299 Days: The Preparation (15 page)

The WAB staff, including Grant, went to the Republican election night “victory party.” Grant had gone to one a few years earlier but quit going. They were like funerals. There never were any “victories” on election night.

The first returns came in a little after 8:00 p.m. Menlow was winning but it was surprisingly close, though, 52% to 48%. A drunken lunatic running over a child still got almost enough votes to win with a “D” after her name. Grant hoped that those voters simply didn’t know what had happened. But, with the constant repeating of the video of her on TV, most of the people in the state must have seen her running over that little girl. That meant a sizable portion were still voting for the State Auditor because she had that all-important “D” after her name on the ballot.

WAB staff were invited to Menlow’s hotel room at the party. At this joyous moment, they were all silent. They still couldn’t believe that a Republican—and one who promised reforms, no less— might actually win an election in ultra-leftist Washington State.

Then Menlow’s cell phone rang. Everyone knew what that meant. The concession call from the other side.

Menlow was very polite and respectful. When he hung up he wasn’t smiling. He looked scared.

“Well, that was the concession call.” Menlow said, still very disturbed. “Oh crap. We won. Now what do we do?”

Menlow’s campaign manager, an attractive and savvy-looking young woman named Jeanie Thompson, blurted out, “Dunno. Maybe a transition team?” Everyone in the room laughed. No one had any plan whatsoever for actually winning. This was the first time it had actually crossed their minds.

Menlow pointed at Tom and said, “We need to talk.” It was pretty obvious that the people in the hotel room would be the transition team. It was an electric feeling. Finally! The good guys had won. We can do some good things, Grant thought. Finally. It was their turn to fix things.

Not surprisingly, WAB essentially ran the transition. There was no one in the Washington State Republican Party who remembered how to do one since they hadn’t won any statewide elections in over thirty years.

So WAB just made it up as they went along. Grant, Ben, and Brian were the main WAB people working the transition team. They were Olympia insiders and knew all the things necessary to come into a state agency and transform it.

The ring leader of the old State Auditor’s bureaucrats was Nancy Ringman. She was the Chief of Staff. She was a hateful little troll.

Like most of the other people running Washington State (and the rest of the country at that point), she was a baby boomer. Similar to so many others of her generation, she grew up in the 1950s and early 1960s, was raised by “squares,” rebelled against all that was official American squaredom in the late 1960s and early 1970s, went to college and learned about how great socialism was, got various jobs, and excelled in her career. She had to prove “woman power” to everyone and do it all: career and kids, although the career was more important. She had to be tougher than any man because the “old boys” would try to trip her up.

The problem with that mantra was that there were fewer and fewer “old boys.” Most of the work force at the management level, especially in government, were either female baby boomers like Nancy Ringman or feminized male baby boomers who felt guilty about being male and didn’t want to look “macho.”

Nancy Ringman revered government. It could solve all problems. In her mind, the only bad thing in the world was people who got in the government’s way. Why did those people oppose all the great things government could do? They were greedy, that’s why. Greedy people wanted to keep their ill-gotten gains.

Nancy was the typical Olympia bureaucrat, and she lived in the Cedars, along with Grant. She knew that Grant worked at WAB, which meant that he was one of those evil people.

Grant didn’t really recognize Nancy at first. He didn’t recognize most of the people who lived in his neighborhood. One day, when Grant was over at the State Auditor’s Office meeting with the new Auditor-elect, Nancy saw him. To say that she hated Grant was an understatement. But her job was on the line so she thought she’d try the pleasantries that had gotten her this far.

“Oh, hi, Grant,” she said. “I’m Nancy Ringman. Your adorable children come over to trick or treat. I’m on Whitman Street. I understand you’re helping Auditor-elect Menlow on, ” she couldn’t bear to say “transition.” “Helping him on some matters,” she finally said. Nancy was trying to smile, but it was coming off as gritting her teeth.

