During the Iran-Contra investigation, Fawn Hall proved a secretary with a high school education could out-think a room full of senators.
In the early 2000s, Hugh Gaughan proved a school janitor with a GED could out-investigate the HR department of a big city school system.
Cleveland is on many lists for least desirable places to live in America. One survey noted its poor weather, its usually crappy sports teams, and its generations of corruption turned off many to the idea of coming to live in or near the Mistake by the Lake. (At least you could light the Cuyahoga River on fire if it was cold.)
So Cleveland was a likely place for public employee union corruption. And Hugh, a custodian in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, found it in spades.
In the early 2000s, Hugh got off on the wrong foot with his new boss, a school principal named Beverly Valencic. Hugh said she got ticked off at him when she announced her royal highness and told him her first name was Beverly, and he gave the low-class pop-off reply, “Like the Beverly Hillbillies?”
In 2002, Hugh had to move a girl out of his way with a hand push so she wouldn’t get hurt by a large piece of furniture he was moving. His school principal Ms. Beverly decided to show she could call names, too, so she called Hugh a sex offender. Co-workers teased him unmercifully, so Hugh decided to defend himself.
Hugh sued principal Beverly Valencic for slandering him. He alleged other school employees wrongfully mocked him due to her slander. He pointed out he had molested no one and she reported him for no wrongdoing, like an educator is supposed to do if she or he suspects any potential abuse of children, so she knew what she had said about him was false. She paid him an undisclosed sum to settle the case out of court.
Hugh then did something much bigger. He determined to find real sex offenders and other felons in the Cleveland school system and expose them so they could be fired. Hugh had read one of my books and decided to be his own detective. He wanted to see if what I was telling people would work.
In 2003, Hugh got a copy of the list of employees in the school district (which is a public record), and matched them against the criminal records of Cuyahoga County.
The list of employees of any government agency (except groups like the CIA, who shield good people and a large number of sociopaths) is a public record. So are the salaries of these people. You are entitled to obtain this record on any agency you choose by filing a freedom of information request with the appropriate agent at the agency. Call them or check them out on the Internet to find out.
Hugh, who has epilepsy and Tourette’s syndrome, stutters occasionally and speaks with a tic. So people look down on him. But we at Sherlock Justice don’t measure a man’s smarts or his heart or his guts by his personal appearance or by his smoothness of speech. Hugh obtained the list of employees and went to work anyway.
Hugh found roughly 10 employees were either sexual predators or other felons who the school personnel officials had not screened properly or knowingly allowed into the school system due to cronyism (ties to unions or politicians or school system personnel). This was in violation of Ohio state law, which forbids the hiring and retention of felons in the schools.
Hugh turned over this list of felons to TV investigative reporter Carl Monday. In early 2004, Monday, after finding a dozen or so more convicted felons on the school payroll on his own, ran a TV program on the scandal on Cleveland TV, which provoked a major outcry, and won him an award for investigative reporting.
Hugh’s union “brothers” figured out Hugh was the confidential source behind the outings. They were displeased he turned in “good union brothers” because they were rapists or drug dealers or vicious thugs. They didn’t care Hugh was helping children. They “expressed concern” he was narcing out union members who happened to be felons.
Union men “express concern” a little differently than most people. Good union brothers started threatening Hugh with bodily harm. Hugh’s union was Laborers International Union Local 860, the union they featured in the movie “To Kill the Irishman.” The present union boss, Anthony Liberatore Jr. is the son of the union boss involved in the bomb hit on Danny Greene which was the inspiration for the movie.
Hugh Gaughan — he cared about protecting school kids from predators
So Hugh went to school district officials and asked for some form of whistleblower protection. The internal affairs A-hole who heard his request snarked, “Why don’t you get see if you can get it from Carl Monday?” Of course Hugh, not the internal affairs loser, outed the perps and by doing so showed up HR people and internal affairs people up as a stooges parasiting their salaries off of the taxpayers.
