land bank director, a county auditor. Every one looks like the centre until you stand next to them and look outward. Each is holding two or three threads; there are dozens of threads; every thread ends in somebody else's hand. There is no person at the top of this county. Be exact about that sentence, because it will sound like an acquittal and is the opposite. We did not fail to find the boss. The structure does not have one, does not need one, and is stronger for the absence. The arrangement has a name — not ours. It is a hundred-year-old term from corporate governance, coined for what happens when the same small group of people sit on the boards of companies that are supposed to compete with, buy from and audit one another. It is called an interlocking directorate. In a corporation, that is a competition problem. In a county government it is something else, because the boards in question are not companies. They are the commission that spends the money, the office that audits the spending, the board that runs the elections, the agency that makes the arrests, the office that files the charges, and the bench that hears them. A pyramid — a syndicate, a chain of command — is efficient and fragile. It has a head. Remove the head and the body stops, because the body was only ever an extension of the head. That is why prosecutors build cases upward, and why the public expects a story like this one to end with a single arrest. A lattice has no head. It has redundancy. Every function is reachable by more than one path, every participant is replaceable, and no single removal changes the arithmetic of anything. This episode rests on two records: a table of money, and a list of the people who were supposed to be watching.
Act II 4:04
Start with the money, because the money is written down. In this investigation's recovered material there is a spreadsheet. One hundred and thirty-seven rows. Each row is a contribution to a political committee: a name, a date, a dollar amount, and — for most of them — a street address. It runs from April 2023 to June 2026, and the whole file totals fifty-six thousand, five hundred and eighteen dollars and nineteen cents. The committee's reports filed since add fifty-four more gifts, and bring its total to seventy-one thousand, two hundred and ninety-four dollars and ninety-five cents. The committee is Friends of Casey Kozlowski — in 2026, the President of the Ashtabula County Board of Commissioners. Most of this file looks like a rural county race. Fifty dollars. A hundred dollars. Twenty-five. More than two-thirds of the rows are a hundred dollars or less. Neighbours, small businesses, people who put a sign in a yard. And then the ledger changes register. David McGrath. Five thousand dollars, the seventeenth of July, 2023. Two thousand dollars, the first of July, 2024. Five thousand dollars, the fifth of September, 2024. Total: twelve thousand dollars. Kathryn Ward. Five thousand dollars, the twenty-eighth of November, 2023. Five thousand dollars, the twenty-second of March, 2024. Two thousand five hundred dollars, the twentieth of March, 2025. Total: twelve thousand five hundred dollars. Those two filings carry the same address. The record shows Ward and McGrath contributing from one household. One household, twenty-four thousand five hundred dollars, one committee. Ninety-one donors put money into this file. Two of them, filing from one household, account for forty-three percent of every dollar in it — and, with the newer reports counted, still more than a third. There is a third name. Jonathan Ehrenfeld. Two thousand dollars, the eleventh of April, 2024. One thousand two hundred dollars and seventy-five cents, the twenty-first of May, 2025. Total: three thousand two hundred dollars and seventy-five cents. You have met all three: the man who runs the buses, his wife, and the man who owns the campus. The man whose company runs the county's buses, his wife, and the developer whose complex those buses are described as serving are three of the four largest individual donors in the campaign file of the commissioner who moved the lease's renewal. And the two of them who share a household give nearly five times what the largest donor outside it gives. Now the dates, in order, because the order is the finding. On the ninth of August, 2023, the county asked for bids to run its buses. McGrath's first five thousand had landed twenty-three days earlier. Ward's first lands two weeks after the award, and three weeks before the original lease. Resolution 2024-580 — the renewal of the fleet lease, on Kozlowski's own motion — passed on the twenty-fourth of December, 2024. McGrath's last gift to him lands the fifth of September, 2024: three and a half months before the vote. Ward's last lands the twentieth of March, 2025: three months after it. Money before. Money after. And after March 2025, the gifts to this committee under those two names stop. A year later, twenty-five hundred dollars arrives — the same amount — from a house in Madison, under the name Donna Andrus. The house is the home of David McGrath's parents. Andrus is the name his mother was born with. Andrus. You have heard that name. It is the family that built Indian Creek and sold it. And it is a bank: a hundred and one loans in the county's records, seventeen million dollars. Nineteen of them are David McGrath's, from his mother's brothers. McGrath is an Andrus. And look who else borrows. The man who is mayor of Geneva-on-the-Lake. A village councilman's company. The chairman of the Geneva Township trustees. The mayor chairs the village planning commission. The councilman sits on it. So does McGrath. Three of five — and by July 2026 that commission had approved Jonathan Ehrenfeld's lakefront homes. Ehrenfeld funds the same two commissioners McGrath does. And in every year on record from 2020 to 2025, the district that carries Spire's sewer was Casey Kozlowski's seat. One family. One developer. One commissioner. Nobody had to sign anything. Every payment was lawful, and reported on time. That is the argument, not a caveat against it. This is what a captured county looks like when the capture operates inside the law: the transaction is disclosed, the disclosure is filed, the filing is public, and nothing happens. The paperwork is not the weakness in this system. It is the proof that the system does not need to hide.
