Well, I spent much of the Christmas weekend writing another story for Civil Beat updating what’s going on with the Mike Miske case. I started a day or two before, reading over a few court documents for what I thought would be a brief blog post, but as I started piecing a story together, I realized it was going to be more substantial and would be worth offering to CB, a move that would only take a little additional polishing.

But writing the story ended up taking much of Christmas, and about half of yesterday (Sunday).

Perhaps I’m weird, but I always enjoy getting to this stage of a reporting project, when I push past the temptation to procrastinate further and actually start pulling the pieces together into what I hope will be a coherent whole. Yes, I enjoyed the process even though it was Christmas!

In any case, I expect it to appear over on Civil Beat on Tuesday.

And it reminded me that Alexander Silvert’s book on the Kealoha conspiracy case included three long paragraphs near the end of the book in which he described someone he saw as a menacing figure, “he whose name cannot be spoken.” It turns out to be an unmistakable reference to Mike Miske, although Silvert, true to form, never mentions his name.

Throughout the case there was lurking a dark and foreboding figure who was always present in the back of our thoughts. That menacing dark person was thought to have connections to Katherine. We jokingly referred to him as “he whose name cannot be spoken,” a reference to Voldemort of Harry Potter fame. It was meant as a joke, but sometimes not. Even today my wife and I stick to this mantra and don’t speak this person’s real name lest our fears manifest themselves into reality. Superstitious? Yes. But better safe than sorry. During our investigation into Katherine’s past history we uncovered the fact that she had been involved in multiple business ventures. They seemed completely innocuous at first. A real estate venture here, a solar company there, a financial hui here. Business partners came and went. But one name stood out. He was rumored to be a local mafia figure. He was a person whom many of my clients had told me was very dangerous and violent. I had heard the same from federal agents. It was said he had thugs working for him and had had a professional sports personality beaten up at his nightclub. To this day, if I come across a story in the paper referring to “he whose name cannot be spoken,” I’ll simply say “Voldemort,” and my wife knows exactly who I’m talking about.

It seemed that every month we would learn new information that made the connection between Katherine and this Voldemort fellow stronger. At first it was hard to believe that Katherine, a high-level county prosecutor, a person who was head of the Career Offender Unit, could possibly be a friend or business associate of a suspected underworld crime figure. But the more we learned about Katherine’s character and personality, the more we thought it was possible. When we finally got the FBI to investigate the Kealohas, the thought that Katherine might take matters into her own hands and “call” upon her friend was always in the back of our minds. It never happened, but that didn’t stop us from being wary of strangers or out-of-place cars in our neighborhood, didn’t stop us from closing window shades so no one could get a clear look into our house. After the Kealohas were convicted, Voldemort himself was charged with murder. To this day we have no specific evidence that Katherine really had any direct connection to this person, but the mere suspicion that she did was enough to keep us on our toes.

See: Silvert, Alexander. The Mailbox Conspiracy: The Inside Story of the Greatest Corruption Case in Hawai‘i History (p. 293). Watermark Publishing. Kindle Edition.