CRIME SCENE: In this 1989 photo, Sheriff Tony Bamonte stands on Spokane‘s Post Street bridge near where two former Spokane policemen told him they had thrown the pistol into the Spokane River that another policeman used to murder the Pend Oreille, Wash., night marshall in 1935. Bamonte found the pistol’s rusting remains, propelling him into the national spotlight. That Depression-era crime pales in comparison to what he charges was the first-degree manslaughter of Jo Savage by the Cowles family with the help of public officials reaching to the highest levels of the federal government.
‘Deathtrap’
Woman died, public threatened because of
government collusion with powerful family, they say
By Larry Shook
SPOKANE, WASH. — The former sheriff credited with solving America’s oldest open murder case is accusing one of America’s oldest publishing dynasties of organized crime that reaches to the highest levels of the federal government, including the U.S. Dept. of Justice, the FBI, the IRS and the SEC. The corruption, he says, has already caused one woman’s death and could lead to large numbers of other deaths.
Based on an extensive “chain of evidence” that he has compiled over the last eighteen months, and a new “smoking gun” document that he obtained only last week, Tony Bamonte yesterday called upon the Washington State attorney general and the Spokane County commissioners to take aggressive action.
Bamonte asked the public officials to immediately close a central downtown parking garage here where a woman died three years ago when a wall failed. The facility is part of the trouble-plagued River Park Square shopping mall. River Park Square is owned by the Cowles family, the dominant force in Inland Northwest media for more than a century and one of the nation’s wealthiest and most powerfully connected publishing clans.
Bamonte also asked the attorney general to empanel a grand jury to investigate evidence that the garage patron’s death was a direct result of organized criminal activity involving the Cowleses and public officials. This criminal activity, he says, continues to threaten garage parkers.
“The basis for these requests is contained in the enclosed 92-exhibit, 229-page documentation of evidence concerning the April 8, 2006, death of Ms. Savage in the River Park Square garage in Spokane, Washington,” Bamonte wrote Attorney General Rob McKenna. “This evidence provides a time line of nonfeasance and, what appears to be, criminal assistance rendered by public officials concerning the first-degree manslaughter complaint I filed in August 2007 with the Spokane county sheriff and Spokane city police chief in the matter of Ms. Savage’s death.”
Jo Ellen Savage died after her car plunged from the seventh floor of the Cowles parking garage. The garage was the financial cornerstone of the Cowles mall, redeveloped a decade ago with public funds.
“This documentation establishes evidence of criminal activity, corruption and subsequent cover-ups involving specific members of the Cowles family, the Spokane County sheriff and prosecutor, and the Spokane city police chief and mayor surrounding Ms. Savage’s death,” Bamonte’s letter to McKenna continues. “It also provides evidence that the hazard that killed Ms. Savage continues to exist and worsen with time. Further, the evidence suggests that the entire Cowles garage may be in such poor condition that an outright failure of the facility is possible. If that happened, a large number of people could be injured or killed.”
Public money funneled to private mall
The initial furor surrounding the Cowles mall involved the family’s ability to leverage at least $100 million of public funds to redevelop it. Citizen lawsuits attempting to halt the public/private partnership failed, but the national media assailed its dubious use of public money. Both
Time and
Forbes magazine branded River Park Square a prime example of corporate welfare.
The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article about the project, also questioning its use of public funds.
In the end, the Cowles mall, which opened in 1999, triggered a successful securities fraud lawsuit against virtually every major project participant.
A scathing IRS report, which read like a criminal indictment, ruled that municipal bonds sold to finance the parking garage violated federal tax law. The IRS didn’t stop with merely collecting taxes on the Cowles garage, however. It called the redevelopment of River Park Square a “scheme” that used a “rigged” appraisal. It found that “a chain for events was put in place that appears to be designed to hide the true nature of the transaction.” The Cowleses and Spokane officials used “smoke and mirrors,” wrote the IRS, to fashion a deal that “raises troubling questions of potential fraud… It is clear from the facts of this case, the developer [the Cowles family] had, and continues to have, a particular relationship with the City of Spokane… such that it was in a position to control or influence its activities.”
Despite such language, the IRS did not pursue criminal charges. That inaction raised suspicion among many, including Bamonte, that it had been coopted by Cowles influence.
“The death of Jo Ellen Savage on April 8, 2006,” wrote Bamonte in the August 18, 2007 manslaughter complaint he filed with Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich and Spokane Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick, “came about as the direct result of certain city officials who, with deliberate intent and disregard for the public’s safety, appeared to have colluded to bypass mandated city safety-inspection rules in favor of the financial interests of Spokane’s most powerful family — a family who controls 80% of Spokane’s media and, indirectly, the political careers of Spokane’s elected and appointed officials.”
The Cowles family publishes Spokane’s only daily newspaper,
The Spokesman-Review, operates the city’s NBC-affiliate TV station, KHQ, and publishes the city’s business journal. The family’s real estate empire includes major holdings in the Spokane Valley, the core of downtown retail property, vast timberlands, and a paper mill on the Spokane River.
Criminal complaint became hot potato
Bamonte, a 25-year law enforcement veteran and former three-term sheriff of neighboring Pend Oreille County, was thrust into the national spotlight two decades ago when he was credited with solving the Depression-era murder of the Pend Oreille night marshall by a notorious Spokane policeman. Bamonte obtained confessions from two other former Spokane policemen — one eventually became police chief — to covering up the 54-year-old crime. That case, and the media attention surrounding it — a front-page
New York Times story, the book
Breaking Blue, a segment on the TV program “Unsolved Mysteries” — made Bamonte nationally famous.
Bamonte says he first learned of the disturbing details surrounding Savage’s death by reading the article “Death by Parking” on this website. Long retired from law enforcement, Bamonte has for many years been recognized as one of the inland Northwest’s leading historians. He and his wife, Suzanne, operate their own publishing company. A planned book on Spokane’s history will contain a chapter dealing with the Cowles family’s hundred-year influence over the community, he says. It was in the course of researching that chapter that he read “Death by Parking.”