Grant didn’t hate Nancy, although he would be entitled to. He just thought of her as typical of everything that’s wrong. She and the rest of the government-worshipping baby boomers needed to make room for a new generation of people. The new generation who had borne the brunt of all this wonderful government and knew what was wrong with the utopia the baby boomers had created— and who weren’t so corrupted by the system that they could actually fix things. All Grant could think when he was talking to her was, “Get out of the way.” But he didn’t say it out loud.

Obviously the old Chief of Staff would need to go. That was a top-level change that Menlow himself needed to do. Grant, Ben, and Brian would do all the rest of the firings. At first, Grant felt bad about firing people, although most were crappy at their jobs and many of them were lazy. They all, to one degree or another, had covered up bad things. But it was still hard to fire someone.

They all had jobs waiting for them in some other state agency. The government knew how to take care of its own. The State Auditor’s Office hacks would come out of this unscathed. They didn’t see it that way, though. Even though they had guaranteed jobs— most were actually making more at their new agencies run by fellow Democrats —they still felt entitled to do the job they wanted to do. They actually felt it was entirely their choice which job they had. And, in the past, they had always got what they wanted. The old Auditor’s staff viewed the voters as idiots who were meddling in their careers.

The question was how deep the firings would go. Of course, WAB thought they should go very deep. Clean house.

Menlow, however, was a nice guy. He didn’t want to fire everyone. He was a politician; why make enemies he didn’t need to?

“If we fire everyone, who will run the agency?” Menlow asked them in one of their meetings. “Now that I’m the Auditor, if this place screws up it’s my fault.” In hindsight, this should have been a clue to Grant that Menlow wasn’t a reformer but rather just a new bureaucrat.

Ben could see what was happening. He dealt with politicians all the time. “Yeah, but you ran for this office to change things. To start doing good things. Remember when we asked what you’d do different and you said, ‘my job.’ Well, your job is to fire these corrupt shitbags.”

Menlow frowned at the “s” word; he didn’t like swearing. He regained his composure and said, “Yeah, I guess you guys are right. But let’s leave the rank and file workers. They didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Yes, they did,” Grant said. He retold the story of rank and file State Auditor’s employees not doing anything about Sellarman at the Real Estate Board. Grant gave other examples of State Auditor’s employees who hadn’t lifted a finger even when irrefutable evidence of corruption was presented to them.

“Besides,” Grant said to Menlow, “even if the rank and file didn’t personally do bad things, they have loyalties to the people who made the decisions.”

“And,” Brian added, “Because so many illegal things have happened in the State Auditor’s Office, the rank and file have a motive to help cover it up since they were involved, too.” Good point. All the rank and file employees were accessories to the misconduct and would act like accessories by trying to thwart the investigations.

Menlow was silent, thinking about what he should do. The silence continued. Tom could see that Menlow was reluctant to fire people and that WAB couldn’t force Menlow to grow a pair of balls.

Finally, to let Menlow save face, Tom said, “The people elected you, Mr. Auditor, not us. It’s your office. It’s your choice on the rank and file.”

After some more discussion, Menlow said he wouldn’t fire the rank and file. “Or some of the mid-level managers,” Menlow added. So Menlow had gone from wondering if he should fire the rank and file to now thinking he should keep some of the mid-level managers, who were definitely guilty in all the corruption of the State Auditor’s Office.

Menlow said, “One more thing, guys. I need someone to go after agencies on behalf of citizens. Grant, you want a job here?” What? Working for the government?

“Yes,” Grant blurted out. It surprised even Grant that he said that. “What, exactly, would I do?”

“Take in citizen complaints about state and local government and then use the full power of the State Auditor’s Office to investigate the complaints.” Menlow was smiling, knowing that Grant wanted to do this. Menlow was also smiling because he knew he could leverage WAB’s credibility with the right wing and never have to worry about being thought of as too soft on state and local agencies when he had hired a WAB pit bull like Grant.

“Special Assistant to the State Auditor?” Menlow said. “How does that sound?” Menlow knew what Grant would say.

“The full power of the State Auditor’s Office?” Grant asked. After Menlow had just gone soft and decide to keep most of the old employees, Grant was wondering if Menlow would really do any reforming.

“I get free reign to go after people who broke the law?” Grant asked. He needed this authority to do his job.

