JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

I wrote last week that David Jungerman’s hiring of a lawyer to represent him in a southwest Missouri attempted burglary case would likely significantly complicate the state’s attempt to gain a conviction.

That has begun playing out. Last week, Jungerman’s attorney filed a motion to dismiss the felony charge on grounds that Jungerman owned the house he allegedly attempted to break into and, thus, could not be charged with attempting to enter it.

Judge David Munton has set a hearing on the motion for next Tuesday.

Although routine motions and hearings can be tedious and distracting for those of us who want to see justice served as expeditiously as possible, this is the way it is in our legal system. Moreover, every twist and turn of this particular case is worthy of being sliced and diced because — as we all know — it’s very possible that David Jungerman gunned down and murdered Kansas City lawyer Thomas Pickert outside his Brookside home last Oct. 25.

The Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office does not have adequate evidence to bring charges — at least in the opinion of prosecutors — and the southwest Missouri case appears to hold out the best chance of getting Jungerman convicted and behind bars.

…It’s important to say here that none of the mainstream media outlets, including The Star and the local TV stations, has been following the attempted burglary case. I firmly believe those media outlets have steered clear of the case because they are afraid of being sued for libel. But it is absolute nonsense to cower from this case: It is a fact that police interviewed Jungerman, who will turn 80 next month, and searched his white van, which is similar to a van two witnesses saw at the scene of the crime. One witness reported seeing an elderly white man with gray hair standing next to the truck, and another reported seeing an elderly white man with gray hair driving away from the scene.

The block where Thomas Pickert lived with his wife, Dr. Emily Riegel, and their two young sons is dotted with “Hate has no home here” signs.

Moreover, Jungerman had a powerful motive — Pickert had represented a client who won a $5.75 million verdict against Jungerman — and Jungerman has a history of solving problems his own way, that is, with gunfire and without summoning police. He has said several times, including in court, “I always carry a gun.”

So, “the media,” in my opinion, is doing the public, including Pickert’s widow and their two young sons, a terrible disservice with its “non-reporting.”

But that’s the way it is, and I assure you I am going to continue dogging this case until it is resolved.

That said, I do not intend, at this point, to cover the hearing next Tuesday. The main reason is the hearing is scheduled to take place in Greenfield, MO, which is northwest of Springfield, and a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Kansas City. (I have previously made trips to Lamar and Nevada for hearings, and both those cities are significantly closer to Kansas City.)

The case is scheduled to go to trial in Lamar on April 3, and I am definitely planning to attend, assuming the case is not dismissed and the current schedule holds.

**

Although I have no legal training, I do not expect the dismissal motion to be upheld. It is very likely that Judge Munton will take the motion under advisement after the hearing and will rule later. He would post his ruling into the public file on the case, which is available for viewing on Missouri Case Net. That is where I intend to get the result. (The case number is 16B4-CR00187, and it must be entered precisely that way.)

As I said above, Jungerman’s attorney, S. Dean Price Jr. of Springfield, contends it was not illegal for Jungerman to enter his own property.

The charge relates to Jungerman’s confrontation, on June 28, 2016, with a man who was renting a house Jungerman owns outside Nevada. The state alleges Jungerman kicked at the door, entered and, with a hand on a gun in his waistband, approached the tenant and demanded to know, “When are you getting out of here, you mother fucker?”

Two other people besides the tenant were in the house at the time, and they, like the tenant, are slated to testify at trial.

Besides being charged with attempted burglary, which could get Jungerman a prison sentence of up to seven years, he is also charged with misdemeanor harassment. (The maximum penalty for a misdemeanor is up to a year in jail.)

In his dismissal motion, Price says:

“As a matter of law, an owner cannot unlawfully enter his own property without some pre-existing order denying entry…There was no pre-existing order denying Jungerman entry into his property. Jungerman believed he had a right to enter the dwelling.”

…I could not find any Missouri case law pertaining to breaking and entering a house that one already owns. I’m sure there is some case law; I just don’t know how to access it.

However, the Criminal Defense Lawyer website offers some interesting background on the subject.

“You might be surprised to learn,” it says, “that in most states, in certain situations, people can be charged with trespassing or burglarizing their own property. Burglary is committed by going into a building without permission in order to commit a crime inside. The issue most often comes up in cases involving domestic violence or during landlord-tenant disputes.”

And this…

The law recognizes different kinds of property rights: a person can have an ownership right, or a possessory right, or both. For example, a landlord owns a house, but does not have the right to be there any time he or she pleases. The right of possession belongs to the tenant…In trespassing and burglary cases, a person who both owns and possesses a piece of property cannot be charged with these crimes because, absent unusual circumstances, the defendant always has permission to be on the property. However, a person who has an ownership interest in a property, but not a right of possession, can be charged with trespassing or burglarizing his or her own property in some states.

The core issue, then, will probably be whether Jungerman had “right of possession.”

That sounds different to me than a “pre-existing order denying entry.”