The criminal investigator’s training soon trumped the historian’s scholarship. Before he knew it, Bamonte found himself investigating Savage’s death on his own. After a year of research, he decided he had to act.
“I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do everything I can to prevent another tragedy like that one,” he says.
Bamonte hoped his complaint would result in a long overdue criminal investigation of Savage’s death. Instead, it launched a contest of wills between the former sheriff and local officials. Anne Kirkpatrick, the police chief, promptly referred Bamonte’s complaint to the FBI. Ozzie Knezovich, the sheriff, supported the chief’s decision. The FBI accepted the case.
Based on a long history of dealing with public corruption, the former sheriff smelled a rat. He immediately fired off letters to Kirkpatrick, Knezovich, Spokane Mayor Mary Verner, and the FBI agent in charge of the Spokane office. He informed them all that Kirkpatrick’s action was improper under the Revised Code of Washington. While local and state law enforcement had a duty under state law to investigate Savage’s death, he advised the recipients of his correspondence, the FBI had no jurisdiction in the matter.
If Chief Kirkpatrick saw merit in the case, reasoned Bamonte, she had to know that “referring it to the FBI was not her proper remedy under the law. I believe she ducked a call out of her own political self-interest. Taking on the Cowles family and facing its editorial wrath is not a healthy thing for any politician in this area to do.”
Bamonte’s reasoning is heightened by his own experience on the Spokane Police Department, where he served for eight years. “I hadn’t been on the job for two weeks when my supervising officer, Charlie Dodson, warned me: ‘You don’t take on the Cowles family.’” Bamonte says that admonition was repeated many times during his years as a Spokane policeman. Other retired Spokane policemen say they were given the same warning.
Chief Kirkpatrick declined comment on Bamonte’s charge that she acted improperly.
Smoking Gun
The new evidence Bamonte obtained last week is a declaration by Rex Franklin, the former manager of the River Park Square garage. It is a grim portrait of a dangerous place.
In his declaration, Franklin says that for many years before Jo Ellen Savage died, the garage was replacing one to three panels a year just like the one that failed and killed Savage. The panels were ruined, said Franklin, by vehicle contacts that were so light that “most of these contacts did not damage the vehicle.”
Franklin describes terrifying barrier failures that left vehicles hanging out of the garage, resting on their undercarriages.
Of one incident, Franklin said: “In 1990, a particularly serious vehicular-spandrel incident occurred. An elderly gentleman driving a Cadillac bumped into a spandrel… I personally inspected the subject vehicle, I asked the driver and passenger who were panic-stricken to exit their vehicle, and I observed the panel broken off and hanging by rebar…”
Below the protruding car and dangling concrete was a pedestrian hallway, noted Franklin.
“To the best of my recollection, at the time I tendered my resignation in March of 1994, only one of the numerous spandrel failures, the one that occurred in March of 1991 had become public knowledge,” declared Franklin.
Franklin’s declaration was signed July 19, 2006. I had known of its existence since about that time but had been unable to obtain a copy of it. While the content of it was generally characterized to me, I did not know the details. Even so, in 2006 Franklin confirmed to me that during his tenure as a garage manager, he had begged the Cowleses to make much-needed repairs and they refused.
A
Spokesman-Review story last Thursday (Feb. 5, 2009) by Jonathan Brunt referred to the newly surfaced statement, which was also posted on the newspaper’s website. I immediately called Brunt to find out how he had obtained it and how long he had had it. It was an important question, because Franklin’s declaration contained chilling evidence of a public safety hazard that the public had long been entitled to know about. Brunt could not be reached for comment.
Former sheriff Bamonte was shocked by Franklin’s declaration. He says it strongly supports bringing criminal charges against James P. Cowles, as former head of Cowles real estate companies, and his niece, Betsy, chairwoman of Cowles Publishing Co. and president of KHQ TV, who took over from him.
Even more dismaying to Bamonte, he says, is that the FBI and county prosecutor have long been aware of this evidence and taken no action.
“What kind of people could have this kind of deadly knowledge and do nothing about it?” he asks. “A lot of people have known for a long time just how dangerous the River Park Square garage is, and yet they have kept silent — allowing their fellow citizens to be exposed to this proven deathtrap. That tells you just how afraid people are of the Cowles family.”
(Click here to read
Franklin declaration.)
Creating a chain of evidence
Since filing his manslaughter complaint, in some one hundred pieces of correspondence to various public officials and Cowles media personnel, Bamonte has established what he refers to as a “chain of evidence” exposing a pattern of criminal activity involving Cowles family members and an ever-widening circle of public officials. Bamonte’s evidence shows that both the Cowles family and city officials in Spokane had long known of the public safety hazard that claimed Savage’s life. They covered up that evidence, he says, as part of a fraud that used the Cowles parking garage to illegally launder public money into Cowles real estate companies.
Typical of Bamonte’s “chain of evidence” correspondence is the letter he wrote to Sheriff Knezovich on January 21, 2009.
“Based on three separate and damning engineering reports, the RPS garage has been identified, since 1993, as an extremely dangerous public facility – information currently unknown to the general public,” wrote Bamonte.
“Contained in these engineer reports you will find terms used such as the following:
. . . ‘sub-standard materials,’ ‘sub-standard construction,’ ‘steel corrosion related stress occurring on the parking deck slabs, slab soffits, beams, girders and precast spandrels.’ ‘These findings are serious and indicate an imperative for actions to repair, restore and protect . . .’ ‘the 1999 addition to the freestanding parking garage was not built to a first class condition,’ ‘the parking garage has not been operated and maintained in a first class order, condition and repair.’ ‘many precast spandrels are in poor physical condition with scaling and delaminations present,’ ‘inferior quality concrete finishes in many locations,’ ‘much, if not most of the restoration was not performed on the original Circa 1974 garage, during or after the Circa 1998 parking garage expansion project,’ ‘Petrographic analysis of concrete core samples indicates the concrete is of relatively poor quality in terms of it having moderately to poor cement past-aggregate bond,’ ‘Assume that the panels [barriers] will fail and add steel cables to stop vehicles before they impact the panels.’ Etc. . . .
