Angela’s Family Restaurant at East 71st and St. Clair clanks with the sound of the breakfast crowd as Jeff Johnson steps through the door, squeezes his trim mustache and scans the room with an apprehensive grin. The 50-year-old seems to know half the Glenville regulars in here. When he sits, they stop at his table to pass on some much-appreciated warmth.
He hopes the smiles translate to forgiveness. And votes.
Johnson is “seriously considering” a run this November for the Ward
8 council seat that once propelled him to the state senate, both times
in the footsteps of former Mayor Mike White. That was before a
conviction for White-style campaign tactics sent Johnson packing to the
federal penitentiary at Elkton.
“That year, 1998, could have been, were it not for my bad judgment,
a wonderful year for me,” says Johnson. “But that’s not what happened.
I had a picture in my Columbus apartment of the U.S. Capitol, and I had
to take it down. I couldn’t even look at it anymore.”
The Capitol is where many think he would have landed that year, as
front-runner in the race for Louis Stokes’ congressional seat, were it
not for the way he was raising money to get there. (Stephanie Tubbs
Jones went to Washington instead.) It had been his goal ever since he
set football aside at Kent State to pursue politics. Raised in
Glenville and Collinwood, Johnson was a three-sport athlete and dating
the head cheerleader when he headed for college. In his junior year,
the communications major joined the board of the black student union
and complained about the white-bread coverage in the Daily Kent
Stater. Connie Schultz, now a Plain Dealer columnist, was
editor of the college paper then. She didn’t shy from the
criticism.
“If you know so much,” she recalls thinking, “why don’t you start
writing a column? I thought it was important to get his voice in the
paper.”
By the time he graduated, he was president of the black student
union and homecoming king. After a semester studying city planning at
Cornell, he began his law studies at Case. He joined the Ward 8
Democratic Club and became an apprentice to the up-and-coming Mike
White. He laid out White’s ward newspaper, organized food drives,
whatever was asked.
Four years later, a few weeks before Johnson graduated from law
school in 1984, White became a state senator and invited the
26-year-old Johnson to carry on: “Mike was not going to hand his torch
to anybody. I had to earn the right to succeed him.”
In his half-decade on council, during which Johnson won three
campaigns, Council President George Forbes was in charge. It wasn’t
always pretty.
Johnson had a sprawling patch of desolate land at East 105th and St.
Clair he wanted to turn into Glenville Plaza, “and because there were
some votes where I didn’t vote along with George, he kept holding up
that project. He would not pass that legislation.” Johnson confronted
Forbes at a finance committee meeting. Forbes gaveled the meeting
closed and slammed off as Johnson crowed, “You’re hurting my
community.” A few days later, council’s black East Side members
convened a meeting exclusively to scold Johnson, and heated words
between Forbes and Johnson turned to combat.
“He picks up this chair, kept it in his hand and just swung,”
recalls Johnson. “I ducked, and the leg hit me on the shoulder. I was
getting ready to go at this point, but his bodyguard stepped in. Guess
you can swing chairs around when you’ve got a bodyguard.”
The legislation was passed soon after, though; Glenville got its
plaza. And Johnson preserved his tenuous relationship with Forbes by
providing a needed vote to maintain his leadership. “What I learned is
that if you don’t fight for your independence, it’ll be taken away from
you,” he says.
In 1990, White left the state senate to become mayor of Cleveland.
He raised Johnson onto the pedestal to replace him again — some
say because White feared Johnson would overshadow his rise to power. So
Johnson carved out a niche as an advocate in Columbus, since “most of
the decisions are made in rooms you weren’t allowed in because you
weren’t a Republican.”
In 1997, the Ohio Democratic Party and the Ohio Bar Association
named him Ohio Legislator of the Year. But his ascendency was
short-lived. In March 1998, he was indicted on charges of trading his
influence in return for campaign cash from Cleveland grocers. In
November of that year, 2,000 members on the National Black Caucus were
in Cleveland for their convention when his conviction became front-page
news.
Grocer Aly Hamed had avoided a food-stamp trafficking and
tax-evasion rap by recording 200 conversations with Johnson, who
unwittingly exposed himself raising $15,000 in campaign dough and
personal loans in exchange for helping grocers obtain WIC permits and
liquor licenses.
“Had me on tape,” recalls Johnson, “my arrogant self, saying, ‘I’m
not doing a damn thing else for you until you finish raising this
campaign money you said you were giving me.'”
Even in the era of Mike White, it didn’t play very well. The only
other time Johnson had crossed the law was when he, the late
Councilwoman Fannie Lewis and others were arrested outside Tower City
for protesting the firing of Cleveland State’s vice president for
minority affairs.
“I was too aggressive in raising campaign cash,” he admits. “It’s a
hard push to have the resources to run for election, but there’s a
right method to it, and I took shortcuts. It was wrong, bad judgment,
and I paid dearly. The reality is, I went from Senator Johnson to a
number within a year.”
Schultz says she can see “quite a humility in Jeff now, which says
to me: lessons learned. You can get out of prison and always blame it
on somebody else — you know, couldawouldabeen — but you
don’t hear that from him now.”
Johnson got out in August 2001 and was immediately hired in Mayor
Jane Campbell’s communications department. He credits Campbell with
allowing him to rebuild his credibility. He quickly became her director
of community relations. It was a notable recovery, after having made 19
cents an hour scrubbing prison bathrooms.
“Jeff’s a good guy,” says former Councilman Bill Patmon. “He’s made
some errors, but most people make errors. It’s what makes us human.”
Adds Larry Howard, Johnson’s pastor at Historic Greater Friendship
Baptist Church: “I’ve seen his change in his attitude, his way of
thinking. He’s faced up to this, paid for it and has made a major
change in his life. He has too much talent to not utilize it for the
community.”
He’s trying. In October 2007, a county judge sealed his felony
record, allowing him to run for office again. To “test the waters,” he
ended up a distant second to Warrensville Heights Mayor Marcia Fudge in
the special election last fall to replace the late Stephanie Tubbs
Jones in Congress. And the same commission that in 2002 recommended
that he be disbarred (the high court rejected that unanimously)
recently supported the reinstatement of his suspended legal license. He
expects to hear officially this summer.
Now he has eyes for his old seat again, currently held by Sabra
Pierce Scott, Council President Martin Sweeney’s majority leader.
Pierce Scott didn’t return Scene‘s calls, and Sweeney declined
to comment.
“I just hope he doesn’t run against me,” says Mt. Pleasant
Councilman Zack Reed about Johnson’s return. “People like Jeff, they
appreciate him, so I don’t think it’s going to be as hard as it can be
for other individuals to get back his credibility. He’s got a reservoir
of credibility that I don’t think has drained out yet.”
Johnson knows that Sweeney, a loyalist to Campbell rival Mayor Frank
Jackson, will unleash the Council Leadership Fund against him. He knows
things might get negative. None of that matters to him.
“Glenville, it’s dying — the foreclosures, the crime —
and there’s an energy level that needs to be brought back,” he says. “I
can do that. I’m a better person today than I was before. I’m smarter.
And I can be effective at City Hall. I’ve spent a lot of time working
both sides of the aisle there. I’ll raise my money the right way, and I
expect Marty will spend money against me, but I’m not afraid of that.
The real test has nothing to do with Marty Sweeney. The real test is
whether voters are ready to forgive me.”
This article appears in Apr 1-7, 2009.