The long-awaited grand jury indictment alleging Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke and four others were part of a public corruption conspiracy dropped on Friday afternoon. Reporters who had been salivating for a couple of years at rumors of $35,000 in cash handed over in a paper bag to pay off an “influential” legislator were quick to react—but likely disappointed.

There is nothing in the 30-page indictment about $35,000 changing hands, in cash or otherwise, and no mention of a paper bag. (The full indictment is embedded at the bottom of this post, and the network chart above maps out the alleged connections and specific charges against each defendant. I’ve added question marks alongside the line representing campaign contributions, indicating the hurdles to treating them as bribes).

The indictment places lobbyist and businessman Tobi Solidum at the center of the alleged scheme. Solidum, who has apparently left the state and is believed to be in the Philippines beyond legal reach, pitched a public-private partnership early in the pandemic to scale up local COVID-19 testing, including high-profile traveler screening at Honolulu Airport.

By January 2022, Solidum estimated his compamies were processing an half of all COVID-19 tests statewide, according to the indictment.

The indictment does not allege the original contract awards were obtained through bribes. Instead, the criminal charges center on events in early 2022, when federal emergency funding was drying up and contractors and state officials were scrambling to secure state appropriations to maintain testing operations.

According to prosecutors, Solidum made cash payments and issued checks to then-State Rep. Ryan Yamane—chair of the House Health Committee—between 2020 and 2022 in exchange for legislative influence and insider access. Solidum is also alleged to have directed a $7,000 payment to Ford Fuchigami on January 30, 2022, for legislative assistance while Fuchigami was serving on the staff of the Senate Ways and Means Committee.

Notably, the indictment contains no allegations that Sylvia Luke accepted any personal cash payoffs. Instead, the case against Luke hinges on a January 20, 2022 dinner meeting at Morton’s The Steakhouse, where two $5,000 campaign checks were handed to her by Solidum and his stepdaughter, Kristen Pae. Luke turned the checks over to her volunteer campaign treasurer, Leo Asuncion Jr., to be deposited into the “Friends of Sylvia Luke” account.

Despite early media focus on the Lieutenant Governor, the State’s own filings position her far from the center of the conspiracy. As Deputy Attorney General David Van Acker acknowledged when the indictment was unsealed: “If we’re looking at the most culpable individual factually, we believe that is Ryan Yamane.”
With Solidum absent, Yamane faces the heaviest allegations involving direct off-the-books payments. Fuchigami faces charges tied to his $7,000 payment, while Asuncion is charged with making false statements and concealing records regarding the checks, though he is not accused of taking bribes.

For Luke, prosecutors are attempting to convert two political contributions—deposited in a campaign bank account—into criminal bribery. Because Hawaii courts have yet to establish a clear legal line distinguishing legitimate political contributions from criminal bribery, prosecutors face a steep hurdle in proving an explicit quid pro quo.

As one legal commentator observed following the filing: Lieutenant Governor Sylvia Luke is Innocent.

Illustration by ChatGPT

I was reading an article in the Economist Magazine on Saturday describing the growing class tensions and street battles over access to air conditioning across the globe (“The geopolitics of air-conditioning“). Yes, I subscribe to The Econonist online and find it a source of good reporting.

As extreme heat breaks tempers and electricity grids, fights over ac—or the energy that powers cooling tech—are threatening to break politics. It is a decidedly modern problem: ac hardly existed even in America before 1960; now climate change has made it a near-absolute must in much of the world. In November the cop30 climate summit, held in Belém, Brazil, declared cooling technologies like air-conditioning to be “essential infrastructure” like water, energy and sanitation.

That got me wondering about A/C’s history in Hawaii. I found the answer in the Hawaii Modernism Context Study done for the Historic Hawaii Foundation

This sction on air conditioning appears as Chapter 4.2.1 in this Historic Hawaii study that provides a broad review of 20th Century architecture in Honolulu.

The idea of circulating cool air through a building has existed at least since the beginning of the first millennium. To keep their houses cool during the summer months, affluent Romans piped aqueduct water behind their interior walls. Circulating cold air through a structure wasthe cooling method utilized by Chinese during the Han dynasty at least by the third century.

