THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

But today the Toledo Blade, which deserves much praise for its reporting, lays out how Tom Noe laundered state funds to make political contributions to, who else, the Republicans.

Tom Noe often transferred tens of thousands of dollars from the Ohio rare-coin funds he managed to his personal business before bankrolling Republican candidates and causes with contributions and loans.

A Blade examination of the accounting records from Mr. Noe’s $50 million rare-coin venture shows a pattern of large sums of money moving from the coin funds to his personal business, Vintage Coins and Collectibles, in the days and weeks before the coin dealer and his wife, Bernadette, made contributions to Republican candidates ranging from President Bush to U.S. Sen. George Voinovich and Gov. Bob Taft down to Lucas County Auditor Larry Kaczala.

Mr. Noe typically listed the payments from the coin funds to Vintage Coins as "profit distributions" or "coin purchases."

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According to the computerized accounting records of Capital Coin I, II, and their subsidiaries, Mr. Noe since 1998 transferred more than $19 million from the state coin venture into his business accounts at Vintage Coins, including more than $13 million for "coin purchases" and more than $1.7 million in "profit distributions." In that same time period, Vintage Coins transferred about $5 million back to the coin funds, the records show.

As Mr. Petro lodged accusations about how Mr. Noe bought houses and paid-off loans with state coin fund money, he stopped short of making claims about how the coin dealer paid for political contributions and loans he and his wife doled out, totaling more than $300,000 since 1998 — the year he received his first installment of $25 million from the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation to invest in rare coins.

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Mr. Noe’s political contributions to Republicans increased substantially in 1998 after he received the first payment from the state, and his contributions more than doubled again in 2002, the year after the bureau gave him his second installment of $25 million.

This scenario was obvious from the beginning, but it is nice to see that the records validate it. Now we wait to see if the Republican AG in Ohio will prosecute this case effectivly.