CLEVELAND, OH – Ernest Lamont Smith, 49, doesn’t know how much of a loser he portrayed himself as when he told jurors in his criminal trial that he made his $4500 a year council salary his full-time source of income for four years. That’s $86.53 a week plus an open invitation to join Mayor Brandon King and Michael Smedley at the “all you can steal” buffet.
Smith didn’t have a job when King appointed him along with Ricky Pitts, illegally, to serve on the city council in 2017. To protect his investment in his illegal appointees, the racketeering-minded mayor threatened the two individuals’ council’s president appointed, Devin Branch and Kelvin Earby, with arrest if they attended council’s meetings.
Since mayors don’t appoint council’s members, all of Smith’s and Pitts’ votes were illegal from 2017 through 2019. Smith’s fortunate state auditors haven’t yet investigated the $4500 he received in earnings annually between 2017 and 2019, before his election to council, as a theft and demanded a return of the city’s money.
In 2017 when King appointed him to council Smith was unemployed, broke and his car was parked and inoperable with what he described as a “blown engine.” Smith blamed his engine failure on East Cleveland’s streets instead of the worn piston rings he didn’t have the money to maintain and repair.
Smith hadn’t been employed since around 2012 when he was terminated by a charter school. A source close to Smith said the state of Ohio was feeding him with an EBT card in his residence at 1700 block of Strathmore Avenue. East Cleveland voters should see the ridiculousness of King appointing an unemployed man living on food stamps, the legislative authority’s poorest member, to a city council whose president, Joie Graham, appointed him to lead council’s finance committee. Smith later nominated himself for president of council and was voted to preside over its meetings by current council vice president Timothy Austin and ex-Ward 4 Councilor Korean Stevenson.
Smith was so poor he needed King to let him use four cars in the city’s inventory and to give him a gasoline credit card, illegally, to fuel his travels throughout the city and elsewhere for the next six years. The PIN for the ex-councilor’s gas card was 9779 and Smith was the only member of council who used it. He absolutely fit the characteristics of the type of “title chasing” elected officials and employees King and Michael Smedley had mastered the ability to manipulate.
Like the majority of the elected officials and workers whose ignorance has ruined the city’s government, Smith did not read any of the constitutions, federal, state and local laws he had taken an oath of office to obey. Anyone with the intelligence to read and obey constitutions and laws, who might know enough to challenge them or report their crimes to authorities, was unwelcomed around King and Smedley.
A broke and intellectually deficient non-reading member of council like Smith, who was susceptible to a car bribe from King, was easy to manipulate and use in exchange for a loyal vote. King and Smedley had become experts at using the “titles” of the city’s public offices as trophies to dangle in front of the willing weak-minded dummies who coveted them to fill their little ego needs.
Smith delivered regularly for King as he turned his eyes away from their crimes and opted not to use the council seat to protect East Cleveland residents from their financial and civil rights abuses. As a fake activist, Smith even voted against the Tamia Chapmann ordinance ex-Councilwoman Juanita Gowdy introduced to cause uncertified and untrained police officers to be prosecuted.
Smith insisted on testifying in his own defense, despite courtroom sources observing both King and his attorney advising the “food stamp politician” against it. It wasn’t a smart move since Smith had already demonstrated on his social media page that he didn’t know how not to convict himself with his own words. The “poli-trick-cians” he claimed were behind his indictment had nothing to do with his stealing.
Smith had not read Ord. No 127.08 when he accepted four vehicles and a gasoline credit card from King for his personal use. Neither had former council clerk Khadijah Guy when she let King manage the council office through her compliance with his scheme to violate the local law. King and recalled ex-Council President Thomas Wheeler had backed her for the job before she was fired by Councilman Nathaniel Martin after he replaced Wheeler. Guy defied the wishes of the majority of councilors who employed her to help King obstruct them.
As council’s clerk Guy had no legal authority to give Smith the keys to a city vehicle King was assigning for his personal use. This is especially since it was her duty to prepare the council meeting agenda that included a resolution stripping him of the vehicle. It’s one of the reasons her claim of finding no law that instructed the Clerk of Council not to issue vehicle keys to Smith is ridiculous.