My prediction: Motion denied. Next!

I’ve been poring over the latest Kansas City Star circulation data, and everything I see leads me to believe one of two things is going on:

Either management is not doing a good job of tracking digital subscriptions, or its push to sharply increase digital subscriptions is tanking.

Print subscriptions have been steadily dwindling for 20 years, of course, and The Star, like other papers, has been emphasizing the transition to digital.

What concerns me — and what should be of great concern to all Kansas City Star employees, especially upper management — is that statistics indicate digital subscriptions were down slightly more than 50 percent between December 2016 and December 2017.

For the quarter ending December 2016, the Alliance for Audited Media, a trade organization, showed The Star with 12,908 stand-alone, digital subscriptions. For the quarter ending December 2017, the figure stood at 6,471.

(Those figures do not include digital subscriptions that automatically go with print subscriptions.)

Again, the remarkable thing about those numbers is that for years The Star’s owner, McClatchy Co., had been emphasizing the transition from print to digital.

Another number that does not seem to square with the reported digital decline is that McClatchy reported a nearly 15-percent increase in digital-only advertising between 2016 and 2017. (In case you’re wondering, McClatchy does not break down advertising revenue for each of its 29 daily newspapers; it just gives overall figures.)

The 15-percent increase is good news, but “softness” in print advertising continues to drag down the company’s overall performance: It lost $34.2 million last year.

Like I said at the outset, the reported downswing in digital subscriptions is a mystery. If The Star cannot get its figures straight, that’s a problem in and of itself. If the numbers are accurate, it’s an even bigger problem.

**

Odds and ends:

:: The Star saw average paid Sunday print circulation dip from 119,892 to 118,203 between the third and fourth quarters of last year. Average Monday-to-Friday print circulation fell from 78,122 to 76,853.

:: At year’s end, corporate debt stood at $873.7 million, continuing the long hangover from McClatchy’s ill-advised purchase of the Knight Ridder chain for $4.5 billion in 2006.

:: In a news release accompanying the fourth-quarter report, McClatchy president and C.E.O. Craig Forman said, “Our intent is to sharpen our connections to our local markets, both in terms of audience and advertising, by accelerating our digital product and sales efforts.”

Looks to me like the focal point of the acceleration effort should right here in Kansas City.

I would never have guessed that Terry Gray, the 23rd Street Ramp Maniac, would have had the means or smarts to hire a good attorney, but he has done so, and it is already paying dividends for him.

Gray is the guy who careened 90 miles an hour down the northbound ramp off I-435 and slammed into an SUV, beginning a chain-reaction crash that left two people dead, two seriously injured and vehicles strewn around and through the intersection.

Gray, 51, made his first appearance in court Tuesday, nearly five months after the crash, which took the lives of 16-year-old Samantha Raudales of Shawnee and 3-year-old Ryan Hampel of Independence. Two other people were seriously injured, including Samantha’s father, Edwin Raudales-Flores, who suffered a brain injury.

Gray is charged with two counts of causing death while driving under the influence of marijuana and two counts of DWI resulting in serious physical injury.

I’ve been following this case closely, and ever since the prosecutor’s office filed charges Jan. 4, I’d been checking Jackson County Corrections Department records, looking for a booking mugshot of him. But nothing had turned up.

People like to see photos of defendants charged in high-profile cases, and when I was at The Star we always went aggressively after video of “perp walks” (which you don’t see too much of any more) and booking mugshots.

**

After learning that the prosecutor’s office had allowed Gray to remain free pending his first appearance, I fully expected him to be booked and “mugged” on Tuesday. Partly for that reason — and also because the appearance was scheduled for 8:30 a.m. — I didn’t bother to go down to the courthouse that day.

To my surprise, however, even after Tuesday, I couldn’t find any sign of Gray in Corrections Department records. In addition, the Kansas City Police Department had no record of him being booked through the city jail.

The thing about mugshots is everybody looks guilty, even if you’re Tiger Woods or Nick Nolte — and nobody wants their mugshot published, and defense lawyers hate them.

Nevertheless, mugshots have routinely been a matter of public record at the state and local level for more than a century. To the frustration of the media, it’s different in federal cases. Two years ago, the Cincinnati-based 6th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a 20-year-old legal precedent that allowed news organizations and others to obtain booking photos of criminal defendants who appeared in federal court.

Writing for the majority, Judge Deborah Cook called mugshots “squarely within [the] realm of embarrassing and humiliating information.”

“Booking photos convey guilt to the viewer,” she wrote. “Indeed, viewers so uniformly associate booking photos with guilt and criminality that we strongly disfavor showing such photos to criminal juries.”

**

But even in state court — at least in Jackson County, MO, it turns out — a good lawyer can sometimes circumvent the mugshot problem.

Things started falling into place for me in the Gray case after I found through court records that John P. O’Connor, a longtime, highly respected criminal defense attorney, had entered his appearance on behalf of Gray on Jan. 22.

