Updates On Flint Water Crisis Investigation: Emergency Manager, DTE, DWSD, GLWA, GM, TARP, Carlyle Group, Dana Nessel & Her New Special Prosecutor

Yes, the Flint Water Crisis will end up in Detroit because everyone was stealin' so the new Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel is going to send in her gurl, Kym Worthy, to see who is under investigation so they can be proactive in taking over the prosecution to save her crew.

It may a campaign financing promise, but, hey, what do I know?

I know this case goes way back and Dana has no intention of addressing trafficking of tiny humans or child poverty in Michigan because her crew needs to fund more campaigns, but then again, child welfare is under a federal investigative purview as is the entire election of 2018.

Anyway, 2019 is going to be busy, busy, busy because there shall be lots of clowning.

FUN FACT! GM TOOK TARP

Another MDEQ employee pleads no contest to Flint water crisis charges

FLINT (WJRT) (1/7/2019) - Another Michigan Department of Environmental Quality employee has pleaded no contest to charges related to the Flint water crisis.

Liane Shekter-Smith, the department's former chief of drinking water and municipal assistance, originally was charged in July 2016 with two felonies and one misdemeanor charge.

She pleaded to a misdemeanor charge of disturbing a lawful meeting, which carries a possible penalty of 90 days in jail and a $500 fine. The other charges were dropped in exchange for her plea.

As part of the plea agreement with Special Prosecutor Todd Flood, Shekter-Smith must testify against other government officials charged in the Flint water cases. She likely will be a witness in the upcoming preliminary hearing for former Emergency Manager Darnell Earley and former Flint Water Department Manager Howard Croft.

If she provides misleading statements or fails to cooperate with prosecutors, Flood said a guilty plea to a five-year felony charge of misconduct in office will automatically be entered on her behalf. A review to determine whether she complied with the plea agreement is scheduled for April.

Shekter-Smith and other DEQ officials are accused of failing to do their jobs and provide safe drinking water for Flint residents after the switch to pump water from the Flint River in 2014.

Fellow DEQ officials Michael Prysby and Stephen Busch both pleaded no contest on Dec. 26 to misconduct in office and tampering with water monitoring reports -- both felonies -- along with misdemeanor violations of Michigan's drinking water law.

With Shekter-Smith's plea, seven of 15 people facing criminal charges related to the water crisis have pleaded guilty or no contest. A no contest plea is not an admission of guilt but is treated as one at sentencing.

Then, this happened...

Flood won’t comment on AG’s request for new Flint water prosecutor

FLINT, MI -- Three days after new Attorney General Dana Nessel said she wants to replace him, special Flint water prosecutor Todd Flood showed up for work, struck a plea deal with a former state drinking water official and refused to talk about his job security.

Flood answered several questions about his future and Nessel with “no comment” on Monday, Jan. 7, following continuation of a preliminary exam in Genesee District Court.

Nessel issued a news release Friday, Jan. 4, saying she had provided Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, a member of her transition team, “with the relevant materials related to the (Flint water) cases and has requested that her office take over the prosecution of the criminal cases on her behalf.”

Worthy issued her own statement Friday, saying she would evaluate the remaining criminal cases filed by Flood but not necessarily replace him.

That sounds like code for, "I am just going to take a look to see who is going to be charged so I can put together a defensive strategy for Dana and company."

Flood was appointed to the job by former Attorney General Bill Schuette. He’s charged 15 current and former city and state government officials with crimes related to the water crisis.

Seven of those cases resulted in plea agreements, three have been bound over to Genesee Circuit Court for jury trials and five are in the process of preliminary examinations in Genesee District Court.

As a candidate for office earlier this year, Nessel was among critics of the Flint water prosecutions, calling them “politically charged show trials” but didn’t say for certain if Flood would be replaced.

Despite the uncertainty, the special prosecutor is operating as though he plans to continue working on the cases.

Kym Worthy will evaluate, not take over Flint water prosecutions

Flood told District Judge Jennifer Manley on Monday that he doesn’t need to return to court to check on the status of the cooperation of former Department of Environmental Quality official Liane Shekter-Smith until at least February. That’s after she’s expected to testify in the preliminary exams for former Flint emergency manager Darnell Earley and Howard Croft.

Last month, Flood told Genesee Circuit Judge Joseph Farah that he anticipated remaining on the job after the transition from Schuette to Nessel.

But, the Flint Water Crisis, which happened under the Emergency Manager Law, is still a matter of interest for Elijah Cummings, Chair of the U.S. House Oversight Committee.

https://democrats-oversight.house.gov/investigation-of-the-flint-water-crisis

BI-PARTISAN DEAL LED TO FLINT WATER POISONING FOR PROFIT: THE KAREGNONDI WATER AUTHORITY (KWA)

No Flint water crisis if no Karegnondi Water Authority

KWA started “greatest water war in Michigan history”

GLWA widened war, taking over all of  DWSD

KWA initiator Jeff Wright, a Democrat, tied to scandal-plagued Synagro, alleged money-laundering, shady campaign financing

 

Wright prioritized selling untreated water to DTE, other businesses over the people’s need for treated water

Karegnondi Water Group members get Bond Buyers’
“Midwest Deal of the Year” award in 2014.
Without them, the poisoning of Flint would not have happened.

DETROIT – The mass lead poisoning of the people of Flint, Michigan, a cold-blooded act of domestic terrorism, was contrived for the profit of the Wall Street bond market, corporations and politicians by both Republicans and Democrats with their own agendas.

The two parties are battling the matter out in electoral debates, with Michigan’s Republican Governor Rick Snyder justifiably though hypocritically castigated by Democratic candidates like Hillary Clinton for his role in this unspeakable catastrophe.

“The governor of that state acted as though he didn’t really care,” Clinton said during the NBC News debate in Charleston, S.C. “If the kids in a rich suburb of Detroit had been drinking contaminated water and being bathed in it, there would’ve been action.” Clinton’s Democratic opponent Bernie Sanders simply asked Snyder to resign.

In the most  cynically exploitative campaign move so far, Clinton just published the video below. It calls for donations to a Flint non-profit, rather than pledging billions from the U.S. Treasury to save Flint, just as the U.S. Treasury bailed out General Motors, which left Flint, taking with it 72,000 jobs.

No politician has expressed any intention of locking Snyder and cronies up for life without parole, the only sentence appropriate under Michigan law, or of providing the billions of dollars necessary to rebuild not only Flint’s water infrastructure, but the city itself, devastated for decades by its abandonment by General Motors and other corporations.

Ten Flint residents have already died from Legionnaire’s disease linked to contamination of the city’s water.  Tens of thousands more, especially children and babies, face irreversible life-time damage due to the neurological and behavioral effects of lead, according to the World Health Organization.

A petition to recall Snyder has finally 

been approved by the notoriously recalcitrant State Elections Board and will no doubt receive mass support, as it should.

