toledoblade.com --

Second of two parts

Joe Kidd was a Republican. Paula Ross was a Democrat. But when she arrived at Mr. Kidd's office at the Lucas County Board of Elections one day in January, 2004, she wasn't there for a partisan scrap.

As director of the elections board, Mr. Kidd had a better relationship with Ms. Ross than her fellow board member, Republican Bernadette Noe.

Mr. Kidd recalls Ms. Ross walking into his office and asking, "•'How is it going?' I said, 'Fine.' She said, 'I think you better sit down.'•"

PART 1

• Kidd's 'wrong choice' led to Noe's downfall

Ms. Ross then told him that Ms. Noe had gone to Lucas County prosecutors and accused him of soliciting or accepting money from a consultant for Diebold, the voting-machine manufacturer.

Mr. Kidd said he soon learned that prosecutors had been told he had received a $2,000 cash bribe from a Diebold consultant.

He said he was shocked, because he knew it wasn't true.

Ms. Ross advised Mr. Kidd to get an attorney.

Joe Kidd, former director of the Lucas County Board of Elections, now lives in a Detroit loft with his dog, Romeo.
( THE BLADE/ANDY MORRISON )

Zoom | Photo Reprints

"She said she's serious, she's taking you out,'' Ms. Ross told him.

"Bernadette ought to be careful about making allegations of wrongdoing because there are plenty of fingers that point right back at her,'' Mr. Kidd said he replied.

Later, Mr. Kidd met with Tom Noe and asked him to ask his wife to "call off the dogs." Noe said he couldn't, Mr. Kidd recalled.

"•'What do you want me to do? I can't control her,'•" Mr. Kidd recalled Noe as saying in a recent interview with The Blade, the first he's granted since the Noe scandal broke last year.

Soon, Frank Stiles, chief investigator for the Lucas County prosecutor's office, wanted to meet with Mr. Kidd.

In the first of many meetings Mr. Kidd would have with state and federal prosecutors, Mr. Stiles asked whether he had accepted a bribe from a Diebold consultant, according to Mr. Kidd.

"I said, 'There is no truth to it. Go ahead and spend all of your time looking at it. There's nothing there. But if you really want to find something that is worth your time, you really need to look at this. You need to look at Tom and Bernadette,'•" Mr. Kidd said he told the investigator.

Federal court records show that Mr. Kidd told prosecutors, and eventually the FBI, that Tom Noe had laundered money through him to the Bush/Cheney campaign.

Mr. Kidd told the FBI that in October, 2003, he gave a $2,000 check to Noe for the President's campaign and Noe then gave him a check for $1,950 - while they were in his downtown Toledo office in the county board of elections at One Government Center.

Mr. Kidd told the agents that Ms. Noe, an elections board member at the time, came to the office with her husband and was present when the two exchanged checks.

Last month, Ms. Noe told The Blade she didn't know about the illegal campaign contributions made by her husband until shortly before an FBI raid of their Maumee condo in April, 2005.

Tom Noe, through his attorneys, declined to be interviewed for this article. His wife, in an e-mail to The Blade on Saturday, said she didn't make a "specific allegation" of a bribe taken by Mr. Kidd.

She said she went to authorities because in an earlier meeting with Mr. Kidd and a Diebold consultant, the issue of GOP fund-raising came up.

Mr. Kidd said that wasn't true.

Last month Tom Noe was convicted in U.S. District Court in Toledo of illegally laundering more than $45,000 to the Bush/Cheney campaign through two dozen "conduits," including Mr. Kidd. Noe was sentenced to 27 months in a federal penitentiary and fined $136,800.

He remains free to help his attorneys prepare for his criminal trial in Lucas County Common Pleas Court on felony charges that he embezzled more than $2 million from a $50 million rare-coin investment he set up and managed for the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation.

The trial begins tomorrow.

It was Tom Noe who gave Mr. Kidd his big break, hiring him in 1994 as executive director of the Lucas County Republican Party.

"He's young and aggressive,'' Noe told The Blade 12 years ago.

"I want someone with the fire in the belly that Beazley had 10 years ago,'' he added, referring to former Lucas County Democratic Party chairman Michael Beazley.

And in 2002, it was Noe who hired Mr. Kidd as director of the county board of elections.

But problems soon began to pop up for Mr. Kidd in his new job.

In a county where most Republicans would rather write a campaign contribution than "pick up boxes,'' Mr. Kidd said he needed help mobilizing volunteers.

So he decided to hire an old friend who needed a job - musician and GOP activist Jon Stainbrook - to work in the warehouse operated by the board of elections. The two had met as students years before at the University of Toledo.