“The true extent of this information about the garage’s poor condition has been illegally and unethically kept from the public by the owners of the garage and covered-up by city officials for years – both before and since Jo Savage’s tragic death. None of the primary safety suggestions contained in these engineers’ reports were ever implemented. To the contrary, the patchwork repairs the garage owners elected to make appear to have weakened the already dangerous barriers and made them less safe, providing the public with an increased sense of false security. The engineers’ reports indicate that not only do the spandrels present a reckless and life-threatening condition but the entire garage appears to need some immediate attention. The worst case scenario would be a complete failure of this parking garage (especially during a full-capacity load that could exceed the containment of 1000 vehicles) beginning at the upper level in a similar fashion to the world trade center buildings. This is a legitimate concern based on the engineers’ reports outlining the condition of the garage. It is also important to note the last of these inspections was made six years ago.
“The point, Sheriff, is that engineering evidence suggests this is the type of structural deterioration that could cause a collapse with a massive loss of human life. I am again putting you on notice of this condition and strongly request that you share this letter with Prosecutor Tucker, Mayor Verner and the entire Spokane City Council, Chief Kirkpatrick and your personal attorney.”
In other correspondence, Bamonte has asked both the Spokane City Council and the CEO of Nordstrom — the prestigious retailer is River Park Square’s anchor tenant — to take immediate action to protect the public’s safety from what he refers to as documented hazards in the Cowles garage. Bamonte believes Nordstrom has a special duty to act, because covenants in its lease with the Cowleses give Nordstrom effective control of the garage.
Bamonte copied that correspondence to Stacey Cowles, publisher of the Cowles-owned
Spokesman-Review newspaper, and two
Spokesman-Review reporters. That correspondence constitutes “guilty knowledge” on the part of Cowles media personnel. “If Cowles reporters choose to cover this story, I will give them my full cooperation in developing it, as I assisted them in covering other crimes throughout my law enforcement career,” says Bamonte. “If they ignore the story, I will include that as evidence in my continuing efforts.”
Bamonte notes that he has also taken care to load various Cowles reporters with guilty knowledge of their employer’s actions. According to the newspaper’s own code of ethics, he has noted, the reporters have a duty to report facts he has brought to their attention. Facts he has asked them to report on, he says, bear on Savage’s death and “the relationship of evidence of River Park Square financial fraud to her death.”
“I have made such a clear record of
The Spokesman-Review’s non-reporting of criminal evidence surrounding the River Park Square fraud and Savage’s death that I now consider the newspaper’s conduct part of a larger pattern of criminal activity,” says Bamonte.
“That pattern of organized crime continues to threaten the lives of unsuspecting visitors to the Cowles garage today,” he continues. “Based on the evidence I am presenting, specific government officials must now act or they will be complicit in the crimes I am alleging. We have a crisis here. Lives are at risk. Public officials are taking their orders from a corrupt family that uses its media to run local government. These public officials are covering up evidence of manslaughter and fraud because it implicates them. It’s the most dangerous and repugnant public corruption I’ve ever seen, and it extends all the way to the U.S. Department of Justice and FBI. Evidence shows that the federal government is well aware of what’s going on in Spokane and is doing nothing about it. I believe this is because of the political influence and media power of the Cowles family.”
Bamonte says that if the public officials from whom he is demanding action “do not act, as they are required by state law and their oaths of office, I will personally pursue them in the courts by bringing civil charges against them. I’ll also do everything I can to prevent them from using public money to defend themselves against the public corruption charges I will bring against them.”
“This is how public corruption in Spokane works. Take on the Cowles family and they punish you editorially.”
—Ex-Sheriff Tony Bamonte
Outraged citizens clamor for justice and public safety
Ex-sheriff Bamonte is not alone in worrying that the Cowles garage represents a continuing public safety hazard. Nor is he alone in concluding that that danger reflects a larger pattern of criminal activity involving the Cowles family and Spokane officials.
• Dennis Beringer, former City of Spokane real estate manager, says he will not park in the Cowles garage for fear that it’s unsafe. He was outraged in the 1990s when he and other city department heads were “ordered” not to inspect the parking garage. (See
“Death by Parking.”)
• Steve Rudd, one of the Northwest’s top construction fraud investigators, says he provided evidence in 1999 to the former anchorman of the Cowles-owned NBC television station in Spokane that the garage was not inspected and appeared to suffer from poor workmanship and materials. Rudd says the former Cowles anchorman, Randy Shaw, told him his superiors would not let him cover the story. Shaw confirmed Rudd’s account.
River Park Square developer Betsy Cowles, publisher Stacey Cowles’s sister, declined comment.
• Two citizens who for years had studied the complicated River Park Square financial dealings became incensed last summer by the refusal of law enforcement to criminally prosecute evidence that the project was fraudulent. On August 19, 2007, the day after Bamonte filed his manslaughter complaint, Tim Connor, former senior editor of online
Camas magazine, and former Spokane city councilwoman Cherie Rodgers filed a
criminal complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice. After a year, in September 2008, the DOJ dismissed the complaint, offering no refutations of incriminating evidence.
• Like Bamonte, Ron Wright, who is a retired 35-year veteran of the Riverside, Calif., police department, has also studied the River Park Square case. Also like Bamonte, Wright has provided various public officials with evidence that he says clearly justifies both a RICO investigation (RICO stands for the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act) and a state organized crime investigation.
“Basically, the work of
Camas magazine has the case in chief in the can,” says Wright, a former detective who specialized in economic and high-tech crime. “You can throw a dart at the
Camas reporting and match evidence to the RICO and Washington State organized crime statutes. My review is that the
Camas magazine documentation of crime is overwhelming. It shows that there is a collection of individuals in town that collectively or independently have acted over time in an ongoing criminal enterprise/conspiracy, to basically raid the public treasury.”
• Retired Spokane Police Department Detective Captain Bob Allen agrees with Wright’s assessment. Allen studied
Camas’s reporting because he was concerned about damage that the city’s River Park Square securities fraud settlement did to the police department’s budget.
“That settlement cut into the department’s budget,” says Allen, “and that has compromised public safety in Spokane. I read the
Camas reporting and thought, ‘Good God, this has elements of criminal activity.’”
