Glass House

by Brian Alexander

  When he was about twelve, the parents of a friend, aware of Hutchinson’s plight, took him into their home. “They essentially raised me all my teenage years. I give no credit to my mom and dad whatsoever. But as far as being able to do what I do, going to work every day and living like a normal human being? I give all that credit to Sean’s parents, Rita and Russ Miller.” Russ worked for Diamond Power as a millwright. He also taught plumbing classes at a county technical school. Russ showed Hutchinson, and his own son, how to work with their hands, how to demand excellence of oneself—the rewards of discipline. Hutchinson owed his success in no small part to the fact that Russ Miller had a good job.

  * * *

  Eric Brown was friendly with Brad Hutchinson, though it could be said that Brown was friendly with lots of people—his mother-in-law’s generation of local do-gooders, old football pals, attorneys and judges, people he’d helped over the years, a longtime friend at Anchor Hocking who was convinced the company wouldn’t last long. Over the preceding months, I’d watched him walk into the Ale House 1890, and the Cherry Street Pub, and every time, people shot their arms up in the air to greet him from across the room. They shook his hand. They slapped him on the back.

  That experience wasn’t unique to Brown—this was Lancaster, where you had to work to avoid people you knew. But a lot of Lancastrians watched Brown grow up, or they grew up with him. They watched him play on the high school offensive line, and they cheered when he made All-Ohio. When pummelings from the 350-pound linemen of Division I college ball, along with homesickness, drove him back to Lancaster, he pinned a badge to his chest, belted a gun around his waist, and became a nineteen-year-old county deputy. He’d worked in local law enforcement ever since, for thirty-two years. During that time he drove people home who were too drunk to drive themselves, sparing them a DUI. He rescued their cats and dogs. He caught burglars who tried to rob their businesses. Once in a while, he knocked their heads. He worked undercover drug investigations, sometimes by himself, with no backup, when local police were just beginning to figure out how to conduct them. Too often, he sat in their living rooms, looked them in the eyes, and laid the news out in black-and-white: “Your kid is gonna die if something doesn’t change.”

  And he was married to a Hajost, so even if he’d wanted to avoid socializing beyond the duties of his job, he couldn’t. That’s why his announcement to Lancaster that he was leaving the Major Crimes Unit to become deputy director of Ohio’s HIDTA—the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program—was so painful, for him and for the town.

  The new job came with a big raise over his MCU salary, and he considered it an honor. His gut told him it was the right move at the right time. Maybe he should have left even earlier. For sure he was burned out. The MCU needed some new leadership with new ideas. But Lancaster was his town and his responsibility. The MCU’s charge was to act within both Fairfield and Hocking counties, and all the cities and villages in them, but he always tried to pay more attention to Lancaster. Now he felt like he was abandoning it. “I feel a lot of guilt,” he told me.

  He believed he could do some good on a bigger stage by helping to coordinate squads like the MCU all over the state and by attracting federal funding. But he’d be out of the field now, and the old football star in him, the adrenaline addict, couldn’t help but feel that he’d be watching the action from the sidelines.

  He rehashed a number of arguments in his head to shoo away the guilt. For example, he told himself that even though his job wasn’t finished in Lancaster, it never would be. That’s why he hated the term “drug war.”

  “It’s not a fucking war!” he told me on one of the few occasions when he seemed to lose his temper. “We protect each other. We protect our community, our kids, families. We gotta keep it at bay, we can’t just let it roll.” A war, he argued, had winners and losers. But there were no winners or losers in his world. The best you could do was try to control the rot.

  Brown understood that much of what plagued Lancaster was far out of the town’s control. Too much of the local leadership was incompetent, or just overmatched. The world beyond Lancaster was big and merciless, but local officials had spent so many years being snugged into Lancaster’s cozy society, and trying to re-create the town of their youths, they’d blinded themselves.

  They kept thinking the world was a place of goodwill, where people would do the right thing. But it was all about the money. There was money to be made by the CTC, the transition center old Sheriff Peck created that brought felons into John and Wendy Oatney’s neighborhood. Peck knew where the money was—newly released convicts were a growth industry—so he went after it. But hadn’t the city ever heard of zoning regulations?