But make no mistake—getting rid of Snyder will not cut out the cancer of racism and profiteering that has devastated Flint, Detroit, and cities across the U.S. for years.

The most blatant example of the bi-partisan midwifery of the Flint water catastrophe is the creation of the Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA), in what a Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) spokesman called “the greatest water war in Michigan’s history.”

He was quoted before the creation of the Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA), which has since robbed the people of Detroit, the largest Black majority city in the U.S., of the entire DWSD, the country’s third largest water and sewerage system, founded in 1836, which had been serving 40 percent of Michigan’s population.

The poisoning of the city of Flint, which is also a majority Black, would not have happened without the creation of the KWA at the instigation of Genesee County Drain Commissioner Jeff Wright, a white Democrat who has been Drain Commissioner since 2001 and spent 23 years prior to that in the department under former Drain Commissioner Anthony Ragnone.

According to U.S. Census figures, Genesee County is 75.2 percent white, and 20.6 percent Black, with a 21 percent poverty level. Flint is 37.4 percent white, and 56.6 percent Black, with a 41.5 percent poverty level.

Jeff Wright, CEO of KWA, Genesee County Drain Commissioner

In 2013, the KWA began building a 63-mile pipeline to Lake Huron that runs parallel to DWSD’s pipeline for the region. While boasting it will lower water rates, the Authority admits the pipeline will only deliver raw water, unlike the DWSD, which delivers fully treated water. Communities which sign on to it will have to treat their own water, creating ways to do so at additional costs to customers and profits to contractors. Wright said in 2011 that he wanted to bring raw water in for the benefit of businesses in the area.

The pipeline was supposed to have been up for operation by 2015.

The KWA now includes the “Genesee County Drain Commissioner, Lapeer County Drain Commissioner, Lapeer City, Sanilac County Drain Commissioner and the City of Flint,” according to its website. St. Clair County is reportedly also considering membership as Wright courts more regional customers.

Wright, who has a history of shady dealings with water contractors, began the push to create the KWA in 2006. Snyder’s appointee, Flint Emergency Manager Ed Kurtz, later endorsed it as well. In 2013, Wright got the Democratic City Council of Flint to agree to disconnect the city from the DWSD, which had supplied high-quality water to Flint residents since 1967, and connect with the KWA instead.

Due to KWA construction delays, however, Snyder and Kurtz ordered the ultimately disastrous long-term use of the polluted Flint River in the interim, falsely claiming that Detroit had refused to negotiate better rates for its Genesee County customers. While the Flint Water Treatment Plant, using the Flint River, has always been a back-up water supply to DWSD, which gets its water from Lake Huron, the plant was never outfitted to operate with river water for more than 20 days, on an emergency basis.

DTE’s Greenwood Energy Center in Avoca, MI
is on the proposed Karegnondi line.

VOD reader Peter Bernard wrote, “DTE has been involved in the formation of KWA since the beginning. DTE didn’t need treated water to run its turbines. Was it the demand of DTE for untreated water as soon as Flint withdrew from DWSD that caused Flint to pump untreated water into its supply system? I worked for Detroit Edison as a summer intern 60 years ago and they always thought pure water was an extra expense since super-heated stem automatically purified the water driving the steam turbines.”

In 2011, Ron Fonger of the Flint Journal reported that DTE told the KWA board it was interested in purchasing up to three million gallons of untreated water per day from the Authority for its Greenwood Energy Plant.

“Genesee County Drain Commissioner Jeff Wright called the news ‘very encouraging’ during a meeting of the KWA Board of Directors today, and said others could follow ‘as more businesses are made aware of (what we are doing and) the lower cost of untreated water,'” Fonger wrote, adding that Wright said KWA would work with DTE.

Map shows KWA pipeline in red,
DWSD pipelines in blue.

In 2014, the Bond Buyer magazine gave KWA the Midwest Bond Buyer of the Year award during an elaborate ceremony in New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, for its second sale of $220 million in bonds to finance the pipeline, an intake facility, and two pumping stations.

It earlier sold $35 billion in bonds despite Detroit’s bankruptcy filing.

“Long before Detroit filed its Chapter 9 bankruptcy case in the summer of 2013, Flint and Genesee County, Michigan saw the need to break away from their dependence on the Detroit water system,” the narrator of a video shown at the ceremony said in a disingenuous, factually inaccurate introduction.

“In 2010 they formed the Karegnondi Water Authority, the two governments’ long-term strategy to deliver a more reliable water supply at more reasonable rates. After years of planning and crafting a bond structure with dual backstops to protect investors, the Authority hit the market in early April with its inaugural issue for $220 million in bonds. . . .The governments expect to cover the debt repayments with system revenues, and both put their limited tax GBO payments behind the bonds.”

The narrator said that Genesee County also pledged to cover Flint’s portions of the bonds if it is not able to do so under state emergency management.

Former Detroit CFO Sean Werdlow and former
Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick receive Bond Buyer award in 2004
for disastrous $1.5 billion COPS deal.

“Entering a market where local governments across Michigan faced heightened penalties, the authorities sold the bonds to more than 30 investors and achieved borrowing costs below projections,” the narrator said. “The deal paves the way for the County to trade in annual rate increases of about 11.5 percent for ones closer to five.”

The presentation recalled a similar Bond Buyer award given to former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his then-CFO Sean Werdlow in 2004, for the disastrous sale of $1.5 billion in “Certificates of Participation,” or “Pension Obligation Bonds,” an amount that ballooned to $2.8 billion with default penalties and interest swaps. Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr cited the deal as one reason for his improperly authorized 2013 Detroit Chapter 9 bankruptcy filing, but never followed through on a lawsuit he filed calling it “void ab initio, illegal and unenforceable.”

Below is the video presented at the Bond Buyer 2014 awards ceremony, on the Karegnondi Water Authority and the bonds involved.

In 2013, Tucker, Young, Jackson and Tull (TYJT), a Detroit-based engineering and consulting company, was contracted by the Michigan Department of Treasury to provide a study of the proposed KWA, contrasting it with the advantages of Flint remaining with the DWSD. The study strongly contradicted claims the Bond Buyer made at the 2014 awards ceremony, and other made in a study contracted by the community of Swartz Creek. (See full TYJT study at http://voiceofdetroit.net/wp-content/uploads/FLINT-KWA-TYJT-water_report.pdf,)

DWSD spokesman Bill Johnson

“The Flint City Council’s approval of the Genesee County Drain Commission-backed idea to link Flint and a proposed multi-county connector effectively launched the greatest water war in Michigan’s history, “ Bill Johnson, communications head for the DWSD, said in a press release. “The action ignores a credible state-sponsored study that came out against the ill-advised Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA) project. And the vote makes no connection to Flint’s fiscal reality. All things considered, the City of Flint is best served by the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD).” (See full release at http://voiceofdetroit.net/wp-content/uploads/water_war_undermines_flint-dwsd_relations-2013-14.pdf.)

