CLEVELAND, OH – Mayor Brandon L. King got an invoice for $5000 from Robert Half International, Inc. employment agency to cover the fee for hiring Latasha Williams to handle East Cleveland’s payroll. The Half letter described Williams as an Accounting Clerk. As a temporary city employee the job she held was as the Payroll Administrator. The letter with the demand for the $5000 was addressed to ex-director of finance Charles Iyahen and is dated April 24, 2023.
Aside from records showing Council never approved a contract authorizing the mayor to pay Robert Half $5000 to hire employees it refers, Iyahen’s last day in office was Friday, April 21, 2023, three days before the Half letter. He submitted his resignation on April 10, 2023. It was four days after an April 6, 2023 criminal complaint was filed against him with the municipal court by East Cleveland city council. Dereliction of duty. Obstruction of official business. Theft in office.
The Robert Half letter confirms Iyahen as being a participant in a violation of Section 72 of East Cleveland’s charter giving the mayor the authority to spend up to $2500 without public bidding. There is no section of the charter or Ohio law that gives the office of East Cleveland mayor more spending authority. The director of public service is authorized to spend up to $50,000 without public bidding, with council approval, for certain public improvements. That authority isn’t given to Ohio mayors.
In East Cleveland the director of finance has no authority to enter a contract with an employment agency to hire employees without asking council. City hall jobs are usually posted around city hall and other public buildings. The idea of a broke city paying over $5000 to hire an employee like Williams, with no special skills, is insane.
Euclid, Ohio resident King and Iyahen had already confessed that they’d ignored council’s $26 million budget for 2023 and were spending the $36 million the mayor had budgeted. Iyahen was also paying King’s property management company the $14,100 the mayor billed the city for office space. King kept his mouth shut while Iyahen’s clerk of court wife, Wendy Howard, was paid $107,000 instead of the $64,500 Judge William Dawson had authorized.
Iyahen saw the writing on the wall and left. His wife, Howard, left with him on May 5, 2023. She gave Dawson one day advance notice on May 4, 2023. Before he panicked and left on April 21, 2023, Iyahen appointed Chief Accountant Valencia Meeks to handle the director of finance’s duties he was vacating.
The date of the Robert Half letter, April 24, 2023, confirms a conversion occurred that changed Williams’ employment status from temporary to permanent. She was originally hired temporarily to discharge only payroll duties in 2022. On or before April 24, 2023 she was hired as a permanent, full-time employee. Less than one week later King found his spending without council approval, and in criminal violation of its budget, being questioned by Meeks. He decided to identify a replacement who would obey his orders instead of obeying laws like Meeks was doing.
King settled on Williams because he learned she possessed a masters degree in business and accounting from Ashford University in San Diego, California. King had created his own online university in 2011 with an Indian alien partner, the University of East Cleveland, to apply for U.S. Department of Education funds. King’s last IRS 990 filing for non-profits shows $24,000 in funds.
Ashford University was owned by Bridgeport Education, Inc. and is now the University of Arizona Global Campus. Bridgeport Education, Inc. is now Zoovio. It’s an online university that was investigated by the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education & Pensions in 2011.
Last March 2022, California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, won a $22.3 million settlement against Ashford University for students like Williams. Bonta’s suit claimed Ashford University recruiters gave students “false or misleading information about career outcomes, cost and financial aid, pace of degree programs, and transfer credits, in order to persuade them to enroll at Ashford.” Ashford students learned their online degrees were not being accepted by state licensing agencies. They’re among the students who Democratic President Joe Biden wants taxpayers to pay their education debts.
Williams has two resumes and both are paper thin and full of inconsistencies. Before being hired temporarily last year by King, Williams’ resume identifies her spending between 2014 and 2022 at Cuyahoga Community College. The job title was Coordinator, Special Student Services/Enrollment Representative. She helped U.S. veterans and foreign students enroll at the state and local tax funded two-year college. That’s in one of her resumes. In another she claims to have worked for TRI-C between 2007 and 2022 for 15 years. There’s no explanation for why she’d leave the security of a politically safe job she’d held for either 8 or 15 years to being a temporary worker for a mayor whose administration is under a federal and state public corruption investigation.
Before Cuyahoga Community College, Williams claims to have worked for two years between 2012 and 2014 at the Northern Ohio Recovery Association (NORA) as a “financial analyst” in one of her resumes. In another resume her NORA employment dates are from 2012 until 2016. For seven months between 2011 and 2012 Williams worked for Cleveland Property Management Group as an accounting clerk. If her resume showing a TRI-C employment history between 2007 and 2022, then Williams held down two other day jobs when she was supposed to be on duty at the college.
There was absolutely no prior municipal finance experience in Williams’ work history and education prior to King hiring her as a temporary payroll employee in 2022. Cleveland Property Management Group appears to be the first employer to hire her for seven months in 2011. Williams’ resume also raised questions about the legitimacy of her background.
Williams’ claims she “generated over $3 million in non-profit funds for 7 different programs” for NORA. NORA is under the executive leadership of Anita Bradley and it’s annual budget, according to its 2022 IRS 990 filing, is about $5.2 million. The bulk of the drug recovery agency’s funding is from the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). SAMHSA is under the United States Department of Health & Human Services. NORA also receives Ohio drug recovery grant funds. This is information I know, as a writer, because I once trained NORA’s board on its official duties.
To have “generated” over $3 million implies that Williams wrote grants for NORA between 2012 and 2014 that funded the majority of its annual budget. According to NORA’s 2012 and 2013 IRS 990 filings, the non-profit’s income was $2.5 million and $2.6 million for each year. Williams’ resume doesn’t identify what she describes as the “non-profit funds” for the $3 million she claims to have “generated” for NORA in two years. If her claim is to be believed, Williams generated more revenue for NORA per year than its director. Bradley handles grant writing duties for the non-profit she founded in 2004 with board president Carolyn Jones.