“If I make RPS a cornerstone of my campaign, the ‘powers that be’ will ensure that I do not get elected.”
— Mary Verner in a pre-election email
‘The powers that be’
Because Bamonte, a lifelong Democrat, is respected in Spokane political circles, candidates for office often seek his advice and support.
At the request of then-Councilwoman Mary Verner, who was running for mayor, Tony and Suzanne Bamonte hosted a political gathering in their home. The former sheriff says he sought assurances from the candidate that she would confront the abuses of River Park Square if elected mayor and that she would try to recover the millions of dollars the project has cost Spokane’s citizens.
“She said, ‘I have to get elected first,’” says Bamonte.
Rich Magney, one of those present at the meeting, confirms those remarks. Magney says Verner promised to review RPS, just not before Election Day. “She said, ‘I’m just not going there,’” says Magney. “I think she was convinced it would trigger a Cowles media attack that she wouldn’t be able to survive.”
On the eve of the 2007 mayoral election, Bamonte emailed Verner reminding her of her commitment to confront the corruption surrounding River Park Square. Verner wrote back that such a move would be politically fatal to her.
“I do appreciate your correspondence and hope you will give me just a bit of wiggle room on these important issues,” she wrote.
“I recognize the huge issues of morality, courage, and strength of character involved in taking on the RPS issue. I also know that if I make RPS a cornerstone of my campaign platform, the ‘powers that be’ will ensure that I do not get elected ... period. This has been a real David v. Goliath battle all the way.”
Verner did not respond to an email request to discuss her “powers that be” message to Bamonte.
“We did not advise the driver
to test our barriers.”
—Newspaper publisher Stacey Cowles in email to Tony Bamonte
As evidence of how the powers that be operate in Spokane, Bamonte says he is especially chilled by an email he received from
Spokesman-Review publisher and River Park Square owner Stacey Cowles.
On June 5, 2008, responding to Bamonte correspondence, Cowles wrote: “... a woman tragically, but neglectfully crashes her car off a parking deck that owners ensured met nationally accepted building code requirements and was considered safe by 3rd parties before that instant. We did not advise the driver to test our barriers, nor did we have the obligation to tell her not to. Our obligation was to meet safety standards, which we did. Are these standards high enough? This is a different debate. Our answer is no, and we have installed a new system that will resist much higher impact.”
“Not only does this show Mr. Cowles’s disdain for the facts — his family’s own engineering consultants advised them to install steel cables to prevent a tragedy like Savage’s — it shows his utter disregard for the safety of the patrons of his family’s shopping mall,” says Bamonte. “Those cables still have not been installed. Moreover, with his recognition that the building code did not address the proven hazards of his garage, Mr. Cowles appears to be admitting to a reckless disregard for public safety. That is the element of this state’s first-degree manslaughter statute that applies to Savage’s death.”
Bamonte acknowledges that asking public officials to close the River Park Square parking garage until its safety can be established confronts them with a painful choice. The Cowles-owned mall is the core of downtown retail activity in Spokane. Spokane remains the commercial center of the inland Northwest.
“But the city made a deal with the devil, and this is the consequence,” says Bamonte. “Officials now have to choose between public safety and economic vitality. That’s the kind of damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t dilemma corruption leads to. I’ve been trying to warn Sheriff Knezovich about this for a long time now. Spokane is held hostage by the Cowles family. The sheriff and the rest of Spokane’s officials have been unwilling to rescue the hostage.”
Bamonte cites his
April 7, 2008 letter to Knezovich, in which he states, “the most dangerous attainment of organized crime is the ability to control government” and references IRS findings of such control. (See
“The Casino Was Rigged.”)
Federal investigation called a ‘whitewash’
On September 5, 2008, the U.S. Department of Justice issued its response to the River Park Square criminal complaint filed by former councilwoman Cherie Rodgers and journalist Tim Connor a year earlier. Robert Westinghouse, who introduced himself as the lead criminal investigator, said no evidence could be found to justify criminal charges.
Connor calls the Department of Justice investigation a “whitewash.” He cites three reasons.
First, it refused to examine evidence of criminal fraud contained in the devastating 27-page IRS report of June 22, 2004. (See
“The Casino Was Rigged.”)
Second, it refused to examine evidence that the RPS scandal turned on a fraudulent appraisal of the parking garage. This evidence shows the RPS valuation clearly violated an important federal law passed to prevent bogus appraisals. (See
“Hocus-Pocus.”)
The law in question is the Federal Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989 (FIRREA). At the September 5, 2008 press conference Connor reminded Westinghouse that he had specifically asked federal investigators to determine whether the $23 million loan of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) money to the Cowles project obeyed FIRREA. Connor says he made that request as a “good faith test” for the Department of Justice investigation.
Westinghouse acknowledged Connor’s request, then answered his question in a way that seemed to offer a stunning confession. He said HUD authorized the loan to the Cowles project “notwithstanding the fact that its own requirement had not been satisfied in that regard.”
With that phlegmatic admission, as Connor sees it, the U.S. Department of Justice failed a simple test of whether it had seriously investigated the alleged River Park Square criminal fraud.
Finally, the Department of Justice refused to discuss evidence that one of its own officials, eastern Washington U.S. Attorney James A. McDevitt, played a critical role in the RPS fraud. (See
“Under the Influence,” “Jim McDevitt's Non-Disclosure,” and Tim Connor’s
chronolgy of his dealings with DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility.)
FBI Lacked Jurisdiction
But the DOJ press conference was not confined to the question of financial fraud. It also addressed Bamonte’s manslaughter complaint. Westinghouse declined to comment on Savage’s death, saying the federal government was turning the investigation over to Spokane County Prosecutor Steve Tucker, because it wasn’t the FBI’s jurisdiction.
That, of course, was what Bamonte had been warning from the moment the FBI accepted the case from Chief Kirkpatrick. “They’re covering up the public corruption that killed Jo Savage,” says Bamonte. “They’re trying to run out the statute of limitations on her death. The Department of Justice and FBI willfully wasted a year in investigating Savage’s death.”
