CLEVELAND, OH – The Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corporation (CCLRC) quit-claimed a free home addressed at 12600 Speedway Overlook to East Cleveland city council candidate Timothy Ray Austin on September 25, 2023. The property exchange occurred 43 days before the general election in which Austin defeated incumbent Ward 2 Councilwoman Juanita Gowdy on November 7, 2023.
Gowdy had dually served as council’s president and had been raising questions about the CCLRC’s legislative requests after one of its officials offered a council employee a bribe to place its legislation on the agenda. Austin appeared to be the CCLRC-backed replacement candidate. He is now council’s vice president after he was orchestrated twice into the position by indicted Mayor Brandon King and his indicted chief of staff, Michael Smedley. Mayors pursuant to Section 113(A) of East Cleveland’s charter are prohibited from supervising council’s affairs as King did with its elections.
The CCLRC, as an IRS designated non-profit, violates its status by involving itself in the campaigns of East Cleveland’s elected officials while seeking approval of its legislative agenda. CCLRC Vice President Dennis Roberts is on record as donating $100 to King’s “partisan” 2021 re-election campaign in violation of the Hatch Act as the employee of a federally funded entity. He’s seen as an unethical player by councilors who view him as matching King’s arrogant disregard for the city’s laws when it comes to his requests. Among East Cleveland’s legislative gifts to the CCLRC is a controversial $4 million American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) contribution to its coffers that has been spent without reports to council.
The Cuyahoga County My Place website recorded the free home’s value in 2023 at $17,500 when the CCLRC gifted it to Gowdy’s opponent. The CCLRC’s gift to Austin increased his assets by $87,500 less than one year later in 2024 after the home was renovated for his mother.
On August 9, 2023, three months or 90 days before the November 7, 2023 election, an unidentified author uploaded a CCLRC story on its website about the gift of a home Austin was identified as “buying” in the first paragraph. The story’s second paragraph identified Austin as a “former” member of East Cleveland city council without identifying that he was a current candidate.
The anonymous writer noted that Austin’s past council experiences made him familiar with the CCLRC. What the anonymous author did not reveal was how Austin had previously participated in East Cleveland city council’s discussions and voted for acts that led to $4 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds being directed to the CCLRC.
The CCLRC’s unspent federal ARPA balance is now a controversy that is muddled by Austin’s gift-conflicted voice in discussions and vote. Two CCLRC council critics, councilors Dr. Patricia Blochowiak and Twon Billings, have exposed and criticized the fraud in the city’s legislative processes that has builders building new properties without council’s approval. Gowdy was also asking ARPA spending questions the CCLRC didn’t want answered.
Blochowiak and Billings have criticized the CCLRC for marketing the new homes as “tax abated” though there is no tax abatement legislation approved by council. What was presented as a tax abatement agreement the school board enacted was that a city in fiscal emergency would make-up the district’s lost property tax-abated revenue from the general fund. The logic behind it is insane.
Also on the table is a greenway walking path between homes, which homeowners have angrily opposed, that public records confirm was approved by a fake Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) whose membership in no way complied with the authorized composition of members approved by council. Interim Mayor Sandra Morgan cannot advance decisions made by an improperly constituted BZA as an official act simply because King failed to obey laws in the past.
The last paragraph of the CCLRC’s anonymously written August 9, 2023 story about Austin explains how thrilled he was at working with its staff and inspectors, and that he’d “buy” and renovate another property. The story was written 90 days before Austin won another four-year term on an East Cleveland city council that had CCLRC legislation King, Smedley and attorney Willa Hemmons were rigging procedures and avoiding duties to place in front of council.
Twice in the same story the anonymous author created the false public impression that Austin was a qualified buyer in its Deed in Escrow program. The “property laundering” gift to Austin appears to have been an investment in his future votes for legislation that favored the CCLRC’s objectives once he rejoined East Cleveland city council. The upbeat story was also a public relations gift to a political candidate who was eager to trade off his public office for an unreported “thing of value” from the CCLRC.