The study concluded that the cheapest and safest option out of eight through 2042 for Flint’s water supply was to provide it directly through an adaptation of DWSD’s Imlay City pumping station, which is closer to Flint. DWSD has always provided water for the area through its Lake Huron Water Treatment Plant at Ft. Gratiot, Michigan, which sends it to the Imlay City station to go to Flint. Flint then supplies it to other regional customers.  (See graph below.)

TYJT noted that the KWA proposal did not account for cost overruns on construction contracts, an almost inevitable occurrence, or provide a back-up water supply as does the DWSD for all its customers in the event of failure of the primary supply.

Why did Wright ignore this study? His connections with shady contractors during his tenure as Genesee County Drain Commissioner beginning in 2001, and earlier in his 23 years serving under former Drain Commissioner Anthony Ragnone, are well-known.

Southwest community organizer Denise Hearn leads protest against Synagro’s Detroit boondoogle outside the Detroit Wastewater Treatment Plant July 31, 2008.

Wright himself formerly owned a water consulting business called Tara/Aqua Management. During his term as Commissioner, he has signed multiple contracts with Synagro Technologies, Inc. for sewage sludge removal, dewatering, and land application at the county’s Linden and Ragnone treatment plants, from 2002 through 2009, according to a 2010 Flint Journal expose by reporter Ron Fonger.

At least two of the Genesee Drain Commission Synagro contracts, in 2003 and 2005, were signed by James Rosendall, former Synagro vice-president of development who went to prison for 11 months, in connection with the Synagro/Carlyle  bribery scandal that brought down former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, DWSD head Victor Mercado, and former City Council President Monica Conyers, among other Black city officials.

Synagro VP James Rosendall

Rosendall was the only white who was jailed, while Black officials who refused to act as FBI informants received terms as long as five years.

Judge Avern Cohn barred the defense from asking why Synagro and the Carlyle Group were not charged in the RICO indictment.

Whatever you do, do not tell anyone the reason why the defense was barred from asking why Synagro and the Carlyle Group was not charged in the RICO indictment was because there was an ongoing investigation into other matters of interest.  Sssshhhh.......

Wright was an FBI informant against Conyers’ aide Sam Riddle during the probe. Many officials involved in the probe acted as informants rather than being charged as well.

Synagro was purchased by the insidious Carlyle Group in 2007, one of the largest private equity and alternative investment firms in the world which has extensive ties to the global defense industry.

The Carlyle Group’s board has included politicians from around the world, including former U.S. Presidents George H. W Bush and George W. Bush, and their former cabinet members U.S. Secretary of State James Baker III, and U.S. Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci, also former chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Arthur Levitt, who served under Pres. Bill Clinton.

It is connected to the Bin Laden family and to former Phillippines dictator Fidel Ramos, among numerous others. Synagro went bankrupt in 2013 and was sold.

The KWA’s current major contractors include the omnipresent L D’Agostini & Sons, based in Macomb, at a starting cost $24.6 million for the pipeline and $11.06 million for the intake station on Lake Huron. D’Agostini earlier sued the DWSD because it was barred from further contracting with the department after its involvement in the RICO indictment of Kilpatrick et. al. was exposed. D’Agostini previously did 70 percent of its business with the Department.

The Alabama-based American Cast Iron Pipe Company, which operates one of the largest ductile iron pipe casting plants in the world, has a contract with a starting cost of $84.1 million, while the Flint-based E & L Construction’s contract for the Imlay City pump station has a starting cost of $11.78 million. All this work duplicates DWSD pipelines and intake and pumping stations already servicing the area.

Pipe for Karegnondi Water Authority is hoisted into Lake Huron.

Recently, Channel 2 reporter Charlie LeDuff interviewed Jeff Wright in a story focusing on the profits made by contractors on the Flint water switch. They included Kurtz campaign contributors AECOM, with $18 billion in revenues in 2015, and the engineering firm hired to ensure that the switch to Flint River water would be safe, LAN (Lockwood, Andrews and Norman).

LeDuff reports that firm’s original contract began at $140,000 and ballooned later to $4 million, despite the fact that it did NOTHING to ensure the safety of the city’s water.

(VOD takes issue with LeDuff’s initial contention that Flint ratepayers decided to opt for the KWA because they were paying “outrageous” rates to Detroit. That is a claim that has been made by DWSD’s wholesale customers in six counties for decades, never with an addendum that the communities involved add their own surcharges to the wholesale rates. LeDuff also appears to conclude at the end that water flowing through Flint’s pipes now from DWSD is safe, which it will not be until complete replacement of the corroded infrastructure. )

Voting is beautiful, be beautiful ~ vote.©

Detroit News Heralds The Quantum Renaissance In Recording Public Corruption

Thank you, Daniel Howes and Robert Snell, The Detroit News.

This is exactly what I wanted to see as preserving the annals of history in an interactive.

This type of recording of the public record, as opposed to reporting, model can easily be built upon, with videos, case filings, and trusts filled with individual databases.

I am humbled because this is heraldry and this is what it means to be keeper of the record, an office held to protect the children's trust for the posterity of the right to a civil society.

This is the beginning of the Quantum Renaissance.

Driven by Greed: An interactive view of Metro Detroit corruption

Driven by Greed: An interactive view of Metro Detroit corruption
A video primer on corruption: Count the kickbacks, cash and bribes pocketed by Metro Detroit's most corrupt UAW bosses, auto execs and politicians.

Driven by greed: Alliance of FCA, union leaders fueled decade of corruption

Detroit — Dennis Williams requested the meeting with General Motors Co. CEO Mary Barra because the United Auto Workers president wanted to deliver a message: He would support a merger of GM with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV.

All GM needed to do in the spring of 2015 was agree to the blockbuster combination to realize ambitions FCA’s then-CEO, Sergio Marchionne, openly touted, even if a prospective deal imperiled plants, products and thousands of union jobs Williams was obliged to protect. The union leader's position defied projections of job losses, reinforcing rank-and-file suspicions their leadership had grown too close to management — and too willing to plunder union resources for their own benefit.

A four-year federal probe has revealed allegations about UAW leaders wasting the auto industry bailout’s historic second chance by embezzling member dues, shaking down union contractors and scheming with auto executives.

"The UAW's done its own research, and we think it's more favorable than you guys do," Williams told GM's leaders of Marchionne's latest proposal, according to two sources familiar with details of the meeting. "I think it's worthy of some study."

The suggestion essentially culminated Marchionne’s evolving strategy to gain control of old Chrysler assets from bankruptcy and to buy union support for his vision to create a global American auto colossus the Italian-born executive would control. Marchionne dismissed skeptics, instead insisting such a tie-up would not result in the plant closings and rank-and-file job losses GM said it would after its own board-level study of a potential combination.

