Narration, as voiced 194 lines · select a line to jump there
Act I 0:42
Flip a coin. Heads. Again. Heads. Ten heads in a row is one chance in a thousand. Twenty in a row is one in a million. Somewhere around the sixth or seventh, every person who has ever lived feels the same thing: this is not luck any more. Luck or fate. Chance or design. Coincidence or karma. Every culture on earth has its own names for that argument, and one question that settles it. What are the chances? It is the question people ask about a marriage, a lottery ticket, a diagnosis. It is the right question to ask about a county. This is Ashtabula County, Ohio. Ninety-seven thousand people, and a few dozen names that keep turning up in the same chairs. A county where the public bus fleet rents for nine dollars a year, where the prosecutor is married to the drug task force, and where a board of three has said yes nine thousand times. For nine episodes this series has read you the county's own paper: its signed resolutions, its deeds, its court files, its campaign filings. Tonight we do the one thing we have not done yet. We add it up. One rule holds for every number you are about to see, and we will keep it in front of you. Every figure that goes in is a figure the record proves. Every "if" is ours, and we say it out loud, so you can argue with it. If a number here feels unfair to someone, change the "if" and run it again. We will show you how. The arithmetic you can check. The opinion is ours, and we are not shy about it. Quiet numbers first.
Act II 2:55
Start with a calendar, because a calendar does not take sides. In the summer of twenty twenty-three, Ashtabula County decided to put the running of its public bus fleet out to bid. David McGrath's first gift to Commissioner Casey Kozlowski's campaign: five thousand dollars, dated the seventeenth of July. His first gift to Commissioner JP Ducro's: four thousand dollars, dated the twenty-eighth. Four days after that, on the first of August, the board voted to go out for bids. The motion was Ducro's. Say a gift can land on any day of the year. The chance that four thousand dollars lands in the five days before that motion is five in three hundred and sixty-five. One in seventy-three. Now take both first gifts, to both commissioners, and notice that both fall inside the one month before the county asked for bids. Any day of the year for each: one in a hundred and thirty-nine. Maybe July is just when people feel generous. On the seventh of November, the voters of Geneva Township made David McGrath a trustee. On the fourteenth, the commissioners gave his company the bus system. Ducro's motion again. Fifty-two weeks in a year. The award came in the one right after his election. One in fifty-two. Two weeks after the award, Kathryn Ward, his wife, made her first gift: five thousand dollars to Kozlowski. Three weeks after that, the board passed the dollar-a-vehicle lease. Any day of the year for her gift, and it is one in seventeen that it lands in the three weeks before the lease. From the first cheque to the dollar lease: a hundred and fifty-five days. A year on, the renewal came up on Christmas Eve, the one working day when nobody in the county is looking at county government. Kozlowski moved it. Ducro seconded it. His last gift to Kozlowski had landed a hundred and ten days before that vote. Hers landed eighty-six days after it. The gifts stand on either side of the renewal like bookends. All of it legal. All of it reported to the state on time. We are reading it to you off the state's own list. None of these numbers is big. One in seventy-three. One in fifty-two. Those are the odds of a good parking space. Keep them anyway. The big numbers are built out of the small ones. The gift before the bids: one in seventy-three. The award after the election: one in fifty-two. Both first gifts in the month before the bids: one in a hundred and thirty-nine.