Bamonte says he is disgusted that Tucker has the case again. Almost immediately after Savage died, former city councilman Steve Eugster asked Tucker to call a grand jury to investigate her death. Tucker refused.
“Tucker said the police should investigate, but that’s the problem,” says Bamonte. “Chief Kirkpatrick refused to do that. The Spokane police department filed a nine-page incident report on Savage’s death. I know from my experience as an accident investigator that her death should have yielded a report of many hundreds of pages to a few thousand pages. This is just another example of the Spokane police department covering for the Cowleses. And why should Tucker investigate Savage’s death now, with just two months remaining on her statute of limitations, when he ducked the investigation to begin with? It’s impossible for him to adequately investigate it now. This is such a display of contempt on the part of our law enforcement agencies and government, not just toward Savage’s family but toward the people of Spokane, and toward visitors who shop in River Park Square. If Cowles corruption kills you, this is what you can expect at the hands of your ‘public servants.’”
Bamonte considers the DOJ investigation a fraud itself for the simple reason that investigators did not interview key witnesses. As he was quoted in “Death by Parking,” former city real estate manager Dennis Beringer says former assistant city manager Nick Dragisich informed department managers that the city would
not inspect the Cowles garage based on orders of the developer. Beringer says he was not contacted by federal investigators. Beringer stays in touch with Dragisich, who now lives in Minnesota. Beringer emailed Dragisich on Saturday, January 17, 2009, to ask if any investigators had yet contacted him about the garage. “No,” Dragisich emailed right back, “but I would tell them everything I know.”
“Those are key witnesses concerning Savage’s death,” says Bamonte. “Both are on record saying that the city obeyed orders from the River Park Square developer not to inspect the RPS garage. There is simply no excuse for ignoring that kind of evidence of public corruption.”
Remarkably, investigators also failed to interview Seattle attorney O. Yale Lewis, the city’s first RPS special counsel, according to Lewis. In court filings, Lewis raised the possibility that Spokane public officials had entered into a conspiracy with the RPS developer to “improperly divert public money for private purposes.”
Asked in January 2009 if he had information that would have aided a federal criminal investigation, Lewis answered: “I have information that would have been useful to them. I don’t know why they didn’t contact me.”
“I don’t know why either,” says Bamonte, “unless they didn’t want to know what Lewis knows. I think Rodgers and Connor, and the public itself, were badly misled by the Department of Justice investigation. That was an agency investigating itself and simply covering up the evidence of its own wrongdoing. All you have to do is read the
Rodgers/Connor complaint containing the evidence of [James] McDevitt’s role in the RPS financial fraud to see that.”
Westinghouse blithely dismissed that idea at his press conference: “What I can say with confidence is that there was no evidence that came to our attention that suggested that any particular individual or any group of individuals acted with an intent to deceive.”
When I read those remarks over the phone to Gary Ceriani, the Denver attorney who served as lead plaintiff counsel in the RPS federal securities fraud case, laughter burst from the earpiece.
“Mr. Westinghouse apparently did not look at the same evidence I did,” said Ceriani. That evidence can be reviewed in the bondholders’ Omnibus Statement of Facts. (See the story
“Fraudville, USA.”)
“Both in the case of the fraud and the Savage death, the conduct of the Justice Department is shameful,” says Bamonte. “Here you have a federal agency pretending not to see evidence of crimes that has been in plain sight for years. In my mind, this raises serious questions of whether the Cowles family, with its media power, and connection to
The New York Times, has actually corrupted the federal justice system.”
Allison Cowles, once the widow of former
Spokesman-Review publisher William H. Cowles 3rd, is now married to the man who risked prison to bring the world the Pentagon Papers: retired
New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger.
Attorney Dave Savage said he found
“substantial grounds for criminal prosecution for manslaughter.”
The only heir of Jo Ellen Savage — her son Jesse — was represented in the matter of his mother’s death by the Pullman, Wash., law firm of Irwin, Myklebust, Savage & Brown. One of the countless ironies of River Park Square is that the woman who died was formerly married to David Savage, past president of the Washington State Bar Association. One of his legal specialties is wrongful automotive death. David Savage is Jesse’s father.
Jo and David Savage remained such close friends after their divorce that when David remarried, Jo effectively became a member of that family, too. Moreover, Jo, art director for the Washington State University alumni magazine, worked for David Savage’s new wife, Sally. Sally is a vice president of the university; she is also its chief legal counsel. Sally Savage and Jo Ellen Savage were best friends.
“No one who didn’t know our family could understand us,” David Savage once said.
So the death of Jo Ellen Savage was a deeply felt loss to an unusually close-knit expanded unit. Jesse Savage was to be married in the late summer of 2006 at an inn in Sausalito, Calif. David and Sally had booked Jo into a room next to theirs.
Immediately after the Department of Justice press conference, Savage could be seen giving
Spokesman-Review reporter Jonathan Brunt an interview outside the federal courthouse where the conference took place.
His former wife’s death did not go to trial, Mr. Savage told Brunt, but the insurers for the Cowles family settled the case for “substantially” more than a million dollars.
This was a telling settlement, attorneys close to the case told me, because “under Washington State law it’s cheaper to kill someone than to injure someone. Had Jo’s death gone to trial, it had five hundred thousand dollars written all over it. They settled because they didn't want the evidence presented at trial,” the source said.
Mr. Savage told Brunt that his law firm turned over four boxes of evidence to the FBI as part of a request that resulted from former sheriff Bamonte’s manslaughter complaint. The contents of those boxes, Savage told Brunt, contain “substantial grounds for criminal prosecution for manslaughter.”
This was the first time Savage had spoken publicly about his former wife’s death. His law firm, however, had plenty to say earlier. In a press release, it had referred to the same old engineering studies that Bamonte says support first-degree manslaughter charges against James P. Cowles and Betsy Cowles.
“Yesterday we were provided with the 1993 engineering report of Atwood-Hinzman, Inc., Consulting Engineers,” Savage’s law firm wrote in a June 7, 2006 press release.