In his second-floor president’s office adorned with football helmets and portraits of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., Williams parroted Marchionne's rationale to Barra, President Dan Ammann and CFO Chuck Stevens, according to a civil racketeering lawsuit GM filed against FCA in November. For at least the fourth time in three years, GM said no deal.

The $85 billion government bailout that 10 years ago rescued GM, delivered Chrysler Group to Marchionne's Fiat SpA for no cash down and gave the United Auto Workers large stakes in both automakers also fueled a decade-long corruption conspiracy that has tarnished FCA's revival, undermined the UAW's credibility and exposed the labor union to federal takeover.

Thousands of pages of federal court records, dozens of interviews with auto industry figures, lawyers and federal officials, as well as on-the-ground reporting in three states, help define the origins of the country’s largest union corruption scandal in 40 years and highlight the multimillion-dollar cost of a scheme hatched in the auto industry’s darkest hour.

"This is an ugly story," said Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. "Pots of money from the government can be irresistible to people. It suggests that there is a culture of corruption and sort of a cozy collusion between the company and union brass" — a culture that an automaker could exploit.

Frank Hammer, 76, of Detroit is a retired UAW international representative and self-described dissident. He traces the roots of corruption to the “extremely hazardous cultural change” that happened after the union and the automakers began jointly operated programs and opened training centers in the 1980s, a move he saw as a threat to the union.

Fiat Chrysler executives, armed with $12.5 billion in taxpayer funds, started funneling bribes and illegal payments to UAW officials within days of the automaker emerging from bankruptcy in June 2009, The Detroit News has learned, partially squandering a second chance financed by American taxpayers. Prosecutors allege the money was part of a broad attempt by Fiat Chrysler executives to secure labor concessions from the UAW by keeping labor leaders “fat, dumb and happy.”

The government’s four-year investigation has revealed how labor leaders misused the bailout’s historic second chance by embezzling money from worker paychecks, shaking down union contractors and scheming with auto executives. The conspiracy stretched from the California desert and a union town on the banks of the Missouri River to the woods of Northern Michigan and the Jersey Shore.

"When the UAW goes on strike and the workers are making — I think it was $275 per week ... And what does the leadership get? Bottles of booze worth $1,300. Lavish steak dinners," U.S. Attorney Matthew Schneider, the Justice Department's top prosecutor in Detroit, told The News.

In all, UAW officials and auto executives are accused of misappropriating nearly $34 million since the bailout 10 years ago, according to an analysis by The News. That money includes embezzled member dues and funds siphoned from facilities that train roughly 150,000 of the union's nearly 400,000 members.

The timing of illegal payments within days of attaining control of Chrysler signals the importance Marchionne appeared to place on buying influence within the UAW, one of the nation's largest and most powerful labor unions. When the remnants of Chrysler emerged from bankruptcy, its UAW retiree health care trust owned a majority stake in the Auburn Hills automaker, and a close relationship with the union could buttress Marchionne's hope of one day acquiring GM, sources familiar with the investigation said.

So far, 13 people tied to the UAW and Fiat Chrysler have been charged in federal court, and prosecutors have implicated at least seven others in the conspiracy. Those include Williams, the union's president emeritus, and recently resigned President Gary Jones, who is accused of stealing as much as $700,000 from workers and trying to cover up crimes. William's attorneys did not respond to requests for comment, and Jones's attorney declined comment.

Thirteen UAW and Fiat Chrysler officials have been charged in auto scandal
Corruption Inc.
Before the UAW scandal erupted two years ago, public officials in Metro Detroit went to prison for receiving bribes that amounted to as little as a used purple Lexus and $10,025 worth of hair plugs.

The auto industry corruption crackdown, centered in America's Motor City, is establishing new benchmarks. Union leaders and auto executives have been accused of receiving an average of $422,000 in illegal benefits — twice as much as regional politicians and municipal employees convicted in the last decade.

"I do think it’s based on greed," Schneider said. "The instant that you decide to put your interests ahead of somebody else’s and serve your greedy or selfish interests, that’s it."

The corruption spanned at least four generations of UAW leaders, a mix of presidents, vice presidents and the union’s junior varsity. According to the government, there was a band of thieves at the UAW’s Solidarity House headquarters along the Detroit River, swindlers in regional offices in the heartland and shakedown artists on the East Coast.

UAW Vice President Joe Ashton headed an Atlantic City crew that strong-armed union contractors into paying kickbacks. The embezzlement squad in St. Louis was led by the late Region 5 Director Jim Wells, a hot-headed gambler who, until now, has not been publicly linked to the scandal, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

Colleagues describe Wells as a Svengali who taught subordinates how to skim member dues, including one bespectacled accountant named Gary Jones who last year took control of the UAW while continuing to skim money, according to prosecutors.

The crews committed crimes on their own and as a team, creating a national network of corruption connected most directly by three letters: UAW. Every December the crews united in Palm Springs, where member dues and Fiat Chrysler cash financed a more than $1 million spending spree. Labor leaders spent freely on poolside villas, five-figure filet dinners and vodka poured from crystal skulls.

From 2014-15, UAW bosses spent member dues on 107 rounds of golf at the nation’s premier courses. With union money, they bought new golf clothes, rainbow-colored golf balls made in South Korea and golf equipment, including a $1,955 set of Titleist golf clubs.

Federal agents seized a matching set of clubs from the suburban Detroit garage of Jones, right next to where they seized more than $32,000 in cash during an August raid. The raid, as well as allegations Jones embezzled member dues, elevated the four-year investigation from a focus on comparatively minor labor law crimes to what legal experts describe as outright thievery.

The pots of money prosecutors say were tapped by UAW officials are dwindling as the investigation approaches its fifth year. GM and the UAW have agreed to shutter a training center financed with money that ended up in labor leaders’ pockets, and bargainers for FCA and Ford Motor Co. are dissolving their joint centers; union officials have mothballed nonprofit charities since investigators started questioning whether the UAW leaders personally benefited from donations; and federal agents are questioning whether union bosses drained accounts that were established to buy flowers for auto worker funerals.

The corruption scandal has proven costly for the UAW. Eight people linked to the union have been convicted so far. The UAW lost its seat on the GM board last year, a seat awarded during the Detroit automaker’s bankruptcy that was occupied by a retired vice president later accused of demanding $550,000 in bribes and kickbacks from a union contractor.

A sitting UAW president implicated in the scandal resigned as the union initiated steps to remove him, and his predecessor has been implicated, too. The scandal also has tarnished the UAW’s historic reputation as a clean union, a legacy of its longest-serving president, Walter Reuther. The UAW lost 35,000 members last year, and the ongoing investigation is expected to all but doom the union’s ability to lure new members in southern plants owned by foreign automakers.

And the four-year corruption investigation has exposed FCA to civil racketeering charges by crosstown rival GM, a target of Marchionne's quest to consolidate the two automakers into a global powerhouse Marchionne planned to lead. GM alleges that the FCA CEO, who died two summers ago, masterminded a scheme to buy UAW influence to raise costs on GM, weaken it and engineer a merger.