I’ve known John more than 40 years, ever since he worked in the old Jackson County Jail on top of the courthouse and before he entered law school. He’s now got a son, P.J. O’Connor, who has followed him into the law business.

So, I sent John an email, asking where his client was booked in and why I couldn’t find a mugshot.

He wrote back that he had taken Gray directly to the Jackson County Criminal Records division — which is in a separate building from the Corrections Department — and that Gray had posted $7,500 cash bond (against a face bond of $75,000) and was not required to be mugged. His next scheduled appearance is March 7.

I wrote back to John: “Damn! That’s part of the value of hiring a good attorney!”

His reply: “Yes, get ’em out the back door!”

Wanting to be helpful, however, John told me Fox4 News had taken video of Gray sitting in the courtroom on Tuesday. “Can’t you (get a) screen shot?” John wrote.

I then went to the Fox4 website and found this photo…

For Gray’s purposes — and John’s — that photo is far better than a mugshot. Gray is cleaned up and looking appropriately serious and concerned.

In the end, Gray may well get a very stiff sentence, but with John in his corner, in my estimation, he has a good chance of getting a plea agreement that could keep him out of prison the rest of his life.

I, of course, don’t want Gray to see the light of day after he either pleads or is convicted. But he is entitled to a stout defense, and my hat is off to John for his crafty handling of the case in the formative, early stages.

**

I told John that in the absence of a booking photo of Gray, I would run his “mugshot.” Here it is…He, too, looks appropriately serious.

Thursday was a great day for Kansas City.

After years of hand wringing, steps forward and steps backward, we have a Memorandum of Understanding — 68 pages between the city and Edgemoor Infrastructure & Real Estate — to build a new, $1 billion terminal at KCI.

It may not be easy from here; there will probably be many difficult days ahead, in fact. But chances are now good we will have a new airport in the early 2020s.

I can’t wait. I’m 71 — will be 72 next month — and hope to God I’m here to see it.

Yesterday, after nearly two months of “double, double toil and trouble” (you can always count on The Bard), the council approved a new and improved M.O.U. on an 8-5 vote.

That’s hardly a mandate — just one tick above a bare majority — but good enough to move ahead.

I have no interest tonight in rehashing the battle or running down the people who voted “no.” (Suffice it to say, I will not support for mayor any of the “nay” voters on Thursday.) What I want to do is pay tribute to certain individuals and to my former employer, The Kansas City Star, for making this result possible.

But first, as I am constantly urging my friends at The Star to do, let’s enumerate the vote:

Yes: Mayor Sly James, Dan Fowler, Quinton Lucas, Jermaine Reed, Katheryn Shields, Jolie Justus, Alissia Canady and Kevin McManus.

No: Heather Hall, Teresa Loar, Lee Barnes, Scott Wagner and Scott Taylor.

**

Now, my list of heroes.

The Kansas City Star Editorial Board

I just don’t think this would have happened without the insistent prodding and holding-to-account that editorial page editor Colleen McCain Nelson and her fellow editorial writers engaged in. (Dave Helling deserves a lot of credit, too; he has written the vast majority of airport editorials.)

It was a remarkable demonstration of consistent and relentless urging of the council to do right by the citizens. (I wish I could say I was equally consistent, but a couple of times I let developments unsettle me and called for halting the process and starting over. For that, I deserve to be called “Shaky JimmyC.”)

The Star’s shining moment came the afternoon of Dec. 14, just hours after the council’s jaw-dropping 9-4 vote to dump Edgemoor. In an editorial that was updated the next morning, The Star said:

“In an astonishing display of arrogance, nine members of the Kansas City Council betrayed voters and rejected a negotiated memorandum of understanding with Edgemoor Infrastructure, the company picked to develop a terminal at Kansas City International Airport. The decision — cooked up out of the public’s eye — once again injected chaos into the airport terminal project.”

You could feel the fury behind those words. I loved the passion. It went on to slap the council up side the face and warned it, in so many words, to shape up.

“Kansas City voters should be furious about the council’s ham-handed interference with the project. Less than six weeks ago, voters overwhelmingly endorsed construction of a new $1 billion terminal at KCI — a remarkable show of faith in their elected leaders.

“Those voters knew Edgemoor had been selected in a relatively open procurement process. Now nine council members have betrayed that faith, in a stunning bait-and-switch. It confirms every claim of distrust in local government.”

I think that editorial rattled and embarrassed several council members, and, indeed, the council did shape up.

Mayor Sly James

The mayor gets a lot of criticism for being headstrong and egotistical, but, by God, people love this guy because he exhibits incredible strength, and he’s usually right.

After getting the airport project off dead center with his support of a “sole-source” contract with Burns & McDonnell, Sly had the guts to shift gears after the project was opened to other contractors. He saw that the city would be getting a raw deal with Burns and Mac (a proposal from bidder AECOM came in at $400 million less than Burns and Mac’s, and Edgemoor’s proposal came in at a stunning $776 million less. Faced with the facts, Sly knew it was Burns and Mac that had to be dumped, not Edgemoor.

