The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity has been “the coal industry’s most public voice” in the on-going fight over new energy regulations proposed by the Obama administration, as the Center for Public Integrity’s Kristen Lombardi notes in her new article today.

And voluntary reports from major companies offer a rare glimpse at the flow of corporate money into this nonprofit trade association.

The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, which spent $1.7 million on federal lobbying last year alone, is organized under Sec. 501(c)(6) of the U.S. tax code — meaning it does not have to publicly reveal its funders or how much money they gave.

The organization lists about 30 member companies on its website. Six of them combined to give more than $1.9 million in 2012, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of voluntary corporate disclosures.

Rail company Norfolk Southern Corp. contributed more than $835,000 to the coalition last year, records show. It also gave more than $35,000 to the National Mining Association, which has also voiced concerns about President Barack Obama's push for more stringent regulations to curb climate change.

Meanwhile, American Electric Power Co. Inc. gave at least $503,000, CSX Corp. gave more than $242,000, Union Pacific Corp. gave more than $242,000, Ameren Corp. gave at least $72,500 and Southern Co. gave at least $50,000.

The actual amounts may be even more as the companies either disclosed only a minimum level of dues pay or the portion of dues that were explicitly used for lobbying purposes.

Many additional corporate contributions go undisclosed to the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, which raised $47 million in 2011, according to its most recent annual report filed with the Internal Revenue Service.

Adam Wollner contributed to this report.

The Post-9/11 GI Bill has paid for nearly 1 million veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to go to school at a cost of about $30 billion since 2009, but the federal government has yet to document how many of those students graduated, much less whether they stayed in school.

Neither the Department of Veterans Affairs nor other agencies maintains data that tracks retention and graduation rates among students under the Post-9/11 GI Bill. Without that data, some worry those benefits could be in danger.

“We need to track these numbers to defend the Post-9/11 GI Bill,” said Michael Dakduk, executive director of the Student Veterans of America, a Washington, D.C.-based organization. "It's an investment into our military. It's an investment into our country."

Every previous version of the GI Bill has faced elimination or reduction, Dakduk said. The World War II GI Bill expired after 12 years, and educational benefits during the Korean and Vietnam War eras were reduced as those conflicts ended.

“History proves to me that it’s a very, very real threat,” Dakduk said. “This is a benefit that could definitely be scaled back as involvement winds down overseas — unless we can prove a return on investment.”

The Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2008, designed to provide an education to those who served after Sept. 10, 2001, approves benefits for use toward graduate and undergraduate degrees, as well as technical training, which includes everything from nursing and management to truck driving and acupuncture.

Benefits have been disbursed to public and private nonprofit schools, as well as to private, for-profit universities and institutes, which collected more than $639 million by July 2010.

VA numbers also show that students in five states — California, Texas, Virginia, Florida and New York — have been granted the most GI Bill funds since August 2009: at least $7.8 billion, according to a News21 review. California, Texas, New York and Florida are the top four states with the most for the number of schools collecting GI Bill dollars, with Virginia ranking No. 7.

Spending on the Post-9/11 GI Bill is estimated to hit $42 billion next year, according to VA and White House projections.

The VA has not released a 2011 breakdown of payments to individual schools, because of inaccurate entries into its system, VA spokesman Randal Noller said in an email. The VA did release the number of veterans trained at each school through January 2013, but that list includes duplication among students who transfer schools. The department also released a report of funding to each county under the Post-9/11 GI Bill, but not total benefits paid to each school.

VA officials replied to auditors in a May 2013 Government Accountability Office report that the primary VA job is to provide benefits, “not to be responsible for veterans’ individual academic performance or goals.”

The GAO report, however, called it “critical” for the VA “to not only collect outcome data, but also plan how it will use such data to improve management of its education benefits performance.”

Without that, auditors concluded, it’s difficult for the VA to help students and “inform policymakers about the value veterans are receiving for the government's substantial investment.”

