Latest / True Crime: Killer Secrets / Lineman Finds One Word That Brings Down a City Racket: The Hartwell Towing Case

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Lineman Finds One Word That Brings Down a City Racket: The Hartwell Towing Case · True Crime: Killer Secrets

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: A utility lineman named Curtis Sheridan, had been reading polls
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: for 17 years. He knew every conduit box, every cable run,
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: every staple pattern on the wooden crossbeams along the Renner
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: Boulevard corridor in Caldwell. On a Tuesday morning in October 2019,
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: something stopped him eight feet off the ground. A laminated
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: sheet had been zip-tied to a junction box, facing outward,
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: as if someone wanted it found. It was a page
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: from an internal dispatch log. In the margin written in
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: red ballpoint ink was a single word. Cleared. Underlined twice.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: He photographed it and called the number on the bottom.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: That call reached Detective Gary West. And West had been
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: waiting five weeks for exactly this. The page Sheridan found
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: was not the beginning of this story. It was not
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: even close to the beginning. But it was the first
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: piece of physical evidence that could be held, photographed, submitted,
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: and sealed into a court file. States Exhibit 7. What
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: it connected to? 211 entries. 37 businesses. Four years of
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: systematic collection was already documented in a log that nobody
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: outside one building was supposed to see. Before the timeline begins,
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: Rice's name appears on three separate deeds, each filed within
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: 90 days of the last. The man who ran this
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: operation was not reckless. He was meticulous. He kept records
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: because he feared disorder more than exposure. And that discipline,
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: that personal religion of documentation, became the most precise instrument
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: of his own destruction. Renner Boulevard in Caldwell is not.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: a glamorous address. It runs 11 blocks through the city's
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: light industrial and mixed-use corridor, past nail salons and cold
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: storage operations, and a grocery distributor that has been in
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: the same family for three decades. The businesses there are
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: not large. Most carry thin margins. A bad month is
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: a real threat, not an abstraction. Jason Rice was 38
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: years old in 2013. He had spent the previous several
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: years managing subcontracted parking enforcement for the city, a job
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: that gave him a precise education in how municipal pressure worked,
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: how inspection schedules ran, and which regulatory levers produced results
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: quickly when Hartwell Toying came available that year. Rice purchased
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: it for $ 240, 000. The majority of that money came from
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: a private lender whose identity does not appear in any
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: incorporation document on record. What Rice was buying was not
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: just a tow company. According to evidence presented at trial,
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: he was buying access to a structure that already existed.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: Frank Hess had spent 23 years as a veteran of
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: the warehouse workers local. By 2013, he also sat on
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: the city's commercial development advisory board, a position that gave
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: him legitimate standing at city hall at licensing hearings, at
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: every table where a small business's fate might be decided quietly.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: Supported financial records obtained by the grand jury in October
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: 2019 revealed that Hess had been receiving regular payments since 2012.
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: That is one full year before Rice signed the Hartwell
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: Purchase Agreement. Rice did not build this. He stepped into it.
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: The day-to-day architecture was simple. Within 30 days of a
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: new business opening on or near Renner Boulevard, Someone from
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: Hartwell would appear. Barry Neff wore the company polo and
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: carried a clipboard. Lucas Steele wore the polo without the clipboard.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: Their pitch was framed as a service agreement. Area coordination,
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: they called it. Parking management. Protection from the kind of
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: regulatory friction that they implied could slow a new operation
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: down considerably. Monthly rates scaled with the size of the operation.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: A payday lender paid $ 800. A grocery distributor paid $ 2, 200.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: The cold storage warehouse on the north end of the
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: corridor paid $ 4, 500. Castillo collected in cash on the 1st
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: and the 15th of every month, and Rice recorded every
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: transaction by hand in a bound dispatch log in red
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: ballpoint ink in a column along the right margin. Don
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: Cooper was 24 years old when she took the dispatch
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: desk at Hartwell in 2016. Her hourly rate was 31%
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: above the market rate for the role. She understood what
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: the job required. She sat with the dispatch log open
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: in front of her. Most of her shift, routing calls
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: and logging movements. She also noticed, sometime in her first months,
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: that certain entries did not match the timestamps of actual towels.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: Durations were extended. Locations were adjusted. The log recorded what
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: Rice wanted it to record, not always what had happened.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: She stayed. She processed the calls. And every Tuesday evening
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: from six to nine, she volunteered at the Caldwell food
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: shelf three blocks east of Hartwell's lot. According to case
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: notes confirmed by Detective West, she did not miss a
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: single Tuesday across three years. Sandra Vo opened her nail
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: salon three blocks north on Renner in 2017. She was
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: placed on the collection list that same month at $ 600
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: per month. For two years, she paid. Then, in August 2019,
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: her lease terms changed. Her margins compressed, and she missed
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: one payment. Within weeks, a city inspector arrived and cited
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: her for three ventilation violations. The salons on either side
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: of hers, running identical equipment, received no citations. Shortly after,
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: according to the dispatch log, a vehicle registered to her
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: primary supply vendor was towed from a loading zone. The
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: documented parking duration in the log was fabricated. Cooper dispatched
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: that tow, And that night, she made a copy of
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: the page. That copy of the page sat in Dawn
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: Cooper's apartment for weeks. She did not call a lawyer.