At yesterday’s council meeting, before the vote, he had harsh words for AECOM and its recently cooked-up partnership with Burns and Mac.

“Heck, before Edgemoor was selected, Burns & McDonnell and AECOM privately and publicly talked about each other as if they were fighting in a schoolyard. After they were both rejected, however, they formed a convenient partnership and now Edgemoor is under attack.”

Way to go, Sly. I will vote for you for whatever you run for next.

Councilman Kevin McManus

I live in the 6th Council District, which is represented by McManus (in district) and Scott Taylor (at large).

McManus

Both were strongly behind Burns and Mac, which has its headquarters in the 6th District, and both voted to dump Edgemoor on Dec. 14. But of the two, only McManus had the courage to do what was right and turn against Burns and Mac in the wake of its proposal — a proposal so greedy that my late, great friend Steve Glorioso said “would have made Tom Pendergast blush.”

McManus didn’t make any friends at Burns and Mac, but I think with his show of integrity yesterday he positioned himself for bigger things down the road.

Councilwoman Alissia Canady

Canady

Along with Councilman Lee Barnes, (at large), Canady represents the 5th District. She joined him — the most strident Edgemoor opponent — in the infamous Dec. 14 vote. Like McManus in the 6th, however, she came around to see the folly of the at-large member’s position.

Thank you, Councilwoman Canady.

Charles Renner  

Here’s a man who worked tirelessly behind the scenes, whose expert guidance and familiarity with public-private partnerships helped keep the council on the right path.

Renner

Renner is a partner with the Kansas City-based law firm Husch Blackwell, which, along with the Boston-based WilmerHale, has been paid more than $1 million to advise the council on the new-terminal process.

That’s a ton of money, for sure, but after the Dec. 14 debacle, members of the council’s Finance & Governance Committee said that in the context of a $1 billion project, the amount was not out of line. So true.

Renner got his undergraduate and law degrees from UMKC. He earned a B.A. in political science in 1997 and received his law degree three years later.

Thank you, Charles — and your fellow legal beagles, who kept fine tuning and explaining this deal right up to yesterday afternoon.

David Jungerman, whom police questioned in the October murder of Kansas City lawyer Thomas Pickert, recently made a decision that will greatly increase his chances of beating a felony charge in southwest Missouri.

David Jungerman

He hired an attorney.

This is bad news for those of us who believe Jungerman shot and killed Pickert, who had helped a client win a $5.75 million civil verdict against Jungerman.

In the absence of solid evidence in the Pickert case, the southwest Missouri case may well be the best opportunity to get Jungerman behind bars.

Jungerman had been representing himself for almost a year, since a Joplin defense attorney withdrew. The case, in which Jungerman is charged with attempted burglary, is scheduled to go to trial April 3. A pretrial conference, which had been scheduled for Feb. 15, has now been pushed back to March 15.

Stymied in the Pickert case, the Jackson County prosecutor’s office has worked with Vernon County Prosecutor Brandi McInroy to try to get Jungerman convicted of attempted burglary in the southwest Missouri case.

The goals are: 1) get a conviction, 2) get a prison sentence of several years, and 3) hope the 79-year-old Jungerman dies in prison.

As long as Jungerman was representing himself (self-representation is called “pro se”), the odds were very good, given his legal naiveté and lack of training, that he would be convicted.

Jungerman’s chances of beating the charge have now increased markedly.

This is not an open-and-shut case, and an experienced defense attorney should be able to exploit inconsistencies that have arisen.

In June 2016, Jungerman is alleged to have kicked at the door of a home he owns outside Nevada, MO, in Vernon County. With a hand on a .40-caliber Glock stuffed in his waistband, he demanded of the tenant, “When are you getting out of here, you mother fucker?”

One of the problems is that Prosecutor McInroy originally charged Jungerman with burglary, alleging that Jungerman kicked the door open before entering. A few months ago, McInroy lowered the charge to attempted burglary and changed the wording in the charge to say Jungerman “kicked at” the door.

Burglary is a Class B felony in Missouri, punishable by 5 to 15 years in prison. Attempted burglary is a Class C felony, which carries maximum imprisonment of seven years.

For his part, Jungerman does not deny saying what he allegedly said or having a handgun in his waistband. (“I always carry a gun,” he has said.) But he contends he did not kick at or kick in the door. He also disputes that he can be charged with attempting to enter a house that he owns.

**

The judge overseeing the case, David R. Munton, has repeatedly urged Jungerman to hire an attorney. Jungerman contended at one point that he couldn’t afford an attorney and asked Judge Munton to appoint one.

The judge refused. In the Jackson County civil case in which Pickert represented a man whom Jungerman had shot, Jungerman acknowledged he was a multi-millionaire and that he owned thousands of acres of farmland in southwest Missouri.