Student Veterans of America is pursuing a more proactive role. In January, the organization announced it would collect college graduation rates for veterans. Joining the VA and the National Student Clearinghouse, SVA hopes the information will show veteran outcomes on campus.

Numbers aren’t expected until later this year. The project, estimated to cost $300,000 is still awaiting some financial backing, Dakduk said.

Former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, a Vietnam War veteran and former secretary of the Navy, proposed the Post-9/11 GI Bill in 2007 as an updated version of the 1944 GI Bill, which educated 7.8 million World War II veterans.

In the first year of benefits payments, from August 2009 to July 2010, 1,968 public schools took in more than $696 million to educate 203,790 veterans, with spending averaging about $3,418 a student, according to VA data.

Private schools, New York University and George Washington University among them, received $416 million for teaching 49,470 veterans, about $8,409 a student.

For-profit schools collected nearly as much funding as public institutions, more than $639 million, for 76,746 veterans, or an average of $8,337 for each student.

For-profit institutions — the University of Phoenix, ITT Technical Institute and the Art Institutes, for example — have drawn particular scrutiny for collecting GI Bill money.

Led by Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions in 2010 launched a two-year investigation into for-profit colleges.

The study found that during the 2010-2011 school year, for-profit schools constituted eight of the top 10 schools that collected GI Bill funds. The University of Maryland at No. 8 and University of Texas at No. 10 were the only public institutions that made the top 10 list.

Harkin’s committee questioned whether veterans attending for-profit schools were benefiting from the education or being used to meet certain federal funding requirements. For-profit colleges can collect no more than 90 percent of their revenue from federal sources, such as Pell grants and similar U.S.-backed student aid. Because the Post-9/11 GI Bill is not counted as federal student aid, the Harkin report and others asserted that for-profit schools aggressively recruited veterans to stay under the 90 percent cap.

The Harkin report cited constant phone calls by recruiters, pressuring applicants to sign contracts before speaking to a financial adviser, and similar tactics. It also asserted that the millions of dollars put toward the education of these veterans does not benefit them once they start looking for jobs. At a July Senate hearing before the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, veterans advocates complained that for-profit schools “target” veterans as “nothing more than dollar signs in uniform.”

Steve Gunderson, CEO and president of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, a Washington D.C.-based lobby, said in an interview: “There are good and bad schools in all of higher education. But they should go after the bad schools and not a whole sector.

“Are there bad schools in our sector? Yes. Are their bad schools in all of higher education? Absolutely,” he said.

Gunderson said the argument that for-profits are not beneficial for veterans is unfair because there is no data to prove public schools do any better than private schools, or the reverse.

The U.S. Department of Education has suggested a system to track student veterans and active service members while they attend higher-education institutions. The proposed system would track the number of Post-9/11 GI Bill beneficiaries and Department of Defense Tuition Assistance recipients, as well as how much money each school receives. The system would be in place for the 2014-2015 school year and collect data from the previous school year. The department did not have a deadline for approval.

Without those numbers, Gunderson said it’s unfair to presume that public schools are better for students than for-profit institutions.

The colleges his organization represents offer an alternative to the traditional four-year model, Gunderson said. Sometimes, these are better for veterans because they fit the schedules of those returning from war. Many have jobs and families, he said.

“The last thing they want to do is sit in a dorm or take five, three-hour-credit courses,” he said in an interview.

Michael Green, a Marine Corps veteran studying at the University of Phoenix Murrieta, Calif., campus, chose the school because of its flexible schedule, he said. Green works on an accelerated pace that traditional universities don’t offer, taking classes in five-week sessions instead of the typical 16-week semester.

Although the University of Phoenix was reaccredited for 10 years, the Higher Learning Commission in July gave the school two years to address concerns over governance, assessment of student learning, and faculty research and scholarship.

Green, who served three tours in Iraq before leaving in June 2012, balances a seasonal job as a high school football coach with night classes toward his business management degree. He said the Phoenix schedule works for veterans and other non-traditional students.