“Yes. Full authority,” Menlow said. This was the political compromise Menlow was making; keep the old employees, but hire a pit bull to go after corruption. It seemed like it would work, at least everyone in that room hoped it would.

“Done,” Grant said and extended his hand for a handshake. “So, boss, when do I start?”

That was it. Government-fighter Grant Matson had just become a government employee. For a good cause, of course.

Chapter 19

A Hillbilly with a Law License

Why in the world would Grant want to be a government employee? Grant loved WAB, but he realized that he could do more of what he was meant to do— fight government corruption — at the Auditor’s Office. Work the problem from the inside. Tom, Ben, and Brian understood. They were happy for him. They knew that they would still see him all the time.

Work at the State Auditor’s Office was great. Grant actually got paid to help people who were getting screwed by the government. And he didn’t have to send them a bill. And Grant had the authority of the State Auditor’s Office behind him so he could do great things for people from the inside. Grant was now a white-collar sheepdog fighting back against bullies. It was pure heaven.

The first few months of work at the Auditor’s Office were the “honeymoon period” when everything was wonderful. One of the people Grant got to help was Joe Tantori.

Joe ran a firearms training facility for military and law enforcement. It was a compound; secure as hell. It looked like a mini Blackwater facility. The military didn’t want onlookers seeing how they trained.

Joe’s facility was about two hours north of Olympia on the Puget Sound. There were numerous Navy bases in the Puget Sound and they did not have training facilities for firearms, which seemed weird. One of those bases was the Naval Magazine Indian Island where they stored munitions for the various naval installations in the Puget Sound. The second base was the Bangor nuclear submarine. Both bases needed a place to train. So did all the various local law enforcement agencies and even the federal law enforcement agencies on the Sound like the Border Patrol and Coast Guard at Port Angeles. Joe’s range was it.

Joe constructed an extremely safe complex of shooting ranges and located it far from any neighbors so they wouldn’t be bothered. He had a few hundred acres of buffer.

But that wasn’t good enough. One of the distant neighbors was one of the three elected county commissioners. A few days a year, when the air temperature was just right and the winds were perfect, the commissioner could hear the faintest sound of gunfire. This was unacceptable. The commissioner started his quest to shut down Joe’s facility.

The county, without a warrant, “inspected” Joe’s facility. The Sheriff, who knew that the search was illegal, would not go along with it. So the county’s land use enforcement officer, who was part of the county environmentalist clique that had elected the complaining county commissioner, conducted the search. The county land use department then ordered Joe to close it based on a repealed version of the land use ordinances. That’s right; a repealed ordinance. Just like the Board of Real Estate tried with Ed Oleo. When the law won’t allow what the government wanted, why not just use a repealed version of the law?

Joe brought it to their attention that the ordinance had been repealed and that the county had given him a building permit to build a shooting range exactly where he did and to the exact standards they specified. That wasn’t good enough. Joe’s lawfully permitted facility did not fit the land use department’s “vision” for the area; a “vision” which did not include “violent” things like a shooting range and men in military uniforms. The hippies who dominated the county didn’t like the “militarization” of Joe’s land even if it was completely legal. Law and property rights needed to yield to the community’s “vision.”

This started five years of litigation, which cost Joe almost a million dollars. The land use department enforcement officer would periodically appear at Joe’s range and inspect it, despite the fact that he had no warrant. This was completely unconstitutional. But Joe’s remedy was to go to court — expensive and time-consuming court. An elected judge, who knew the “community’s vision,” did not include Joe’s lawful and harmless use of his own property, sided with the county over and over.

In all this litigation, Joe had sent the county a subpoena for all the communications between the county commissioner, land use department, and the hearing examiner deciding the administrative appeal of the building permit. The county said no such documents existed. One morning a package appeared on at the main gate to Joe’s facility. It contained several years of emails between the commissioner and the judge that said things like, “Do whatever it takes to shut down Tantori” and “I don’t give a fuck about the law. Shut that asshole down.” One reply from the hearing examiner said, “Anything you say, boss.” The smoking guns.