At one hearing, while urging Jungerman to hire an attorney, Judge Munton said something to this effect:

“If you have appendicitis, you can cut yourself open with a knife and remove your appendix, but most people seek help.”

Last month, Jungerman finally took Munton’s advice. On Jan. 22, a Springfield criminal defense attorney named S. Dean Price Jr. entered his appearance on Jungerman’s behalf.

Words in large type at the top of Price’s website say, “Sometimes even small cases need a big lawyer.”

The website goes on to say:

“If you’re facing felony charges, you know that you need a criminal defense lawyer who puts your defense and your interests at the forefront….When your future is on the line, choose a defense attorney who has dedicated his life to the idea that every defendant deserves the best possible representation.”

Jungerman’s future is definitely on the line. He will turn 80 next month, and he has taken an action that might mean he won’t celebrate his 81st birthday behind bars.

I hope that’s not the case, but hiring an attorney was decidedly in his own best interests.

I wrote with relief early last month about Jackson County prosecutors having charged Terry A. Gray — the 23rd Street ramp maniac — with enough felony charges to keep behind bars the rest of his life.

The mysterious part about the case, however — as I also noted at the time — was that he was not taken into custody when the charges were filed. Several times over a period of days, I did an online Jackson County Corrections Department inmate search, and Gray’s name did not turn up.

It took me a while to sort this out, but today I got the information I’ve been after:

For some reason, prosecutors allowed Gray, 51, to remain free until he made his first appearance before a judge. Mike Mansur, a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, said today Gray is scheduled to appear before Judge David Byrn at 8:30 a.m. next Tuesday.

At that time — assuming he shows up — the charges will be formally read, and, according to charging documents, prosecutors will ask for a bond of $75,000.

To me, this is very maddening. I don’t understand, first, why a man who is an obvious threat to the health and welfare of other people was allowed to remain free for five months while awaiting his first appearance. And, second, $75,000 seems like too low of a bond.

If he can rustle up $7,500 cash — 10 percent of the face amount — and goes through a bondsman, he will be allowed to go free once again, until he goes to trial or pleads guilty.

Mansur didn’t have an explanation. All he said was that Gray’s first appearance had been “continued” — postponed — a couple of times, for some reason.

To remind you how dangerous this creep is, police have determined he was high on marijuana and going 90 miles an hour down the ramp when his pickup slammed into a stopped SUV, which, in turn, hit two other vehicles and sent them flying, as well. The momentum of Gray’s pickup carried it across all four lanes of 23rd Street, and it ended up against a rock wall on the far side of the intersection.

In the process, Gray killed two people — 3-year-old Ryan Hampel of Independence and 16-year-old Samantha Raudales of Shawnee — and left Samantha’s father, Edwin Raudales-Flores, with a serious brain injury.

There’s only one word for this crash — ghastly.

Adding insult to injury and death, a bystander took some shocking cellphone video of Gray’s reaction. Not once did he indicate any concern — or even curiosity — about the people whose lives he had either taken or changed forever.

Terry Gray’s pickup, after the Sept. 17 crash on the 23rd Street ramp

In the video, he is seen walking back and forth around his truck, disgustedly picking up broken pieces from the truck and finally kicking a large piece. In the video, he never once looks back in the direction of the three vehicles that lay twisted and mangled in the lanes behind him. And one of the most maddening aspects of this is that he was flying an American flag from the back of his truck. A real patriot, this guy.

**

To me, this entire process has taken way, way too long. Consider this timeline:

:: Sept. 17, the wreck occurs

:: End of November, the case goes to the prosecutor’s office after a two-month police investigation

:: Jan. 4, charges are filed

:: Feb. 6, Terry Gray is scheduled to make his first appearance

I understand it takes a while for the results of toxicology tests to come back from the crime lab, but this is ridiculous. This guy should have made his first appearance two or three months ago.

If he had killed or badly injured anyone with a high profile, or someone rich, my guess is the police and prosecutor’s office would have put a much higher priority on the case and moved it along much more quickly.

But the people whose lives he changed, or ended, were everyday people, apparently with no connections and no influence.

And so, Terry Gray — a damn bum and menace to society — has remained free. And who knows? That turd might even be driving. He has clearly shown he has no regard for traffic laws…It’s a free country, right? We know Terry Gray believes that because he likes to fly the flag that vouches for his belief in “the American way.”

It’s no wonder many people are cynical about politics and the notion of public service.

This week we have seen two examples of once-respected public officials having given in to the temptation to line their own pockets.

The two I speak of are former Jackson County Executive Mike Sanders and former Shawnee Mission School District Superintendent Jim Hinson.

Let’s look at Sanders first…

Mike Sanders and wife Georgia, outside the federal courthouse

Once considered a “rising star in Missouri’s Democratic Party,” as The Star put it, Sanders — a lawyer, no less — pleaded guilty Friday to a federal corruption charge, admitting he misused tens of thousands of dollars for his personal gain and then lied about it on campaign finance records.