Willis Haviland Carrier is credited with inventing the modern electric air conditioner. In 1902, a year after Carrier graduated as an engineer from Cornell University, he designed and built a commercial air-conditioning unit for the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing and Publishing Company in New York. The system was intended to be used to actively cool machinery involved in the printing process, but Carrier discovered that not only could his design cool the air, but regulate humidity as well. Reduced humidity and temperature helped printing presses calibrate ink and paper alignment. This development paved the way for industrial and commercial use of air conditioning as Carrier and six other engineers formed the Carrier Engineering Corporation in 1915, and opened a factory in Syracuse, New York. In 1921, Carrier patented the centrifugal refrigeration machine, a centrifugal-compressor similar to the centrifugal turning-blades of a water pump. The ‘centrifugal chiller’ was the first practical method of air conditioning large spaces. Cooling for human comfort rather than industrial need began in 1924, when the J.L. Hudson Department Store in Detroit installed three Carrier centrifugal chillers. In Hawaii, the McInerny Store on Fort Street (no longer extant) was air conditioned in 1926, which would make it a very early example in the nation of air conditioning used for the comfort of people. The boom in human cooling spread from department stores to movie theaters with the Rivoli Theater in New York being an early example. In 1928, Carrier developed the first residential ‘Weathermaker’, an air conditioner for private home use, and in 1932 the Carrier Engineering Corporation used the recently invented refrigerant Freon to make the world’s first self-contained home air conditioning unit, called an “Atmospheric Cabinet.” The Great Depression and World War II slowed the non-industrial use of air conditioning. After the war, consumer sales started to grow and by 1953 over a million window units were sold.

W. A. Ramsay Ltd. became the Hawaii agent for Carrier Corporation in 1935, and in a September 1935 half page newspaper advertisement proclaimed itself the only air conditioned offices in Hawaii. Later that year the Hawaii Theater installed air conditioning as part of its remodeling; in 1936, the Cooke Trust Company Offices, Waikiki Theater, and Queens Hospital asthma ward all became air conditioned. In 1938, Von Hamm Young, who was the distributor for Frigidaire air conditioners, installed this equipment in the offices in the Campbell Estate Building on Fort Street. The first fully air conditioned house in Hawaii was the Topping residence (1938) designed by Dahl & Conrad. Another early appearance of air conditioning in Hawaii was at Shangri-La (1939) where Doris Duke had air conditioning installed in three rooms: her wine cellar, kitchen storage room, and the room which contained the master phonograph. The young millionairess explained to the press that Hawaii’s climate was one of the things that induced her to build a home in the islands, and she had no intention to manufacture her own climate in which to live.

The use of air conditioning in Hawaii gradually expanded during the 1950s and 1960s, especially in new commercial buildings, and was associated with a sense of being modern and up-to-date. The Honolulu Advertiser concisely summed up this implicit relationship in one sentence when it reported, “The Pacific Development Co. is constructing a modern building to house six air conditioned offices and shops” at 1202 Waimana Street between Pensacola and Piikoi Streets (July 2, 1954, page B6). The coffee shop in the no longer extant Edgewater Hotel (1951) was the earliest known air conditioned eating place in Waikiki. The hotel also presented Hawaii with the islands’ first automated elevator and also the first hotel swimming pool. Times Supermarket claims to be the first super market to install air conditioning, and St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church in Kalihi (1952) was the first air conditioned place of worship. Very few home owners or builders chose to install climate control in modern dwelling units, and in June 1968 Hawaiian Electric Company estimated that no more than sixty five homes in Hawaii were fully air conditioned. Cost was a large consideration because the $2,000 to $4,000 expense increased the cost of a dwelling by at least ten percent.

Air conditioner dealers and installers were cautiously optimistic that their sales in Hawaii would accelerate during the 1970s, reflecting the dramatic growth in sales that took place on the mainland during the last half of the 1960s. They optimistically looked toward the growing condominium market as a major consumer for air conditioners, as witnessed by the construction in 1968 of both the Princess Leilani condominium apartment (1561 Kanunu Street) and the Wailana (1860 Ala Moana Boulevard), whose apartments came fully air conditioned. The number of residential units completely air conditioned in Hawaii increased by 322 units by the end of 1968. By 1969 six fully air conditioned condominium projects were under construction, including three developed by Bruce Stark. This developer considered air conditioning a given for all future condominium construction as high-rise dwellers desired air conditioning not only for keeping cool, but in order to reduce noise, air pollution, wind, and sun glare. As the 1970s turned into the 1980s, the growing popularity of air conditioned environments resulted in architects designing less open buildings, as they no longer felt a need to rely on the natural ventilation of buildings by the trade winds.