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The Buried Placard That Exposed a Farmers Market Extortion Ring · Crime Bloodlines

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On June 14th, 2014, a road grader operator named Angela
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Zimmerman was cutting a gravel maintenance pass through Kellner Park
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: when her blade turned up a laminated card. It was
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: a vendor certification placard for the Carver Falls Farmer's Market.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: Serial number 0047, issued to Tanner Creek Organics. The problem
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: was simple and absolute. That placard was also hanging on
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: the Tanner Creek Organics stall, across the.
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: Park, right now.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: There was only supposed to be one. What Zimmerman had
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: pulled from the gravel was not a duplicate by accident.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: It was evidence of a shadow system, a second set
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: of placards printed in parallel, used to pull cash from
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: small farm vendors who had no idea they were being extorted.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: According to the case record, 31 of the 44 licensed
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: vendors at the Carver Falls Farmer's Market spent three seasons
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: paying fees that went into a single man's pocket. Not
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: into the city's accounts. Not into any auditable fund. Into
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: his pocket. The man who built that system was William Barrett.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: 51 years old, chairman of the Carver Falls Agricultural Licensing
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: and Market Board, and owner of Renfield Ag Supply. He
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: had been appointed without a dissenting vote. What follows is
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: the story of how that shadow operation ran, how one
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: person inside it refused to look away, and why a
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: single laminated card, buried in a gravel road, became the
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: crack that brought the whole structure down. Carver Falls sits
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: in the upper Midwest, population roughly 80,000. It is the
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: kind of city where the regional identity is still tied
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: to agriculture, where a farmer's market is not a weekend novelty,
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: but a civic institution, part of what the town understands
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: itself to be. The Kellner Park Market had run for decades.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: Vendors drove in from surrounding counties. Families scheduled their Saturday
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: mornings around it. In spring 2011, the city formalized that institution.
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: The Carver Falls Agricultural Licensing and Market Board was established
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: by ordinance to oversee vendor certification, health compliance, and placard issuance.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: It was the kind of structural decision that generates almost
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: no public attention. A board was needed. People were appointed.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: A chairman was named. That chairman was William Barrett. On paper,
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: the certification process was straightforward. Vendors paid an official fee
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: of $ 350 per year. They received a laminated placard confirming
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: their license status. They displayed it at their stall. The
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: board maintained a log.
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: Simple. Clean. Accountable.
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: Barrett had no visible reason to subvert it. He was
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: already a recognized figure in Carver Falls agricultural circles. His
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: supply company, Renfield Ag Supply, had operated in the county
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: for years. The board appointment was, by most accounts, a
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: natural extension of that standing. In spring 2012, a 27-year-old
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: named Alice Stevens was hired as the board's certification coordinator.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: Her job was administrative, process applications, maintain the placard log,
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: keep the laminator running. She was organized, detail-oriented, and knew
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: enough to the role that she read every procedure manual
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: she was given. That instinct would matter later. Stevens worked
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: alongside the official log from her first week. She tracked
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: which vendors had been certified, which placards had been issued,
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: and which print runs the laminator had completed. It was routine.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: It was meant to be routine. What it was not
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: meant to produce was a discrepancy. But that is exactly
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: what it produced. By fall 2012, Stevens had noticed that
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: the laminator log showed more print runs than the official
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: placard log reflected. The numbers did not align. More cards
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: had been printed than the system accounted for. She did
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: not yet know what that meant, but she kept a
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: copy of the laminator log in her desk drawer, separate
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: from the official files. That copy sat there for about
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: 18 months. What Stevens did not know, what no vendor
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: and no city official appeared to know, was that Barrett
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: had built a second layer into the system. almost from
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: the beginning. Shortly after the board was established, Barrett's associate
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: Dennis Prater began delivering a second set of placards alongside
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: the official paperwork. These placards were not logged. They were
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: not connected to the official $ 350 fee. They came with
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: a separate cash payment, $ 500 per vendor per year, collected
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: by Prater under the label of freight coordination fees through
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: his company, Overland Transit Solutions. The shadow placard was Barrett's
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: insurance mechanism and his revenue stream simultaneously. Vendors who paid
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: received both cards. The second one was described, according to
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: case records, as a backup. In case the original was lost,
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: most vendors paid. According to the investigative record, by summer 2013,
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: 31 of the market's 44 licensed vendors were making that
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: $ 500 cash payment. At peak, the scheme was generating roughly $ 15, 000
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: per month.
