Baumgartner Prosecutor Sees Tax Debt Erased
Posted on Sunday, 26 of July , 2009 at 8:37 pm
COMMENTARY
© By June Maxam
How does a public officer rip off school districts and municipalities to the tune of nearly $200,000 and get away with it?
Just ask Erie County prosecutor Kevin Baxter.
Looks like Baxter’s nemesis former attorney Elsebeth Baumgartner wasn’t so wrong after all about some of her allegations against Baxter.
Baxter has become a highly controversial figure in northern Ohio over the last eight years and now has had nearly $200,000 in delinquent taxes owed by a defunct business operation of which he was part owner written off.
For the first time in more than eight years, Erie County officials agreed to write off over $800,000 in tax debts owed the county including some $199,424 in delinquent personal property taxes owed by Island Express Boat Lines Ltd., a limited liability company formed by Baxter and others in 1997. Records indicated that Baxter had a 30% interest in the company.
Baxter has no personal liability as LLCs protect the owners from liability.
Baxter along with Andrew S. Martin, Duane C. Ohly and Joseph C. Fratoe collectively operated Island Express Boat Lines Ltd., Island Rocker III LLC which operated a passenger ferryboat service running between Sandusky, Port Clinton and the town of Put-in-Bay on South Bass Island in Erie County. http://vlex.com/vid/island-express-boat-put-bay-line-26601733
In 1997, prosecutor Baxter, Ohly, along with several other Island Express investors, purchased a single, open-hulled boat named Rocket I. Rocket I was capable of taking up to 149 passengers from downtown Sandusky to downtown Put-in-Bay. Later, Island Express purchased another vessel, the Rocket II.
In 2002, a third vessel, Rocket III, was purchased by Island Rocket III, LLC, an entity formed by Island Express specifically for that purpose.1
The only year in which Island Express showed a profit was 1998, the last year the company was up to date on its taxes. Baxter filed a dissolution certificate for the company with the Ohio Secretary of State indicating the business was formally dissolved on Dec. 31. 2007.
Baxter and his company are the root of the original false criminal charge filed against whistleblower Baumgartner who is now serving an eight year term in Ohio state prison for having dared exercised her First Amendment rights to criticize Baxter and his company and later judges and other public officials. She was found guilty of intimidation and retaliation against retiring visiting judge Richard Markus for, among other things, calling him corrupt and a “rent-a-judge” in court filings.
Baumgartner’s legal problems started in 2002 when she was criminally charged with falsification a crime for addressing the Port Clinton City Council meeting on January 2, 2002 about Erie County Prosecutor Kevin Baxter.
In 2002, Baxter’s company sought a public contract with the City of Port Clinton. Baumgartner, then still an attorney, asserted that a company owned by a public official would not be allowed to hold a public contract if that public official owned more than 5% of the company as spelled out in ORC 2921.42. Records showed that Erie County Prosecutor Kevin Baxter owned 30% of Island Express.
Baumgartner, who was known as an expert in federal grants as well as patent law, also asserted that Island Express illegally obtained federal grant funding while a public official owned over 30% of the company.
Based on sworn affidavits from alleged eyewitnesses, some who were former associates of Baxter, Baumgartner charged that Baxter had an involvement with organized crime. She said the eyewitness statements confirmed that Baxter was using the boat company “……for drug smuggling and gun running.
Following the meeting, Joseph Fratoe, one of the owners of Island Express and a personal friend of Baxter, filed a criminal complaint against Baumgartner claiming falsification. But while they claimed that her public statements against Baxter and the company were false, they never filed a civil claim of defamation against her.
In Garrison v. Louisiana (1964), the U.S. Supreme Court held it was unconstitutional for the State of Ohio and Erie County to prosecute Baumgartner for her statements at the public council meeting. The Constitution limits state power to impose sanctins for criticism of the official conduct of public officials, in criminal cases as in civil cases, to false statements concerning official conduct made with knowledge of their falsity or with reckless disregard of whether they were false or not.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=379&invol=64
The Port Clinton Council meeting in January, 2002, came just a month after a key witness in a murder case that had been prosecuted by Baxter, signed an affidavit saying that she had fabricated her testimony at the 1995 trial of Dewitt McDonald, saying that she had been coerced by Baxter to do so.
Krista Harris, a black woman who was being represented on criminal charges in 2001 by Baumgartner, stated under oath that she had been coerced to have a sexual relationship with prosecutor Baxter who had allegedly threatened to bring false criminal charges against her if she did not give perjured testimony at the McDonald trial http://www.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/08a0013p-06.pdf
Harris’ allegations were never investigated, summarily dismissed because Baxter denied them.