Act III 10:26
Keep reading. Past the top three names the table stops being a document about a bus contractor, his wife and a developer, and becomes a directory of the county. Several of these contributions are not from people at all. They are from other political committees. Citizens for Whittington — the campaign committee of Commissioner Kathryn Whittington — appears twice: fifty dollars on the third of April, 2024, and ninety dollars on the twenty-seventh of March, 2025. One sitting commissioner's committee, contributing into another sitting commissioner's committee. Citizens for O'Brien — one hundred dollars, the nineteenth of March, 2024. Scott Lynch for Judge — two hundred and thirty dollars, the third of April, 2024. The Committee to Elect Sarah Fowler Arthur — two hundred and fifty dollars, the thirteenth of April, 2024. Hold that last name. Now the individuals, read by their offices rather than their names. Nicholas Wayman is a member of the Ashtabula County Board of Elections — the body that administers the county's elections and certifies its results. He appears three times: one hundred dollars on the fifteenth of April, 2024, two hundred and fifty on the twenty-seventh of March, 2025, and two hundred and fifty more on the twenty-first of March, 2026. In all, six hundred dollars. He is also in the files of the county auditor's campaign, a judge's campaign, and Commissioner Ducro's. Scott Yamamoto is the Ashtabula County Auditor — the officer whose job is to independently examine how the commissioners spend public money. He appears once here: fifty dollars, the twenty-sixth of February, 2025. And on the twelfth of August, 2024, he gave fifty dollars to Citizens for Ducro. The auditor is a contributor to two of the commissioners whose spending he audits. April Grabman is the county prosecutor — in 2024, the only candidate for the chair Colleen O'Toole was forced out of. One hundred dollars, the second of April, 2024. That August, fifty more to Citizens for Ducro. Both commissioners sat on the board that paid a law firm out of O'Toole's office budget. Her row prints no address: where almost every donor gives a street or a post-office box, hers reads address on file with the Board of Elections. In this file, two people use that protection: the county prosecutor, and Marianne Sezon — a judge of the Common Pleas Court, where this county's felonies are tried. Casey O'Brien appears twice as well: ninety dollars on the fourth of May, 2024, and fifty dollars on the tenth of April, 2025. Casey O'Brien sits on the bench of the Western County Court — the county court that hears the ordinary criminal and civil business of this county's western half. Commissioner J.P. Ducro the Fourth appears three times: fifty dollars, fifty dollars, and forty, in March 2026. Every member of the board is in this file: one collecting, two paying in. Now set five of these names beside each other: the auditor, the prosecutor, two judges, and the committee of a sitting commissioner. The auditor examines how the commissioners spend. The prosecutor decides what this county charges. Two judges hear what the prosecutor brings. And the committee of the third vote on a three-member board sits inside the campaign file of the second. Add up what those five put in. Fifty dollars. One hundred. Ninety and fifty. Fifty and fifty. Fifty and ninety. Five hundred and thirty dollars, across eight contributions, out of a file of fifty-six and a half thousand. The smallness is not a weakness in the finding. The smallness is the finding. Nobody is buying an office for a hundred dollars, and nobody is buying anything at all for fifty. What a fifty-dollar cheque purchases is nothing. What it records is membership — a signed, dated, filed statement that the person signing it is on this man's side, made by people holding the offices that are supposed to be on nobody's side. Every one of those eight payments was lawful. Every one was disclosed on schedule, which is the only reason they can be read to you. No agreement is alleged, and none is needed for anything you have just heard. This is not a document that shows a deal. It is a membership roll. And the money runs sideways through the county's other campaign files too. Casey Kozlowski paid into Citizens for Ducro on the twenty-sixth of January, 2022 — the only money it took in that half-year — and his own committee paid in again in August 2024. One commissioner putting money into the committee of the commissioner sitting beside him. His committee paid into the sheriff's — the Committee to Re-Elect Bill Niemi — in August 2023 and again in July 2024. In March 2026, William Niemi paid a hundred dollars back into Kozlowski's. The commissioners approve the sheriff's budget. The sheriff funds the commissioner's campaign, and the commissioner's campaign funds the sheriff's. And on the twenty-eighth of July, 2025, Casey Kozlowski paid two hundred and fifty dollars into Friends of Scott Yamamoto — the county auditor's campaign — at the same fundraiser as the sheriff and the prosecutor. The same campaign took two hundred and fifty dollars from David McGrath in June 2025, and five hundred more in June 2026. The commissioner funds the auditor's campaign; the auditor funds the commissioner's; and the man who runs the county's buses funds the auditor's. And the auditor's office is the one that cuts the county's checks to that bus company. None of this is a chain. A chain has a first link. What these files describe is a mesh — money moving sideways between people who oversee one another, in directions that make no sense unless the point was never the amount.