“We got stay-at-home moms and guys who are working 40, 60 hours a week,” he said. “The classes are convenient, the homework is challenging. In my eyes it is a good university.”

Before joining the Marines, Nick Lanteri attended Fitchburg (Mass.) State College, where he had fun, he said, and didn’t care about accomplishing anything.

After returning home from two tours in Iraq in 2007 and 2008 with post-traumatic stress disorder and a traumatic brain injury, Lanteri said he didn’t take online courses, because he couldn’t focus on them.

 “I just can’t sit in front of a computer that long. I can’t,” he said. “And for me, a lot of the stuff — even in classes now — a lot of stuff, they’ll explain it, but I kind of need that face-to-face explanation.”

Now a criminal-justice major at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, Lanteri said he’s more focused on finishing his degree.

“Because it’s hard for me to be in those large classrooms, and in those large groups of people,” he said, “school for me, now, is a goal to get accomplished. It’s like an obstacle I need to conquer.”

With student veterans such as Lanteri, who has attended multiple schools, the population proves to be a difficult group to track.

Most surveys of graduation rates only count first-time college students, or those who enter degree programs without any previous college credits. That means veterans who started degrees before their enlistment or took classes while still in the military aren’t counted.

Some veterans enroll part-time and take longer to finish their degrees, so they can’t be tracked by traditional four-year graduation rates.

Corwin Cherry, who served in Iraq in 2003, enrolled in what then was Pensacola (Fla.) Junior College after he left the military in 2005.

Cherry, 34, has PTSD and said the chaotic nature of the classroom could trigger panic attacks and headaches.

“You don’t like crowds. You don’t like a lot of stuff going on at the same time,” he said. “So when you’re in a little, small classroom with a lot of people you don’t know, you just can’t stay focused on it.”

After failing several classes, Cherry switched to Kaplan University, a private for-profit school that allows him to take all his courses online.

Taking classes at home, in a quiet environment he’s comfortable in, Cherry plans to graduate with a degree in alternative medicine in 2017, he said.

The Post-9/11 GI Bill provides for 36 months, about four academic years, of benefits.

For veterans attending a public school in a state where they have residency, benefits cover full tuition. For veterans enrolled at a public school outside of their home state, the GI Bill covers up to the cost of the most-expensive undergraduate public tuition in that state, leaving the student to pay the difference.

At private and for-profit schools, benefits cover up to $18,077.50 an academic year.

“There’s never been a more generous GI Bill,” said Rod Davis, director of the Texas A&M University System Veterans Support Office. “We’re in better shape than we’ve ever been before.”

In addition to tuition benefits, students receive a monthly housing allowance depending on their school’s location, from $768 in Alpena, Mich., to $3,257 in New York City. Allowances average between $1,000 and $1,400, while students whose schoolwork is exclusively online get $684 a month, according to the VA.

Without comprehensive data on student veteran outcomes, some schools have begun tracking their veteran enrollment. Arizona State University calculates veteran retention rates by tracking military students within larger universitywide surveys.

Joanna Sweatt, ASU’s military advocate, reported a 94 to 96 percent retention rate between fall 2012 and spring 2013 for first-year veterans at ASU. The numbers show that ASU veterans services, which include academic support and counseling, and the Post-9/11 GI Bill keep veterans in the classroom, she said.

“Someone’s inevitably going to ask, ‘Is that money being spent well?’” she said. “These numbers help show that it is.”

In 2011, Operation College Promise, a Trenton, N.J.-based national policy program, began a six-year survey to track about 700 Post-9/11 GI Bill students on 21 campuses nationwide.

The first installment of that survey, which will show retention rates for the 2011-2012 academic year, is scheduled to be released later this year. Preliminary numbers are promising, said Wendy Lang, executive director of the program, which focuses on the transition of veterans into postsecondary education.

“They’re progressing toward a degree just as efficiently, if not more efficiently, than your traditional student,” she said.