Act III 5:47
Now the money. A transaction has a small side and a large side, and the county has only ever shown you the small one. Nine buses. One dollar each. Nine dollars a year, and the county does not even collect it: the nine is knocked off the company's own invoice. The large side: one million, four hundred and twenty-eight thousand, nine hundred and seventy-five dollars a year, paid to the same company to run them. For every dollar of rent coming in, a hundred and fifty-eight thousand, seven hundred and seventy-five going out. Or try it by the day. At nine dollars a year, the rent would need four hundred and thirty-five years to pay for one day of the driving. In twenty nineteen, the company holding that lease had one driver and one vehicle. Five years on, nine county buses. One to nine. Over five years the county's payments to his two companies come to seven million dollars. That household gave the two commissioners who moved those votes twenty-nine thousand: twenty-four thousand five hundred to Kozlowski, four thousand five hundred to Ducro. For every dollar the household gave, the county has paid its companies two hundred and forty. Look at the whole donor list, because the state keeps it for you. Friends of Casey Kozlowski: a hundred and ninety-seven gifts, seventy-two thousand dollars in all, from a hundred and five individual donors, plus twenty gifts from committees and companies. Nearly three gifts in four are for a hundred dollars or under. Yard-sign money. Two people at one kitchen table are one dollar in every three. It would take two hundred and forty-five of those hundred-dollar neighbours to match the bus man and his wife. On Ducro's side the file is smaller, and the same man is its largest donor: four thousand five hundred of twelve thousand seven hundred and ninety. More than a dollar in three there as well. Now rank the hundred and five by what they gave. The top four: Kathryn Ward. David McGrath. A private donor. And Jonathan Ehrenfeld, who owns the campus those buses are said to serve. Say how much a person gives has nothing to do with county business. Put a hundred and five names in a hat and draw the order. The chance that the bus man, his wife and the developer come out as three of the top four is one in forty-seven thousand. Maybe they just like him. Two votes carry a motion on this board. McGrath funds two of its three members. Every motion needs a mover and a second, and on a board of three, one of those two is always a man whose campaign he pays into. Now the developer. Four votes on tax breaks around Ehrenfeld's campus between twenty twenty-one and twenty twenty-five: the abatement zone, the Marriott, the Wyndham, the Chipotle. Four motions. One mover every time: Casey Kozlowski. Draw the mover from the three chairs at random each time: one in eighty-one. His gifts to the two commissioners come to four thousand two hundred dollars. Public money that names his campus or his companies: four million in grants and appropriations, and more than a million more in public loans. Twelve hundred to one. Nobody here is telling you what a cheque buys. The record does not say, and neither do we. The record says the amounts, the dates and the ratios, and you can hold all three at once. Rent against the running bill: a hundred and fifty-eight thousand to one. The household's gifts against the county's payments: two hundred and forty to one. Three of the four biggest donors standing at the receiving end of the buses: one in forty-seven thousand.
Act IV 10:35
Now who owns the ground, and who is related to whom, because in this county those are the same map. Seven parcels beside the Spire campus, rezoned in the last week of December twenty twenty for the man who was buying the campus. When the trustees voted, one of the seven was already in his company's hands. Fifteen months later, the other six were his as well, in whole or in part. Seven for seven. The neighbours were promised restrictions out loud at that meeting: buffers, setbacks, nothing commercial. Twenty-three instruments have been recorded on those parcels since twenty ten. The number that carries a restriction: none. Six years on, the number of rooms built on them: none. He bought one hundred seventy-five acres. Today fifteen of his companies hold seven hundred and sixteen. Four acres for every one he arrived with. Now the families. Take the county's control points: the board that spends, the office that charges, the courts that hear, the land bank, the elections board, the task force. Call it fifty chairs that matter. In those chairs this series found five pairs of relatives, and one man sitting in two. A detective and the prosecutor: husband and wife. A state senator and a county judge: mother and son. A judge, and a relative of his who ran the county land bank. A city judge and a member of that city's council, from one family. The man who got the buses and the commissioner's largest donor: husband and wife. And a chief deputy sheriff who presides over a city council: one man in two chairs. The day the prosecutor took her oath in the commissioners' office, a state senator took hers in the same room. The judge who swore her in was her son. Here is the "if". Say every person in this county has ten close relatives living in it. Now fill fifty chairs by drawing names at random from ninety-seven thousand. The chance of five related pairs among them: one in four million. Small counties run on old families. Agreed. That is the point, not the alibi. Follow one old family into one room. The Andrus family, David McGrath's mother's family, is a bank in everything but the sign. A hundred and one loans on the county's books. Seventeen million dollars. Forty-two of those loans in one village, Geneva-on-the-Lake. Forty-five times, that family sold the land and lent the money on the same day. The village planning commission decides what gets built there. Five seats. The mayor. A councilman. David McGrath. Three of those five have that family as a lender. Say that family's borrowers are spread across the county like anybody else's. A hundred and one loans among ninety-seven thousand people. The chance that three of five seats on one board sit in the book: one in eighty-nine million. By July of twenty twenty-six, Jonathan Ehrenfeld's gated lakefront homes had that commission's approval. How each member voted is written nowhere the public can read. Now the chair with the funeral home behind it. The county buries its poorest dead at a thousand dollars each. Since twenty twenty-one: twenty-nine of them. Eleven went to the firms of the commissioner who oversees the program, JP Ducro the Fourth. More than one in three. On the signed pages, Ducro has stepped out of a vote six times in five and a half years. All six on one piece of business: the contract to carry the coroner's dead, work his own company once did. Six for six. On the bills that paid his family's funeral homes, he did not step out. He moved or seconded those bills himself on four occasions. And Casey Kozlowski's younger brother's excavating firm: two hundred seventy-five thousand dollars from the county. When its licence comes up, Kozlowski steps out. On twenty-five of the days that firm was paid, he voted yes on the week's bills. Twelve of those times, the motion was his own. Seven rezoned parcels, seven his: seven for seven. Five related pairs in fifty chairs: one in four million. Three of five planning seats in one family's loan book: one in eighty-nine million.