Harris’ affidavit was one of those used by Baumgartner to blow the whistle on Baxter at the Port Clinton City Council meeting. Four days later, the first of what was to become multiple criminal charges against her were filed. She was convicted of falsification, simply on the basis of Baxter’s denial. She was placed on probation which was later revoked and she was sent to jail. It went downhill from there.
No investigation has ever been conducted of the allegations of wrongdoing raised by Baumgartner against various public officials.
The allegations of drug use by Baxter have continued to dog him.
Harris had also stated in her sworn affidavit that Baxter had used cocaine in her presence at his residence. Harris swore under oath that Baxter had forced her to be his sex slave and had forced her to change her testimony at McDonald’s murder trial which resulted in his conviction. McDonald is serving a life sentence in the State Ohio Penal Institution.
Last January 10, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that the affidavits provided by Harris and Edward J. Baxter, Baxter’s brother who has also alleged Baxter’s cocaine use, constituted sufficient evidence to order the filing of a second habeas corpus petition for McDonald.
Harris’s affidavit contained three factual averments that comprise prosecutorial misconduct on the part of Kevin Baxter sufficient to vacate McDonald’s murder conviction. The court stated that no evidence has been put forth by the State of Ohio or Kevin Baxter proving that Ms. Harris’s affidavit is false and thus under the rules of evidence is presumed to be true.
Harris’s affidavit stated 1) Kevin Baxter induced her to provide perjured testimony at the trial of DeWitt McDonald by threat of criminal prosecution on charges he would fabricate. 2) Baxter used the threat of a perjury charge to coerce sexual relations from Krista Harris during the trial phase of McDonald and thereafter. 3) Krista Harris stated that Kevin Baxter engaged in cocaine use in her presence at his home in Sandusky Ohio and used public funds to finance his sexual relationship with her.
The McDonald matter is still pending.
In March, Baxter sued the Sandusky Register, its editor, publisher and a reporter, claiming that their reporting of testimony at a court hearing in the civil service hearing of fired Sandusky police chief Kim Nuesse concerning allegations of his cocaine use had defamed him.
“Wake Up and Snort The Cocaine” was one headline in the Sandusky Register on March 3 when Baxter testified at Nuesse’s civil service hearing that a state investigation had “cleared” him of allegations he abused cocaine.
On March 27, the Register published a column which stated that the newspaper had filed numerous public records requests for records associated with the Nuesse hearing but that attorney city law director Don Icsman has refused to produce them despite them being accessible under the Ohio Revised Code.
The Register has been unsuccessful in obtaining the file concerning the alleged investigation of Baxter from the office of state Attorney General Richard Cordray. An estimated $100,000 had allegedly been spent on the BCI investigation of Baxter’s alleged cocaine use. Cordray’s office has also denied a request by the Associated Press for the Baxter file.
The attorney for Nuesse says he has a copy of the Baxter file but that he has been ordered not to release it.
While Judge Joseph Cirigliano ordered the testimony stricken from the record, nevertheless it was spoken in the hearing room and Register reporter Jason Singer maintains it was reported accurately.
Cirigliano also barred a document which had been produced during the hearing from release. Cirigliano incredulously said there were questions if the testimony and document were public information and ordered them stricken from the record.
The BCI document was presented as evidence at the hearing to show that the government had a “credible witness” who confirmed Baxter’s cocaine use but because the witness could only testify to Baxter’s alleged cocaine use of several years ago and not recently, the government chose not to press charges, according to the document.
Cirigliano, who has a conflict of interest involving Baxter in that he was the judge in the highly controversial probate case involving Baxter’s mother, has also thwarted the Register’s attempts to obtain copies of the hearing transcripts, saying that only the lawyers in the case could order the transcripts, not a reporter.
Baxter is claiming that the Register “fabricated” testimony from an undercover narcotics agent from the state Bureau of Criminal Investigation about Baxter’s alleged cocaine use. While the Register and other newspapers reported the testimony, it does not appear in the official court record as hearing officer Judge Joseph Cirigliano who many claim has a conflict of interest and should not be involved in the case order the bulk of the law enforcement officer’s testimony stricken from the record.
It wasn’t just the Register that reported the testimony concerning Baxter’s alleged cocaine use and ensuing state investigation. On March 14, in its coverage of the Nuesse hearing, the Fremont News Messenger and the Port Clinton News Herald also reported that a state Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation officer testified that Baxter, a witness in the case, had been investigated in the late 1990s for alleged on-the-job cocaine use.
So far, apparently Baxter has not submitted to drug testing in an effort to prove the allegations false
http://www.northcountrygazette.org/2009/04/03/baxter_cocain/
http://www.northcountrygazette.org/2009/04/08/baxter_testing/
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Category: Courts, Government, Ohio, Opinion, Politics
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