School officials, seizing on a dispute Hugh had with another worker and a dispute he had with Her Nibs Ms. Valencic, ordered him to undergo psychological evaluation.
This is a tactic the Communists have used often against dissidents. After all, the Reds felt, anyone who disagreed with their pirate Communist regime couldn’t be rational. The shrink, basically an opinion whore retained by the school system to slime inconvenient people like Hugh, acknowledged the principal had sullied Hugh’s name, that Hugh had outed a number of criminals, and that Hugh received threats against his safety. He still ruled Hugh unfit for duty.
Hugh hired a psychologist, who noted Hugh’s actions were those of a normal red-blooded blue-collar male when confronted by the scumbag employees and supervisors and educators who surrounded him. Hugh’ consulting psychologist also noted the opinion whore did a poor professional job of evaluating Hugh when measured against professional standards of psychologists. Hugh kept his job.
Hugh continued exposing felons, but now did so openly since he was a known whistleblower. Hugh found 20 or so more felons after the Carl Monday TV exposé, including three in the first half of 2013, his last half-year on the job. Hugh reported them all to school district officials. They kept some of the criminals on the payroll despite these disclosures.
Hugh also drew up a list of employees who had domestic violence arrests or “issues.” One of those on this list was school bus driver Ariel Castro. His story comes later.
In December 2008, a female Cleveland Metropolitan School District security guard apparently used a student to concoct sexual misconduct accusations against Hugh. The security guard then falsified an investigation report about these allegations. School district officials compounded the security guard’s evident felony, and fired Hugh in March 2009. They did this, even after the Cleveland Police Department sex crimes investigator cleared Hugh and said his accusers were not believable.
A federal arbitrator did a little checking of his own. He reviewed the layout of the school, including videotape Hugh had taken to prove the student’s and security guard’s story was false, against the bungling falsehoods the school district’s top dogs and bitches put out. He noted the teacher who was responsible for the student said the boy ran down a flight of stairs into a bathroom, and ran back up within 30 seconds, which was corroborating evidence of Hugh’s story. Hugh said he saw the kid speed into the can and told the kid to get out of the john and get back to class.
The arbitrator noted the Cleveland Police sex crimes investigator cleared Hugh and concluded the student and the security guard were lying. He also noted the security guard was unable to produce written notes for her report, an official took a report from her verbally that was full of holes and distorted it further, and the woman who ruled to fire Hugh did so even though she knew the police had exonerated him. Her excuse? She didn’t have the police report in writing. The dog ate her homework. Or maybe her brain, after she sneezed it into a handkerchief.
The arbitrator in May 2010 ordered Hugh restored to work, and ordered the school district to pay him for all the months he was out of work. The lying security guard kept her job despite committing felony perjury or falsification, take your pick.
In 2012, Cleveland school district officials wrongfully leaked Hugh’s shrink evaluation from 2004 to yet another shrink and opinion whore. This shrink, one Deborah Koricke, apparently falsely tried to label Hugh a head case and wigged out when Hugh refused to meekly submit to the school board Stalinism. Hugh also turned her in to the Ohio state board whose members discipline shrinks who behave unethically and/or unprofessionally.
Cleveland school district “deputy chief of Human Resources” Donna Bowen (someone who should have been checking on felons in the schools) was apparently complicit in the shrink smearing by illegally releasing Hugh’s records, Hugh charged. Hugh turned in the school district officials to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In late 2012, Cleveland school officials agreed to pay Hugh $15,000 for offenses they committed against him, including wrongfully releasing his medical records. They evidently did so not out of a sense of justice, but out of a sense of fear Hugh could beat them for even more in court.
Cleveland school district officials, unfazed by their latest loss, decided to trump up a negligence of duty accusation against Hugh after he committed a minor infraction on the job. Hugh videotaped them at the hearing so he could prove they were lying. They fired him not for negligence of duty, but for insubordination in taping them against their wishes when they were conducting a hearing against him. Hugh had offered to pay a secretary to take notes, but they refused his offer.