In response, FCA pointed to a previous statement labeling GM's lawsuit a "meritless attempt to divert attention from that company’s own challenges." The Italian-American automaker said it "will deal with this extraordinary attempt at distraction through the appropriate channels and will stay focused on continuing to deliver record results." 

The allegations against the UAW and ongoing investigation also have heightened the possibility federal prosecutors will file civil racketeering charges against the union. The move could result in the federal government taking control of one of the nation’s largest and most powerful unions, instituting broad reforms and removing current leaders.

Warning signs in plain sight
"Fat, dumb and happy" was in full flower by spring 2017. That's when an interior decorator dropped off a basket of white birch sticks at a cabin in northern Michigan.

The lakefront, wood-paneled cabin was being renovated by Williams, then UAW president, as part of a $10 million upgrade to the union’s Black Lake Conference Center, a 1,000-acre retreat near Cheboygan. The project was bankrolled after the first hike in membership dues in almost 50 years.

The increased dues, one answer to the union's worsening financial predicament, helped to replenish a depleted UAW strike fund. Besides paying for wages and medical and prescription drug benefits for striking workers, the $750 million fund also finances operations for the conference center dating back to the Reuther era.

Flush with cash for the renovations, Williams outfitted the cabin with a humidor and wine cooler, according to a source. He also commissioned a larger retirement home for himself on an adjacent property that would soon draw the interest of FBI agents. And it eventually would be built with nonunion labor.

Cabin for retired leader rises as feds question UAW spending

But first, Williams needed a few final decorations. He arranged for an interior decorator to bring baubles and decorative pieces, including the basket of white birch sticks that carried a $150 price tag. The expense struck UAW officials familiar with the cabin project as frivolous because a few feet from the cabin's front door stood a forest of white birches, their branches free for the taking.

Such spending ran counter to the mandate Williams inherited from his election in June 2014: repair the UAW's finances and boost membership. That included raising member dues 25%, even as corruption fueled by those same dollars flourished.

By spring 2017, life within the upper echelon of the UAW was far removed from the Great Recession that threatened the union's existence and the U.S. auto industry just eight years earlier. UAW membership was up more than 21%, automakers were booking fat profits, and more membership dues were flowing into UAW coffers.

Williams cut costs and increased revenue. But the way he did it would soon draw attention from a team of federal agents from the FBI, Internal Revenue Service and Labor Department. They were told by a top aide to Williams that he had saved the union money by offloading travel and entertainment expenses to Fiat Chrysler, the No. 3 Detroit automaker run by his old friend, Marchionne.

Ex-UAW boss Dennis Williams OK'd using training center funds, aide says

Fiat Chrysler executives poured more than $100 million into the Detroit joint-training center it operated with senior officers from the UAW, according to court records and tax filings. Fiat Chrysler Vice President Alphons Iacobelli — a Harvard-trained executive with exotic hobbies that included collecting solid-gold fountain pens and Italian-made, cherry red roadsters — handed those labor leaders credit cards paid for by the automaker and encouraged them to swipe liberally.

"If you see something you want," Iacobelli told UAW officer Nancy Adams Johnson in July 2014, according to federal court records that recount the conversation, "feel free to buy it."

How it started
Iacobelli was the automaker's top labor negotiator when what's now called Fiat Chrysler exited Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2009 with $12.5 billion in federal aid and a new leader, Marchionne. That's when Iacobelli, his company's point man with the UAW, admitted to opening the financial spigot.

Starting that month, authorities say, Iacobelli and Fiat Chrysler made more than $9 million in illegal payments over eight years to the UAW to cover salaries and benefits of union officials assigned to the training center. Some of those officials worked at the center, but for a large number of UAW officials these were no-show jobs, prosecutors said in a sentencing memo. Iacobelli and Fiat Chrysler viewed the payments as "a political gift" to the UAW..

"It was merely a corrupt mechanism whereby FCA money could be used by the UAW to keep the UAW’s costs down," Assistant U.S. Attorney David Gardey said in court filings. The payments violated a federal law — the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 — barring company officials from giving money or things of value to labor leaders.

The UAW also collected a 7% fee in addition to the $9 million paid for the no-show jobs, according to prosecutors. Starting in June 2009, that fee pumped an additional $2.9 million into the UAW's bank account, ostensibly to cover administrative costs.

"FCA viewed the 7 (percent fee) as simply another cost of doing business with the UAW in terms of keeping labor peace," Gardey said.

On Sept. 29, three months after Fiat Chrysler left bankruptcy court, Iacobelli met with the automaker's financial analyst, Jerome Durden. At the time, Durden controlled the books of the UAW-Chrysler training center and was a close friend of UAW Vice President General Holiefield, the burly labor leader assigned to the union's Fiat Chrysler department.

During the meeting, Iacobelli talked about restarting an internal Fiat Chrysler plan to funnel money to "high value/high leverage programs," according to a Durden email summarizing the meeting. The email referenced one such program: the nonprofit "Leave the Light On Foundation," a charity for poor children headed by Holiefield. Durden served as the charity's treasurer.

"The overall tone of the meeting," Durden wrote in the emails, "was a desire to deliver some good news to the UAW for a change."

The meeting transformed the foundation from a purported charity into a Trojan horse used by Iacobelli, Durden and others to hide illegal payments. The payments were designed to keep Holiefield happy and to extract favorable labor concessions for Fiat Chrysler, prosecutors said. Durden pleaded guilty in 2017 to making illegal payments to Holiefield and others.

Between 2009 and 2015, Iacobelli and others steered more than $1.2 million in illegal payments to Holiefield, wife Monica Morgan-Holiefield and others. The payments included first-class airfare, clothing, jewelry, furniture; $13,300 to pay for the Holiefields' pool; and $262,219 to pay off the mortgage on their home in suburban Detroit.

Iacobelli was not a rogue auto executive breaking labor laws that bar management from giving labor officials money and things of value, his lawyer David DuMouchel said: "Mr. Iacobelli joined an already ongoing conspiracy. The practices and corruption that are the focus of this case started long before Mr. Iacobelli."

And prosecutors say Iacobelli answered to one person on UAW matters: Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne.

The sweater-clad CEO forged a close relationship with Holiefield, who headed the UAW-FCA Department and led national contract talks with the automaker. Keeping Holiefield happy was a priority for Marchionne and his executive team.

As his team funneled bribes to Holiefield, Marchionne seduced him with gold — a mustard-yellow, limited-edition watch in February 2010, eight months after the Fiat Chrysler bankruptcy concluded.

The Terra Cielo Mare, part of the Italian watchmaker's line of custom-made timepieces, featured the Fiat logo and retailed for $2,245. At that price, the average UAW member would need to work two weeks on the assembly line to afford one.