The release noted that the report had been commissioned by the Cowleses themselves, because of an earlier barrier failure at their garage. That earlier failure was exactly like the one that killed Jo Savage. The findings of that report, as the press release made clear in type bold and italicized, were pure dynamite.
“The report found ‘the panels are not resisting the required lateral loading of 6000 [pounds] although the engineering analysis indicates that the should.’ It noted that ‘several panels cracked in the past when they were struck in a similar way. Based on this information, it appears that a problem exists.’
“The Atwood firm concluded there were only two logical ways for the garage owners to resolve the conflict between the panels [sic] apparent code compliance and their failure, namely, perform real-world impact tests to determine under what circumstances the panels fail, or ‘assume that the panel[s] will fail and add steel cable to stop vehicles before they impact the panels.’
“The barrier which failed Jo Ellen Savage was marked for repair or replacement more than ten years ago but no action was taken.
“Had the owners acted on the engineers’ recommendation within the last 13 years, Jo Ellen Savage would be alive today.”
In a
Spokesman-Review story the day after his September 2008 interview with David Savage, reporter Jonathan Brunt quoted him: “For economic reasons the owners chose not to make the repairs or modifications, thus placing the economics of the garage ahead of public safety.”
Many hats: construction veteran and former rodeo competitor Steve Rudd became one of the Northwest’s top construction fraud investigators. He presented evidence to a former Cowles TV anchorman that things weren't done right on the RPS project. The Cowles journalist told Rudd his superiors wouldn't let him report the story. Rudd says the original structure was in such poor condition that it should have been torn down, not remodeled. Now he, too, worries that the garage might not be safe.
‘The concrete just exploded’
Steve Rudd, a highly commended former construction fraud investigator who worked as a laborer on the River Park Square renovation, shares the worries of former sheriff Bamonte and former City of Spokane real estate manager Beringer about the garage’s safety.
“In all my years in construction, that’s the only project I’ve ever been on where I never saw concrete being tested or work being inspected. It was also a very dangerous site. There were OSHA [federal worker safety] violations all over the place. Fire retardant chemicals were improperly handled, and there was widespread worker illness as a result.”
Rudd says he presented evidence to Randy Shaw, former anchorman of Cowles-owned KHQ TV, of the garage’s ills. As a federal whistleblower, Rudd had helped the former Cowles broadcaster develop prize-winning stories about other construction fraud cases, some of which resulted in criminal sentences.
Rudd says Shaw took his evidence of River Park Square construction violations to his superiors but was denied permission to report on them. Shaw confirmed Rudd’s account, but would not otherwise comment. KHQ general manager Pat McRae and KHQ president and RPS developer Betsy Cowles refused to comment on Rudd’s charges and Shaw’s confirmation.
Even more troubling, Rudd says he saw extensive evidence of the “advanced deterioration” of the RPS structure while he was working on it. “I think it should have been completely torn down, not remodeled,” he says.
At one point during construction, Rudd says he saw the riser of a forklift bump into an overhead beam. The impact was such that Rudd wouldn’t have been surprised had it chipped the concrete. Instead, says Rudd: “The concrete just exploded as if it had been shot. There was rusted rebar inside.” Good concrete, he says, doesn’t behave that way. “At the worst, maybe a chunk would fall down. But it just kind of exploded. In my experience, when concrete loses its structural soundness it just kind of crumbles when you touch it.”
This, he says, is more a function of quality than age. “Some old concrete you can’t bust up with a sledgehammer.”
Rudd says he was also struck by the number of places in the garage where rusting rebar was exposed, another sign of deterioration or poor quality. “I saw a lot exposed rebar in that garage,” he says. “Exposed rebar rusts, causes voids, weakens structures.
“I don’t know that it’s [the garage] a public safety hazard, but I saw more than enough evidence to convince me that it might be. I certainly believe that it should be inspected immediately to confirm that it is safe for public use.”
Bamonte says, “With my various correspondence to public officials, I’ve been crying wolf for over a year-and-a-half now. This is a big wolf, and it’s been preying on this city for a long time. Why wouldn’t Cowles want her garage inspected? Why wouldn’t the city inspect it? I wonder if it’s because Cowles and city officials know it wouldn’t pass,” says Bamonte.
Rudd wonders the same thing. He says if he were asked to investigate the River Park Square garage today, he would begin by calling in a qualified engineering firm from well outside Spokane to escape the pull of the city’s corruption.
“I would order a thorough study of the garage, complete with core samples throughout the facility,” says Rudd. “There’s no use speculating about the garage’s condition. You want to know. Those core samples will offer crucial evidence.”
As part of the engineering study, he says he would also require production of every construction test and permit going back to the original 1974 structure that is still standing. “Concrete has to be poured to a certain spec. The forms you pour the concrete into have to meet a certain spec. The ground you pour the concrete on has to be compacted to a certain spec. And all that has to be tested. There would have to be records of all that.”
Those records, he says, would tell an important story.
And if the records don’t exist?
“That would tell a story, too,” says Rudd.
(For background notes on Steve Rudd and Randy Shaw,
click here.)
“At this point, it looks to me as though every public official with a duty to protect the public’s safety... is failing to do so.”
—Ex-sheriff Tony Bamonte
Old cops, fresh ultimatums
In his 35 years of police work in Riverside, Calif., former Detective Ron Wright estimates he contributed to the incarceration of maybe a thousand criminals. His resumé bristles with commendations, citations, and cop’s cop endorsements.
“Detective Wright developed a reputation as an extremely thorough investigator that displayed an enormous amount of expertise, particularly involving cases that involved criminal conspiracies, economic or political conflict of interest cases, fraud or identification theft cases, and highly technical computer related crimes,” wrote Lt. Guy Toussaint. “If I was a ‘bad guy’ I would not want Ron on my tail.”
Yet the former detective didn’t come north in 2006 looking for trouble. Wright says he retired to Spokane for its physical beauty and because it seemed like a nice, quiet place to put up his feet. He says he was so outraged by the evidence of the community’s deeply entrenched public corruption that his investigator’s instincts took over.
“This is organized crime, just without the Sicilian surnames.”