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: Uintext. Unrecorded.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: Invisible to every audit the system was capable of producing.
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: because no audit had been designed to look for a
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: parallel placard series. Barrett had not coerced.
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: Anyone with threats.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: He had not needed to. The board he chaired controlled
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: inspection reports. Vendors whose compliance files showed minor flagged violations
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: had reasons to stay cooperative. The pressure was structural, not spoken,
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: and it worked. The person least aware of how completely
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: it worked was Alice Stevens, sitting at her desk with
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: a laminator log that did not add up, trying to
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: understand a gap she did not yet have a name for.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: The laminator log had been sitting in Stevens' desk drawer
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: for about 18 months when the second image arrived.
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: It came by phone. June 2013.
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: Susan Kraft, a vendor at Bluebell Ridge Farm, called the
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: certification office with a routine question about her paperwork. Somewhere
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: in the middle of the conversation, Kraft mentioned the backup one,
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: the placard that Barrett's man had brought out with the
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: rest of her documents.
• 5:42
  Speaker 2: She said it as.
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: Though it were obvious, as though everyone knew. Stevens did
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: not say anything that would alarm her. She finished the call,
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: set down the receiver, and looked at the drawer.
• 5:53
  Speaker 2: The laminator log.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: Showed more print runs than the official placard log reflected.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: She had assumed a clerical error, a software glitch, some
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: reasonable explanation that hadn't surfaced yet. But Kraft had just
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: described a second placard delivered by hand. Not mailed from
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: the board office. Not entered in any system. Stevens could access.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: Delivered by Barrett's man. That phrase did not appear in
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: any procedure Stevens had been trained on. She opened the
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: drawer and pulled out a copy of the laminator log.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: Then she started a second folder. What went into that
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: folder over the next eleven months was not dramatic in isolation.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: It was a collection of small, wrong images. A print-run
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: count that climbed without a corresponding entry in the official log.
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: An invoice from Overland Transit Solutions, a freight company, appearing
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: in board financial records that had no obvious connection to
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: a market that did not ship anything. Vendor names appearing
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: in Prater's collection schedule that did not appear in any
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: flagged violation list, which would have explained why they might
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: need extra services. Each image alone was explainable. Together, they
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: formed a pattern. Stevens could not name, but could not
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: stop seeing. She did not confront Barrett. She did not
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: mention it to the other board staff. According to later records,
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: she began volunteering regularly at the Kellner Community Food Pantry
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: on the eastern edge of the park, the same park
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: that bordered the market's seasonal lot. Rose Okafor The pantry's
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: director would later confirm Stevens' consistent presence there during that period.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: What Stevens was doing on those visits, beyond sorting canned goods,
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: was watching. The market, the lot, the comings and goings
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: of a man named Prater, who arrived not with freight
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: but with a soft-sided document carrier. She never opened one
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: of those carriers.
• 7:35
  Speaker 2: She didn't need to.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: She had the log. By summer 2013, the picture had
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: sharpened into something close to certainty. 30, one of the
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: market's 44 licensed vendors, were making a cash payment of
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: $ 500 per year.
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: Not to the board. Not by check. To Prater. In person.
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: Labeled as freight coordination fees.
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: At peak, that was roughly $ 15, 000 a month, moving invisibly
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: through a system built to be invisible. A system built
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: on parallel records can be contradicted by its own second copy.
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: It requires that both sets stay hidden. And Prater had
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: a problem with the old ones. Shadow placards did not
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: last forever. Vendors occasionally lost them. Prater issued replacements. The
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: retired cards, the ones that had been replaced, needed to disappear.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: According to the investigative records sometime in autumn 2013, Prater
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: drove to the gravel service road along the eastern edge
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: of Kellner Park and disposed of them there, scattered in gravel,
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: out of sight, gone, or so the assumption went. The
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: first thing that actually broke the scheme open was not
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: Stevens' folder. It was a road grader blade. June 14th, 2014.
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: Angela Zimmerman was running maintenance on the Kellner Park Service
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: Road when her blade caught something laminated in the gravel.