The Cuyahoga County My Place website confirms that Austin didn’t pay a dime to the CCLRC for the quit-claimed property he’s identified twice in one story as “purchasing” for an unspecified amount. The home is an expensive “gift” Austin did not disclose as such on the 2022 Financial Disclosure form he submitted to the Ohio Ethics Commission on August 7, 2023.
The address was simply noted as one of the 11 properties he owns in his name. None of the homes are held under the name of Austin’s Personal Property Choice Investments, LLC he registered with Ohio’s Secretary of State in 2015.
Austin did not disclose the free house as a gift on the 2023 Financial Disclosure form he filed on April 30, 2024. The free home is not identified as a gift in the 2024 Financial Disclosure form Austin filed on February 16, 2025. He had two opportunities to amend his financial disclosure forms to disclose the $17,500 CCLRC gift and did not.
According to the CCLRC’s anonymous author, Austin was supposed to have been a participant in the CCLRC’s Deed in Escrow program. The websites for the CCLRC and Cuyahoga County explain that the Deed in Escrow program homes are “sold” to “qualified buyers”. The exact words below were lifted from the CCLRC website story about its Deed in Escrow program.
“We offer several programs to purchase and renovate properties in our inventory. Our Deed-in-Escrow Program is the most popular, allowing qualified buyers—whether owner-occupants or investors—to buy and renovate Cuyahoga Land Bank properties. The Land Bank’s Real Estate Development team prepares professional renovation specifications (“the spec”). The buyer has approximately four months to complete renovations according to the spec after their offer is accepted. The deed to the property is held in escrow by the Land Bank until all renovations are complete and have passed a final inspection.”
Austin had paid more for the 10 homes he had previously purchased in the private market before joining East Cleveland city council and voting to support King and Smedley’s property development schemes with the CCLRC. His first purchase appears to be a multi-family property he paid $150,000 for in Euclid. The majority of his properties are in East Cleveland.
A source Austin knows and conflicts with told this writer he told him during the 2023 council campaign that the CCLRC had given him a $25,000 renovation grant and that he’d returned some of the money because he didn’t need it all. The details for his CCLRC transactions in 2023 are not explained in Austin’s finance reports to the Ohio Ethics Commission.
The CCLRC hasn’t given East Cleveland council members like Blochowiak and Billings all the information they’ve requested about how it’s spent the city’s $4 million. Both view the CCLRC as corrupt.
The home the CCLRC sold to Austin belonged to a deceased woman with unknown heirs
The last person to own 12600 Speedway Overlook was the late Irene Snowden. The story the CCLRC’s anonymous author shared about how Austin acquired the property differs than the story told by records on file between the County Auditor and County Recorder’s offices.
The CCLRC author wrote that “Austin watched for nearly 15 years as a house across from his home in East Cleveland passed from owner to owner, each one leaving it in a worse state than the last. It fell into disrepair and finally foreclosure.”
According to Cuyahoga County property records, Irene and Vance Snowden purchased 12600 Speedway Overlook from Liongihas and Apolonija Leknickas in 1961. The home was built between 1903 and 1907 in the Deming Brothers Co. Speedway Boulevard allotment. The Snowden’s were the second American Negro family to buy a home on the street. Neighbors who knew the Snowden’s say husband, Vance, was generally not seen. The son, Vance, Jr., stayed to himself. Irene Snowden was usually seen going and coming from more than one job.
Vance died October 14, 1985 and Irene followed 23 years later on July 7, 2008, according to Cuyahoga County Probate Court records. There’s no record of the two being married to each other in Cuyahoga County. Irene was identified as an unmarried woman.
In October 2006 Vance was deceased and Irene Snowden obtained a $25,943 grant to renovate her home through the city of East Cleveland’s community development department during this writer’s term as mayor. My administration placed a lien on the property to recover its investment. There is no evidence in the foreclosure record showing East Cleveland city council passing legislation surrendering the city’s $25,943 interest in the outcome of the sale.