In this weekly column, former health insurance executive Wendell Potter offers commentary on matters relating to U.S. health care reform

It’s been a while since you’ve seen a lot of stories in the media about Obamacare “rate shock,” hasn’t it?

“Rate shock” stories were all the rage several months ago, like this one from Forbes last December: “Aetna CEO (Mark) Bertolini: Get ready for ‘Rate Shock’ as Some Insurance Premiums to Double in 2014.”

Health insurance executives were hoping we’d swallow their scare campaign on rates, and thus get behind efforts by their friends in Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act.  

Many of those friends, like Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., are members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which sent out a press release on March 14 with the headline: “Obamacare Oversight: The Looming Premium Rate Shock.”

The next day, that committee held a hearing entitled: “Unaffordable: Impact of Obamacare on America’s Health Insurance.” During that hearing, at which I testified, Blackburn read a long list of what she claimed were names of businesses in her district that had experienced Obamacare rate shock.

Skeptical, I sent Rep. Blackburn a letter asking if I could see those letters and help her determine if Obamacare was really the blame or if, possibly, and more likely, those businesses’ insurance carriers were just gouging them. Five and a half months later, I’m still waiting on a response. Even though I’m from Tennessee too.

Since that hearing, the headlines have diminished because there’s little evidence that the “rate shock” allegations were based on anything other than assertions made by insurance company CEOs and lobbyists and their buddies on Capitol Hill.

The number of rate shock stories declined as state after state disclosed over the summer what insurance companies will actually charge for policies next year. Those disclosures have shown that not only will premiums not skyrocket when Obamacare’s most important consumer protections kick in on January 1, most Americans who buy coverage on their states’ online marketplaces will get better deals than they can today.

A study published last week by the Rand Corporation, a research group, is also helping to show that the rate shock hype was just that: hype.

Rand researchers said that although prices will vary from state to state, Obamacare will not increase premiums overall. Yes, some people, smokers in particular and folks enrolled in policies with benefits so meager they will be outlawed next year, will have to pay more. But most Americans who will be buying coverage in the marketplaces (also known as exchanges) will be eligible for tax credits that will make their coverage more affordable and, in many cases, cheaper than what is available today. Don’t expect a press release from the House Energy and Commerce Committee about that.

Another study released earlier this month also indicated that Obamacare has not been the cause of recent rate increases. The Kaiser Family Foundation’s annual survey of employer-based insurance showed that over the past year, premiums for family coverage increased just 4 percent. While 4 percent is still a hefty increase for many workers, it’s far less than the double-digit increases that were common in previous years.

So what happened to the rate shock scare?

Politicians and the media were all too willing to repeat what CEOs of big for-profit insurance corporations were saying without analyzing their motives or taking into account the fact that the marketplaces will force real competition in the health insurance world.

What the insurance company executives were actually “disclosing” several months back was what they would like to charge for their policies on the marketplaces, not what they actually would be able to charge. Aetna, for example, might have liked to be able to charge $500 a month for a certain policy but it won’t because its competitors will charge less than that for the exact same coverage.

We’ve already seen in Oregon and other states that insurers have been resubmitting lower prices for policies after seeing what their competitors’ price plans are.  

I predict that beginning Oct. 1, when the marketplaces go online, most people will discover that because of the new level of competition and the availability of tax credits, affordable coverage will actually at long last be available. To save face, though, you can also expect those politicians who have been crying “rate shock” to search high and low for constituents who believe their policies have grown more expensive because of Obamacare. And, like Rep. Blackburn did last March, some of those politicians will read the entire list of those constituents in a Congressional hearing.

The idea of hauling young offenders into court — and hoping lockup will change them — no longer appeals to a host of experts who work in the juvenile criminal justice system. But it’s not always easy for law enforcement, probation officers and even defense attorneys to know what they can do differently to deter kids who are at risk of becoming adult offenders.