One of Hugh’s persecutors was Nick Jackson, brother of Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson, and Chief of Business Operations of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. Nick Jackson has been accused multiple times of sexual harassment, incompetence, and inability to manage security and construction projects he was allowed to run. He has the job in the opinion of many because he is still the mayor’s brother. Hugh’s disciplinary hearing was postponed in May 2013 because Nick Jackson couldn’t make it. The high-ranking knucklehead had hurt himself while doing some drag racing.
Hugh’s union steward said he saw nothing wrong with Hugh’s actions in videotaping the hearing. After all, school officials had lied against him in the past when they thought they could get away with it. Ohio state law also does not forbid the accused from videotaping such a disciplinary hearing. But the chief union attorney failed to file a timely appeal, so Hugh lost his job. Hugh complained about the lawyer’s negligence. The mouthpiece then claimed he exercised discretion not to defend Hugh even though the union steward who accompanied Hugh to the disciplinary hearing defended Hugh’s taping action. Hugh accused the union’s top lawyer of either incompetence in missing a filing date or unethical conduct in tanking a legitimate grievance by refusing to file an appeal of the decision to fire him, as it was his duty as a union attorney to do.
Attorney Dirk Van Capias, who represented Hugh for a charity (vastly reduced) fee in an earlier case against the school district, said bitterly, “When it comes to whistleblowers, public sector unions are just another layer of management.”
Cleveland school district officials fired Hugh Gaughan May 15, 2013. Days earlier, neighbors of Cleveland school bus driver Ariel Castro and police rescued the three females he used as sex slaves from his house. Castro was jailed, pleaded guilty, and hanged himself in his prison cell.
Castro was on Hugh Gaughan’s watch list in 2003 because he had been charged with domestic violence in 1993. Hugh noted to school officials such school employees bore closer watching because of their proneness for violence against weaker women and children.
Castro, his wife’s relatives said, locked her in, beat her, broke her nose and dislocated her shoulders, threw her down a flight of stairs, knocked out one of her teeth, and otherwise beat her so badly he caused her brain damage and partial paralysis. She finally left him in 1996 and took their daughters with her. But Castro would abduct his daughters repeatedly. He didn’t have primary custody of them. In 2005, Castro’s ex-wife filed a restraining order against him after he abused her yet again. She died in 2012.
Police busted Castro in 2000 for driving with false license plates. This is a ploy abductors use to grab girls and young women so they can avoid being accurately ID’ed and arrested.
State officials suspended Castro’s driving license in 2004. But Cleveland school district officials did not stop him from driving their buses loaded with children. Not even after he made an unsafe turn in traffic and put a busload of kids in harm’s way.
School district officials fired Castro late in 2012 for leaving a bus at a school near his house unsecured. He said he walked home to rest. Beating and raping girls in chains is hard work.
The only group of government officials who cared about Castro as a lawbreaker were county tax officials. He fell behind on his property taxes after his firing, so they sent him a note saying they were foreclosing on him and intended to come out to the house. They mailed it the day the girls were rescued from Castro’s dungeon house. If neighbors hadn’t acted that night, Castro might well have murdered them to cover up what he had been doing to them for a decade.
“We’re the government. We’re here to help.”
If the school district officials had done a safety and security check at Castro’s home, ccompanied by police, similar to the treatment they were giving Hugh, they would have found the girls Castro had kidnaped and was raping routinely. If Cleveland school district officials had listened to Hugh instead of covering up for felons and engaging in continual harassment against him, they might have been able to save those girls many years of captivity, torture, and sexual abuse from a Cleveland public schools employee.
