The glowing profile of a Ponzi schemer

Good morning, and welcome to The Weekender.

There was something strange about the glowing profile of convicted fraudster Siddharth Jawahar that appeared last month in the Jefferson City News Tribune.

It was a News Tribune story. Except it really wasn’t.

The byline belonged to Jake Kroesen, editor of The Missouri Times, another Scott Faughn-owned publication. Faughn bought the News Tribune late last year.

Prosecutors say Jawahar agreed to pay Jeff Roe’s Axiom Strategies $10,000 to obtain favorable media coverage and letters of support intended to influence the federal judge deciding how long he would spend in prison.

Four days later came Kroesen’s story.

It portrayed Jawahar as a philanthropist and jailhouse educator whose “heart, mind and perseverance” had transformed the lives of other detainees. Somehow, the $35 million Ponzi scheme that put him in a jail cell two hours from the News Tribune’s coverage area never made it into the story.

And the people who run the jail dispute the story's central claim that Jawahar built an educational program inside the facility. Officials at the Ste. Genevieve County Detention Center told KMOV that no incarcerated person, Jawahar included, had ever started one.

On a recorded jail call three days after the story ran, Roe and Jawahar discussed corrections, photographs and Roe’s idea to “put a little money around it and geofence his house” so the judge would see the story. 

“I know he’ll see it,” Roe said.

Political consultants trying to plant flattering stories is not exactly Watergate. Floating a plan to buy your way onto a federal judge's phone is a more modern wrinkle.

Jawahar’s attorney told the judge his client never actually ended up paying Roe. And the judge said he never saw the article, just before sentencing Jawahar to 11 years in prison.

“The plot was unsuccessful,” the judge said, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

This wasn’t Kroesen’s only turn in the News Tribune.

On May 24, Kroesen wrote a News Tribune profile announcing Jeff Suddy’s Republican primary challenge to incumbent Cole County Circuit Judge Cotton Walker. The piece introduced Suddy as a prosecutor, Air Force veteran and experienced courtroom lawyer and largely made the case his campaign hoped to make to voters.

Faughn was not merely observing that race from the publisher’s office. He gave Suddy $2,500 a month before Kroesen’s News Tribune profile.

To its credit, the News Tribune reported Faughn’s donation in a July story by one of its own reporters.

Over at The Missouri Times, Faughn and Kroesen jointly wrote that Walker was “one of, if not the most liberal” elected judges in Missouri while describing conservatives as lining up behind Suddy. The story scrutinized Walker’s campaign donors but did not disclose that Faughn had already contributed to Suddy.

Walker defeated Suddy 79% to 21% on primary night.

The Missouri Times, which is largely an online compendium of press releases and opinion pieces, has always occupied an unusual corner of Missouri political media. Faughn founded it with former House Speaker Rod Jetton, and his own involvement in the political world he covers has sometimes been anything but arm’s length.

Most famously, Faughn testified in 2018 that he paid $120,000 in cash to the attorney representing the ex-husband of the woman at the center of the Eric Greitens scandal. Faughn said it was his money and that most of it purchased recordings for a book he has yet to publish. Lawmakers publicly questioned that explanation, and the attorney who got the money offered a different account of where it came from.

Nothing in the court record indicates the News Tribune knew about the Axiom agreement when it published the Jawahar profile. But many of the article’s claims about Jawahar’s jailhouse teaching reappeared a week later in a letter of support that U.S. Rep. Sam Graves sent the judge.

The News Tribune has since removed some of the article’s more detailed claims and added a publisher’s note saying references to work Jawahar “may have done while in jail” were taken out. The note does not say how the story came to the paper. 

Neither Kroesen nor Faughn responded to requests for comment about the story.

When Faughn bought the News Tribune, the worry was never that he would sit in the publisher's office dictating stories. It was that the paper's 160-year reputation in the community would drift into the service of the political media operation its new owner had spent years building, and that readers wouldn't be able to tell where one ended and the other began.

Maybe there is an explanation that makes all of this less troubling.

For now, readers are left with only a byline and a shrug.