Guy’s a Ph.D. who wants to be called “doctor” but testified that she couldn’t find Ord. No. 127.08 in the “big green books” next to her council office desk. In East Cleveland even the Ph.D.’s don’t read.
Ord. No. 127.08 was enacted by East Cleveland city council on September 18, 2007 during this writer’s term as mayor between January 1, 2006 through December 31, 2009. The legislation’s intent was to prevent the “personal use” of public vehicles by the city’s officers and employees.
“(a) No employee or agent of the city shall: (1) Operate any city vehicles for personal use; or (2) While off duty keep any city vehicle at a personal residence or any place other than on city property designated for the parking of such vehicle when that vehicle is not being used to conduct city business.”
The legislation reads that only the mayor, chief of police and chief of fire are assigned public vehicles to drive home as they were designated as being on “continuously on duty.”
“For purposes of this section, only the Mayor, Fire Chief, Police Chief and whoever City Council by legislative action may designate from time to time, shall be considered to be continuously on duty and required to keep city vehicles at their personal residence.”
Only the city council could expand the list of officials authorized to be assigned public vehicles pursuant to Ord. No. 127.08, that council enacted on September 18, 2007. Smith as a member of the “legislative” branch of government was administered an oath of office to obey and enforce constitutions and laws a 10 second conversation can reveal he’s never read. Even if he read Ord. No. 127.08 like King did, he accepted the semi-literate mayor’s interpretation that the words above were not a restriction on him.
Despite Ord. No. 127.08’s restrictive instructions, made mandatory by the use of the word “shall,” King said it did not prohibit him from giving a car to whomever he wanted. English is the Patois speaking Jamaican-ancestried King’s second language. “Him struggle wid ridin komprihenshan.” The use of the word “shall” in a law gives the reader it applies to no other choice but to obey it as written.
Smith told Assistant Prosecutor Andrew Rogalski that East Cleveland taxpayers needed to pay for his vehicle, repair, insurance and gasoline expenses because he was serving the “health, interests, rights and needs of the people of East Cleveland.” He repeated that phrase often as if he practiced it. In his mind the more he repeated the phrase the more legitimate it sounded.
All the little “programs” he believed he had created under his bootleg Oppressed Peoples Nation “non-profit” were now programs of the city that justified his use of a city vehicle. Smith didn’t understand that a city authorized “program” is created by an ordinance of council that is budgeted and approved during a regular public meeting. One member of council has no authority to “create” anything on their own. Smith didn’t realize, like most criminals, that every excuse he used to justify his violation of Ord. No. 127.08’s plain English language instructions buried him deeper.
Smith cast himself during his trial testimony as alone among every other municipal councilor in Cuyahoga County for defining his legislative duties the way he did. It was another admission of his ignorance of the lawful duties of his elected office as defined in Section 731.05 of the Ohio Revised Code, “Powers of the legislative authority.” Below are the words of the law he took an oath of office to obey but didn’t read.
“The powers of the legislative authority of a city shall be legislative only, it shall perform no administrative duties, and it shall neither appoint nor confirm any officer or employee in the city government except those of its own body, unless otherwise provided in Title VII of the Revised Code. All contracts requiring the authority of the legislative authority for their execution shall be entered into and conducted to performance by the board or officers having charge of the matters to which they relate. After the authority to make such contracts has been given and the necessary appropriation made, the legislative authority shall take no further action thereon.”
Smith tried to sell the story that he was a good guy councilman and the leader of the “Oppressed Peoples Nation” that Patricia Rowell and Anthony Steele joined him in registering with Ohio’s Secretary of State on September 7, 2010. Twice in 2015 and 2023 Smith’s Oppressed Peoples Nation’s registration was canceled by the Secretary of State for failing to file statements of continued existence.