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: She stopped the machine. She climbed down. The card was dirty,
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: cracked along one edge, but still legible. It bore a number, 047,
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: and the name Tanner Creek Organics and the official seal
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: of the Carver Falls Agricultural Licensing and Market Board. Zimmerman
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: flagged it. The card was logged and forwarded. By then,
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: Laura Hicks had already been working the case for eight weeks.
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: Stevens had contacted State Compliance in April 2014, and her
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: tip had been routed directly to Hicks, a State Agriculture
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: Compliance investigator. Hicks had spent those eight weeks building something
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: patient and specific. Subpoenas for Overland Transit Solutions, invoices, a
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: review of Barrett's brokerage accounts, interviews with seven vendors, five
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: of whom confirmed the cash payments. She had authenticated the
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: laminator log Stevens had kept. What Hicks had not yet
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: found was a physical shadow, a plaque The entire evidentiary
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: case rested on paper and testimony. The scheme existed in
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: numbers and in the accounts of vendors who had paid
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: money they were told was standard. Then placard 047 surfaced
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: from the gravel of Kellner Park, five days before Hicks
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: executed her warrant. The case now had a physical artifact
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: that should not have existed. at all. A laminated card
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: in an official format, bearing an official seal. For a
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: vendor that records showed had never received a second placard.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: It had been buried in a gravel road eight months earlier.
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: It had been retrieved by a machine that was not
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: looking for it. Here is what that card actually did.
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: It recontextualized everything that had come before it. The laminator
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: log anomaly, which a defense attorney could have argued was
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: a clerical error, now had a physical counterpart. The missing
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: print runs had produced something real, something a jury could hold.
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: Hicks executed the warrant on June 19th. Barrett and Prater
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: were arrested on June 22nd. What happened in the 72
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: hours that followed was the part Barrett had not planned for.
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: He was placed in general population at the Shelby County Jail.
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: His cellmate was a man named Ray Obert. According to
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: the sworn statement Obert later provided to Hicks, Barrett talked
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: during the three days between June 22 and June 25.
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: He was not under interrogation. He was not in a
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: formal interview room. He was in a cell, and he
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: talked the way people talk when the structure that has
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: held everything together has just collapsed under a warrant and
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: a pair of handcuffs. Obert's sworn statement reached Hicks four
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: days after the arrest. She requested a formal interview with Barrett.
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: He confirmed everything, all of it. 41 pages. The confession
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: covered the shadow-placard mechanism. Prater's role in collection and disposal,
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: the Overland Transit invoices as a laundering layer, and the
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: structural use of inspection reports to maintain vendor compliance without
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: explicit threats. Barrett described it with the same precision he
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: had used to build it. According to the record, there
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: was no hesitation in the document. He understood exactly what
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: he had done and how it had worked. What no
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: one in that interview room knew. What would not surface
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: for another two years was that Barrett had done something
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: like this before. Not a placard scheme. Not an agricultural board.
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: Four years before the Carver Falls Market Board was even established,
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: a break-in at a Shelby County agricultural cooperative had gone unsolved.
• 12:01
  Speaker 2: $ 12, 000 in cash.
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: No physical evidence recovered at the time. A cold case
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: that sat in a file somewhere while Barrett built his
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: board and ran his market and collected his fees. It
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: was his booking profile from the June 2014 arrest that
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: eventually produced a DNA match to that 2007 break-in. The
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: connection was made in fall 2016. Barrett was charged in
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: early 2017. No additional prison time was added to the
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: nine-year sentence he was already serving from his March 2015 conviction.
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: The scheme had not started with the farmer's market. It
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: had started earlier, in a building no one was watching,
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: with $ 12, 000 in cash and no witnesses.
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: The market was the.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: Second act, and the laminated card in the gravel road
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: was the detail that closed both of them. The trial
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: opened in March of 2015. It ran 11 days. Alice
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: Stevens testified for two of them. She walked the jury
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: through the laminator log discrepancies she had first noticed in
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: fall 2012. The copy she had kept in her desk
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: drawer in the phone call from Susan Craft in June
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: 2013 that confirmed what the numbers already implied. She described
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: about 18 months of quiet documentations. folder by folder, while
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: running the same certification desk where the scheme operated around her.
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: The jury heard that she had contacted state compliance in
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: April 2014 and that Laura Hicks had taken the case
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: from there. Barrett was convicted on all 14 counts.
