To help highlight the damage being done in American statehouses—and how public service has been corrupted in so many of them—I’m providing regular excerpts from “Laboratories of Autocracy” to paid subscribers.
There’s no better example of the power and damage of the pay-to-play culture in Ohio politics than what has happened to Ohio’s once vaunted system of public education over the past generation. It’s a case study I highlighted in the book—one that the powers that be in Ohio want everyone to forget:
It started with some notes on a napkin.
Then another napkin. Then another.
More specifically, the napkins piled up at the West Side Waffle House in Columbus.
And the man scribbling on them, William Lager, found himself dead broke after a divorce and a business gone belly up. A server at the Waffle House noticed that he’d even photocopy coffee coupons, then hand them over as if they were real, to save money on his morning caffeine fix.
But on the back of those napkins, Lager wrote a business plan that would turn things around. In fact, the plan on those napkins would make him filthy rich, affording him multiple houses in Ohio and a $3.7 million home in Key West. The billion-dollar business he built became the darling of the state’s movers and shakers, touching thousands upon thousands of Ohio families. He could get his calls returned by any politician in the State, from the governor on down, and Jeb Bush enlisted Lager to spread the word nationally about what he’d built. He even hired the server away from the Waffle House to work for his growing empire.
Sounds like the American dream, right?
Think again. Copying those coupons was a tell.
On those napkins, Lager drew up a plan that grew into arguably the largest scam in the history of Ohio. An online, for-profit charter operation that claimed more students than any in the nation by 2015, and was larger than most Ohio colleges.
From early on, problems emerged.
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