The decision enraged a fellow Republican, county Auditor Larry Kaczala. Mr. Stainbrook had once challenged Mr. Kaczala in a primary election and lost, but the auditor was still angry, Mr. Kidd said.

As he fell out of favor with Mr. Kaczala, Mr. Kidd said Ms. Noe tried to bury him.

After taking the blame for a few mistakes which he attributed to Mr. Kaczala's office, Mr. Kidd said he had had enough. In January, 2004, new precinct boundaries weren't posted on the board of elections Web site and 15 candidates for precinct committeemen were knocked off the primary ballot.

Mr. Kidd blamed incompetency in Mr. Kaczala's information technology office. Mr. Kaczala pointed a finger back at Mr. Kidd and his oversight of the elections office.

Mr. Kidd said Mr. Kaczala's ire led Ms. Noe to ask for his resignation as director of the board of elections. At the time, Mr. Kaczala was challenging U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat.

The Noes recruited Mr. Kaczala, a popular Lucas County Republican, as a congressional candidate to boost turnout for President Bush's re-election efforts in northwest Ohio, Mr. Kidd said.

And they were in attendance at a successful May, 2004, fund-raiser in Washington for Mr. Kaczala. It drew dozens of donors and most of the Republican members of the House from Ohio. It was organized in part by Rep. Bob Ney, who has agreed to plead guilty to federal corruption charges. House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois made a guest appearance.

"This was all a way for Tom and Bernadette to arrive on the national scene,'' said Mr. Kidd, who said Ms. Noe once showed him Karl Rove's phone number on the speed dial of her cell phone.

In 2004, Tom Noe was at the height of his power.

He was northwest Ohio coordinator for the Bush/Cheney campaign, had visited the White House to celebrate Ohio State University's national championship football team, and had set his sights on Washington as a member of a U.S. Mint advisory committee.

In April, 2004, the elections board fired Mr. Kidd, citing his "disengagement" from his management duties.

Ms. Ross said that in his final months at the Board of Elections, Mr. Kidd holed up in his office with the door closed and also spent a lot of time out of the office.

"The fact is he was not doing his job,'' she said.

A month later, Mr. Kidd's mother died. His marriage had fallen apart. He said most of his friends, except for Mr. Stainbrook, stopped dropping by.

"I was poison,'' said Mr. Kidd. "Nobody knew how it would turn out. Tom and Bernadette were people to be feared at the political level because they were vindictive."

In July, 2004, Mr. Kidd landed a job in the legal department of a suburban Detroit firm that finances technology deals. He commuted from Toledo.

Four months later, President Bush won re-election. Democrat John Kerry conceded after concluding that Mr. Bush had carried Ohio.

On April 3, 2005, The Blade published an article about how the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation had invested $50 million in rare-coin funds controlled by Tom Noe - a Toledo-area coin dealer and GOP fund-raiser.

The newspaper reported that the state continued to invest in the coin funds despite problems documented by an internal state auditor.

The audit determined that two gold coins worth roughly $300,000 were lost in the mail in 2003, and that Noe had written off hundreds of thousands of dollars in state funds as bad debt.

In late April, 2005, two FBI agents showed up at the suburban Detroit office where Mr. Kidd works.

A receptionist called to say he had visitors.

The agents turned their backs to the receptionist before flashing their badges.

"We'd like to talk to you,'' one of the agents said.

The company's sole conference room was being used, so Mr. Kidd and the two FBI agents met in an office with glass walls.

The FBI agents said they wanted to talk to Mr. Kidd about the Oct. 30, 2003, fund-raiser in Columbus for Mr. Bush.

"They pulled out this big chart of all the conduits. It was like something you would see in the movies,'' Mr. Kidd said.

The chart had little drawings of Tom and Bernadette Noe's heads at the top, with lines connecting to dozens of people they used to funnel money to the President's campaign.

The agents offered Mr. Kidd immunity from prosecution if he would provide information about Tom and Bernadette Noe.

"If you do not accept it, it will not be offered again,'' Mr. Kidd recalls one of the agents telling him.

Mr. Kidd contacted his Toledo attorney, Jerry Phillips.

Mr. Kidd recalls him saying: "Go ahead and tell them everything you know. Do not lie. If you don't know something, say I don't know. The worst thing to do is give wrong or misleading information. Be cooperative."

He was cooperative, telling the agents everything he had told county prosecutors.

But he had a question for the FBI agents.

"Where have you guys been? I've been on pins and needles for a year," Mr. Kidd told them.

A year had passed since Mr. Kidd had told his story to the Lucas County prosecutor's office in April, 2004. Why had it taken so long for the FBI to find him?