• 13:25
  Speaker 2: Extortion. Fraud.
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: Official corruption. The jury needed no deliberation that stretched into
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: a second day. The verdict covered everything the 41-page confession
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: had already confirmed and everything the Overland Transit invoices had corroborated.
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: The sentence was nine years in the state correctional system.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: Restitution was ordered at approximately $ 400, 000, distributed across the 31
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: vendors who had paid shadow fees across.
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: Three market seasons.
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: The official certification fee had been $ 350 a year. Barrett
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: had collected $ 500 per vendor per year, on top of
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: that untaxed and unrecorded, through a man with a transit
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: company and a laminated card. The math, laid out in
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: open court, was not complicated. It had just never been checked.
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: Dennis Prater entered a guilty plea to conspiracy. His sentence
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: was four years. He served 26 months. The city council
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: acted before the year was out. That fall, the ordinance
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: governing the Agricultural Licensing Board was amended to require annual
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: third-party audits. The shadow placard system had worked in part
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: because no external review had ever compared the laminator log
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: against the official placard registry. The amendment did not restore
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: what the vendors had lost. It closed the gap Barrett
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: had used. There is something worth pausing on here. The
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: scheme generated approximately $ 15, 000 a month at its peak. Over
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: three seasons, 31 vendors paid into a system that had
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: no legal basis, no oversight, and no paper trail outside
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: the records Barrett controlled. None of them knew what the
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: others had paid. None of them knew the card in
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: their stall was a second card. The isolation was the mechanism,
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: and it held until one vendor, on one phone call,
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: described the wrong card to the wrong person That person
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: was 27.
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: Years old when she took the job. She had no
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: investigative training.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: What she had was access to the laminator log and
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: enough attention to notice that the print runs did not match.
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: Angela Zimmerman found placard number 047 in a gravel road
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: on June 14, 2014. She was operating a road grader
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: in Kellner Park, on the eastern edge of the seasonal
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: lot where the market ran every Saturday. The placard came
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: up with the blade. She stopped, looked at it, and
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: set it aside. That one card reached Laura Hicks five
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: days later. Hicks executed the search warrant.
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: On June 19th.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: Barrett and Prater were arrested on June 22nd. The entire
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: visible structure collapsed in eight days, but the real span
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: was longer. Alice Stevens had been carrying that documentation for
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: about 18 months before anyone in an official capacity saw it.
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: She had sorted canned goods at the Kellner Community Food
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: Pantry on the same weeks she was building her file.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: Rose Okafor, the pantry's director, later confirmed Stevens had been
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: there regularly throughout that period. She had not told Okafor
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: what she was doing. She had not told anyone. There
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: is a version of this story, where the card stays buried,
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: where the autumn rains pack the gravel tight enough that
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: a road grater's blade passes over it, clean, where Stevens
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: contacts state compliance and the case moves on documentary evidence alone,
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: without the physical corroboration that Hicks needed to make the
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: warrant airtight. That version is possible.
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: It is close. It did not happen.
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: What happened instead is that a laminated card surfaced at
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: the right moment, in the right road, in front of
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: the right operator, and it matched a number that was
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: not supposed to exist in any official log. The system
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: Barrett built had a structural weakness he could not design. Away,
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: the shadow placards were physical objects. They could be destroyed,
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: but Prater had not destroyed them. He had driven to
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: the park road in autumn 2013 and scattered them in the.
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: Gravel and in springs.
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: A county grader with a steel blade would push every
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: last fragment into the drainage ditch. Barrett understood exactly what
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: had unraveled him. The 41-page confession is the evidence of
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: that understanding. He described the mechanism with precision because the
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: mechanism no longer protected him.
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: It had already been found.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: Alice Stevens left the certification desk after the trial. What
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: she built in that drawer, folder by folder, over a
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: year and a half, is what put 14 counts before
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: a jury and held them there. The restitution checks went
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: to 31 vendors. The ordinance was amended. The audits began.
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: The laminated card that started it was number 047, issued
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: to Tanner Creek Organics.
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: It should not have existed.
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: It had been retired, discarded, pressed into gravel. And it
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: came up anyway. And it came up anyway. Pushing through
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: compacted soil and two seasons of dead leaves, the stem
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: pale from the dark and the flower already opening.
• 17:57
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