As part of a partnership, four centers that offer expertise on reforms have just been given a portion of an infusion of $15 million from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which has already invested $150 million in juvenile-justice research and reform over nearly 20 years. The foundation’s decision speaks to research-based theories that are gaining traction, which postulate that overly punitive approaches can increase juveniles’ risk of turning into expensive adult inmates.

The new “Resource Center Partnership” was announced in Atlanta in August at the National Conference of State Legislators’ 2013 Legislative Conference.

The centers receiving the foundation money are part of a hub of experts who provide training and consultation in key areas, including mental-health needs for youth and higher quality legal representation to advocate for youth in court.

The need for troubled youths to be in close touch with mental-health experts was underscored in August when a 20-year-old — with documented psychological needs— entered a Georgia school armed with a rifle and 500 rounds of ammo. He exchanged gunfire with police, but was talked into surrendering by a school bookkeeper who showered him with empathy in a calm but firm tone.

The groups receiving the grants are the National Juvenile Defender Center; the Status Offense Reform Center, the Robert F. Kennedy National Resource Center for Juvenile Justice; and a new technical Assistance and Education Center attached to the National Center for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice.

As the MacArthur Foundation noted, as many as 70 percent of more than 2 million children and older youth who enter the juvenile justice system have “at least one diagnosable mental health need” and about a quarter have serious emotional problems.

And as brain research has increasingly made clear, juveniles just aren’t physiologically programmed to make the most logical decisions.

The Delmar, N.Y.-based National Center for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice has a “Mistakes Kids Make” video message on its website summing up some facts that aren’t widely known by the public.

“Only five percent of kids who get arrested have committed a violent crime. But the other 95 percent often face the same fate,” the message says. Locking them away in a “one-size-fits-all” approach can expose them to danger and harden them more.

Minors accused of “status offenses,” such as running away or underage drinking, can end up in exposed to the hardening impact of detention rather than getting help that’s more appropriate for their needs.

Soledad McGrath, Justice Reform program officer for the MacArthur Foundation’s U.S. Programs, said the centers can help “practitioners on the ground” who already work in juvenile-justice systems. (The Center for Public Integrity receives funding for independent journalism from the MacArthur Foundation, but not for juvenile-justice reporting.)

McGrath said the funding will also strengthen a new network of “strategic allies” with the clout to push for change in local and state policies: they include the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the National Center for State Courts and the National Conference of State Legislatures, which conducts and disseminates new research and ideas to state lawmakers on problems they’re trying to address.

In a report last year, the National Conference of State Legislatures — a nonpartisan research group — said that states in the 1990s moved away from a “traditional emphasis on rehabilitation” toward “tougher, more punitive treatment of youth, including adult handling.”

Now a number of state legislators, both liberals and conservatives, are sold on the idea that there are better and less expensive ways to rehabilitate minors.

Labor unions are increasingly flexing their muscles in the political arena through the use of super PACs — the organizations frequently funded by billionaire businessmen and often derided for unleashing a flood of special interest money into elections.

During the first half of 2013, unions contributed $10 million to the political committees, which are permitted to accept donations of unlimited size from individuals, corporations and labor groups — more than five times the $1.7 million they gave to during the first six months of 2011, the last off-election year.

Union giving accounted for roughly $1 out of every $6 raised by all super PACs during the first half of 2013, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of federal campaign finance filings.

By contrast, corporate super PAC donations held steady, totaling about $4 million during the first six months of both 2011 and 2013.

“Super PACs give unions an important new tool in elections,” said David Keating, president of the Center for Competitive Politics, which advocates for the deregulation of political spending.

Super PACs arose out of changes to campaign finance law ushered in by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling and a related lower court ruling, SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission, in 2010.

The pair of decisions allowed corporations and unions to use treasury funds to bankroll political advertisements that called for the election or defeat of federal candidates — or give to intermediaries that do so, such as super PACs and nonprofits.

Now, labor unions can use super PACs to “speak out to voters who may share union concerns,” Keating added — instead of only being able to communicate with their own members about the candidates they support.