Snowden’s last recorded activity with her property was a $58,000 “open ended mortgage” she entered with National City Bank on September 25, 2007. When Irene Snowden died on July 7, 2008 her average annual property tax bill was about $1407.05, according to county records.
By 2012 the deceased homeowner owed $9068 as the house remained vacant without a caretaker. There is no trail of county records which lead to a court-ordered foreclosure that resulted in the CCLRC acquiring the late Snowden home in 2018. The Cuyahoga County Probate Court docket shows that an Anjeanette Gay made application to administer Snowden’s estate on October 14, 2008 that was denied on May 8, 2009. From then Snowden’s estate was in legal limbo.
In 2018 Cuyahoga Sheriff Clifford Pinckney’s office added 12600 Speedway Overlook to a foreclosure sale for unpaid taxes after Irene Snowden’s death. The Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas docket identifies a foreclosure action being filed against Snowden and or her heirs by the Treasurer of Ohio for a first half delinquency of $681.59. Past due taxes were $24,247.53.
The property was sold by the sheriff’s office to the CCLRC for $2662.98 on December 21, 2018 during Austin’s first term on city council. The transfer from the sheriff to the CCLRC on the county auditor’s website shows a zero-dollar transaction. The King administration did not enforce the city’s $25,943 lien against the Snowden property to recapture the CDBG and HOME funds that had been invested to renovate it.
If he knew the CCLRC was violating the city’s vacant property registration ordinance, and wasn’t maintaining 12600 Speedway Overlook in accordance with the city’s standards for vacant properties for the five years it sat vacant and deteriorating, Austin had every right to complain to the city’s building department to demand the ordinance be enforced. The vacant property registration ordinance was enacted in 2008 the year Snowden died.
He didn’t seek to enforce the ordinance as the facts in the CCLRC’s ghost story about the councilman unravel. Austin also said nothing about what appears to be the city’s forgiven $25,943 lien that King, individually, had no authority to cancel so Austin could receive a clear title to the Snowden home.
Though the anonymous CCLRC writer quoted Austin as claiming 12600 Speedway Overlook was transferred from owner to owner, it had only transferred from the late Irene Snowden to the sheriff’s control to the CCLRC for five years before it transferred to Austin.
CCLRC is still under a federal criminal investigation
Currently, the CCLRC that attorneys James Rokakis and his best friend and late law partner Gus Frangos built is being investigated as a property laundering enterprise. The records show East Cleveland’s elected officials have been willing accomplices. FBI agents have an April 7, 2022 text of Smedley asking the Al Zubair brothers to fund an expensive dinner with the CCLRC’s late chief executive, Frangos, at the Marble Room restaurant.
Sources told this writer that like late Cleveland Housing Court Judge Raymond Pianka, Frangos died of a heart attack on August 10, 2024 shortly after he was visited by federal law enforcement agents. The federal investigation that resulted in the indictments of former CCLRC official Kenneth Tyson on November 28, 2018 didn’t stop.
There’s an abundance of evidence that proves CCLRC is abusing the state’s foreclosure laws to acquire and transfer homes, apartment buildings and commercial properties taken from others for back taxes to their relatives, friends and associates. Rokakis and Frangos lobbied the Ohio General Assembly for both the third-party tax lien sale laws that took homes from property owners and the landbank laws that let the two of them control who gets them. It was a malicious ethnic cleansing scheme that has literally wiped-out American Negro home and property ownership on Cleveland and Cuyahoga County’s east side.
The CCLRC is East Cleveland’s number one slumlord with over 30 acres of property it violates the city’s vacant property registration ordinance to keep vacant and deteriorating. Every vacant property owner is required to pay an annual vacancy fee of $250 that doubles each year the property remains vacant.