The watch came with a hand-written note: “Dear General, I declared the goods at less than fifty bucks. That should remove any potential conflict. Best regards, and see you soon,” according to federal court records obtained by The News.

Federal investigators later asked Marchionne whether he had given UAW leaders valuable items when he was questioned during a secret meeting at the U.S. Attorney's Office in downtown Detroit in July 2016, sources told The News.

Nope, Marchionne said. Investigators then confronted the CEO with evidence about the timepiece. The meeting ended with Marchionne exposed to federal charges. But the 66-year-old, accused in GM's civil racketeering lawsuit of masterminding the decade-long bribery conspiracy, was never charged with a crime before he died in July 2018 in a Zurich hospital.

Prosecutors have labeled the auto company a co-conspirator, along with the UAW and the training center, in a conspiracy to violate federal labor laws. Fiat Chrysler is negotiating a settlement that could cost the company less than $50 million.

How the feds got wise
The federal crackdown on auto industry corruption started with a right-hand man and a cherry red roadster.

In September 2013, Holiefield’s top aide, James Hardy, abruptly left the UAW amid allegations he was selling jobs at Chrysler plants. Hardy cooperated with federal investigators and was never criminally charged. But he gave federal investigators a window into the UAW’s internal affairs, as well as a deeper understanding of how the union’s Fiat Chrysler department was plagued by corruption.

A few months later, on May 15, 2014, Iacobelli walked past palm trees and into the exotic car dealership, Naples Motorsports, in southwest Florida. He zoomed out with a red 2013 Ferrari 458 Spider convertible and installed a “IACOBLI” vanity plate on the $365,482 exotic car.

The conspicuous purchase drew attention from federal investigators who analyzed financial records and determined the Ferrari was purchased with money that was supposed to pay for UAW blue-collar worker training.

Feds reveal big-ticket items bought during Fiat Chrysler & UAW conspiracy

► INTERACTIVE:  A Database of corruption in Detroit

Feds reveal big-ticket items bought during Fiat Chrysler & UAW conspiracy
The Ferrari and Hardy led to a sprawling investigation that would push the UAW to the brink of federal oversight, reshuffle the top ranks of the U.S. auto industry and expose Fiat Chrysler executives as schemers bent on warping the collective bargaining process. It also would form the basis for the civil racketeering lawsuit from arch-rival GM alleging that FCA, led by its CEO, systematically bribed union leaders in a conspiracy to raise GM's labor costs to force a merger.

While Marchionne was handing out watches in Italy, a separate scheme was underway 7,614 miles from Turin at a UAW regional office in a suburban St. Louis. And corruption big and small flourished in one of America's most iconic auto towns, Flint, the home of the sit-down strikes, the vast Buick City complex and the stress of GM's decades-long retreat.

The Hotspot Flint
Corruption infiltrates lower levels of UAW leadership, too, said Kathy Otto, former president of UAW Local 326 and 1292. “Each director in Region 1-C-D had their club that you were encouraged to donate to, although it wasn’t required," she said, confirming that she was approached by regional staff about paying into these clubs when she was elected.

She describes a system of political patronage. Members in good standing would get preferential treatment in conflict resolutions, to speed their ascension through the leadership ranks, to burnish their standing among union brothers and sisters.

“I felt that if you're not part of the club you're not going to get the help," Otto said. "My thought was that I was elected just like they were, and I shouldn't have to donate to some slush fund. Some think that they're privileged. They're not. They're servants.”

The groups sported quirky names that rhymed, an apparent union tradition. Norwood Jewell, the former regional director in Flint who abruptly resigned as vice president and director of the FCA department before his conviction on federal charges, had one, too, confirmed Otto and John Gleason, Genesee County clerk and a former member employee at GM Flint Truck Assembly.

“When you try to do the right thing, it’s constant harassment,” said Gleason, who added he found about 50 spikes thrown in his driveway three times in 2016 after supporting a county politician the UAW wasn’t backing. An investigation into the incidents is ongoing.

He has organized rallies calling for the removal of Jewell’s name from all union property, especially the memorial honoring sit-down strikers in front of the UAW Region 1-D office in Flint. Gleason’s grandfather was one of them.

“If the corporation wasn’t abusing its employees, we would never have had a union,” Gleason said. “What they started to end, they have since joined. It’s disgusting. I’m absolutely disgusted.”

Jewell, sentenced in August to 15 months in federal prison for accepting bribes, is not the only product of the Flint culture swept up in the federal crackdown. Mike Grimes, 65, of Fort Myers, Florida, pleaded guilty in September to federal charges of wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering. The government said Grimes received $1.5 million in bribes and kickbacks from union vendors.

People who worked with Grimes, both in the union and at GM, expressed shock that he could be implicated in the federal crackdown. He was administrative assistant to UAW Vice President Cindy Estrada when she headed the union's GM Department, and Estrada says Grimes "would have been the last person I ever thought would do that. I've never been more shocked in my life — and hurt and angry. "

Frank Hammer and Grimes worked in the GM Department as international representatives. Hammer was surprised when Grimes was charged with collecting kickbacks from vendors to the Center for Human Resources, a jointly operated training center between the UAW and GM that is funded by the automaker.

"He was one of the guys I thought that was on the higher end of the spectrum in terms of doing his job and so on," Hammer said. "He has fallen and succumbed to the temptations."

Hammer blames the alleged partnership between union leaders and management, epitomized by joint training centers like the UAW-GM Center for Human Resources on the Detroit River known derisively as "the palace."

"The idea was they were going to build on this cooperative relationship. It would be a whole system from the shop floor to the top leadership where this partnership was fertilized and grown.” And that partnership, Hammer believes, led to corruption.

“UAW officials began to view themselves as co-managers, and they got to the point where they said, ‘we ought to get the perks, too.’ In this new era of managerial partnership, I think some of them convinced themselves they deserved what their managerial co-partners had. I think some of them really began to think that way.”

The scam back east
In the fall of 2012, a bribery and kickback scheme involving different UAW officials was intensifying along the East Coast. Like the St. Louis crew long headed by the late Jim Wells, the East Coast ring involved a UAW power broker poised to reach the union's governing International Executive Board.

His name was Joe Ashton, a regional UAW director in Atlantic City who celebrated his 40th anniversary in the union when GM was in bankruptcy court a decade ago. His job included organizing blackjack dealers and other casino workers — until he moved on to bigger things in Detroit.

Ashton was named a UAW vice president and director of its GM Department in June 2010. His new duties included helping to operate the UAW-GM Center for Human Resources, an impressive training facility financed by GM. The CHR, also known in some UAW-GM circles as the "Center for Hidden Relatives," survived GM's 2009 bankruptcy in part because the automaker received a taxpayer bailout totaling nearly $50 billion.