  Why hadn’t the state done anything about the car-title-loan shops and payday lenders that prey on people down on their luck? “We should have statutes,” he argued.

  There was no mystery to why Lancaster was pocked with car-title and short-term loan storefronts. The industry spent heavily to finance the campaigns of favored politicians. Lancaster’s congressman, Steve Stivers, received $80,700 during the 2013–14 election cycle, making him one of the top recipients of short-term-loan industry money in the U.S. Congress. The Ohio Consumer Lenders Association, the lobby group that represented the largest Ohio title-loan lenders, gave generously to John Kasich and the Ohio House Republican Organizational Committee Building Fund.

  I spent two hours watching an Advance America storefront, an outlet of one of the largest such lenders in the country, now owned by the Mexican firm Grupo Elektra. The outlet was near the hospital. One person after another, often dressed in medical scrubs, filed into the store.

  I decided to ask about a car-title loan on the used Buick I’d bought. A young woman named Sarah tried, with little clarity, to explain the terms.

  “It’s a sixty-day loan. Your first payment would be due within thirty days. And, um, we can refinance anytime. Once you refinance, it saves you on your CSO fees and your—”

  “What’s a CSO fee?”

  “Your interest and stuff. Rates. Stuff that you save 5 percent each time that you refinance. It’s not very much, but it’s 5 percent, but it helps. After the sixty days, you—your big lump sum would be actually due, um, you know, but you can refinance and it would take it down to um, let’s see … I gotta have that little cheat-sheet thing.… You’ll be renewing your loan—you get charged the same, but your principal is going down 5 percent rather than—or 10 percent rather than 5 percent—in sixty days. That makes sense. It’s really hard to explain.”

  In order to help clarify the terms, I asked Sarah what most people do. “I have some people that refinance three times a week or three times a month. I have some that refinance every thirty days, and I got some that refinance on sixty days.” A lot of her customers, she said, took out smaller loans, under $500, because they didn’t have checking accounts. They used the money to pay bills.

  I asked her if she’d let me take the “little cheat-sheet thing,” which listed the payment schedule and interest rates, with me. Sarah said company policy forbade it. But after a lot of confused back-and-forthing, I finally figured out that, on a $1,000 loan, I would owe service-fee payments of $255 per month. None of that amount would be applied to the $1,000 principal. But not to worry, Sarah said, because I could refinance for another fee, rolling over the balance (now $1,255). She encouraged me to keep rolling it over, providing the incentive of a 5 percent reduction in principal each time I did so. The interest rate worked out to be about 300 percent. If I’d wanted a simpler $107.50 payday loan, the interest would have been 636.99 percent—at a time when a thirty-year mortgage was going for about 3.8 percent, and banks could borrow money from the Federal Reserve almost for free.

  This was the sort of loan that helped put Wendy Oatney in a deep hole of debt, the kind of loan Loving Lending was trying to combat—against the efforts of the very politicians for whom most people in Lancaster voted.

  Private equity and mainstream
American banks helped finance outfits like Advance America. According to a report by Reinvestment Partners, a North Carolina–based financial justice advocacy organization, before being purchased by Grupo Elektra, Advance America was supported by a credit line of $300 million provided by Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and U.S. Bank, among others. The money the banks lent, which cost the banks almost nothing, helped enable Advance America to charge poor people 300 percent interest.

  Advance America did not supply the loan. It was what’s called a credit service organization, or CSO. The actual loan would come from NCP Finance, based in Dayton. NCP described itself as “the premier CSO lender in the country.” NCP helped make Ohio one of the biggest markets for predatory lending in the United States. A report by the Center for Responsible Lending documented that five states accounted for half of the loan fees—amounting to $3.95 billion—charged by American high-interest car-title and payday lenders. Ohio was one of the five, accounting for $318,256,497 in fees, an amount that does not include interest payments.

  NCP and its founders were also generous contributors to Dave Yost, Ohio’s auditor, Stivers, and Kasich.