Specifically, he and his former chief of staff Calvin Williford, who also pleaded guilty to one felony count, acknowledged they used campaign cash for gambling trips to Las Vegas and other personal purposes.

What a couple of idiots. But Sanders more than Williford. My guess is Williford allowed himself to fall under Sanders’ misguided influence and felt honored and flattered to be asked to join the boss on junkets to the “Entertainment Capital of the World.”

The Star’s “killer team” of Mike Hendricks and Steve Vockrodt had a very telling paragraph in their story:

“While the 50-year-old Sanders was stoic during and after his hearing, Williford, 60, sobbed following his proceedings after greeting friends and family members in the audience. He could be heard telling his family, ‘I am such an idiot.’ ”

That certainly makes me more sympathetic to Williford, and I hope he can turn his life around and get a good job somewhere after prison — if, indeed, he and Sanders end up doing time.

But Sanders…Wow, what a turd. What a phony.

He took everybody by surprise on Dec. 21, 2015, when he called a press conference and dropped a bombshell: He would be leaving his elective position in 10 days, at the end of the year, with three years left in his third term. He had previously served a four-year term as county prosecutor.

At the news conference, his wife Georgia sat off to one side, smiling pleasantly, as Sanders explained he was leaving politics because the job was taking too big a toll on his family life.

He said:

“Now it’s time for me to really focus on my family and do what’s really necessary to raise my two sons, 9 and 12, and focus on that. For us, I think it’s a great time as a family…The thing about politics, the thing specifically about this job is it takes you away so much. It is truly a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week job. You never know when that phone call’s going to come…”

We know now that the FBI was onto him even then and that he was making his exit because of the nasty cloud that had formed over him.

How much his wife knew then we have no idea. I hope it was nothing, or not much. In any event, her words that day have a decidedly different ring to them in light of yesterday’s plea.

“I’m so thrilled,” she said back then. “It’s time. It’s time for him to move on and do something different. I’m so happy for him, and for us.”

Again yesterday, Georgia Sanders was with her husband. Again she was off to the side. But she was not smiling.

And what about those boys? They would now be 11 and 14…I wonder what they’re thinking about good ol’ Dad. How confused and disappointed they must be. I hope they were spared the images of their father on the steps of the federal courthouse, listening to his lawyer speak for him, professing how apologetic he was “not only to his family but the residents of Jackson County.”

Yes, Friday was a bad day for Jackson County residents. Once again we are left sorely disappointed by an elected official who seemed like an advocate of good government but turned out to be another crook trying to enrich himself.

**

Hinson

Hinson isn’t nearly as reprehensible as Sanders, but he’s another who left people wondering why his commitment to public service evaporated in a flash.

Hinson announced last April that he would retire at the end of the last school year, even though he was only 54 at the time and had only been on the job four years. In a statement, he played the same, tired song Sanders had played, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family and “pursue other lifelong goals.”

What was clear, though, was he just wanted to disappear. And no wonder: Rumors of romantic liaisons with one or more district officials swirled, and there was a rumor of a D.U.I.

So he did disappear, for a while, anyway. This week, though, he was back in the news.

The Shawnee Mission Post, which does a great job covering central and eastern Johnson County, reported that Hinson had taken a consulting job with the very law firm he had brought on, as superintendent, to handle most of the school district’s legal business.

It’s a classic case of the old revolving door, where a public official channels a lot of business to some firm or some “consultants” and then doubles back after leaving office and gets rewarded for his earlier beneficence.

The Post had the figures showing just how deep the beneficence was. The law firm, EdCounsel, billed SMSD $10,106 during the 2013-14 school year; $69,982 in 2014-15; $188,823 in 2015-16; and a whopping $405,111 last school year.

I’m sure EdCounsel very much appreciated Hinson’s patronage. But, like Jackson County residents with Sanders, what good did any of that do for the patrons of the Shawnee Mission School District? Hinson’s legacy, in my opinion — and I’m a substitute SMSD teacher — is having constructed a wide moat between parents and district governance on one hand, and between teachers and district administration on the other.

Under him, the district became insular and secretive, and teachers chafed under his autocratic rule. The district will be struggling for a long time to undo the damage Jim Hinson wrought. I’m sure he doesn’t care, though; he’s getting big payback for enriching a bunch of lawyers.

**

Note: A big thank-you to friend and regular reader Tracy Thomas for the tip on Hinson.

Clear the children from the room; I’m goin’ on a rant…

Yesterday, The Star turned four reporters loose on the Sam Brownback story: their top political reporter, their Washington (McClatchy) correspondent, their Topeka correspondent and the Wichita Eagle’s Topeka correspondent.

In today’s print edition, those four reporters produced 65 inches of copy — more than enough to fill half a page without photos or graphics.

They topped their story, naturally, with the news that Vice President Mike Pence cast the tie-breaking vote in the U.S. Senate to put Brownback’s ambassadorial nomination over the top on a 50-49 vote. (Bear that count in mind.)

