This is at best tangential to managed care, but I just can’t stop watching the Tom Noe train wreck.
Noe’s trial date for allegedly laundering money to fund the Bush campaign will be set shortly, and it may well fall during the campaigning season, bringing tears to the eyes of his former colleagues in the Ohio GOP. Noe, a source of much fodder for this and other blogs due to his criminal mismanagement of Ohio’s workers compensation funds, is now a pariah in his own party.
Although his coin investments have been the cause of much of Noe’s trouble, evidently he didn’t limit himself to theft. In his desire to become one of the party’s “pioneers” (those who raised at least $100,000 for the GOP) Noe allegedly funneled cash through several other individuals, a practice that is illegal.
And this isn’t small potatoes – according to the Toledo Blade (one of the best newspaper names I can think of):
“Prosecutors have said the Noe case is the largest campaign money-laundering scheme prosecuted by the U.S. Justice Department since new campaign finance laws were enacted by Congress in 2002′ If convicted on the federal charges, Mr. Noe could face as many as five years in a federal penitentiary for each count and a fine of nearly $1 million. Attorneys say a conviction, however, would result in a shorter prison term.”
There is speculation that Noe’s political connections helped him land the consulting deal with the state’s workers comp fund – which has cost the fund over $13 million in reduced reserves and is the basis for that set of criminal charges.