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: She did not call a reporter. She called Gary West,
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: a detective in the financial crimes unit of the Caldwell
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: Police Department. On a Tuesday evening in September 2019, she
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: had just come back from the food shelf. West had
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: been building a case against Jason Rice for five weeks.
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: He had one analyst working part-time. What he did not have,
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: until that phone call, was a document that Rice had
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: created himself. Cooper handed West a single photocopied page. On it,
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: in red, ballpoint ink along the right margin, was a
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: notation in Rice's handwriting. A business name. A dollar amount.
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: And one word underlined twice. Cleared. West had seen fragments before.
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: He had financial patterns that suggested coordination. He had timing
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: correlations between inspection citations and collection windows. But a pattern
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: is not a record. This was a record, and it
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: had been kept by the man at the center of it.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: Five weeks later, a utility lineman named Curtis Sheridan was
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: working a pole on the east side of Renner Boulevard.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: He was 17 years into the job. He had climbed
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: that stretch of poles more times than he could count.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: On a Tuesday morning in October 2019, he found a
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: bound log wedged behind a junction box, sealed in a
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: plastic bag, roughly 12 feet off the ground. He photographed
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: 31 pages with his phone before his shift ended. He
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: called the non-emergency line at noon. He was back on
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: his route by the afternoon, Those 31 pages became States
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: Exhibit 7. The single page Cooper had copied five weeks
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: earlier became part of the evidentiary chain that confirmed the
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: log's authenticity. The log documented 211 collection entries across four years,
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: 37 businesses on Renner and the surrounding blocks. Total documented payments,
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: approximately $ 1. 4 million. And in the right margin of roughly
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: one-third of those entries written in the same careful hand,
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: a business name, a dollar figure, and the word cleared,
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: underlined twice. Here is what made investigators pause. Rice kept
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: that log the way an accountant keeps a ledger. Every
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: entry dated every amount precise. The handwriting did not rush.
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: It did not obscure. It recorded. West pulled in corporation records,
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: lease filings, inspection calendars. He cross-referenced the collection schedule against
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: the dates of every citation issued to renter businesses over
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: four years. The correlation was not subtle. Businesses that paid
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: on schedule received no citations. Businesses that missed a payment
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: or that resisted the initial pitch began accumulating violations within weeks.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: Sandra Vaugh's file showed three ventilation citations issued within 17
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: days of her first missed payment. The salons flanking hers,
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: operating identical ventilation systems, had zero citations on record. the
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: inspection calendar pointed to Paul Dre. West requested his financial
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: records through a grand jury subpoena in October 2019. What
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: came back confirmed a flat monthly payment from Rice, beginning
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: in 2015. The same year the freight broker on the
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: south end of Renner had filed a formal complaint with
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: the city about Hartwell's towing practices. That complaint was never
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: assigned to an inspector. According to the subpoenaed records, Dre
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: had received it, logged it as received, and filed it.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: It had not moved since. Dre cooperated within 48 hours
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: of being contacted by West. The subpoena of Frank Hess's
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: financial records changed the shape of the entire case. Hess
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: was 61 years old in 2019, 23 years with the
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: warehouse workers local, a seat on the city's commercial development
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: advisory board, He was the kind of person whose name
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: appeared in meeting minutes as a voice of institutional continuity.
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: West had Hess's name from early in the investigation. He
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: appeared in the dispatch log once, identified only by a
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: notation in Rice's margin. West had assumed Hess was a
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: later addition to the structure. Someone Rice had recruited after
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: buying Hartwell. The financial record said otherwise. The first payment
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: to Hess on record was in 2012. Rice did not
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: purchase Hartwell until 2013. That single date rewrote the sequence.
