CLEVELAND, OH – Cleveland Scene reporter Mark Puente acted as if he discovered one of the other women and the divorce drama surrounding Mayor Frank Jackson’s double-dipping chief of police. He didn’t. I did. I also reported the disturbance at Calvin Williams’ Hough home with Loretta Williams in January 2019 and posted it on my now banned Facebook page. Fuck Mark Zuckerberg. Williams held a news conference to call me a liar although he didn’t mention me by name.
I can name the source who delivered the information about the dispute at Williams’ former home in January 2019 but I won’t. The point is that I know exactly how I obtained the information and who confirmed it. I also know who delivered the information to me about Sherrie Flores’ two children with Williams. I learned of Loretta’s decision to seek a divorce from Calvin and identified the address in Berea as the home he shares with Sherrie.
It’s a story that completely originates with me but that’s not how it was covered by Puente. Cleveland Scene’s editorial thief claimed to have learned of Williams’ divorce and baby mama drama through “city hall sources.”
Yeah. Everybody at Cleveland city hall read, shared or discussed the three stories I wrote about Williams and Flores’ affair and two children. I even texted Jackson to ask if he knew about the divorce. He didn’t text back. I understand. Members of council told me I’d caught everybody off guard.
The ethical way for Puente and his Cleveland Scene employer to have introduced my story to their readers was for them to have summarized my work and credited EJBNEWS as the source. Instead, Puente lifted my information and appears to have asked around city hall to see if he could get an independent source who would confirm what I’d already revealed.
No one but the officials of domestic relations court, their lawyers, family members, close friends and me knew Loretta filed for a divorce from Calvin a year ago. If the town’s other reporters knew, unless they love Williams’ dirty drawers so much they’ll hide the stains in it, they would have reported it. The entire drama is a readership growing scoop that I, alone, published first. Read Puente’s words.
As Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams went through a divorce last year from his wife of 24 years, there were whispers that he was romantically involved with a junior Cleveland police officer with whom he had at least one child. According to police and City Hall sources, it was more than a rumor.
Documents also show that when his wife filed for the divorce in May 2020, Chief Williams’ mailing address listed with the court was a southwestern suburban home owned by that junior officer, Sgt. Sherrie Flores.
Prior to the divorce, a family disturbance occurred at the Williams’ eastside home in January 2019. Chief Williams denied rumors of a domestic violence incident and called stories an attack on his character.
Puente once wrote for the Plain Dealer before he left Cleveland for Florida and a job with the St. Petersburg Times around September 2010. The Plain Dealer’s James McCarty wrote a story describing how Puente was embroiled in a scandal where he allegedly ratted out former Lorain city police officer Joseph Montelon as the author of anonymous letters that ripped chief of police Cel Rivera’s management as full of brutal misconduct. Rivera retired in 2019. Puente was already in Florida when McCarty’s story was published in Cleveland.com in November 23, 2011. So much for his protection of a source.
Puente appears to have been aiding the reputations of fellow Hispanics Rivera and Lorain deputy sheriff Richard Resendez with a claim that he, too, was investigating the source of the anonymous letters he and other reporters were receiving about the Lorain police chief’s tolerance for unconstitutional policing. That’s the information in documents Montelon filed in federal court after the unconstitutional raid.
Puente delivered Montelon’s name to ex-Lorain police captain Richard Resendez who delivered it to Rivera. The Communist-thinking ex-chief of police then contacted ex-Lorain prosecuting attorney Dennis Will who identified the “menacing by stalking” misdemeanor to Rivera as a crime associated with the anonymous letters they had to prove Montelon had written and disseminated.
Rivera assigned Thomas Nimon and Andrew Matheson to investigate Montelon. He also assigned them to confiscate Montelon’s trash from his Wickliffe home far outside their jurisdiction to conduct their “misdemeanor” investigation. When their diving for trash produced no evidence, the cops spying on Montelon and his family without probable cause he’d committed any crime decided to obtain a search warrant. The basis of their search warrant was their claim of seeing someone from inside the home watching them. That act and their wild imaginations led to the conclusion that Montelon was going to destroy the evidence of the correspondence Resendez said Puente claimed he’d written.
Loraine Ritchey operates a WordPress website called “That Woman’s Weblog” and she reached out to Puente after his former employer’s headline described him as a “confidential informant” for Lorain police. He wrote back that he was never the police department’s confidential informant. Apparently the Plain Dealer and cleveland.com whose executives once supervised his work and authorized his wages are not truthful, Puente’s answer implied.
Before he left the Plain Dealer on July 20, 2010, cleveland.com published a story Puente wrote about Resendez being laid off with another captain by then Sheriff Phillip Stammati. One of my cousins was a deputy for Stammati so Resendez’s name is familiar to me. Another cousin served on Lorain city council. I’m also familiar with Rivera’s work. What Puente left out of the “lay off” story about his boy was any of the drama they’d been involved in together.
To Mark and his Cleveland Scene employers. I know I’m the best investigative journalist … ever. The Plain Dealer would have had a wall of Pulitizer’s had my work been published on its pages over the past 42 years. My stories have been “copped” by other writers for the past 42 years and more recently without attribution. The Plain Dealer’s been the worst offender followed by WOIO.
As I don’t read Cleveland Scene unless someone sends me a story, I can’t say how many of my stories have been redone without attribution. After I published a front page story about former East Cleveland councilman O. Mays using a California serial killer’s transcript to teach in the Cleveland Municipal School District they followed up with their own “Pretender to the Throne” story.
The point, Mark, is the shit you did was foul and I’m not the mutha fuckin’ one. You are not going to build your identity as a writer off my mutha fuckin’ work. Your employers, co-workers and colleagues in this town’s media have lied all over my name to create a false impression of me before the public while using my stories without attribution to boost your readership and careers.
I am the best journalist this town has ever seen. Y’all are just too petty-azzed small-minded to acknowledge it.
