Reporters, records led path to Black

JACK BETTS

RALEIGH --

In late 2003, three Observer reporters started checking up on contributors to then-Speaker Jim Black after a political watchdog group noticed his campaign committees had gotten more money than any other candidate from video poker interests.

Bob Hall of Democracy North Carolina found that Black's committees had gotten more than $100,000 from video gaming interests in the previous two-year election cycle. It was especially interesting because legislation to outlaw video poker had twice passed the N.C. Senate, but not the House where Black presided.

Scott Dodd, Jim Morrill and Rich Rubin reported a few days before Christmas 2003 that while the video poker industry had pumped tons of money into Black's most recent campaign coffers, some individual contributors listed on campaign finance disclosure reports didn't even know they had given money,

"Five hundred?" asked Jean Jarvis of Wilkesboro, whose spouse was in the video game business. "And who is this guy?"

That's the sort of suspicious thing that kept reporters and investigators on Black's trail. That path led eventually to a seventh-floor courtroom of the federal building in Raleigh and a 10th-floor courtroom in the Wake County Courthouse. Black pleaded guilty to one federal charge and, in effect, guilty to two state felonies as well.

None of it might have come to light without North Carolina's public records and campaign finance disclosure laws. They are an enormously valuable public asset, constituting a kind of baseline defense against public corruption. They hold clues pointing toward all kinds of problems.

...[snip]...

And in recent weeks the Observer's David Ingram and Rick Rothacker have mined eye-opening data from disclosure reports filed by State Treasurer Richard Moore. They show his campaign has gotten at least $736,000 since 1999 from employees of 42 outside investment firms that do business with Moore's office investing N.C. pension funds.

There is nothing illegal about that arrangement. Moore didn't invent it and isn't the first to use it. But it's the kind pay-to-play transaction that infects N.C. politics with a potentially deadly virus.

---

Charlotte Observer

Methinks the reporters are just now cotton to the fact that the entire power structure of North Carolina politics are honeycombed with this sort of dealing, or so they would have us believe. I have a Hot Tip for them, why don't they check Democratic voter rolls of those who voted, and ask the voters if they voted.