Then, they proceeded to review Brownback’s checkered legacy as Kansas governor.

…I have no beef with the structure of the story or its length. Brownback’s stand as governor has been a certifiable disaster, and it called for an extensive look back.

But, my God, these reporters — all four of them — skipped over one of the most important elements of the Senate’s dramatic vote: Who were the two absent Republican senators, and why were they not there?

I had to do a Google search today to find the answer. On about my third hit, I got the critical information in a Chicago Tribune story that was generated by The Washington Post. The Post writers — Sean Sullivan and Julie Zauzmer — put the information up high, where it belonged, and described the climactic vote this way:

In a dramatic turn Wednesday afternoon, the Senate hit a 49-49 stalemate on a procedural vote to end debate on the nomination. Two Republican senators were absent: Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who is in his home state battling brain cancer, and Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Pence quickly traveled to the Capitol to break the deadlock.

Senators John McCain and Bob Corker

The Post reporters understood that on a vote of this magnitude, the vast majority readers would want to know which senators were absent and why.

(In a follow-up, online story posted several hours ago, The Star included the information about McCain and Corker. But it was a day late and a lot of dollars short.)

**

To me, it’s ridiculous that The Star omitted that basic information in its print edition, which is still what the vast majority of Star rely on for their news.

I’ve been bitching (I told you to get the children out of the room) about The Star’s consistent failure to detail who voted how on any number of local stories, and yesterday they dropped a turd on a major national story.

And while the reporters were certainly at fault, here’s the bigger question: Where the hell were the editors??

Well, I’ve got the answers: Heads up their asses. Brains drifting on wispy clouds. Faces buried in their phones, checking for incoming texts.

We know The Star can do some good work — we’ve seen it in the secrecy in government stories in both Kansas and Missouri — but on the whole the paper has lost its moorings. It no longer covers local news anywhere close to what it did up to the mid-2000s. And more and more, it shovels overly long stories into the paper without giving them a decent edit. Just slaps them online and moves them along for the press run.

**

Yesterday, the editors turned four reporters loose and let them write a dirge about a horrible governor, but everyone involved in the story missed one the fundamental elements of any newspaper story: the “Who” of the “Who, What, When, Where and Why.” In a sense, they also missed part of the “where,” that is, where were the two missing senators? 

For the record the four reporters wearing dunce caps today are political reporter Bryan Lowry; Washington correspondent Lindsay Wise; and Topeka correspondents Hunter Woodall (Kansas City) and Jonathan Shorman (Wichita).

I’m sorry I don’t know the name of the editor who was ultimately responsible, because if I did, I’d put an extra tall dunce cap on him (or her), set him in the middle of the classroom and let the kids fire away with tomatoes.

Splat.

The newest member of The Star’s editorial board offered his first by-lined commentary today, and one thing is clear: He’s got a lot to learn.

Just last week, Editorial Page Editor Colleen McCain Nelson introduced Toriano Porter as eighth member of the editorial board that Publisher Tony Berg reconstructed after blowing up what was left of the former board in late 2016.

Toriano Porter

In Porter — who is African-American — Nelson is giving a young, relatively inexperienced reporter a great opportunity to make a mark at a major metropolitan daily. Although I certainly applaud the appointment of a second minority member to the board (Mary Sanchez being the other), I was concerned when I read that Porter’s major qualification was having been a general assignment reporter at The Star the last two years.

Before that, he worked at a suburban St. Louis paper and the The Independence Examiner and The Lee’s Summit Journal.

Suffice it to say, Toriano Porter is very “green” as a journalist, and the fact is there’s absolutely no way he would have been appointed to the editorial board, with such limited experience, during The Star’s glory days.

**

His column today was about the thoroughly discredited and about to-be ex-president of the Kansas City convention and visitors bureau, which is formally named Visit KC.

My objection to Toriano’s column is he was naively sympathetic to the executive in question.

But first, here’s the backdrop…

Ronnie Burt

The C.E.O., 49-year-old Ronnie Burt, submitted his resignation two weeks ago in the wake of formal, internal allegations that he had harassed and bullied three bureau employees. In addition — and perhaps more important — his firing of another bureau executive led to a discrimination lawsuit that resulted in a settlement that cost the bureau $250,000.

The plaintiff in that case was former human resources manager Janette Barron, who contended Burt fired her last year after she sought an investigation into the harassment and bullying allegations.

It’s pretty clear, this was a big mess and the bureau was in chaos under Burt, who came to Kansas City from a similar organization in Washington D.C. in 2014.

Janette Barron

Under the settlement, which resourceful reporter Steve Vockrodt got under a Sunshine Law request, the visitors bureau agreed to pay Barron $137,500 and her attorney $112.500. Burt tendered his resignation, effective Jan, 31, after the bureau’s executive committee met three times to discuss the situation.

Burt was present at the first of the three meetings but not at the last two, so it’s clear the executive committee decided Burt needed to go. This was not a voluntary resignation.