  Brown mentioned the pawnshop in the middle of downtown, where Hickle’s department store used to be. “That really burns me,” he said. The people who owned it didn’t live there. Out-of-towners and self-interested locals like Peck had fed on the bones of Lancaster. All local officials could do was argue about parking on Main Street or where to build a new jail or applaud a restaurant opening while they prayed for the tourists who were never coming.

  The drug dealers were the ones with vision. They knew they lived in a global, rootless, gadget-coveting, atomized, every-man-for-himself world in which money trumped all other considerations. Mexican and African American dealers “used to be like oil and water. They never mixed. But money solved that.” There was a time when black dealers in the Midwest, like Carly’s connect, never touched heroin. “But they knew there was money to be made, and the best way to make that money was to fix those bridges, so they did.” The Mexicans lost money on dope. Between Afghanistan and Mexico, heroin was now so plentiful they used it as a loss leader while they sometimes forced small-timers like Jason to sell higher-margin ice, a drug that used to be exclusive to blacks and whites. And local whites—who called blacks “porch monkeys” and “niggers” when they were in Lancaster—were happy to drive up to Columbus to help them traffic drugs. The moon rocks Lloyd was using and selling, and a new tide of fentanyl the MCU was beginning to find around town, were often made (like Drew’s shoes, from Guangdong Province) in China.

  The social contract, whatever that once meant, “was gone,” Brown said.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Corporate America is what happened,” he answered.

  * * *

  The fire on Shop 1-2 represented bad news for Solomon, beyond the obvious. The good news was that the Delaware bankruptcy judge approved the prepackaged plan on May 22. The company would again turn private. Monomoy and Clinton would become insignificant shareholders. The lenders would appoint a board of directors. He believed the company would come out of bankruptcy as a restructured business. With the changes he’d implemented in the last half of 2014, and now without the massive debt, he could shift his focus. In the motto-speak he often used, he said, “We’ve turned it around, now let’s turn it up.”

  But the fire was an untimely reminder of Plant 1’s decrepit condition. It was possible that a new board would be a “turnaround” board that would want to step back and rebuild incrementally, starting with safety. More expensive consultants might be hired. Solomon regarded safety as an “apple pie” issue—nobody ever said they were anti-safety. But safety could also be used as an excuse to avoid undertaking initiatives that could build the business. He wanted to sprint. Now that a fire had broken out, Solomon was concerned a new board might want to walk.

  Swink didn’t have the least idea that the company he worked for was coming out of bankruptcy. He said he’d never heard of Monomoy. He knew about fire, though. As he and Aaron Shonk sat on the floor of Brian’s studio, killing time by playing an old-school video game, he held up his right hand so I could see the scar on the meat just behind the knuckles. He’d been branded by his machine. He’d also had a fire erupt.

  Just the other day, he saw a guy break his pinkie finger on a press. In a moment of distraction, the victim stuck his finger under a plunger, and the hydraulic power crushed it.

  Memorial Day weekend was coming up, so I’d invited Brian to drive over to the west side for chicken-wing night at Old Bill Bailey’s. I expected a crowd: I’d been told Bailey’s wings were the best in town. But when we arrived, only five other people sat at the bar. We ordered a couple of basket-loads of wings, with sauce enough for us to bathe in. The beer cost $2, unless you asked for something fancy. There was no piano, and hadn’t been, since Benny Smith sold the place. A jukebox blasted rock ’n’ roll from the 1980s into the near-empty space. A woman who looked sixty, but was probably forty, stood in front of the jukebox. She wore too-big jeans and an old T-shirt. With the arms and legs of dried sassafras twigs and the hips of a skinny eight-year-boy, she swayed by herself to a slow beat only she could hear.

  “Tweaker,” Brian said.

  Overhead, a flat-screen TV mounted on a wall displayed a constant stream of keno games beamed in from the Ohio Lottery. Patrons could gamble away what money they didn’t drink. The state of Ohio took in $298 million from keno in 2014, most of it from the pockets of people downing two-buck beer in places like Old Bill Bailey’s. The money supported the state’s schools so taxes wouldn’t have to. The state’s politicians didn’t regard gambling as a tax. Nobody forced you to gamble.

