Shawn Vestal

Karl Thompson looked like a whole new man. When he walked into the federal courtroom Monday, he wore yellow jailhouse garb – the blousy top a shade darker than the loose pants. Big black letters on the back read: BONNER COUNTY. On his bare feet were cheap plastic sandals. Gray scruff stood out on his chin, and his usually neat white hair was very slightly disheveled. His hands – the hands that had placed countless criminal suspects into cuffs over his career as a cop – were locked behind his back.

Marc Resseman opened his door on Halloween, but he didn’t find trick-or-treaters. He found an old Rogers High School acquaintance.

He said his name was Brandon. He said he was embarrassed. He said he needed gas money to drive to Coeur d’Alene and back. It was an emergency. He said he lived just down the street. I’m your neighbor, he said.

Worried about property rights? Government intrusion? Stifling bureaucracy?

Are we in the midst of a wave of anti-gay violence in Spokane? A pattern with ongoing momentum? Some people think so.

I love a good “issue analysis.” Almost as much as a nice, righteous fistfight. Wouldn’t it be great if today’s Values Voters Summit delivered both?

So the feds say they’ve rooted out a Ponzi scheme built around a bankrupt payday-loan business. Hundreds of investors in the Little Loan Shoppe – gotta love that quaint touch! – were taken for tens of millions of dollars, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission. If the SEC is correct, the Little Loan Shoppe was an illegal scheme to take advantage of investors – with the owners using new investors to pay off old ones, and living a Beemers and Vegas lifestyle in the meantime. Now, in addition to the SEC going after owner Doris “Dee” Nelson, the Bankruptcy Court is suing some of the investors, trying to “claw back” any assets to spread around evenly among those who lost money.

Now that “class warfare” has been declared, decried and duplicated in an impressive lockstep, maybe it’s time to take a look at one of the armies. The big one, I mean. Not the one with all the power.

The meeting took a couple weeks to arrange through a shadowy intermediary. Terms and conditions were negotiated. We met at an undisclosed location, and eventually found ourselves talking – in low, conspiratorial tones – in a dim basement room with a single light. My contact wore a press-on mustache, wig and dark glasses. Really. He would not tell me his name, even when I promised not to reveal it to anyone. “In my world,” he said, “there’s no such thing as off the record.”

It is sad that the Otto Zehm case is becoming a political spectacle. Sad, and absolutely appropriate. Because it’s hard to see what else – apart from insistent public pressure and repeated uncomfortable questions – might lead to an actual public accounting of how the leadership has led.