The agents told him that investigations take time and must be thorough.

Last year, months after finding no evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Kidd, county prosecutor Julia Bates said her office received its first substantial evidence of Noe's illicit campaign activity in late September, 2004, with the return of bank records secured by a grand jury subponea.

But because one of her investigators was on vacation when the records came in, they weren't seen until mid-October.

The next day, she turned over the information to the U.S. Attorney's office.

After the 2 1/2-hour interview with the FBI agents ended, a co-worker approached Mr. Kidd.

"What was going on?'' the co-worker asked Mr. Kidd. "It looked like you were being interrogated by the FBI."

"That's funny,'' Mr. Kidd replied.

The same day that FBI agents interviewed Mr. Kidd, Greg White, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, confirmed publicly that Noe was under investigation for possible violation of federal campaign finance laws. The U.S. attorney's office declined to comment for this article.

Mr. Kidd is comfortable with his role in uncovering the crime because he felt he needed to make amends.

"I took a bad choice and set it right,'' he said.

But Mr. Kaczala, the auditor, doesn't see it that way.

Mr. Kaczala, who is running for re-election against Democrat Anita Lopez, said he doesn't believe Mr. Kidd spoke to prosecutors about Noe's campaign finance violations out of any "intention of doing something right."

"I think it was a defensive action after being accused of something,'' Mr. Kaczala said.

Mr. Kidd said in the years that he spent time with the Noes, they didn't act differently away from the spotlight.

Ms. Noe often said no one messed with the Noes, Mr. Kidd recalled.

"They were hard-nosed political people. They didn't like to lose. Second worst to losing was someone opposing them, disobeying a directive. The only change over the years was they grew more powerful and more wealthy, and their wishes and desires could be carried out to a greater degree of success,'' Mr. Kidd said.

Like Mr. Kidd, Jim Mettler and Allen Roy have seen both sides of the Noes. Mr. Mettler, now a vice president for the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority, was an active Republican who sought the state representative seat once held by Sally Perz.

After a brief intraparty scramble, he was appointed to the post in 1999. Once he was appointed, the Noes supported him during his unsuccessful bid to retain the seat in 2000 against then-schoolteacher Teresa Fedor.

But afterward, his relationship with the Noes turned chilly. He suspects it had something to do with his alternative network of support that he and others had built for other local Republicans; he said they didn't need to rely solely on the county GOP, which was then dominated by the Noes.

"They liked to have you beholden to them. They liked to have you need them and owe them," Mr. Mettler said.

Then, after the loss in 2000, the Mettler-Noe relationship was over.

"There was no gray with them. They loved you or hated you," he said.

Two years later, Mr. Roy would be able to sympathize.

He was a young, energetic Republican who loved politics. He had worked on several campaigns, including President Bush's 2000 victorious campaign, and worked for Maggie Thurber when she was clerk of the Toledo Municipal Court.

In 2002, he waged an aggressive campaign to unseat Peter Ujvagi, a Democratic fixture in East Toledo who was a state representative. Like Mr. Mettler, he ultimately lost.

After earlier having the support of the Noes, Mr. Roy found himself in the wilderness. His political world shrank considerably when word got out that the Noes were no longer in his corner.

"My phone stopped ringing," he said. The episode left a sour taste in his mouth: He said last week it caused him to stop considering himself a Republican. He now manages a clothing store in the Cleveland suburb of Rocky River.

Last month Mr. Kidd moved to Detroit, where he lives in a loft on the top floor of a former warehouse near downtown. He is divorced and has filed for bankruptcy.

He said he has no vendetta against the Noes.

"He loved Tom,'' said Paula Hicks-Hudson, a Democrat who was deputy director of the Lucas County Board of Elections when Mr. Kidd was director. "He would have taken a bullet for Tom."

Mr. Kidd said he doesn't deserve forgiveness for his role in the Noe scandal.

David Lewandowski, the former Lucas County auditor who gave him his start in politics, said Mr. Kidd shouldn't feel that way.

"Part of it is politics. It's just a big grinder. And sometimes you get ground. And sometimes you're the grindee,'' Mr. Lewandowski said.

With polls showing that Ohio Democrats - who have been swept by the GOP in all races for statewide executive posts since 1994 - are in striking distance to turn the tables, Mr. Kidd said the "electorate is very smart and it means we have not lost a moral compass as a society."

"You've got to turn the soil over once in a while to get a healthy crop,'' he said.

Staff writer Steve Eder contributed to this report.

Contact James Drew at:
jdrew@theblade.com
or 614-221-0496.

Permanent Link