  As we drove back through the east side, Brian lit a cigarette. He steered the F-150 through a Kroger parking lot, and I pointed out a dry cleaner that used to be a Burger Chef franchise where I so profoundly flunked lunch-hour French-frying that I was encouraged to surrender my fry basket. Brian didn’t know it was once a fast food joint. He never ate fast food. He believed people in Ohio, by which he meant Lancaster, were so fat because they were addicted to it. He took a deep drag, blew the smoke from his lungs out the driver’s-side window, and said, “That shit’ll kill ya.”

  ELEVEN

  Hope for a Forever Home

  June 2015

  Mark Kraft loaded the syringe and injected the heroin into his arm, feeling its warm safety wrap itself around him. The dope was ten times better than what he used to get before his January arrest. And cheaper, too. There was a lot of good shit floating around now, and the price had dropped by half. You could buy two grams for $100—the old Columbus price, but right there in town.

  That was thanks, in part, to Jason and Lloyd. Mark had known Lloyd over the years, and Jessica Cantrell and Jason, but he didn’t know how they’d helped saturate the market.

  Other than the cravings, the nagging torment of the addict trying to quit, there wasn’t any good reason why he shot up that Sunday. Mark knew he’d be drug-tested, and that he had a court date in two weeks. His lawyer was working on a deal, called “treatment in lieu of conviction” (ILC), that would keep him out of jail and prevent a felony from appearing on his record if Mark entered a treatment program, stayed sober, and obeyed restrictions like curfews. An ILC mattered, because a felony stayed with you. Every junkie knew that felonies yoked you to a head-down future in menial, last-chance jobs. Now he’d put the deal at risk.

  This wasn’t his first slip. He’d taken Perc 30s at least twice since being busted but, through either luck or skill, had managed to slide through the drug tests. Maybe that was because they were fake; he suspected so because they burned when they went up his nose.

  This dope for sure wasn’t fake. But the warmth was temporary. It was always temporary. Moments after injecting himself, he thought, “What the fuck am I doing?”

  * * *

  Over on the south side, John Oatney was still looking for a job. He hadn’t
had much luck. There was hope, though. He’d heard about another warehouse opening just outside of town. He planned to apply.

  And he and Wendy had good news. They’d finally completed their Loving Lending program. Except for a refinanced mortgage, they were debt-free. Loving Lending had helped them roll the second mortgage John had taken out to pay bills into a new loan at a much lower interest rate. They now paid $270 per month. They’d erased their credit card debt, too, and John had cut up the cards. He swore he’d never have another one. It was a big relief, he said, to have those debts off his back.

  Wendy had been granted some stock as part of her compensation back when she worked at Sonic making hamburgers. The stock was now worth about $4,000. John planned to use the money to pay a contractor to re-level the house. Part of it was sinking. Once the house repairs were made, he hoped to sell it for maybe $50,000. Then he and Wendy could move out into the country, where it was peaceful.

  Loving Lending helped John qualify for free government health insurance, saving him about $90 per month. “As soon as I was able to quit paying for my health care and stuff, that freed up even more money,” he told me. The insurance proved timely. John was seriously overweight, and he’d started having chest pains. He assumed he was about to have a heart attack, but doctors diagnosed him as having Barrett’s esophagus, a potentially serious condition caused by acid reflux from the stomach, and often a consequence of obesity. John had to drive all the way up to a Columbus hospital to see a specialist. The expense would have put him right back into heavy debt had it not been for the new insurance. He’d also started to receive food stamps. The Oatneys didn’t have a landline; they received a subsidized cell phone service, an “Obama phone.”

  June was state budget month in Ohio. John Kasich signed new legislation that cut $2 billion worth of income taxes. The top rate in Ohio fell to just below 5 percent. Businesses would pay no tax at all on the first $250,000 in profits. Taxes hadn’t been that low since 1982, when Ronald Reagan was president.