Jaws dropped with the news that Cincinnati City Councilman and frontrunning mayoral candidate P.G. Sittenfeld was charged in federal court with bribery and extortion. The indictment quotes recorded conversations and voicemail messages with former Notre Dame and Bengals’ standout Chinedem Ndukwe, the FBI’s cooperating witness, and two undercover agents, and reads like an episode of the Sopranos. It describes one Alexander (aka P.G.) Sittenfeld soliciting and accepting PAC donations totaling $40,000 from FBI agents posing as developers while promoting his ability to round up votes for Ndukwe’s downtown hotel and sports betting development.
Several $5,000 checks were funneled through several mysterious limited liability companies (LLCs) to the Progress and Growth PAC, which P.G. assured could not be traced to him (Really, P.G., despite the obvious use of your initials in the title?).
In fairness, clever lawyers may be able to persuade a jury that he is not guilty of any crime. After all, what P.G. did—soliciting political donations from developers seeking generous subsidies and tax abatements—came right out of the playbook Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley used to raise more than $1 million to assure his 2017 re-election. P.G. simply mimicked Cranley’s Cincinnatus PAC as a way to harvest additional gratuities from developers who had maxed out to his campaign committee.
But even if P.G. does not end up in prison, where fellow councilmembers Tamaya Dennard and Jeff Pastor seem headed for taking developer cash for personal use, he’s lost the confidence of Cincinnati voters, including mine.
I’ve known P.G. since his first race for council in 2013 and donated to his campaigns. I touted him here in 2016, when he launched a longshot campaign for Rob Portman’s U.S. Senate seat. P.G. was a young Princeton-educated up-and-comer from a prominent Cincinnati family with extraordinary political talent. P.G. drew comparisons to a more spontaneous “boy wonder,” former councilman and mayor Jerry Springer, who had his own seemingly career ending “check to prostitute” run in with the criminal justice system in 1974.
After leading the council field in 2017, P.G. was a prohibitive favorite to replace Mayor Cranley in 2021. Surely, he was not naïve enough to fall into the same trap the FBI set for the less sophisticated Dennard and Pastor?
The indictment portrays a different, darker guy, relentlessly nagging FBI agents posing as developers for PAC cash. And when I read about P.G.’s frenetic efforts to harvest campaign donations from LLCs before the 2018 November election, I was personally, well, pissed off.
That year, I worked with former Judge Mark Painter and Councilman Wendell Young to place a charter amendment on the ballot that would close the so called “LLC loophole.” Mayor Cranley had used the loophole to harvest hundreds of thousands of campaign dollars from developers in excess of the $1,100 per donor limit through their multiple LLCs. P.G. said he shared our concern, helping us get the amendment on the ballot. But as the indictment reveals, that fall P.G. was secretly soliciting multiple LLC campaign donations from developers before their prohibition at the November election. Dialogue from the indictment tells all you need to know about all those LLC donors:
P.G.: Where do you guys find these LLCs. Do I want to know?
FBI “Guy”: Yeah. You probably don’t.
Of course, P.G. hardly needed another $40,000 to win the mayor’s seat. Unlike the cash taken by Dennard or Pastor from their FBI pals, it was not money he used to pay personal expenses. Topping off his PAC account seems, in retrospect, some sort of macho “my PAC is bigger than yours” hubris.
In a Facebook video posted after a not guilty plea, P.G. said he would fight the charges, implying that his political career will survive. In contrast, Jerry Springer, apologized to voters, resigned and then successfully returned to council after his disgrace in 1975. Voters were willing to forgive the young, charismatic Springer.
But personal indiscretion is different from betrayal of public trust. If Ndukwe’s sports book ever opens, I’d wager that there will be no comeback for a politician who privately pandered for developer dollars while posing as one of the good guys.
