A former Michigan state trooper tells a different story of Dan Gilbert’s arrest on operation of gambling business than the Cavs owner has been peddling to the news media. Gilbert has made it seem a minor episode, best forgotten.

Gilbert, a billionaire of the mortgage business and owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, has been a lead proponent of a monopoly casino issue on the November ballot. Issue 3 will give Gilbert a monopoly casino in Cleveland.

A lieutenant detective tells of the arrest of Gilbert when he was a Michigan student. He posed as the father of a gambling debtor. He said a victim told him of a strong-armed threat unless he paid. He also linked a car filled with manure to the betting business as a method of forcing collections of gambling debts.

The detective, John Fiedler recorded the meeting with Gilbert when he went to pay the debt. He said he was shown a ledger with betting data with pages of bets made, some as high as $1,000 or more.

Here is his statement in full:

My name is John Fiedler, and I was a member of the Michigan Department of State Police for 25 years.

“Today, Atlantic City, in the eyes of one gambling executive, Tim Wilmott, is in a ‘death spiral,’” that’s the tone of a Sunday New York Times piece on the financial troubles of the city’s casinos.

“Rows of slot machines stand eerily empty,” says the story while hotel rooms are empty. Many casinos have experienced double digit revenue drops, the report said.

The article is far from a hatchet job. However, it does have a cautionary message to Cleveland and other Ohio cities where casinos would go if Issue 3 is passed.

Cleveland will be rolling the dice next Tuesday when voters go into the booths to cast a vote that would give a billionaire a monopoly board contract for a Cleveland casino.

“The economic slowdown has shown that the gambling industry is not quite as recession-proof as was so long believed,” it said of Atlantic City.

And you might like to remember as you go into that booth the promise of Atlantic City’s gambling sales people:

“Billed as a ‘great experiment’ in urban redevelopment, legalized gambling was pitched to voters as an effort to reverse Atlantic City’s long decline…”

Sound familiar?

The office of Governor Ted Strickland announced today that that Ohio energy research projects have received more than $17.3 in stimulus money. One of the recipients was right here in Cuyahoga County as Momentive Performance Materials of Strongsville was awarded $4.5 Million. Here is the full release from the Governors office:

Ohio Governor Ted Strickland today congratulated four Ohio projects that received more than $17.3 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy for advanced energy research. These projects were among $151 million in federal funding awarded to 37 major research projects nationwide from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

“We are grateful to Secretary Chu and the U.S. Department of Energy for providing these funds, which will allow us to enhance our state’s advanced energy capacity, and to the Ohio congressional delegation for supporting the Recovery Act and Ohio’s applications,” Strickland said. “Being among awardees such as MIT and Stanford University is a testament to Ohio’s competitive position in the advanced energy field.”

The general election is fast approaching and everyone seems to have an opinion on Issue 3 which would bring in casinos to the Buckeye State if it were to pass next Tuesday. The Downtown Cleveland Alliance came in with a late endorsement today writing in a press release:

Downtown Cleveland: The Downtown Cleveland Alliance (DCA) formally announced its support for State Issue 3 today. The Alliance joins the Greater Cleveland Partnership in its backing of the constitutional amendment that would legalize casino gambling in Cleveland, Toledo, Cincinnati and Columbus.

“Our number one mission is the continual progress of Downtown into a thriving, urban core for our entire region,” says John Carney, Chairman of the Downtown Cleveland Alliance Board. “Issue 3 has the potential to be a major benefit to our local economy, if it is done right. We feel strongly that Dan Gilbert’s downtown proposal will ensure the maximum benefit to Downtown and the surrounding region by building on the investments the private and public sectors have already made.”

Former Congressman Dennis Eckart has joined the party. He’s backing Issue 3. That makes it almost unanimous – every shyster in town is backing a monopoly casino for a billionaire.

What a wonderful town this is.

Eckart, a former Greater Cleveland Growth Association (now Greater Cleveland Partnership) top boss, played a liberal politician for years. It’s has been a money-maker as Eckart has become a corporate shill here.

WKYC-TV allows this lobbyist free air access many Sunday mornings on Tom Beres’s Between the Lines. A lobbyist as a political commentator. Do you go any lower?

WKYC reports that Eckart will fill-in for billionaire mortgage man and Cavalier owner Dan Gilbert He is supposedly ill. Gilbert will be one of the owners of a monopoly casino, if voters approve Issue 3, a constitutional change on Election Day.

Eckart will argue for Gilbert’s casino deal in a debate at Kent State University. He is a trustee at KSU.

Once a Golden Boy liberal politician, Eckart has bounced around after leaving Congress. He has been with law firms Baker & Hostetler and the now bankrupt Arter & Hadden. He served in Congress from 1981 to 1993, leaving to pursue business interests as the Republicans took ownership of the U. S. Congress.