Act V 15:43
Now the machine, and what it takes. The county calls its drug task force multi-jurisdictional: the sheriff's office plus two city police departments. The county's own roster: three officers. Three from the sheriff. Three of three. The board that is supposed to oversee it: four seats. Four from agencies inside it. Four of four. A multi-jurisdictional task force with one jurisdiction, watched by itself. There is no probability for that. It is not an accident. It is a floor plan. The county's page says the task force is funded through grants. The state's audits say two dollars in three, across three years, came from the county's own funds and from no grant at all. What it takes. Since twenty twenty-three, this county's court files hold two hundred and forty-six criminal cases in which somebody's property was forfeited. Which agency do those files name most often as the one that gets the property? The task force. Twenty-nine cases. More than the city police. More than the sheriff's own office. Three officers. One in every eight forfeitures in the county. In those files, thirty-two written plea bargains carry property as part of the deal. In twenty-three of them, the same deal dropped or reduced the charges. Three times in four, when the property went into the deal, charges came out of it. Where the cars go: the county's criminal docket since twenty fifteen runs past eleven thousand cases. The word impound is in twenty of them. The number that names a lot: none. Now what pays for it. Opioid settlement money came to this county because people in it died, and the county's own books mark that fund for public health and welfare. In three audited years, what that fund paid to treatment: nothing. Not a cent. In twenty twenty-three, seventy-five cents of every dollar flowing into the task force's account was settlement money. And the foundation grants to this whole region the next year: two and a quarter million in grants. One grant of the lot went to treatment: a hundred and sixty thousand. Seven cents on the dollar. One more thing it takes: the risk. One officer. Two lawsuits. Settlements worth roughly nine million dollars once the last was paid. The city let him go. The county's sheriff hired him with the second of those bills still unpaid. His cover is a pool of Ohio counties, run by county commissioners and paid for with public money: this county put five hundred forty-seven thousand dollars into it in twenty twenty-four alone. Since then he has been subpoenaed in a dozen or more felony prosecutions. Three officers, one jurisdiction. Four overseers, all inside. One in eight forfeitures. Three plea deals in four with charges dropped. From the county's own settlement fund to treatment: nothing.
Act VI 19:36
Now the household at the centre of the machine. Ninety-seven thousand people in this county. Three officers on its drug task force. The county prosecutor is the wife of one of the three. Say a prosecutor's husband could be anyone in the county. One in thirty-two thousand. Prosecutors and police officers meet each other. We know. Keep going. He used to run the drug task force in another county. He moved to this sheriff's office in March of twenty twenty-four, the month her name was the only one on the primary ballot for county prosecutor. Twelve months in a year. One in twelve. Monday evening, the thirtieth of December, twenty twenty-four, in the commissioners' office. April Grabman takes her oath as county prosecutor, her family around her, with the commissioner who moved the Christmas Eve lease as master of ceremonies. Tuesday morning, the thirty-first. Her husband, Detective Brett Grabman, stands in front of those same commissioners with a grant proposal for his task force: one hundred eighty-eight thousand dollars. The sheriff is beside him. He had been at that sheriff's office since March. The board had sat fifty-one times since the start of that month. He came to the last of the fifty-one: the morning after the ceremony. One in fifty-one. The deadline for the grant, the newspaper reported: January the sixth. Six days away, with New Year's Day in the middle. January the sixth is also the day her term began. Maybe he had only just heard about the grant. Maybe he puts things off. Say the day he came and the day it was due have nothing to do with her. Any day of the year for each. One in a hundred and thirty-three thousand. Here is one that never made an episode. The county's staff directory lists three hundred and thirty people. The prosecutor's page lists twenty-six: every assistant, every paralegal, the office manager. It does not list the prosecutor. The sheriff's page lists thirty-two, five detectives among them, including the two who serve beside her husband. It does not list him. Say names fall off a web page at random. The chance that those two are the two: one in four hundred and fifty-nine. Maybe the webmaster is busy. Now the cases, because this is where a marriage stops being a fact about two people and becomes a fact about everyone they charge. For his first ten months at this sheriff's office, the county's felony docket did not name him as the State's witness once. Then she was sworn in. Twenty months later the count stood at twenty-two. Say his cases came before her term at the pace they came after it. Ten empty months: one in sixty thousand. He was new, and cases take time to build. Hold on to that. It is the kindest thought you are going to get. All twenty-two were prosecuted by her office. None handed to an outside prosecutor. Twenty-two for twenty-two. The three prosecutors before her asked for an outside prosecutor in eleven cases. She has asked once. Not for his. Of his serious cases, thirteen have gone all the way to a sentence. All thirteen went to prison. Nine of them were drug cases, and in this court a serious drug case ends in prison fifty-eight times in a hundred. For other serious felonies here, sixty-nine. Say his cases go the way cases of their kind go in this court. Thirteen for thirteen: one in six hundred. Eight of the thirteen had never had a case in this county before. Eight for eight. Give a first-timer the court's drug-case odds, fifty-eight in a hundred: one in seventy-eight. And the election that put her in the chair that Colleen O'Toole had been forced out of? Nobody ran against her. The only sure thing in ten episodes. One in one. The prosecutor, married to one of three: one in thirty-two thousand. The grant the morning after the oath, due the day she took office: one in a hundred and thirty-three thousand. Thirteen for thirteen to prison: one in six hundred.