Hugh was undaunted even in defeat. He pointed out when his work became public in 2004, one-time Cleveland school district chief Barbara Byrd-Bennett claimed her people didn’t check on school employees committing crimes once they had jobs because it would cost “a half-million dollars a year” to check every one of the school district’s 5000 or so non-licensed employee, like janitors, bus drivers, and cafeteria workers. (She didn’t even give a figure on what it would cost to test the 5000 to 6000 teachers, counselors, shrinks, and school administrators. Compared to other professions, teachers have a very high rate of sex abuse and they have unions and co-workers who will defend them.)
Hugh called Ms. Byrd-Bennett a liar who floated the $500,000 figure to defuse criticism of her for allowing so many felons to have school district jobs. Hugh said all she had to do was force all teachers, other licensed school employees, and blue-collar types like himself to pay for a police screening – about $25 apiece – and then make them pay the extra money ($15 or so per employee) it would cost to have a responsible school district official – assuming one could be found – to analyze the results each year. For the sake of fairness they could charge income-adjusted amounts so principals, teachers, and administrators would pay more, and janitors and cafeteria workers and other laborers would pay less.
Barbara Byrd-Bennett was later axed like a chicken for Sunday dinner. Her offenses? She underachieved at getting education standards up, and she allowed waste and fraud costing many millions of dollars to take place on school construction projects.
It is sadly ironic that Cleveland Metropolitan School District officials fired Hugh as a custodian for doing his job – cleaning the dirt out of the schools.
However, being a janitor with a GED and handicaps didn’t stop Hugh from trying to protect kids by using the public record. He did a more thorough job of exposing child molesters and other filthy felons than the entire HR department of one of the nation’s largest school districts. Why? Unlike them, Hugh cared about the quality of his work. You can do likewise.
SHERLOCK JUSTICE
WE CAN SHOW YOU HOW TO BE YOUR OWN DETECTIVE
END NOTES
Info on Laborers International Union of North America Local 860 union boss Anthony Liberatore and the Danny Green murder come from Edward Whelan’s article in the August 1978 Cleveland Magazine and from a 6/15/1993 Cleveland Plain Dealer article.
Info on the Hugh Gaughan case and Ariel Castro and the Cleveland Metropolitan School District comes from my extensive interviews with Hugh and my review of his records. Info also comes from a 2/6/2004 article by Carl Monday for WKYC-TV in Cleveland, a 5/9/2013 article in The Telegraph, a British paper, and a 10/11/2006 article by Lisa Rab for the Cleveland Scene. Gaughan’s case against the Cleveland principal is Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Case No. CV-04-549396).
Info also comes from Case No. 2004 CRH 003337 (suspension of Castro’s driving license), Case No. 2000 TRD 089278 (driving with a false license plate), Case No. CR-94-305609-ZA (wife-beating, which Castro’s then-wife took back later),
Case No. CV-96-314390 (in which the father of a girl sued Castro for her and won her some money), and Case CV-13- 806496 (the property tax foreclosure case). These cases were in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court or in Cleveland Municipal Court.
Info also comes from the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, whose officials released Castro’s disciplinary file after he was arrested for the serial sexual abuse of the girls. They were looking to distance themselves from this monster who they put with children for many years. Per this record, Cleveland school district officials disciplined him in 2004 for leaving a child in a school bus while he went to get some fast food, in 2009 for making an unsafe U-turn with a busload of kids in rush hour traffic, in 2011 for using a bus to shop for groceries, and in 2012 for leaving a bus unsecured near his home.
Barbara Byrd-Bennett later got a gig as the CEO for the Chicago public school system. Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, a Clinton and Obama minion, hired her. She pled guilty to wire fraud for steering no-bid contracts worth more than $20 million to a firm she used to work for. The firm’s owner evidently promised to kick back $2 million to her after her term as the school system chieftess. She was forced to leave her post prematurely, and is looking at a prison sentence for her corruption, according to a 10/14/2015 Chicago Tribune article. The Tribune’s reporters also noted the firm’s owner was a crony of Emanuel, that Emanuel also appointed the school board members who rubber-stamped the no bid contracts, and that Emanuel’s staffers fought the release of public records on the no-bid contracts scandal.