The vacant property registration ordinance this writer wrote as East Cleveland’s mayor (January 1, 2006 – December 31, 2009) did not exempt the CCLRC or third-party tax lien investors from its enforcement. All vacant properties are supposed to be in either of state of renovation or sale. Every single property owner maintaining an unregistered and deteriorated vacant property in East Cleveland is violating a first-degree misdemeanor ordinance.
Once they joined council, Austin and Richardson expressed no interest in demanding that King or the current mayor enforce the city’s vacant property law against the CCLRC and or the slum buyers they’ve allowed to purchase properties they have not renovated. Blochowiak has correctly noted that the city’s Memorandum of Understanding with the CCLRC expired, and that city officials have no authority to engage the corrupt non-profit’s officials without it.
Austin is currently in the middle of discussions about the CCLRC as an entity that has no money to “develop” its East Cleveland properties and has found no developer interested in developing its vacant lands. Between the King administration and the CCLRC, the city now has 6900 parcels left of the city’s once 12,500 parcels of property. The rest were demolished for personal profit and not for any development strategy.
Frangos’ cousin, Stephen Pontikos, and King’s friend, Darryl Moore, own demolition companies that have benefited from their insider relationships. What Austin appears to have been brought into with the gift of a free home is a RICO-inspired property laundering operation that Rokakis, Frangos, Roberts and others created.
In addition to demolishing landbank properties, four apartment buildings were laundered to Frangos’ cousin, Pontikos, by the Norton and King administrations. The laundered properties were 14042, 14048 and 14078 Superior Road and 1520 Belmar Road. The laundering scheme involved trade-offs of properties to favored so-called “buyers” between the CCLRC and various municipal landbanks. “You give my guy a property I’ll give your guy a property.” The scheme is straightforward.
During convicted and recalled ex-Mayor Gary Norton, Jr’s administration in 2012, the CCLRC gave 14042 Superior to East Cleveland’s municipal landbank and Norton laundered it to Pontikos at no cost. Pontikos sold one of the free apartment buildings for $1.5 million that he was supposed to renovate in four months as a “qualified buyer.” Inquiring minds should wonder how much of the $1.5 million ended up in Frangos and Rokakis’ pockets or if Norton and King received a cut. Council, not the mayor, controls the finances and properties of a municipal corporation pursuant to Section 731,47 of the Ohio Revised Code.
Eye on Ohio reported that in 2018, the year Austin first joined council, King accepted two apartment buildings into the city’s landbank from the CCLRC and laundered them back to Pontikos from the city’s landbank. Pontikos who placed them in two LLC’s he controlled: 14048 Superior, LLC and 1520 Belmar, LLC. All of his apartment acquisitions were supposed to be renovated in four months. From East Cleveland’s perspective the receipt and transfer of the gifted property had to be documented by two separate resolutions of council pursuant to Section 715.20 of the Ohio Revised Code.
King and his brothers own at least 10 formerly landbank properties on Elsinore Street. If the transactions were legal there would be trail of resolutions from the city council Austin served on that approved the municipal landbank’s property transfers.
CCLRC officials are already trying to wrap their tentacles around interim Mayor Sandra Morgan. No one knows where Austin is getting the CCLRC and condominium legislation he’s pushing his colleagues to pass that bears his name as a sponsor before any public meeting. Austin may think he’s “getting things done” in bypassing Shabazz’s authority as council’s president to approve legislation for the agenda. All the mandatory duties he’s ignoring to operate on the rules he’s making up are the equivalent of a bear setting a trap to catch itself.
The fact there’s no paper trail of Council President Lateek Shabazz approving the legislation Austin’s promoting creates a problem for Austin to explain where he’s getting legislation if it’s not originating from Morgan with Shabazz’s approval. When called by this writer about his and Richardson’s recent activities in support of CCLRC, and to discuss its gift of a free home, Austin became emotional and said he had to go.
It’s a tactic I observed him use to deflect from answering hard questions when he was one of the five city council members I worked with as the Clerk of Council.
[NOTE: The feature photo of Timothy Ray Austin was published on the CCLRC’s website and is fairly used for educational purposes.]