**

Porter’s column got off to an alarming start:

“I don’t know if Ronnie Burt is guilty of the harassment and the bullying behavior he’s been accused of. But what if the allegations aren’t true, as the outgoing C.E.O of Visit KC contends?”

Wow…Talk about rushing to a guy’s defense! He might was well have written, “Did Ronnie Burt get screwed???”

Porter went on to quote Burt as saying, “I was deeply hurt by the allegations,” and, “This is my character. This is my integrity, who I am as a person.”

Holy cow…To be sure, it is all about character. The problem is all the evidence — not the least of which is a $250,000 bureau payout — is Burt’s character and temperament are sorely wanting.

Porter’s naivete boiled over when he said, “Burt seemed sincere in his response.”

Well, hell yes he sounds sincere! He’s a trained salesman, for Christ’s sake…a pitchman, a glad-hander whose main job has been to convince people (sincerely) they will have a great experience if they bring their convention to Kansas City.

Porter concludes his column on a syrupy, sentimental note:

“A contrite Ronnie Burt still could rebound and learn from his time in Kansas City. This is his chance.”

Sorry, Toriano, you got it wrong: Ronnie Burt had his chance here. But he fucked up, and now his prospects of becoming C.E.O. at another convention and visitors bureau are very dim…unless some other bureau falls for his phony sincerity.

One reason Mayor Sly James is controversial and has many detractors is he doesn’t always bow and scrape to the City Council.

He’s bull-headed and self-confident and tends to charge ahead like Don Quixote.

If he thinks he’s onto something — like awarding a no-bid, $1 billion contract Burns & McDonnell to build a new airport terminal, he grabs a couple of council members whom he has empowered — Jolie Justus and Mayor Pro Tem Scott Wagner — and off he goes.

On the other hand, his self-confidence and willingness to throw the dice (Remember the $800-million general-obligation bond issue campaign last year?) endear him to an electorate that likes its mayors to be strong, in the style of former mayor and now U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver and former Mayor Kay Barnes.

In addition, he doesn’t kowtow to anyone or any group and doesn’t shrink from using scathing language to call out people and/or companies he believes are trying to sidetrack his good intentions.

I remember another type of mayor — Richard L. Berkley (1979-1991) — one who cowered in his office, afraid to face the media’s “on the record” questions. He always insisted on a dry run off the record to help himself formulate an innocuous on-the-record comment. My predecessor on the City Hall beat once told me, “If I had a nickel for every minute I’ve waited on Berkley to answer some questions, I’d be a rich man.”

Berkley’s standing criticism of anything — be it an unwelcome comment by a fellow council member or a firefighters’ strike — was, “That’s inappropriate.”

When Cleaver succeeded Berkley in 1991, it was like a stifling, heavy paper bag was suddenly lifted from City Hall. To this day, I believe it was Cleaver — for all his faults — who exploded Kansas City’s inferiority complex. He put us on the road to self-respect.

Sly James is no Dick Berkley. He is locked and loaded, and you never know when he’s going to pull the verbal trigger. I trust you recognize, like me, that for that reason alone he is fun to follow and watch.

In mid-December, for example, after a council majority launched a sneak attack that almost undermined the selection of Edgemoor as airport contractor, James called the gambit “an ambush” and said, “You can’t lead people you can’t trust.”

Ouch!

Then, over the weekend, he was at his word-slinging best again, lambasting the people behind a covert, robo-call campaign to discredit Edgemoor as “hogs who have to belly up to the billion-dollar trough.”

He wouldn’t say whom he suspected of initiating the dial-up effort, but the two prime suspects are Burns & McDonnell, which is still on the outside looking in, and AECOM, which the city’s terminal-selection committee ranked second behind Edgemoor. (Recently, Burns and Mac and AECOM teamed up, hoping to jump in and get the job if a deal with Edgemoor fails to materialize.)

**

Despite my appreciation for James’ candor and passionate outbursts, I am not optimistic about the contractor-selection process resulting in a first-class terminal. More than any other escapade of Sly’s that I can think of, this badly flawed initiative has played out in a way that could leave us with a difficult and painful construction process and a mundane and problem-plagued facility.

Because the city (Sly & Co.) decided to put the cart before the horse — i.e., forgoing the conventional design-first, take-bids-later process — we are entirely betting on the come in regard to what this new terminal will look like.

We are in a situation where the contractors, labor unions and other special interests are calling the shots. Guns firmly placed at our temples, we the public are marching down the aisle with Edgemoor. There was  no engagement party, and there is no ring symbolizing commitment — a design we can examine and comment on.

Worse, it looks like there’s no graceful way to exit this union; the suitor waiting in the wings is uglier and greedier than the one we’ve got on our arm.

All in all, I tell ya’, this wild ride could result in a homely terminal that may or may not be functional. For me — and I hope for you — it takes a lot more than a fancy drawing of a two-story fountain to get excited about a new terminal. To me, it just looks like a flimsy veil.

Edgemoor rendering