Now that the corruption trial of the former Honolulu police chief, his wife, formerly a top city prosecutor, and three police officers, Civil Beat has offered up an excellent overview of the case against them (“Honolulu Police Corruption, Civil Beat’s guide to the ongoing U.S. Justice Department investigation into police and public corruption in Hawaii“).
CB provides a timeline in the case, a look at the key players, and a collection of clippings about the case, including ongoing trial coverage.
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It’s the place to start if you want to understand the trial now underway in Honolulu’s Federal District Court. And it’s not behind a paywall, so you’re free to browse.
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Awesome, Thanks Ian
The Kealoha trial is juicy with sex, drugs and the stinking underbelly of city officials exposed. BUT… manini amounts of money compared with billions of missing public money on rail. Kealohas stole from family and a couple kids. I fear those who stole from the taxpayers on rail will never ever be held to justice. Billions and billions over budget and unfinished and nobody knows where the $$ went? Thats a lot to hide. The project managers at HART would have to know.
To restore public confidence every penny of public of the billions spent should be posted on HARTs website. That way the public can learn what happened.
The rail project is wildly over-budget, but claiming that “nobody knows where the $$ went” seems to be a wild overstatement. The money clearly went to pay various contractors. If vast amounts of money are “hidden” or “missing,”
that’s something that has not been reported by any credible news source.
There are plenty of questions that still need to be answered.
How is it that the US Attorney’s Office was suckered into pursuing the failed prosecution of Puana for the mailbox theft that a different crew of feds now alleges was a frame-up and conspiracy by the Kealohas? And was anyone held accountable for that apparent misuse, or abuse, of federal resources?
Were the feds stung by the realization that they’d been played, and did the Justice Department make an aggressive u-turn and send in some straight-shooters from California to try and get the egg off its face?
If all this had erupted while Obama (or some other Dem with or without Hawaii ties) was president and Inouye was still in office, would it have been handled the same way, or at all? Would the whole mess have been ignored or quietly swept under the carpet? It seems quite fair to seriously wonder, though there will never be a real answer.
And how far will this thing go with the remaining targets? Will there be even more?
During to the lead-up to the mailbox theft trial, the alleged conspirators lied about what had happened. They lied to federal investigators. It likely was seen as a relatively simple case, with law enforcement witnesses holding their line. So I wouldn’t view it as an abuse or misuse of resources.
And those lies told to investigators are much of the basis for the current prosecution.
Not so fast.
You seem to be overlooking the fact that a US Postal Inspector has testified in the current trial that he believed there had been insufficient evidence to proceed with the case against Puana; that he recommended the US Attorney’s Office not proceed with the case; and that an assistant US attorney had agreed with him but was overruled by superiors.
“I told him the case was a loser and we should not go anywhere near the case,” the inspector testified he had told the assistant, but the US Attorney’s Office later instructed him to prepare a criminal complaint anyway, according to Civil Beat’s May 22 account of the current trial.
That attempted prosecution was quite the fiasco, obviously.
It therefore seems quite reasonable to wonder whether Puana or anyone else would have been prosecuted so aggressively for the alleged theft of a privately owned mailbox belonging to an ordinary citizen. Regardless of any lies told to investigators by the current crop of defendants, was an extraordinary effort made on a very flimsy case because the owners of this mailbox were top local law enforcement figures or personal friends of somebody who got badly duped?
And it does indeed seem reasonable to wonder whether the prosecution of Puana thus constituted an abuse or misuse of federal resources, and whether the fallout would have been ignored or covered up under a different set of political circumstances. The corruption at Sandwich Islands sure seemed to be inexplicably ignored by federal prosecutors for years, until circumstances changed. Are federal prosecutors really so immune from political considerations and pressures? It certainly appears that Honolulu’s city prosecutors were not.