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: Rice had not built the racket and then brought Hess in.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: Rice had purchased entry into a structure that Hess was
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: already running. The collection system, the inspection leverage, the labor
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: complaint mechanism, none of it originated with Rice. He had
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: bought it the way you buy a business with existing accounts.
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: The private lender who financed Rice's purchase of Hartwell for $ 240, 000,
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: does not appear in any incorporation document. That identity remains
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: unconfirmed in the public record. What the records did confirm
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: was this. When West approached Hess directly, Hess did not cooperate.
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: He did not deny. He said nothing actionable and retained
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: counsel by the end of that day. West already had enough.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: Grand jury indictments came in November 2019-teen. Jason Rice was
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: charged with 37 counts of extortion and two counts of
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: commercial bribery. The case was built almost entirely on documents.
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: Rice had created himself. At trial in March 2021, Rice's
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: defense held for five days. On the sixth morning before
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: the jury returned, he entered a guilty plea to 29
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: of the 39 counts. The jury, which had sat through
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: five days of evidence, was dismissed without delivering a verdict.
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: Rice was sentenced to 11 years. The arson case came separately.
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: In 2015, a freight broker on the south end of
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: Renner had filed a formal complaint with the city about
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: Hartwell's towing practices. The complaint was buried by Dray. Three
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: weeks after that filing, the freight broker's rear storage structure
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: caught fire. Fire investigators classified it as an electrical fault.
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: The case was closed. It stayed closed for nearly seven years.
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: When West's team received Rice's prepaid phone records during the
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: extortion investigation, they flagged a sequence of outgoing calls in
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: the three weeks before the 2015 fire. The calls were
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: to a number that could not be traced to a
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: registered account. But the tower data placed Rice's phones at
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: or near the freight broker's property on three separate evenings.
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: A partial glove was recovered from under the rear staircase
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: of the freight broker's structure. It had been cataloged in
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: 2015 and never sent for testing because the fire was
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: classified as accidental. West requested the DNA analysis in 2021.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: The result came back the following year. The profile matched
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: Jason Rice. Picture the sequence from Rice's perspective. The freight
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: broker complained. Dre buried the complaint at his desk. Rice
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: still moved. He drove to that property on three separate evenings.
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: Case notes show over three weeks. He went through the
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: rear entrance. He left one glove. The fire was never
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: supposed to be anything but an electrical accident. It worked
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: for seven years, until the original complaint surfaced in Dre's
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: subpoenaed files, and West looked again at an old evidence bag.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: that no one had opened. In 2020, too, Rice was
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: convicted of arson. Eight years, consecutive to his extortion sentence.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: Nineteen years total. The private lender who made Rice's purchase
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: possible never appeared in any subsequent investigation file. That name
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: does not appear in any filed document. Whether it belongs
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: to someone else in Caldwell's institutional life, or to no
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: one the investigation never reached, is not something the public
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: record confirms. What the record does confirm is narrower, and
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: in some ways more unsettling. The structure Rice bought into
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: in 2013 had been operating without a name, without a complaint,
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: that survived a desk, and without a single charged crime
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: for at least a year before he arrived. Frank Hess
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: built something durable. Rice made it legible, in red ink,
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: in his own hand. in a log he believed was hidden.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: The dispatch log that Curtis Sheridan photographed on a Tuesday
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: morning in October 2019 is now State's Exhibit 7. It
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: sits sealed in the archive of the Caldwell County Clerk's Office.
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: 211 entries, 37 businesses. Approximately $ 1. 4 million over four years.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: The word cleared, underlined twice in red ink, appears next
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: to roughly one-third of those entries. A jury never deliberated
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: over it. Rice pleaded guilty on the sixth day of trial,
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: in March 2021, before that deliberation could begin. 29 counts.
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: The jury was seated, had heard five days of evidence,
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: and was dismissed without returning a verdict. Rice received 11
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: years on the extortion and bribery charges. Then came the
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: arson conviction in 2022. Eight years consecutive, 19 years total.
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: Frank Hess, the man whose financial records revealed payments stretching
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: back to 2012, a full year before Rice ever signed
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: the Hartwell Papers, was charged separately on federal racketeering counts.