If she worked around NORA’s finances, Williams should have learned the finance laws associated with federal grants that are found in the United States Code, the Code of Federal Regulations and the U.S. Office of Management & Budget’s circulars. The only reference to the words “law” and “compliance” in Williams’ resume pertain to real estate during her brief 7-month employment with Cleveland Property Management Group.
What’s obvious in Williams’ resume is that her only experience with municipal finance has been, until recently, as a temporary payroll employee in East Cleveland since last year. The April 24, 2023 date of the Robert Half letter to Iyahen establishes that Williams was still on probation as a newly-appointed permanent payroll employee when King appointed her to discharge the director of finance’s duties.
For a mayor whose administration is under a federal and state public corruption investigation, in a city where two former mayors have federal felony convictions, Williams represents the perfect sucker for a fiscally duty-exceeding elected official like King. The mayor’s dupe didn’t know when she entered the job, and hasn’t learned since she’s been discharging its duties, the federal, state and local laws she’s already violated that are being reported to and evaluated by state and federal law enforcement agents and auditors. This generation of Americans hasn’t learned “everything that glitters is not gold.”
The director of finance’s office under East Cleveland’s charter, ordinances and Ohio law is one that demands the individual have a dense knowledge of the federal, state and local laws that control municipal finances. It’s a “code intensive” job that requires individuals handling municipal public funds to know which vast sections of laws applies to their duties. King has no clue about the statutory duties of a mayor, let alone those delegated to directors of finance who are discharging the duties of a “treasurer” under Ohio laws. Following his instructions instead of laws will land Williams in jail. When state auditors review the individual transactions that bear her signature, and review them to see if laws were obeyed before she signed, what she did not do that a law required is why she’ll find herself answering investigator questions.
Section 92 of East Cleveland’s charter, and Section 705.28 of the Ohio Revised Code (R.C.), required Williams to be administered an oath of office by the mayor that was delivered to the clerk of council “before” she began working as his interim deputy director of finance. Williams needed to be bonded with an insurer before she could work; and the bond, along with the oath of office, were required to be delivered to the clerk of council before she touched a dime of the city’s money. Only the council can evaluate her background and determine the bond amount that provided coverage for the liabilities she might create. This is found in Section 110 of East Cleveland’s charter she didn’t read. “Salaries and bonds” is the heading.
Failure to obey the instructions of Section 92 of East Cleveland’s charter, and R.C. 705.28, is evidence of the job being refused. Pursuant to R.C. 731.49, “Failure to take oath or give bond,” council has the option of vacating the office of director of finance and King would be required to remove Williams from the job. Williams should assume federal and state law enforcement investigators have been informed she’s discharging duties from a public office she never properly entered. From the day she touched her first public dime as King’s acting director of finance, Williams did so unlawfully.
As a former temporary payroll clerk, Williams would have no knowledge that KMG is King Management Group and American Merchandising Company, Inc. was incorporated by the mayor in 2004. She hasn’t read the December 2016 letter he received from the Ohio Ethics Commission instructing King not to lease office space to the city after his appointment to mayor. Williams would have no or only rumored knowledge that King is selling merchandise to the city through his company. She wouldn’t know it was unlawful for her to pay his invoices.
Williams doesn’t know King didn’t bring the Rumpke waste collection contract before council; and that Robert Half International, Inc. was not authorized by any ordinance or resolution of council to receive the $5000 fee associated with her employment. She doesn’t know the 2023 budget didn’t include the $49,000 she paid to the dealer who sold the city the 2024 Chevy Silverado King instructed her to remove from the school safety zone grant account.
Williams doesn’t have the depth of knowledge that would give her the strength of ethics to tell King “no” when he asks for the passwords to the city’s bank accounts; or instructs her to give him check signing authority on any account he wants. Council has approved no lease agreement with Cleveland Metroparks; so the $2 million King wanted to give them before the council agreed was unlawful. Cleveland Metroparks attorney Rose Fini wrote in an email that the agency did not receive the $2 million. King told a council employee the $2 million was gone.
The answer could come from Williams, who’s accused of making the $2 million Cleveland Metroparks transfer, if she attended council meetings and answered council’s questions as she’s required to do pursuant to Rule 3 of Council’s Rules of Order. The heading is, “Attendance of the mayor and others.”
“The Mayor, the Director of Finance and the Director of Law, or their designated representatives, shall attend each meeting of Council and shall answer such questions relating to the affairs of the city under their respective management and control as may be put to them by any member of Council.”
Williams never learned the term “dereliction of duty” at TRI-C or her other places of employment. She doesn’t know it’s a crime to fail to do a duty imposed by law, and to exceed the statutory authority of a public office. The use of the word “shall” in a law makes the duty mandatory; and one the official the law instructs has no other choice but to perform.
Williams doesn’t know, yet, how the duties she’s failed to perform obstruct the official business of the municipal corporation of East Cleveland; which, ultimately, is bigger than the mayor whose minions intimidate employees with the threat of termination if they don’t do what they’re told instead of obeying laws. It’s what she doesn’t know about the job she’s now in, and the character of the mayor whose direction she’s following, that will have Williams signing her name to public documents that transfer public funds in a way that causes her to face criminal charges.
“Every officer of the city shall, before entering upon the duties of his office, take and subscribe an oath or affirmation, to be filed and kept in the office of the Clerk of the Council, that he will in all respects faithfully discharge the duties of his office.”
If Williams has an oath or a bond, she didn’t filed them with the clerk of council before she started signing checks, transferring city funds and holding herself out to others as the director of finance. Council never evaluated her qualifications and determined the amount of her bond.
