Who Ran Freedom Industries?

Good question:

From left, photographs courtesy West Virginia MetroNews; Tribune-Review; courtesy AATIP

Before the lawsuits and the retreat into federal bankruptcy court, before the change in ownership in a veiled roll-up by an out-of-state coal baron, before the Justice Department’s environmental-crimes investigation, the presidentially declared emergency, and the National Guard’s arrival—nine years before all of that—the co-founder of Freedom Industries, the company at the center of the Jan. 9 chemical spill that cut off tap water for 300,000 West Virginians, was convicted of siphoning payroll tax withholdings to splurge on sports cars, a private plane, and real estate in the Bahamas. And 18 years before that, in 1987, before he started Freedom Industries, Carl Kennedy II was convicted of conspiring to sell cocaine in a scandal that brought down the mayor of Charleston.

Little known, even locally, Freedom was born and operated in a felonious milieu populated by old friends who seemed better suited to bartending at the Charleston-area saloons they also owned. “These people who were running Freedom Industries weren’t the sort you’d put in charge of something like chemical storage that could affect the whole community,” Danny Jones, Charleston’s current mayor, says. “Who are these guys, anyway?”
Good question. Kennedy kept the books for bars and restaurants, including a rib house Mayor Jones used to own, although he hadn’t gotten to know him well. “He was pleasant enough,” Jones says. Until the spill, the mayor had no idea his former accountant had been enmeshed with Freedom. That really seems troubling, Jones says, “especially with the cocaine stuff in his history.”

The whole thing is a fascinating look at shell companies and legal paper shuffling that looks a lot like a way to cover up criminal activity.  I can think of a couple of folks I've run into in business dealings over the years who just didn't seem like they were on the up-and-up, and I doubt that any of them had the checkered past that these guys did.  The name, Freedom Industries, itself is so creepily libertarian that there is built in schadenfreude in the fact that this incident highlights why libertarianism is a ridiculous fringe ideology which deserves to be ignored by anyone with a functioning brain.  Trusting businessmen to ignore their self interest and act in ways which will benefit society as a whole is at least as foolish as thinking that no one will try to rip off the social safety net.  Unfortunately, folks on the right are oblivious to the misdeeds of the wealthy, while folks on the left look away from bad behavior on the part of the less well-off.  Here's an idea, let's do a little bit of figuring to determine where we are getting screwed over by crooks, and put plans in place to deal with those frauds based on how costly they are to society.  Polluting the water supply of 300,000 people seems like a pretty big deal to me.