DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE MOST CORRUPT VILLAGE IN AMERICA
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-most-corrupt-village-in-america/print/
When the police stopped Luvina Mobley Smith, they found a pound of pot in her car and five EBT food stamp cards which drug dealers often take in payment for drugs. It would have been an ordinary enough story except that Smith, despite being a convicted felon, was also the Deputy Clerk of Alorton.
Luvina is the daughter of Callie Mobley, Alorton’s former mayor, who had collected double her salary and served time in jail for income tax evasion. Mayor Mobley, who had been the mayor of Alorton for two decades, had been doing the same thing back to her days as liquor commissioner.
St. Clair County State’s Attorney Brendan Kelly warned, “Alorton City Hall is becoming a criminal narco state at the expense of the citizens of Alorton.”
Alorton, an African-American village run by Democrats, may actually be the most corrupt village in Illinois and the United States.
Alorton’s violent crime rate has been as high as ten times the national average. Its biggest employers are health care, fast food, welfare and education. The unemployment rate for black men is at 31%. Half the people in Alorton live below the poverty line. 70% of poor households consist of single mothers.
The village has the fourth highest poverty rate of any place in Illinois. Its corruption and misery are examples of what happens when the Democratic Party’s power goes unchallenged.
Mayor Randy “Rambo” McCallum Sr. came into office telling cops, “I run this mother___” and ordered them to rob competing drug dealers and split the money with him. When drug dealers were busted, the seized drugs and money were brought to his house where he pocketed the money and resold the drugs.
McCallum Sr. stole so much money that there were no bank deposits for a year. When an undercover informant went to his house, he found crack cocaine on the kitchen table being prepped for sale.
Alorton’s police chief, Michael Baxton Sr., set up surveillance cameras in the police station that he could monitor from home to alert Mayor McCallum when the seized drugs and money were coming in.
The police chief went down for stealing Xbox video games from the trunk of a stolen car telling another cop, “This ain’t (expletive), I’m gonna put you on some real (expletive), teach you how to be real police.”
Baxton Sr. had already been decertified for earlier felony convictions for theft and burglary and should not have even been serving as police chief.
His son Michael Baxton Jr. remained on the Alorton police force where he was hit with three Federal lawsuits for physically abusing people. He briefly became the police chief of East St. Louis until two black board members won a lawsuit because after they were harassed for supporting a more qualified white candidate for the job.
Baxton Sr. had replaced Alorton’s former police chief, Robert L. Cummings, who had been locked up for income tax fraud that included paying the parents of eight children to let him claim tax deductions for their offspring. His brother, Streets Superintendent Ronnie Cummings, who had a previous conviction for selling cocaine, was locked away for attempting to obtain a high capacity gun that he planned to fire through a bag to catch spent casings.
Corey Allen, Alorton’s interim police chief who replaced Baxton, later went on to be indicted for selling a gun to a sex offender who was running from police at the time. While waiting to go to prison, he beat and choked a woman who told his girlfriend that she was his mistress. In between his duties as assistant police chief in Centerville and his criminal activities, he also owned a car wash and played the sax under the name “Sax-Mo.”
Like Luvina, Mayor McCallum’s son, Randy McCallum Jr. followed the family tradition and was charged with a double murder committed while he was under electronic monitoring for yet another crime. Even though one of the murdered men placed a recorded 911 call naming McCallum Jr. as the killer, the trial ended in a hung jury because a holdout juror was facing a battery charge for attacking the killer’s cousin.
Other jurors identified her from her mugshot.
Meanwhile during the time that McCallum Jr. was in prison and his father was still the police chief, McCallum Sr. admitted smuggling marijuana cigarettes to his son.
Determined not to let Alorton’s police department hog all the glory, fire chief Carlos Darough’s car was searched after he ran a stop sign. Inside the car were pot, crack cocaine and a scale. When cops showed up at his house, Carlos’ wife Lanella was caught trying to dispose of more drugs. At another of his homes where undercover police had bought drugs, they found more cocaine and a whole lot of guns.
Carlos had already been on probation after serving eight years in prison for a cocaine conviction. He had been with the Alorton fire department since he was 14 and had been repeatedly arrested over two decades on a variety of charges ranging from drugs to domestic violence.
Alorton’s Public Safety Director, Harry “Dink” Halter, a former police officer and tow truck operator, who had already been arrested for forcing a female driver to perform a sexual act on him and gotten away without being forced to register as a sex offender, was charged with wire fraud and tax evasion for, among other things, taking a grant that Mayor McCallum Sr. gave him to put a fence around his tow yard, kicking back $800 to the mayor and using the rest to pay for his boating expenses.
Mayor JoAnn Reed, Alorton’s current mayor, faced her own set of charges before the election for smuggling a cell phone into jail after her niece had attacked a pregnant woman. The niece posted “I’m in jail but auntie snuck me my phone don’t tell no 1″ on Facebook.
Despite these charges, Reed won the election.
Reed, a former records clerk in an Illinois sheriff’s office, was not exactly a criminal mastermind. Back in 2004, she had been arrested for threatening the son of Mayor Randy McCallum with a flashlight that she pretended was a gun. During her time as a records clerk she accidentally sent a fax reading “Dismiss this case. The guy is the son of one of our deputies” to a newspaper, instead of to the village attorney.
Reed went on to become deputy clerk and then mayor after Mayor Tremylla Johnson was charged with violations of the Illinois Open Meeting Act. Johnson had pledged to restore the confidence of voters in the integrity of Alorton City Government after the arrest of McCallum, but had been appointed mayor at a secret meeting held in her house.
In response to the charges, Mayor Tremylla Johnson resigned for 3 minutes and was reappointed as mayor by a majority of trustee votes, including her own.
These stories can go on being told forever not just about Alorton, but about hundreds of Democratic Party controlled towns, villages and cities. What these places have in common is that their corruption emerges from the absolute rule of one party.
By giving away their votes wholesale to the Democratic Party, African-Americans have handed over power to a corrupt political machine that offers them no alternatives; only poverty, theft and misery.
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