—Former police detective Ron Wright
Had Wright been assigned to the River Park Square case as an active duty policeman, he says, he would have begun working the case based on the
Camas evidence. “I’m just surprised [by] what I find with regard to political/governmental structures in Spokane that basically have failed to act.”
That paralysis, he says, reflects “an expected behavior — how one should act and look the other way with regard to criminal activity. This is organized crime, just without the Sicilian surnames.”
Says Wright, “I will not walk around any town wearing a sign that says ‘rob me.’”
Wright is now forwarding to public officials evidence he gathered in his investigation, and demanding action. The hub of what he alleges is Spokane’s organized crime is the Cowles family and the use it makes of its media as a weapon of punishment and intimidation.
“If you go against Cowles activities,” says Wright, “the Spokesman excoriates you in print. They take you out at the knees. Play ball and they make you a hero. Try to expose a $23 million federal fraud, you’re a ‘civic terrorist.’ Help cover up the loss of almost half the money needed to pay off a municipal bond sale that’s going into Cowles pockets, you’re the ‘perfect’ U.S. attorney.”
Wright is referring to the political demise of former mayor Talbott (see
“All in the Family”), and political ascension of U.S. attorney McDevitt (see
“McDevitt’s Fingerprints” and a
Spokesman-Review article calling McDevitt the “perfect choice” to become Eastern Washington’s U.S. attorney.)
“This is a very unique situation where you have a newspaper that is an instrumentality of criminal activity,” says Wright. “The principals in Spokane’s organized criminal enterprise, the Cowles family, use their newspaper to control public opinion and deflect the hue and cry [that would result] from the public if they were informed.”
Wright reels off a series of other
Camas stories that further support his allegations. “Look at
‘Breaking the News’” he says. “It shows developer Betsy Cowles editing a
Spokesman-Review story for the purpose of deceiving the public about the true costs of the River Park Square garage.”
Another piece “shows that the city’s own bond counsel was advising the
Spokesman-Review publisher how to spin the story about the securities fraud case and that ‘He is very, very concerned that his handprints are not on any of these ideas.’”
Wright cites
another article that “records how RPS developer Betsy Cowles sought the help of John Giese, one of her public relations advisers, in a secret campaign to remove” from office RPS critic Mayor John Talbott. A memo from Cowles to Geise said, “I think you can assume our goal is to be sure Talbott is not re-elected and that we probably need to be more behind the scenes than up in front.”
Says Wright: “I spent my professional life as a policeman and criminal investigator. I have never seen anything like this. The only response I can imagine from any criminal investigator to evidence like this is, ‘Oh, my God!’”
Whether citizens, albeit ex-lawmen, can have an effect on Spokane’s “organized crime” remains to be seen. But, like Tony Bamonte, Wright was professionally known for perseverance. Says Lt. Leon Phillips of the Riverside, Calif., police department: “He can be very dogged when he gets onto a case. I have personally described him as a bulldog that you just can’t get to stop biting your leg. And that will only be when he believes he has exhausted all of the possible leads… He was a great loss to the department when he retired.”
Public officials served notice
On January 14, 2009, Tony Bamonte fired off a
letter to the Spokane City Council, informing it of the chain of evidence he had amassed that implicated the Cowleses and Spokane officials in Savage’s death. The point of that letter, said Bamonte, was to put council members on notice of their legal liability. The statute of limitations lapses on the third anniversary of the Savage tragedy, April 8, 2009.
“From the time of the lapse of that statute of limitations, you have a new crime if no legal action has been taken and the evidence I have presented has not been refuted,” says Bamonte. “The new suspects are those public officials who were notified of evidence concerning Savage’s death and failed to act. This is a Class A Felony under Washington law. As a citizen and retired sheriff trained to recognize crimes of this type, and who has experience with them, I will file a criminal complaint against every public official who is a part of this cover-up. I will also do everything I can to prevent them from using public money to defend themselves from charges implicating them in public corruption.”
Says Bamonte: “Now, this city’s mayor, police chief, sheriff, and prosecutor are ignoring the public danger, just as the Cowles family continues to do. They’re all in this together. This proves just how dangerous Spokane’s public corruption is. In twenty-five years of law enforcement, this is the most blatant contempt for human life and abuse of public offices and trust I have ever encountered.”
Erstwhile Detective Wright entertains similar notions. Noting the wholesale failure of government and law enforcement to take proper action on evidence that criminal activity took Jo Ellen Savage’s life and tens of millions of Spokane taxpayer dollars, Wright recently compiled a three-ring binder of evidence, which he sent by certified mail to Sheriff Knezovich and Chief Kirkpatrick. Included in the 230-page binder were letters to Knezovich and Kirkpatrick demanding they take immediate action, as required by law. He sent email copies of the evidence binder to Mayor Verner and the Spokane City Council. He sent certified copies of his Knezovich/Kirkpatrick demand letter to Governor Christine Gregoire, state attorney general Rob McKenna, and Spokane County Prosecutor Steve Tucker.
“River Park Square represents what we used to call a ‘black binder case’ at Riverside [Calif.] PD,” he says. “When the evidence of a case we were working started spilling out of a manila file folder, we transferred it to a big three-ring black binder. As an investigation progressed we would continue to add additional supplemental reports covering witness statements, discussing other evidence obtained or seized by search warrants. We would then write an investigative narrative alleging violation(s) of a specific criminal offense that threaded and summarized all of the pieces together, based on our investigative experience, sufficient to result in a criminal complaint being filed by our district attorney. Generally, our district attorney would not file a case unless the burden of proof was to a ‘reasonable cause’ standard that would survive a felony preliminary hearing in court. That’s how you get criminals off the street.
“The evidence I presented Knezovich and Kirkpatrick is in a white binder, but it contains abundant reasonable cause to prosecute a first-degree manslaughter case in the matter of Ms. Savage’s death, once statements from key witnesses are obtained and documents supplied are verified as true copies. What I said to both of Spokane’s top law enforcement officers is basically, ‘Investigate this. And, by the way, if you don’t, you’re going to face prosecution yourself. And I’m going to bring the charges.’”