Act IV 17:35
A county is built with checks in it. Walk them, one at a time. The first is the county auditor. In Ohio that office is the internal brake on county spending: it examines the books, it keeps the financial records, and every payment the commissioners approve goes out on the auditor's warrant. It is the last hand on the money. The Ashtabula County Auditor is Scott Yamamoto. He came to the office by appointment, not by election, after service as a township trustee. The exposure is not the man's qualifications. It is the office: an auditor no voter chose, handed the job by the county Republican Party's central committee. The structural facts are the ones that matter here, and there are two. Appointed rather than elected means his mandate came from the same political apparatus as the commissioners he examines, rather than from a separate electorate. And his name is in their donor file. Independence is a structural property, not a personal virtue. An honest man in a dependent office produces honest work nobody has to accept. The design assumed the auditor would be outside the room. He is in the file. The second check sits above the first. Keith Faber is the Ohio Auditor of State — the office that audits the county auditors, the one link in this chain Ashtabula County does not appoint, fund or elect. On paper, the outside. That office is a defendant — and the case against it is an Ashtabula County case from its first line. Colleen O'Toole — the prosecutor who said no in Episode Two, once a judge on Ohio's Eleventh District Court of Appeals, and from January 2021 to January 2025 the Ashtabula County Prosecutor — sued the Ohio Auditor of State eleven days before her term ended. Case Number 24CV009876, Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, filed December 26th, 2024. Here is what she was suing about. In June 2023 she had asked that same office's investigators to look at this county's court-records contracts. They declined. Seventeen months later, on November 19th, 2024 — two weeks after her successor was elected — the state auditor's draft report found that she had spent Law Enforcement Trust and Furtherance of Justice money — forfeiture proceeds, and the prosecutor's discretionary fund — in ways the statutes do not allow. More than twelve thousand dollars flagged. Three thousand seven hundred ninety-four dollars and fourteen cents proposed for recovery. Gift baskets awarded in raffles. A floral arrangement. Donations. Gifts to local law enforcement. Small money — say the number out loud, because the number is not the point. She sued five days before the final audit was certified, to stop the findings from ever issuing. The findings were held. The county's audits for fiscal 2022, 2023 and 2024 each carry the same sentence: findings on those two funds are being held pending her case. Then the courts threw her case out — not on the merits, but because the findings had never issued, so there was nothing to rule on. The trial court dismissed. The Tenth District affirmed. On June 9th, 2026, the Supreme Court of Ohio declined to hear it, one justice dissenting. Now read the shape of the loop. The auditor held the findings back because she sued. The courts would not rule because the findings had been held back. No court has ruled, no final finding has ever been issued — and months after the last court closed the door, three fiscal years of forfeiture findings on this county remain unpublished. Ohio law — section 117.28 of the Revised Code — names exactly two officials who may act on findings like these: the Attorney General of Ohio, and the county's own sitting prosecutor. The sitting prosecutor of Ashtabula County is April Grabman. So in this county, the one official who can act on Colleen O'Toole's spending is the woman who took her chair, unopposed. She is married to a detective on the task force that this county's court files, since 2023, name most often to receive forfeited property. Twenty-two of his felony cases have never once left her office. And of the thirteen people sentenced on the serious ones, not one walked free. The third check is legislative. Sarah Fowler Arthur was the state representative whose district held the Geneva complex from 2021 through 2024. Her husband, Isaac Arthur, chairs the Ashtabula County Board of Elections — the body that runs this county's elections and certifies its results. And her campaign committee is in the donor file we read ten minutes ago. Two hundred and fifty dollars, April 2024. Look at what has happened to the word "oversight" across three offices. The county auditor is a contributor to the commissioner he audits. The state auditor is a defendant. The legislator whose district held the complex is married to the man who chairs the county's elections, and her committee is in the commissioner's donor file. Not one of those facts is a crime. Every one is a check absorbed into the thing it was built to check.
