Equal Time for Lowbrow Shenanigans

Lately, all we’ve heard about are the shenanigans of the big rollers, the filthy rich, the highbrow. Lest we think they’re the only ones tempted by the trappings of power. let’s consider a case of  lowbrow temptation and its expensive fraud on — yes, the taxpayers.

The Columbus Dispatch  and the Cleveland Plain Dealer report that the Ohio Inspector General, after an extensive investigation of one of the offices of the Ohio Department of Transportation, has found trouble. When the invstigator’s report uses terms like “ethical failures, improper relationships, debauchery, raw criminality and depravity,” you know we’re dealing with more than a mere can of worms.

As it turns out, for more than a decade, some employees of this one office of the ODOT awarded over $11 million in contracts to vendors who repaid them with everything from fishing trips to memberships in private golf clubs to Las Vegas hotel rooms to outings to strip clubs to sexual liasons with strippers. The implicated employees were incresingly aggressive, forging documents to sabotage the competitive-bidding process and adding phony requirements to contract bid specifications.

The leader of the group of rogue employees made one of the top salaries in the department, $79,000 — not bad, but nothing to compare to the $100 million salaries we’ve been focused on lately or even the $10 million salaries for that matter. Like the big dogs, though, the Ohio employee was described as being greedy, made worse by his “infatuation with strippers,” whom he gave cash, jewelry, furniture, appliances, and the offer of a breast augmentation. (Think Man Gene.) During work hours, he had sex with strippers in inexpensive motels and in the back of his minivan inside the ODOT garage. You can begin to see a difference between the highbrow and lowbrow.

The housecleaning is well underway: forced retirements, firings, suspensions, and new procedures to keep this from ever happening again. It’s encouraging that the inspector general found fault with ODOT higher-ups for failing to catch these shenanigans for so long. When something like this happens, it seems to me that the first people who should walk the plank are the higher-ups, whether highbrow or lowbrow.