More blame for stealing from people in dire need
The announcement was a good one, that the city will spend $8.8 million to bolster mental health programming at homeless shelters, raise wages for shelter staff, and relocate residents of the YMCA’S obsolete Downtown shelter.
But this good news was tempered, coming as it did the week after markedly worse news was reported by the Dispatch that the Community Shelter Board — the agency that would receive the lion’s share of the $8.8 million — had been bilked out of more than $350,000 by an unscrupulous and, from the sounds of it, unsupervised, former employee.
The $8.8 million, of which $4.9 million would go to the Community Shelter Board, is coming from the city’s American Rescue Plan money, federal funds provided to help communities rebound from the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic.
The shelter board’s share of the money will be spent on training and salaries for 37 new mental health interventionists.
The planned expenditures were praised by advocates.
Among them was Community Shelter Board executive director Michelle Heritage, who was probably happy to talk about anything other than the news of her former employee, Ebony Wheat.
The news about Wheat surfaced after the recent filing of criminal complaints against three people whom federal investigators say were her coconspirators.
A bill of information in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio in Columbus states that Wheat used her position at the Community Shelter Board to cause the agency to issue about 172 fraudulent checks totaling $352,769, from October 2017 to November 2019, to friends who were not landlords and did not provide any services to the agency’s homeless clients. Wheat, in turn, got kickbacks, investigators said.
The money was recovered through insurance, Heritage said.
Wheat was the first to be charged. That happened months ago, and she
already has pleaded guilty to three counts of federal program theft. She is awaiting sentencing.
None of this, however, was acknowledged publicly by the Community Shelter Board at the time Wheat pleaded guilty.
“It's pretty outrageous,” Heritage told the Dispatch. “She stole money from people who are homeless. I don't know how low you can go.”
“The fact that someone would steal from people experiencing homelessness...i mean, how low can you go?” she told WSYX-TV (Channel 6).
The remarks sought to place the embezzlement squarely on the shoulders of Wheat, and sure, that's where most of the blame should be carried.
But certainly not all.
Nana M. Watson, president of the local chapter of the NAACP, thought the board's executive director was getting off easy.
In a letter to the Dispatch, Watson argued that Heritage should lose her job.
She makes a solid argument. “We do know the individual who stole the money was fired, however, the CEO should have been as well for not having necessary financial safeguards in place,” Watson wrote. “For that, she is perhaps just as guilty. The Shelter Board is a recipient of taxpayer's dollars and we certainly expect more and demand more.”
Heritage said the agency had made changes to prevent future thefts, including a requirement that participating landlords meet with the agency in person.
But even a minimal vetting of Wheat would have raised red flags, given her job at the agency was to run its financial assistance program, in which landlords are given money to house homeless people.
Wheat filed for Chapter 7, or socalled “fresh-start,” bankruptcy in 2011, when she listed $14,862 in assets and $98,115 in liabilities. She was sued in small claims court in 2017 and filed for bankruptcy again last year, although by then she was gone from the shelter board.
There also were warning signs regarding Ramiya Mcdaniel, one of the other three defendants now charged. She has filed twice for personal bankruptcy, in 2009 and 2011.
Mcdaniel was also sued by a bank in 2017 for $2,133, a suit that records show she lost.
She was also sued in small claims court back in 2006, by none other than Ebony Wheat. Based on what we know now, they apparently resolved their differences to the mutual agreement of both parties.
As the feds were building their case against Wheat and the others last fall, Heritage appeared in a video touting the board's annual Halloween fundraiser, Maskquerade.
She sits on what looks like a white leather sofa, in a well-appointed yard. She wears fire-engine-red shoes and a black motorcycle-style jacket and sips from a glass of champagne.
“This Halloween, Community Shelter Board is helping you treat yourself, because we don't need any more tricks in 2020,” she says. The video was posted on Oct. 7, 2020, about two weeks after Wheat spoke to the FBI.
The whole affair is very refined, ending with a festive spray of confetti.
Of course, one might wonder why the fight against homelessness requires cocktails and charcuterie, but upon viewing the video there is no denying Heritage's attention to detail.
To some aspects of the board's business, that is. tdecker@dispatch.com @Theodore_decker