Judge Nasty

That's when Plough's dark side began to show. "He started growing sullen," Kanter says. "It started going to his head. He'd always had sort of split personalities, but now they were beginning to merge."

Kanter also says that Plough became consumed by a battle with the Catholic Church. In 2004, Plough discovered that St. Mary's Church in Ravenna would be cutting down old oak trees in the cemetery where his parents were buried. He sued the parish as well as the Youngstown Diocese, trying to block the project.

For the next three years, he waged a lengthy battle against St. Mary's that went all the way to the Ohio Supreme Court, where his case was eventually thrown out. He still made it clear that vengeance would one day be his.

Ravenna Mayor Kevin Poland, who represented the parish, remembers getting an angry call from the judge. "It appears to me that you are going to hold this case against me for the rest of my life," Poland said to Plough.

"I am," Plough responded.

"He became absolutely obsessive and dogmatic," Kanter says.

For the bulk of their friendship, Kanter was one of the few people who could talk sense into Plough. But it was becoming apparent that Plough would listen to no one.

On March 7, as they were closing up shop, Plough approached Kanter about a comment he'd made earlier that week. Kanter had said that he thought things weren't running efficiently. There was a backlog of paperwork, the docket was twice the size of the other judges', and no one could get any meaningful face time with the judge. They needed to work something out, Kanter said.

Instead, Plough told Kanter to get the hell out of his courtroom. "You won't be able to replace me," Kanter said. "This place will still be inefficient, and you'll still be a motherfucker."

The two haven't talked since. Things have only gotten worse for Plough.

For months, defense attorneys and their clients had been complaining about Plough to his boss, Portage Common Pleas Judge Laurie Pittman. But Pittman was already familiar with his erratic temperament.

In 2003, when Plough was an attorney, he threw a fit outside her courtroom, screaming at her bailiff that he didn't have enough time to prepare for trial. Pittman had him arrested. He pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct.

She was concerned that Plough was now handing down unjustifiably harsh sentences, from lengthy community service for litterers to mandatory probation for all DUI offenderççs. And since Plough didn't use a court reporter, lawyers complained that it was impossible to get accurate transcripts of his proceedings. Pittman says he chooses instead to chronicle cases with a tape recorder, "which he turns off and on at his discretion."

In May, Pittman decided she'd had enough. She filed a lengthy complaint with the Ohio Supreme Court, asking it to investigate the judge.

The backlash only worsened when Plough earned searing national headlines just months later.

In August, Brian Jones, a public defender fresh from law school, was assigned a misdemeanor assault case just a day before trial. When he showed up in Plough's courtroom the next morning, Jones asked the judge for more time to prepare. Plough refused. When Jones protested that there was no way he could properly defend his client, Plough had him arrested for contempt of court.

Lawyers flew in from around the country for Jones' trial. ABC and CNN made it their top stories. The judge was roundly condemned in the national legal community. "The people of Portage County should be outraged," says Ernie Lewis, chairman of the American Council of Chief Defenders. "When judges deny the right to a fair trial, all people suffer. The innocent are convicted and the guilty go free."

Still, Plough refused to drop the charges and fined Jones $100.

It's stories like these that lead people to believe that Plough is little more than a combative egomaniac. Kanter can no longer defend his former best friend.

On September 18, Kanter sued his old pal, claiming that he'd been wrongfully fired and that Plough still owed him money for work he'd done on the St. Mary's case. The one man who stood by Plough had now joined the ranks of his detractors. "He lost a lot of humanity on the way," Kanter says. "He became very Nixonian. He goes out of his way to make enemies."