狐狸视频

Courtney Curtis, a former Missouri state representative from north 狐狸视频 County, resigned in 2020 and pleaded guilty the following year to misuse of campaign funds.听

Curtis was sentenced to 21 months in prison and ordered to repay $47,867. He pleaded guilty to three counts of wire fraud and admitted defrauding campaign donors by using money for personal expenses in 2016 and 2017, then filing false campaign finance reports to cover up his crimes.听

Prosecutors said Curtis took 14 trips over 18 months, often with companions, and paid his rent and utilities, bought meals and took out cash withdrawals with the campaign money.

Read more.听

Former 狐狸视频 Alderman Larry Arnowitz was sentenced in 2020 to a year in federal prison and six months of house arrest after he admitted misusing $21,180 in campaign funds for his home mortgage and other personal expenses.

Arnowitz admitted defrauding donors between 2015 and 2019. U.S. Attorney Hal Goldsmith said in a court filing that Arnowitz 鈥渦sed his campaign account like his personal piggy bank.鈥�

Arnowitz was released from prison early and died in 2021.听

Read more.听

Former 狐狸视频 County Executive Steve Stenger was sentenced in 2019 to 46 months in prison, and fined $250,000.

Stenger promised to give county business to a donor, John Rallo, who later received a sham consulting contract. Stenger also told others to ensure that Rallo and partners won bidding for two properties in Wellston, for millions less than the county paid to clean them up for sale.

He 鈥渞epeatedly lied to the public to conceal his scheme and directed others to do the same,鈥� U.S. Attorney Hal Goldsmith said.

鈥淭his defendant鈥檚 criminal conduct was breathtaking in its scope,鈥� he said.

Goldsmith said that Stenger also听punished or tried to punish his perceived opponents, including the 狐狸视频 County Council, county employees who didn鈥檛 do his bidding and the son of a former state representative who opposed his election.

Stenger pleaded guilty to the federal charges within days of being indicted, forfeited his law and CPA licenses.听

鈥� Read more.

Eric Greitens resigned as governor in 2018 amid an impeachment probe. He had been charged earlier that year with felony invasion of privacy, but the charge was dropped.听

The investigator hired by Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner, William Don Tisaby, later pleaded guilty to evidence tampering related to concealing documents and interview notes during his investigation.听

Greitens was accused of taking and transmitting a semi-nude photo of a woman without her consent during a months-long affair in 2015.听

Greitens is now running for Missouri's open U.S. Senate seat.听

Read more.听

Steve Webb, a former Missouri state representative from north 狐狸视频 County, pleaded guilty to felony theft after being accused of stealing $3,000 in campaign funds. He was sentenced in 2014 to 45 days in jail and five years' probation.听

Webb, the husband of current 狐狸视频 County Councilman Shalonda Webb, was chairman of the Missouri Legislative Black Caucus.

Read more.

In three decades in office, former 狐狸视频 city Treasurer Larry Williams survived bounced checks, scathing state audits and drug-dealing employees. What finally brought him down was a "ghost."

In 2011, Williams' friend and employee Fred Robinson was arrested by federal agents for fraud and theft, after stealing roughly $250,000 from a charter school. It turned out that Robinson also had enjoyed a phantom job on Williams' payroll for at least five years.

The U.S. Attorney's office said Robinson was a classic "ghost payroller," submitting false time sheets, taking pay for false hours worked and making about $35,000 a year starting in 2006. Over at least five years, the city paid Robinson as much as $175,000 for a no-show job.

Robinson was sentenced to two years in federal prison; Williams was never charged.

鈥� Read more.

What began as an attempt to reconnect with an old acquaintance ended with a former speaker of the Missouri House being charged with felony assault.

Along the way, the 2009 scandal that torpedoed former Speaker Rod Jetton鈥檚 political consulting business brought a new snicker-inducing term to the political vernacular under the Statehouse dome:

Green balloons.

The sordid story: A recently divorced woman who, as a kid, attended the Baptist church in Charleston where Jetton鈥檚 father was the minister reached out to the recently divorced former speaker.

The two soon agreed to meet for a sexual encounter. She and Jetton agreed on a 鈥渟afe word鈥� she could use if she wanted things to stop.