Act V 23:20
Put the two records together. The same handful of people in Ashtabula County run its government, sit on the boards that steer its money, and pay into each other's campaigns. It does not need to be many. It needs to be more than three, and this episode has already named more than three. The consequence, in one sentence: you cannot arrest the system's head, because the power is woven into the personnel files of the entire county. Test it. Take any one person out. Remove Casey Kozlowski from the Board of Commissioners. Two commissioners remain, a replacement arrives through the same county party apparatus that produced him, and the county goes on buying vehicles. Remove JP Ducro the Fourth. The funeral home does not stop existing. The indigent burial fund still needs a vendor, and that family has been burying this county's dead since 1853. Remove David McGrath. The lease survives him — renewed every winter since 2023, it is an instrument, not a person, and it binds whoever holds his company. Remove the auditor. The office is filled the same way it was filled last time. Remove all three commissioners on the same day — the strongest version of the experiment. The sheriff remains. The prosecutor remains. The municipal bench, the land bank, the Board of Elections and the townships remain, and every relationship among them is exactly what it was the previous afternoon. No removal changes the arithmetic. That is not a flourish; it is the operational definition of redundancy — what engineers build into systems that have to survive damage. The investigation's own framing does not describe one organisation. It names seven overlapping groups — the three-commissioner voting bloc, the triangle around the bus lease, the family pairings, the sheriff's protective apparatus, the frozen forfeiture audit, the funding apparatus and the enforcement household — and that is a framing, not a chart anybody has published. Seven descriptions of one county, each containing people the others also contain. Not a hierarchy. An interlocking directorate with seven names for itself. And nobody designed it. There was no founding meeting. This is not architecture, it is accretion — decades of marriages, hires, favours, endorsements, appointments and small lawful contributions, each unremarkable, each adding a strand. What accumulated has the properties of a designed system without ever having been designed, and is more durable than a designed one, because a design has an author and an author can be found. Two last things. A lattice does not stop at the county line, and the clearest evidence of that is a thing that happened somewhere else. In March 2026, one county west along the lake shore, the State cleared Lake County to fold its narcotics agency into the sheriff's office — levy money and all. What its commissioners want gone with it is the agency's executive board — a prosecutor, a commissioner, a mayor, four police chiefs and the sheriff — meeting every month, over an agency founded in 1979. The Lake County prosecutor asked whether the money could follow. The Attorney General of Ohio said it could. That is Lake County's board and Lake County's agency. Nothing in that opinion moved a chair in Ashtabula County — and that is exactly why it belongs here. Ashtabula County never had a board like that to lose. It built a sheriff-controlled task force in 2019 and gave it an advisory board of police and prosecutors only. The prosecutor's seat still carries the name of the woman who sued the state auditor. What Lake County is still working toward with a prosecutor's request and a state opinion, this county built in from the start, seven years earlier. The structure is not local, and the State of Ohio has now told the county next door, in writing, that the voters' money can follow it. And here cost and revenue stop being opposites. The investigation's analysis describes an apparatus in which liability does not weaken the system but funds the argument for enlarging it: settlements produce budget pressure, budget pressure produces the case for more money, and the money comes through the same doors. A pyramid is damaged by its failures. A lattice metabolises them.
Act VI 28:59
Come back to the file. One hundred and thirty-seven rows. Ninety-one donors. Fifty-six thousand, five hundred and eighteen dollars and nineteen cents. Two people from one household accounting for forty-three percent of it. Both of his fellow commissioners inside his file. Two sitting judges — one of them from the court that tries this county's felonies. A state representative's committee — and she is married to the chairman of the Board of Elections. A Board of Elections member. A county prosecutor. And a county auditor, at fifty dollars, in the campaign file of a commissioner whose books he audits. All of it lawful. All of it disclosed. Every line filed on schedule with a public agency and available to anyone who asked, for years, while nothing happened. You came to this episode expecting a name. So did we. The absence of one is the most serious thing in this series, because everything a citizen is taught about accountability assumes a pyramid: find the top, remove it, watch the structure fall. That method has nothing to do with an interlocking directorate. You cannot decapitate a surface. But note what did work — the only thing in eight episodes that worked exactly as designed. We can read you a hundred and thirty-seven rows of who paid whom because a law required those rows to be written down and filed where the public could reach them. Not an investigation. Not a subpoena. Not a whistleblower. A disclosure statute, doing the job it was written to do, in a county where nearly every other check has been absorbed. That is the lever, and it is why this series keeps returning to a demand rather than a prosecution. And the lever already works: the executed lease, signed David McGrath, Owner, sits on the county's own portal. So does the schedule of nine vehicles. So does the operating contract — more than one point four million dollars a year. What the law has not yet pried loose is the state auditor's findings. And the three thousand three hundred certification pages this county already publishes — the ones naming how each commissioner voted on each resolution — put into one table instead of three thousand three hundred separate scans. Put those findings and that table in the public file on the same terms as the campaign contributions, and this county becomes legible to the people who live inside it — not through anybody's confession, but through arithmetic. Which brings us to the arithmetic, and to the last episode. Because two numbers are left in this county. One of them Ashtabula County put in its own campaign filings and cannot take back. The other has been sitting in its own resolution packets for five and a half years, in plain sight, and until now nobody had ever added it up. That is Episode Ten. The Calculus of Corruption.