So had a multimillion-dollar bribery and kickback game involving money from post-bankrupt GM. In 2012, Ashton conspired with top aide Jeff Pietrzyk and Grimes to demand bribes and kickbacks from training center contractors. In return, Ashton and the aides steered more than $15.8 million worth of contracts for UAW-branded clothes and trinkets, including jackets, backpacks and watches.

The contracts were paid with money from GM that was supposed to train blue-collar workers. Grimes pleaded guilty in October after being accused of helping steer contracts to vendors, including a family-operated business that sold American-made custom logo clothes and accessories — and paid more than $1 million in kickbacks and bribes to Grimes.

The criminal case offered insight into a merchandise industry colloquially called "trinkets and trash." The market includes a collection of companies vying for a share of the more than $29 million spent by the UAW and related groups in the last five years on promotion, advertising and union-branded items.

INTERACTIVE: Trinkets and trash, a database of UAW spending on swag

**************************************

Ashton, meanwhile, chose a more intimate target for a shakedown. In 2012, he devised a plan to give every union worker at GM plants a watch, a gift meant to symbolize the quality vehicles and the strong partnership between GM and the UAW.

Ashton contacted his Philadelphia-based chiropractor Marc Cohen and told him to create a company that could win the contract and supply the watches, according to the government. After Cohen won the $3.97 million watch contract, according to court records, Ashton demanded a $250,000 kickback in spring 2013.

The 58,000 watches were delivered Jan. 31, 2014, a date that proved to be unfortunate. Six days later, GM started to recall about 800,000 vehicles due to a faulty ignition switch, the first public indication of a fatal flaw blamed for the deaths of 124 people.

The watches were never distributed. Yet Ashton's career kept rising thanks, in large part, to the GM bankruptcy. In August 2014, Ashton joined GM's board of directors, replacing Vice Chairman Steve Girsky as representative of the UAW Retiree Medical Benefits Trust. The UAW acquired the board seat during the 2009 bankruptcy in part because its health care trust was, at the time, GM's largest shareholder.

Ashton's career fared better than the watches — temporarily, anyway. As recently as August, the timepieces were languishing in boxes on pallets in a Detroit warehouse. And earlier this month, Ashton pleaded guilty in federal court to charges of wire fraud and money laundering in the corruption scandal.

California, here we come
Once a year, the East Coast kickback crew, the union leaders from Flint and the UAW's Detroit power structure converged on the desert oasis of Palm Springs with what prosecutors described in a Sept. 12 criminal complaint as an embezzlement gang from St. Louis.

The Region 5 group included several generations of UAW officers assigned to the union's largest geographic territory. They worked out of an industrial office in suburban St. Louis. Among them was Wells' successor, Gary Jones, the future UAW president who once served as the union's chief accountant back at Solidarity House.

As Region 5 boss, Jones hosted annual regional conventions in the California desert from 2014 to 2018. The events drew the union president, vice presidents, regional directors and local officers with unofficial titles — including, sources say, the bubble wrapper tasked with packing bottles of leftover booze in luggage and shipping the liquor back home.

Palm Springs continues to play a central role in the ongoing investigation targeting Jones and Williams, the union's two most recent presidents. Prosecutors say the two CEOs conspired with others to embezzle more than $1 million in union funds spent in Palm Springs and Missouri on poolside private villas, top-shelf liquor, cigars, golf and more.

Region 5 conferences in Palm Springs lasted as long as five days. Yet UAW leaders stayed for months, prosecutors said, turning the five-story Renaissance Palm Springs Hotel on East Tahquitz Canyon Way into Solidarity House West, far from cold Michigan winters.

“They came out here for years,” said Steve Fitzharris, the club professional at Desert Princess Country Club, where Labor Department filings show the UAW spent $96,806 in 2014 to rent private villas lining the course. “They were a bunch of nice guys. Normally" their golf events "were very well run."

The expenses, hidden from regulatory scrutiny under a master billing scheme devised by senior union leaders, included more than $6,599.87 for a New Year's Eve meal in December 2016 — $1,942 on liquor, $1,440 on wine, a $1,100 tip and the purchase of four bottles of Louis Roederer Cristal Champagne for $1,760.

When it was time to leave, a UAW vendor loaded luggage, new golf clubs and leftover booze into a tractor-trailer and drove back to Detroit. Union leaders left nothing behind, except evidence of fancy goods bought with someone else's money.

"The vendor also transported the luggage back to Detroit as well as any luxury items that were purchased in and around Palm Springs by the UAW officials," Labor Department Special Agent Andrew Donohue wrote in a court filing, describing a "culture of alcohol" within the senior union ranks.

Sergio's endgame
By 2015, Marchionne wouldn't quit.

Three years earlier, in 2012, his proposed merger with GM received scrutiny from the automaker's top three executives — all Wall Street deal-makers before coming to Detroit. Led by then-CEO Dan Akerson, Girsky and President Dan Ammann conducted an extensive review of a potential combination between GM, Fiat SpA and Chrysler.

They evaluated multiple combinations ranging from joint powertrain ventures and brand acquisitions to a complete merger of what were then three entities. Potential impediments included anti-trust concerns, political backlash, the likelihood that promised "synergies" would not be realized.

Most of all, GM's leaders concluded such a combination would require cutting jobs, brands, products and plants. They worried the cuts would be especially damaging for a metro Detroit region just beginning to recover from the Great Recession and the bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler — worries Marchionne routinely dismissed in favor of his industrial logic and repeated pledge to not endanger "the blue collars."

"By 2014, FCA Group had been rejected repeatedly by GM regarding a merger between the two companies," GM alleges in its civil racketeering lawsuit against FCA. "But in early 2015, having successfully consolidated control over Chrysler and positioned FCA NV for merger, FCA believed it was in a much stronger position to force a GM merger."

In a nearly four-page letter dated March 9, 2015, that was reviewed by The News, Marchionne wrote Barra and then-Chairman Theodore Solso to once again propose a merger between the two companies. The FCA boss said the combined company would stake a "formidable position" in North America and would create a "solid platform" in Europe, among other things justifying his take on the deal.

What he didn't say: the combination would be greased by the support of UAW President Dennis Williams, who could invoke Document 13 of the national UAW-FCA contract to block a merger — or let one proceed. Additionally, the union president wielded practical control over the UAW Retiree Medical Benefits Trust, whose stake in GM could be materially affected should a multibillion-dollar GM-FCA transaction raise the value of its holdings.

Under GM's 2009 agreement with the U.S. Treasury Department, the UAW's shares must be voted proportionately with the remaining shareholders. That makes it nearly impossible for the union health care trust to support or block a proposed merger, despite then having a representative on GM's board — namely, Ashton, convicted earlier this month of wire fraud and money laundering.

But the union itself could support a deal.

On April 14, 2015, GM again rejected Marchionne's proposal. Two weeks later, he used FCA's five-year markets presentation in Auburn Hills to unveil "Confessions of a Capital Junkie," Marchionne's manifesto for industry consolidation doubling as a public appeal to GM. The message was clear: he wouldn't quit.