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: He received seven years. He did not cooperate when West
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: confronted him directly. The record on that point is unambiguous.
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: Paul Dre, the licensing inspector who buried the freight broker's
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: complaint at his desk and collected a flat fee from
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: Rice beginning in 2015, cooperated within 48 hours of being identified.
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: 18 months, plus restitution. Lucas Dio, who knocked on doors
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: in a Hartwell polo shirt on the 1st and 15th
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: of every month, cooperated completely. His sentence was suspended. Three
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: years of probation. Barry Neff was never charged. The record
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: reflects limited knowledge and immediate cooperation. Whatever Neff understood about
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: the clipboard he carried and the visits he made, the
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: evidence did not reach the threshold the prosecution needed. Don
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: Cooper was never charged with anything. She left Caldwell in
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: the spring of 2020. Gary West's case notes. confirm what
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: she was doing before she left and that she continued
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: to volunteer. Every Tuesday, six to nine in the evening,
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: she volunteers at the Caldwell food shelf. West noted without
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: editorial comment that she has not missed a Tuesday. Those
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: notes matter more than they might appear to. Cooper went
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: to West in September 2019, five weeks before Sheridan found
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: the log tangled in a utility line on Renner Boulevard.
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: The investigation already had its interior witness when the photographs arrived.
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: Sheridan's 31 images became Exhibit 7 at the first trial,
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: and his testimony was brief. He returned to his route
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: by noon, but the case's foundation had been laid weeks
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: earlier by a woman who had been paid 31% above
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: market rate to sit at a dispatch desk and not
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: ask certain questions. She asked them anyways. quietly and only once,
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: and directly to the right person. The private lender who
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: financed Rice's $ 240, 000 purchase of Hartwell in 2013 does not
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: appear in any incorporation document. That name is not part
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: of the public record. Whether that person ever faced scrutiny,
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: whether the investigation reached them, whether there is anything to reach,
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: none of that is confirmed. It is the one thread
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: the record leaves hanging, and it is worth sitting with,
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: because everything else in this case was written down. Rice
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: kept a log because he was afraid of disorder. That
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: is the detail that does not let go. He watched
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: his father lose track of things. He decided, at some point,
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: that he would not. He documented every payment, every business name,
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: every month a check cleared. He wrote cleared in red
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: ink and underlined it twice, the way a person does
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: when the word itself feels like relief. He built a
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: paper record of his own extortion racket, With the same
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: discipline a good accountant brings to a clean set of books.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: And that record destroyed him. The deed remains registered in
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: Rice's name, unchallenged, in the county recorder's office. The structure
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: that Rice bought into in 2013 had been running for
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: at least a year before he arrived. Frank Hess built it.
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: Hess understood Caldwell's commercial corridors, its advisory boards. It's labor machinery.
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: He understood which doors to knock on and which officials
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: needed a reason to look away. Rice brought organization to
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: something that was already moving. He made it legible. He
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: put it in writing. Sandra Vo missed one payment. One month.
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: Her lease terms had shifted. Her margins had collapsed. And
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: she came up short by $ 600. Within days, a city
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: inspector arrived. and found three ventilation violations in her nail salon.
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: Neighboring salons with identical equipment received nothing. Then a tow
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: was dispatched against her supply vendor, a fabricated stop, with
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: a timestamp that did not match reality. Cooper dispatched it.
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: Cooper also kept the page. That page is what brought
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: her to West's office in September 2019, not outrage at
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: the system. Not a whistleblower's calculations. A woman who had
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: watched the machinery turn against someone who simply ran short
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: of money one month and could not pretend she hadn't
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: seen it. The dispatch log is sealed now. The photographs
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: are sealed. The trials are over. The sentences are running.
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: Renner Boulevard still has a towing company operating out of
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: the same lot on the south end. Different name, different ownership,
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: according to city licensing records. What the record cannot seal
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: is the question of what Caldwell looked like to the
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: 37 businesses that paid month after month and never filed
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: a complaint. Some of them were afraid. Some of them
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: had calculated that compliance was cheaper than resistance. Some of them, perhaps,
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: simply believed that this was how a city worked. Dawn
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: Cooper knew how it worked. She sat at that desk
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: for three years, took the salary, and eventually decided that
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: the salary was not the only thing she was responsible for.
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: She drives out of Caldwell every Tuesday evening. She still
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: shows up. That is not closure. But it is the
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: truest thing the record gives us. This show is made
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: by Obo Media.