The woman, 35 at the time, later told police she was choked and smacked by Jetton and then she passed out, drunk on wine, until the next morning.

"You should have said 'green balloons,'" Jetton told the woman the next morning, according to a charging document.

Jetton, a Republican who was elected in 2000, played a key role in the Republican takeover in the 2002 elections. When he was elected speaker in 2005, he endorsed "personal responsibility" and pledged to protect "traditional family values."

Jetton eventually pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault, and was placed on probation.

鈥� Read more.

Missouri State Rep. T.D. El-Amin was sentenced in 2009 to 18 months in federal prison for soliciting and accepting a bribe.听

El-Amin, a Democratic state representative from 狐狸视频, took cash bribes from a gas station that was covertly cooperating with the FBI.听

He was released from prison in 2011 after serving most of his 18-month prison.

Read more.听

Missouri state Sen. Jeff Smith, D-狐狸视频, and two of his campaign aides spent years covering up their role in a 2004 election shenanigan tied to a shady group, "Voters for Truth."

The lie would eventually cost Smith his Senate seat, and his freedom. The former campaign workers 鈥� Steve Brown and Nick Adams 鈥� earned probation for their roles in the scheme. Brown also would have to resign a Missouri House seat he won in 2008.

It all started with an anonymous mailer in the summer of 2004. At the time, Smith was trying to elbow his way into the U.S. House, after longtime U.S. Rep. Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., announced his retirement.

Winning wouldn't be easy. Smith had to distinguish himself in a crowded Democratic primary field and take aim at Russ Carnahan, whose famous last name carried serious weight among Missouri Democrats.

As later reported in the Post-Dispatch, someone identified in court records as "John Doe" with the group "Voters for Truth" coordinated with the Smith campaign in July 2004 to blast out mailers critical of "Rusty Carnahan." The fliers did not meet federal disclosure requirements.

In a sworn affidavit in September 2004, Smith denied knowing who created and sent the fliers.

The lie fell apart when investigators caught up with "John Doe" 鈥� a Democratic operative named Milton "Skip" Ohlsen III (who would later be convicted of an unrelated Clayton parking garage bombing). Through Ohlsen they got to Brown, Smith's campaign worker, then convinced Brown to turn on Smith.

鈥� .

In 2003, former Illinois Gov. George Ryan, a Republican who had recently retired after one term, was indicted on federal charges including racketeering, bribery, extortion, money laundering and tax fraud. Most of the charges related to his selling of state influence while in office.

Ryan's immediate successor, Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich 鈥� never one to be outdone 鈥� was arrested in 2008 on federal charges that he attempted to sell the vacant U.S. Senate seat of then-President-elect Barack Obama.

"I've got this thing, and it's f------ golden," Blagojevich famously said in one wiretapped discussion about whom he should appoint to the seat and what he might get for it. "I'm just not giving it up for f------ nothing."

Ryan and Blagojevich both were convicted and served time. Blagojevich is still in. Together they have, in a touchingly bipartisan way, given Illinois a unique place in America's political history: It may well be the only state ever to see two consecutive governors led away in handcuffs.

鈥淚n any state, it would be awful if two governors were convicted in a century," U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald told reporters after Blagojevich's 2011 sentencing, "and yet we鈥檝e seen it twice in five years."

鈥� Read more.

狐狸视频 Comptroller Virvus Jones, in 1995, was sentenced to serve a year and a day in federal prison for cheating on federal income taxes.

Jones, father of current 狐狸视频 Mayor Tishaura Jones, was one of several people indicted after the Democratic primary for comptroller in 1993. The indictment against Virvus Jones accused him of laundering campaign funds for a 鈥渟talking horse鈥� candidate in the comptroller race to siphon votes away from a political rival.

After negotiating for three months, Jones pleaded guilty to two felony counts of tax fraud for not reporting funds he received in 1990 and 1991, totaling $118,000 from his campaign fund and a family member's guardian account.

Jones resigned after entering the plea.