East Cleveland Mayor Eric Brewer eviscerates Issue 6 promoters and their promoter, the Pee Dee, our morning voice from Corporate Headquarters.

Hard to disagree. Read it yourself:

Statement from Mayor Eric J. Brewer regarding Issue 6

October 25, 2009 - City of East Cleveland

“The hell with the Plain Dealer’s opinion. Vote NO on Issue 6.”

Bill Mason has presided over the Cuyahoga County prosecutor's office since 1998 and it's been the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI investigating all the corruption that's taken place in county since he's held office. Mason didn't prosecute Emmanuel Onunwor, he counted him as a friend. He didn't prosecute Nate Gray, he counted him as a political donor. I'm still waiting for him to return the donation to the businessman who was investigated and prosecuted by the FBI and U.S. Attorney for money laundering.

Martin Zanotti manages Parma Heights, but his 2007 audit shows he overspent his budget by nearly $1 million without Council authorization, and authorized 59 percent of his purchase orders to be pushed through without the finance director's signature. He's on his way out the door because he's a poor public manager, but the Plain Dealer thinks he's a genius.

I’d have to agree with Elizabeth Sullivan’s Sunday column saying newspaper should take the responsibility of endorsing candidates and issues. I don’t agree, however, that they do it because they “care.” That’s giving them a little too much credit.

I think unfortunately that the closed way they make their endorsements are a disservice to the public.

The Pee Dee and other papers are always calling for “openness” from others. However, the decisions of the Pee Dee editorials provide no “openness.” They are closed about it. Kept mysterious as electing a pope.

We don’t know who wrote them. We don’t know if there was a vote, as we understand there is on certain matters. We don’t know if it was a 5-4 vote or a 6-0 vote. The score would make a big difference in how a reader would interpret the endorsement.

We don’t know, for example, whether Editor Susan Goldberg put any pressure for an Issue 3 editorial supporting the casino gambling issue here. My suspicion is she did. The fact that we don’t know the vote creates mistrust. The Pee Dee can’t afford any more mistrust.

We don’t know if Kevin O’Brien wrote a particular editorial. We could judge by the strong hints of immaturity in the writing. His columns, for example, are more jokes than considered conservatism. He is a disservice to real conservatives.

I’ve been going over a lot of personal history as I pass my 50th year of some of kind of reporting. What became clear to me is that I became disenchanted with newspapers very early in that time. My distrust came quickly.

Newspapers – or as some call them now, MSM (mainstream media) – long ago destroyed much of their credibility. They became voices of the establishment. They reflect conventional corporate ideas and values. They fail miserably to support of the needs of the poor, the poorly educated, and the unfairly treated.

They have upside down coverage of the most powerful, favoring the influential almost automatically. So-called objectivity substitutes for truth-telling. The scales were rigged, it was clear to me early on.

Newspapers cannot survive if they continue to represent those interests and values.

The New York Times last week said that it had more revenue from subscribers than advertisers. That’s really how it should be.

The Akron Mayor's squabbles with the city's firefighters and police department got even stranger today. Don Plusquellic says that fireman have offered a bounty to policeman of $1,000 if they successfully pop him with a DUI. Plusquellic calls the actions 'immature, rogue firefighters".

The fireman union says that the allegations are not true stating:

''I think this was bar talk — somebody kidding around or something like that,'' Union president Fred Hlynsky said. ''It sounds to me like people are taking sides in this whole thing and hanging on every word that may have been said.''

The Public Animal Welfare Society came out against State Issue 2 in a press release. If passed, the amendment would create a board of 13 who would oversee the agriculture business. The official wording reads it "Require the state to create the Livestock Care Standards Board to prescribe standards for animal care and well-being that endeavor to maintain food safety, encourage locally grown and raised food, and protect Ohio farms and families.

The groups chairperson Patti Fisher says in a press release:

I definitely want PAWS to go on record as being apposed to Issue 2. What scares me is that people will be mislead into believing that if they vote "yes", they are voting to put a stop to inhumane treatment of animals, when in fact, Issue 2 requires NO CHANGE in the way animals are treated!

It's a proposed constitutional amendment to create the Ohio Livestock Care Standards Board. If a regulatory board is created by a constitutional amendment, Ohioans will give away their voice, their right and ability to hold this board accountable for any decisions they make, or actions they take.

19 Action News is reporting that Akron Mayor Don Plusquellic was stopped early on Saturday morning on suspicion of DUI. The reports state that the embattled Mayor, who underwent recall vote and has been have public squabbles with the Akron police force, was stopped when a woman called police and described a vehicle like his that had almost run her off the road.

Plusquellic made news earlier this year for intervening in a bar fight which the police union saw as unprofessional. It will be interesting to see how the latest allegations play out or if this could be just the Akron police force playing hardball with a Mayor that they have public disdain for.