Included in the binder is a letter Wright wrote to Jeffrey C. Sullivan on June 17, 2008. Sullivan is the U.S. attorney for western Washington, Robert Westinghouse’s boss.
Wright wrote Sullivan:
“I believe based on my training, education, and investigative experience that these [facts Wright presented] are part of an ongoing criminal enterprise/conspiracy in Spokane. There is group of individuals [who] at different times have acted individually and/or in concert together to commit criminal acts with the knowledge and approval of this group headed by the Cowles Co. This criminal enterprise/conspiracy has successfully plundered the public treasury of $100 millions of dollars [sic] through successive quasi public/private projects in Spokane.”
Westinghouse offered a vague rebuttal at his press conference: “You can assume that we took all reasonable steps to explore and to satisfy ourselves that there was no criminal wrongdoing.”
“The evidence I had already presented Mr. Westinghouse’s superior shows that no diligent criminal investigator could assume anything of the kind,” counters Wright.
Wright says the reason he informed Sullivan of this evidence was to put him on notice that he believes RICO is applicable to River Park Square and Savage’s death. This was important, he says, first, because RICO dramatically relaxes the stricture of statutes of limitations. RICO is concerned with ongoing criminal enterprises, explains Wright, which involve perpetual criminal violations. The purpose of RICO, notes Wright, is to decapitate criminal enterprises and eliminate and redistribute their resources.
“RICO provides mechanisms for civil recovery of ‘profits’ of illegal activity laundered into ‘clean’ assets by civil seizure and forfeiture,” says the former economic crime specialist.
In a tape-recorded interview, RPS developer Betsy Cowles once told
Camas senior editor Tim Connor that her family could have rolled proceeds from the RPS garage bond sale into the family’s new downtown KHQ broadcast center — if the family chose to. (See
“Secret Deal.”) She denied the family did anything of the kind, but it was provocative that she thought such an action would have been legal.
Any such action, says Wright, would be a perfect RICO target.
Similarly, former RPS garage manager Rex Franklin said that he had been ordered to falsify the garage’s books to make the garage look profitable. (See
“Death by Parking.”)
Were the garage’s books cooked as part of a fraudulent misrepresentation to secure the $23 million HUD loan that secretly built Nordstrom a new store? If they were, lead bondholder attorney Gary Ceriani once told me, there was no funny business Cowles bookkeeping could attempt that his forensic accountants wouldn’t have been able to discover.
Ceriani’s forensic accountants never got into the Cowles counting room, because the RPS securities fraud case settled. What would RICO-based forensic accounting find on the Cowles books?
That question goes to the second reason Wright says he planted the seed of RICO: he wanted to telegraph his own plans. He quotes from the Civil Recourse section of RICO under USC 1962: “Section 1964 (c) permits any person whose property or business has been injured by a RICO violation to recover treble damages, plus costs of the suit and reasonable attorneys’ fees.”
“I have now documented that I have made multiple requests of law enforcement and government officials to do their jobs and properly investigate the evidence of RPS-related crime that I have provided them,” says Wright. “I’ll give them a chance to do their jobs. Because of the statute of limitations on Savage’s death, they don’t have much time left. If they don’t do their jobs, I intend to bring a civil RICO action against the perpetrators of River Park Square, which includes every complicit public official. I’m now in the process of searching for representation from a major class-action law firm.”
Bamonte informed public officials some time ago that he is taking similar steps. He says he has already had an expression of interest from one law firm, but “the match wasn’t right. If I bring a class action, it will be based on the representation of a law firm with the capability of doing this case justice.”
—END—
(Feb. 10, 2009)
Copyright © 2009 by Larry Shook. All rights reserved.
CONTACTS
Larry Shook, (509) 747-8776
Tony Bamonte, (509) 838-7114
Ron Wright, (951) 233-0710
Tim Connor, (509) 838-4580
Cherie Rodgers, (509) 456-2539
Betsy Cowles, (509) 459-5000
Stacey Cowles, (509) 459-5000
Spokane Mayor Mary Verner, (509) 625-6250
Spokane Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick, (509) 459-0020
County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich, (509) 477-5980
County Prosecutor Steve Tucker, (509) 477-3661
State Atty General Rob McKenna, (206) 464-6684
U.S. Atty Robert Westinghouse, public affairs (206) 553-4110
SIDEBAR
RPS: A snapshot of broken government
See what the following agencies and public officials did: Dept. of Justice, FBI, SEC, IRS, Sen. Patty Murray, HUD, James A. McDevitt (U.S. Attorney for Eastern Washington), Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich, Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick, County Prosecutor Steve Tucker, Mayor Mary Verner, Spokane City Council
REFERENCES AND LINKS
Jan. 14, 2009 Letter from Tony Bamonte to City Council
Bamonte letter to county prosecutor Steve Tucker, February 2, 2009. Photos of Savage death scene included.
Atwood-Budinger engineering reports, 1993. While “theoretical analysis” indicated the spandrels should be strong enough to withstand impact, real-life spandrel failures were happening regularly. Advise installation of cables to contain vehicles.
N.G. Jacobson engineering review of RPS garage, 2002.
To learn about the role of U.S. Attorney for Eastern Washington, James McDevitt, in the River Park Square project, see,
Camas stories—
“McDevitt’s Fingerprints, and
“Indictments Sought."
Photo of spandrel fix with notations of Tony Bamonte regarding weakened concrete.
For a draft excerpt from “Girl From Hot Springs” book that describes Rudd’s and Shaw’s efforts to expose construction problems at River Park Square,
click here.
Milt Priggee is the former political cartoonist for the Cowles-owned Spokesman-Review daily newspaper. His biting satire of life in Spokane repeatedly had him on the carpet before the late publisher William H. Cowles, 3rd, father to current publisher Stacey and real estate developer Betsy. “Come on, we have to go save your job,” he says editor Doug Floyd used to tell him. The renovated River Park Square mall reopened on August 20, 1999, the result of ugly secrets that were the subject of the prize-winning Camas magazine series, “How the Spokesman-Review Subverted Democracy in Spokane, Washington.” See Milt Priggee’s work at www.MiltPriggee.com