Secretary of State Judith K. Moriarty was convicted of misconduct in December 1994 and ousted from office, the first time the Missouri Supreme Court had taken such an action.听

The court found that Moriarty had backdated paperwork for her son, Timothy Moriarty, when he filed to run for a state House seat earlier that year.听

Moriarty was the first woman to serve as Missouri's secretary of state and was the first statewide official to be removed through impeachment in state history.听

Read more.听

George Peach boasted that he didn't make deals with criminals. He was the longest-serving 狐狸视频 circuit attorney, and regularly lambasted judges for not handing down tough enough sentences.

Peach also cracked down on prostitution and vowed to chase pornographers out of the city. What he didn't talk about was his "Jekyll-Hyde" double life. For 10 years, he secretly consorted with prostitutes in hotel rooms under the alias "Larry Johnson."

Using that name, he took calls from prostitutes and pimps at his office in the old Municipal Courts Building.

In an eight-month Post-Dispatch investigation in 1992, reporters disclosed that Peach financed his extracurricular activities with cash from a confidential city checking account he controlled. He also took money from a fund set up to aid crime victims.

Peach's secrets began to unravel the day he propositioned an undercover 狐狸视频 County policewoman in a hotel room near the airport. The county prosecutor and police chief spent a day denying that Peach had been arrested. The chief finally admitted it after a reporter told him the newspaper was running the story anyway.

Prostitutes then called the paper to say that they now recognized Peach as a longtime customer听鈥� under a different name. They claimed he had paid them tens of thousands of dollars.

It was unlikely that Peach could afford to pay that much out of his $64,000 annual salary. The reporters immediately set about finding where the money came from.

Through a confidential source, they got access to some of Peach's office checks. They found that Peach had deposited a $2,500 public check where it had no business being: in his private checking account at another bank.

In response to this discovery, Peach handed the reporters a handwritten sheet of yellow legal paper saying he had used the money to pay his taxes听鈥斕齛nd then claiming he had immediately repaid it.

He offered no proof for his story or the repayment.

The publicity from that front-page story forced Peach to open the records of his confidential office bank account. He delayed for two weeks and destroyed many of his records.

The reporters wheeled a big, leased photocopier into Peach's office and spent two weeks copying the checks and records he hadn't destroyed.

In the records, reporters found an envelope containing seven, crisp $100 bills. They handed the money over to Peach听鈥斕齛nd went on to disclose that he had kept thousands of unaccounted-for dollars in cash in his office.

Piecing together hundreds of check records, the reporters proved that Peach had taken at least $12,000 from the city checking account听鈥斕齭ometimes just before his encounters with a prostitute. The missing records might have proven an amount far greater.

The newspaper hired handwriting experts who determined that the signature of "Larry Johnson" was really that of Peach; the prosecutor had been secretly charging hotel bills to the city under his alias.

Peach was indicted on 11 counts of stealing. He denied everything听鈥斕齬ight up to the day he pleaded guilty to seven counts of felony theft and official misconduct.

A judge sentenced Peach to three years in prison but immediately suspended the sentence and placed him on probation. Peach had to surrender his law license and make partial restitution.

Missouri Attorney General William L. Webster was sentenced in 1993 to two years in prison for conspiracy and embezzlement of state resources.

The sentence came after an unusual 11-day hearing where a federal judge found that Webster didn't fully accept responsibility for his crimes. The judge said that Webster didn't know that an assistant was extorting campaign contributions from the state's Second Injury Fund. But the judge also found that Webster should have realized that听solicitation of contributions from lawyers with claims against the fund was a conflict of interest and stopped it.

鈥� Read more.

Thomas E. Zych, president of the Board of Alderman, was acquitted in 1987 after a jury trial of several men.

The charges arose out of attempts to secure the city's cable television franchise.

Convicted were Eugene P. Slay, Leroy Tyus, a former Democratic committeeman, and James D. Cullen, an attorney. A jury found the group not guilty of an accusation that they conspired to extort money or stock from two companies seeking the cable television franchise in 1982. The jury found all the men but Zych committed fraud in allegations connected to a different company. Those convictions were later thrown out by the courts.

The group was indicted in 1984.听

In the 1990s, Zych moved to rural Missouri and was a Methodist minister.