The next gambit came two months later, delivered by Williams on June 18, the same day he told the media the UAW would "not support anything that would hurt our members." Barra, Ammann, Stevens and Cathy Clegg, GM's lead labor negotiator, joined Williams and Estrada, head of the union's GM Department, in Williams' office, according to the GM lawsuit.

The UAW president outlined the inevitability of industry consolidation, according to two sources briefed on the meeting, and warned that GM risked being left behind if the automaker failed to seriously consider Marchionne's latest proposal. But a team of outside lawyers, bankers, financial advisers and crisis communications consultants assembled earlier in the year by GM to fend off Harry Wilson, an activist investor, had studied the proposal — and reached a conclusion similar to the one three years ago.

No deal, in part because doing one with a crosstown rival would lead to plant closures that could devastate the UAW membership. Why Williams would even suggest such a combination mystified GM's leadership, and it would take at least two more years before an explanation began to emerge in the outline of a federal crackdown on union corruption.

"I can't imagine it ever happening," Estrada told The News, adding that she "would have remembered" Williams backing a merger. "It's just insanity. Why would we ever be for a merger that had product overlap and plant closings?"

A potential answer came just a month later when FCA and the UAW held their ceremonial handshake to open 2015 national contract talks. Marchionne and Williams embraced, violating decades of protocol designed to depict the two sides as adversaries, not friends. UAW-FCA members rejected their first tentative agreement, called "transformational" by Marchionne, even as Williams hailed the next and final contract as the UAW's "richest" ever.

In its lawsuit, GM effectively says the 2015 UAW-FCA contract terms served as the culminating payoff in a Marchionne's years-long scheme to buy the support of UAW leadership at the expense of its largest U.S. competitor. It's a charge GM likely will be challenged to prove in its civil racketeering lawsuit against rival FCA.

The corruption exposed by the federal crackdown extends far beyond the UAW-FCA joint-training center in Detroit, or whatever the friendship between Williams and Marchionne may have portended. The continuing investigation is revealing a pervasive culture of self-dealing that also festered outside the orbit FCA began to create a decade ago.

Marchionne carried to the grave his bid to persuade an American partner to build a next-generation industry automotive giant, potentially with the help of the UAW. But the high price for corrupt practices begun soon after the automaker's taxpayer-funded bailout in 2009 continues to be paid — mounting costs for a culture of corruption inside the union Reuther built.

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Dear Gov. Snyder: You Have to Go to Jail

Michael Moore

Dear Governor Snyder:

Thanks to you, sir, and the premeditated actions of your administrators, you have effectively poisoned, not just some, but apparently ALL of the children in my hometown of Flint, Michigan.

And for that, you have to go to jail.

To poison all the children in an historic American city is no small feat. Even international terrorist organizations haven't figured out yet how to do something on a magnitude like this.

But you did. Your staff and others knew that the water in the Flint River was poison -- but you decided that taking over the city and "cutting costs" to "balance the budget" was more important than the people's health (not to mention their democratic rights to elect their own leaders.) So you cut off the clean, fresh glacial lake water of Lake Huron that the citizens of Flint (including myself) had been drinking for decades and, instead, made them drink water from the industrial cesspool we call the Flint River -- a body of "water" where toxins from a dozen General Motors and DuPont factorieshave been dumped for over a hundred years. And then you decided to put a chemical in this water to "clean" it -- which only ended up stripping the lead off of Flint's aging water pipes, placing that lead in the water and sending it straight into people's taps. Your callous -- and reckless (btw, "reckless" doesn't get you a pass; a reckless driver who kills a child, still goes to jail) -- decision to do this has now, as revealed by the city's top medical facility, caused "irreversible brain damage" in Flint's children, not to mention other bodily damage to all of Flint's adults. Here's how bad it is: Even GM won't let the auto parts they use in building cars touch the Flint water because thatwater "corrodes" them. This is a company that won't even fix an ignition switch after they've discovered it's already killed dozens of people. THAT's how bad the situation is. Even GM thinks you're the devil.

Maybe you don't understand the science behind this. Lead, in water -- now, bear with me, this involves a science lesson and you belong to the anti-science party, the one that believes there's not a climate problem and that Adam and Eve rode on dinosaurs 6,000 years ago. Lead is toxic to the human body. There's no way to fully eliminate it once it's in your system, and children are the most damaged by it.

By taking away the city's clean drinking water in order to "cut costs," and then switching the city's water supply to Flint River water, you have allowed massively unsafe levels of pollutants and lead into the water that travels in to everyone's home. Every Flint resident is trapped by this environmental nightmare which you, Governor, have created.

Like any real criminal, when you were confronted with the truth (by the EPA and other leading water experts across America), you denied what you did. Even worse, you decided to mock your accusers and their findings. As I said, I know you don't like to believe in a lot of science (after all, you used to run Gateway Computers, and that, really, is all anyone needs to know about you), but this time the science has caught up with you -- and this time, I hope, it's going to convict you.

The facts are all there, Mr. Snyder. Every agency involved in this scheme reported directly to you. The children of Flint didn't have a choice as to whether or not they were going to get to drink clean water. But soon it will be your turn to not have that choice about which water you'll be drinking. Because by this time next year, if there is an ounce of justice left in this land, the water you'll be drinking will be served to you from a tap inside Jackson Prison.

I am calling upon my fellow Michiganders -- and seekers of justice everywhere -- to petition U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, asking her to arrest you for corruption and assault (i.e., the physical assault you committed against the children of Flint when you knowingly poisoned them).

Yesterday, the federal prosecutor in Flint, after many of us had called for months for this action, finally opened up an investigation into the matter. Now we need your arrest, prosecution and conviction.

And who will be cheering on that day when you are fitted with a bright orange jumpsuit? The poor and minority communities of Michigan who've endured your dictatorial firing of their mayors and school boards so you could place your business friends in charge of their mostly-black cities. They know you never would have done this to a wealthy white suburb.

I welcome all to look at the appalling facts of this case, which have been reported brilliantly here, here, and especially here by the great Rachel Maddow. Thank you, Rachel, for caring so deeply when the rest of the national television media didn't.

I'm asking everyone who agrees with me to sign on to this petition and call for your arrest, Governor Snyder. You are not allowed to run amok in my hometown like you have done. The children whom you have poisoned have to endure a life of pain and lower IQs from your actions. You have destroyed a generation of children -- and for that, you must pay.

It is time for you to go to prison. Out of mercy, I'll ask that you have in your cell your own personal Gateway computer.

Sincerely,

Michael Moore

Flint native

Michigan resident and voter

For everyone wanting to sign on to this petition calling for the IMMEDIATE resignation of Governor Snyder AND for the FBI to arrest him, please sign the petition here.

Voting is beautiful, be beautiful ~ vote.©