He never registered his “non-profit” with the Internal Revenue Service to obtain a 501.c3 designation to collect untaxed donations, so he never filed an annual Form 990 tax return. Without the Internal Revenue Service registration and approval, Smith’s Oppressed Peoples Nation was not an organization or a non-profit. It is just a registered name he created to give himself a “title.” Everybody wants to be a “president” of something. Smith told prosecutors he was still running the Oppressed Peoples Nation while omitting the fact it’s been cancelled since January 30, 2023.
In Smith’s needy mind his legislative duties were in the streets and the taxpayers of a city in fiscal emergency owed him a car. Instead of waking up every morning in search of a job, or building a business, Smith described his day as beginning with his walking to city hall to get the council vehicle and driving to a school to “watch the children” and drive high school students to school.
Smith said he wanted city license plates on a vehicle so residents would know his visit was about city business. The impoverish-minded Smith didn’t realize he was admitting to creating a liability for the city by driving private citizens to school or grocery shopping should he have been involved in an accident, or they injured themselves entering and exiting the vehicle.
Rogalski asked Smith if he was a police officer or service department worker and he answered, “no.” While all he believed he possessed were the skillsets of school crossing guard, Smith wasn’t appointed by King to peep at other people’s children and drive them to school without their parents’ permission.
Smith was a legislator who should have been reading the city’s codified ordinances and correlative Ohio laws, and meeting with employees in congressional-like public hearings to learn if they were obeying them. If he wanted East Cleveland children safe between home and school, he should have been writing legislation to increase the city’s prosperity to pay its bills.
Since King was managing police whose violations of constitutional rights, laws and ordinances were leading the city into financial ruin from the lawsuits, Smith should have been demanding that King and his prosecutors enforce every council ordinance that held them accountable. As a self-described “activist” Smith wasted 6 years on a legislative body and didn’t learn how to write or enforce one law that would reform King’s corrupt government.
Smith interpreted the practices he didn’t see other elected officials doing as the things he should do. In his politically immature mind, he could never be an elected official and call himself part-time for $4500 a year. He even challenged Rogalski with the unsupported declaration that councilmen in his community drive city cars for personal use just like he does. It is possible that Smith may have been the only unemployed male legislator in Cuyahoga County living on public assistance and $86.53 a week.
During his six years on East Cleveland city council Smith remained unemployed with the $4500 part-time council stipend as his primary income source. He had to steal from the financially distressed city’s taxpayers to survive.
Smith’s poverty made him susceptible to King and Smedley’s $10 million schemes with the Al Zubair brothers. It made him turn a blind eye to ex-Chief of Police Michael Cardilli submitting fake Ohio peace officer training and testing records to the state’s attorney general. His poverty made him drive a city vehicle to Detroit to transport underaged strippers to dance at his “back to school fundraiser” at an unlicensed bar.
If Call & Post Publisher & Editor William Otis Walker were alive today he’d editorialize that Smith, King, Smedley, Willa Mae Hemmons, Heather McCollough, Deborah Black and Guy disgraced the American Negro race. Walker’s Call & Post was created out of a merger between the Cleveland Call founded by interim Mayor Sandra Morgan’s grandfather, Garrett Morgan, and the Cleveland Post founded by the late Jean Murrell Capers’ father and uncle, Edward and Howard Murrell. Walker was racially conscious in an uplifting way and despises Negro politicians who demeaned the race.
If Smith were a smart man he wouldn’t be facing a criminal indictment for the illegal four car gifts he accepted from King and did not report to the Ohio Ethics Commission on his financial disclosure statements. He’d see the blessing in the other crimes he committed not being attached to the ones for which was indicted.
He’d thank state prosecutors for not referring him to federal prosecutions for the tax returns he transmitted to the Internal Revenue Service that did not identify the cars and gas as part of his earnings. Smith doesn’t know when he caused false tax returns to be prepared, he committed wire fraud when he transmitted them to the IRS.
The recalled ex-councilman never kept the daily mileage logs that would have detailed how each of his destinations was for city business. In criminal prosecutions the absence of the public records a government official is required by law to create and maintain is evidence that they intended to conceal their acts from the public.
Wire fraud carries fines of up to $250,000 and up to 20 years in prison. Smith shouldn’t be so free with his loose lips.