Act VII 24:47
Now the largest record in the county, and the quietest. Each resolution this board passes ends with a signed page: three names, and one word beside each. This series read three thousand one hundred and eighty-three of those pages. That is ninety-four of every hundred resolutions the county listed from February twenty twenty-one to the end of September twenty twenty-six. Three thousand one hundred and eighty-three proposals. Three thousand one hundred and eighty-three passed. Nine thousand and forty-one yeses. Four noes. Each of the four lost, two to one. The first no did not come until fourteen months in: six hundred and seventy-three resolutions, nineteen hundred and five yeses, before anybody said it. Two of the noes were Ducro's: a union contract for the sheriff's staff, and a Dodge Durango for the sheriff. Two were Kozlowski's: a change to the employees' health insurance, and the hiring of a law firm to advise the board. Say each commissioner says no just once in every hundred votes. Those pages should hold about ninety noes. They hold four. Be gentler. Say a no comes once in five hundred votes. The chance of four or fewer in nine thousand: one in twelve thousand nine hundred. Remember that one. It comes back at the end, and it is the gentlest number we have. The one move on this board that is not yes is stepping out. Twenty-one abstentions against four noes: leaving the room is five times more common here than disagreeing. And every time somebody stepped out, it passed without them. Twenty-one for twenty-one. Now one chair. Kathryn Whittington. Three thousand and thirteen yeses on the pages we read. Noes: not one. Give her one disagreement in five hundred. Three thousand and thirteen yeses in a row: one in four hundred and seventeen. One disagreement in two hundred: one in three point six million. One in a hundred, which still means a person who agrees with her two colleagues ninety-nine times out of a hundred: one in fourteen trillion. Forty-three heads in a row is likelier. And the whole board, one refusal in a hundred, across every proposal read: one in seventy-eight trillion. Most of a county's votes are routine. True. These pages also hold the bus lease, the task force's money and the burial bills, on the same paper, in the same three words. At one no in a hundred, ninety noes expected. Four on the page. At one no in five hundred: one in twelve thousand nine hundred. One chair, three thousand and thirteen yeses in a row: one in fourteen trillion.
Act VIII 28:35
One number is left. It is the one this episode is named for. You have had each piece on its own, and each piece comes with an innocent story. Cases take time. Campaigns raise money in summer. Boards agree. Small towns have big families. So take them at their most innocent. Say every one of these is its own separate accident, with nothing to do with any of the others. The cases, thirteen for thirteen: one in six hundred. The vote, at its gentlest: one in twelve thousand nine hundred. The donors, three of the top four: one in forty-seven thousand. Three records that never touch each other: a court's files, a board's signed pages, the state's campaign list. If they are accidents, they multiply. Six hundred, times twelve thousand nine hundred, times forty-seven thousand. One in three hundred and sixty billion. Thirty-eight heads in a row is likelier. Add the marriage, one in thirty-two thousand, and the accidents come to more than eleven quadrillion to one. Fifty-three heads in a row is likelier. We know what that number is, and what it is not. It is not a proof. It is the price of the word luck. Because that is the choice this county leaves you. Either it is the luckiest county you will ever hear of, or it is what nine episodes have described: a few families, a few donors, a board that says yes, and a prosecutor who goes home to the task force. None of it has ever been found unlawful. Nobody in those chairs has ever had to explain it. That is what the number is for. Not to convict. To make the explanation due. The coin has come up heads five and a half years running. Every culture on earth has a word for what you call that. Pick yours. One in six hundred. One in twelve thousand nine hundred. One in forty-seven thousand. Together: one in three hundred and sixty billion. What are the chances?