Unions can also still spend millions of dollars more educating and engaging their members outside of super PAC channels.

The top donor among unions through the first six months of 2013 was the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, which funneled $1.9 million into its super PAC, Working for Working Americans. Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO invested $1.8 million into its own super PAC — Workers’ Voice.

Those sums rank the two unions as the fourth- and fifth-largest super PAC donors so far this year — only the Democratic Governors Association, the late Bob Perry of Texas and billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave more.

Thomas Flynn, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners’ political director, told the Center for Public Integrity that the unions were still the underdogs in national politics.

“We’re never going to be able to compete with the Koch brothers or the Sheldon Adelsons of the world,” Flynn said, referencing the libertarian-leaning billionaire brothers and the Las Vegas casino tycoon who, along with his wife, donated more than $90 million to GOP super PACs last election cycle. “We just don’t have the resources.”

In a perfect world, Flynn said, the union “probably wouldn’t” operate a super PAC, Flynn added, but “we have to be able to get our message out.”

A representative of the AFL-CIO did not respond to requests for comment, but the union’s president, Richard Trumka has argued that the Citizens United ruling "tilted the playing field” against those “whose voices are being drowned out by excessive corporate spending."

Meanwhile, Jonathan Collegio, the spokesman for the pro-GOP America Crossroads — a behemoth among super PACs during the past two elections, thanks to mega-donations from several notable businessmen and companies — said his organization “views its role as a conservative counterbalance to the unions.”

With Election Day 2014 still more than a year away, the ultimate strength of union super PACs remains to be seen. And the percentage of all super PAC funds coming from unions could drop should a corporation or wealthy individual — or fleet of them — open their checkbooks like they did in 2012.

Emily E. LaBarbera Twarog, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s school of labor and employment relations, says there is still a “wide division” between the financial reserves of unions and private industry.

“The amount of private money pouring into super PACs to fund anti-worker policies and politicians is huge,” she said. “Citizens United blew it wide open.”

Ben Wieder contributed to this report.

The fight to feel like a veteran weighs substantially on female soldiers returning from war, though their numbers have been historic, with more than 280,000 returning from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last decade.

A News21 demographic analysis shows that 17.4 percent of post-9/11 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans are women. More than a quarter of those women are black, almost twice the proportion found in the entire U.S. population.

Yet, these same women are less likely to find a job than male veterans and more likely to be a single parent with children to support, interviews and records show.

They return to a nation that historically defines “veteran” as male, which in the post-9/11 era has meant a lack of female-specific resources at VA facilities across the country.

A 2013 Institute of Medicine report found that women in combat-support roles, like men, experience intense warfare and constant threats on their lives, but the implications of this trauma for women has been overlooked.

“Historically, research on the health of veterans has focused on the health consequences of combat service in men, and there has been little scientific research ... of the health consequences of military service in women who served,” according to the report.

Currently, 360,000 women use VA medical services. But the number is expected to double as more women come home and seek care, many of them relatively new to its services, said Dr. Patricia Hayes, chief consultant of Women’s Health Services at the VA in Washington, D.C.

As of 2008, only 33 percent of the 152 VA medical centers had specified "women’s clinics," records show. Now, about 75 percent offer at least some type of female-specific care, Hayes said.

Army National Guard Spc. Crystal Sandor muscled a 5-ton truck through the ragtag roads of Iraq and likely would be dead from an exploding fireball had the 4-foot-10 soldier been just centimeters taller.

She was awarded a Purple Heart, but had to prove to the Army that she deserved it.

Even back home in Ohio, she doesn’t feel much like a soldier.

“What did you do over there?” some gray-haired male veterans in Akron, Ohio, at the Department of Veterans Affairs asked as they sized up her petite frame. “Did you sell Girl Scout cookies?” one asked.

When Sandor’s husband goes to the VA, he gets handshakes and “Thank you for your service” accolades in the waiting room.

Not Crystal.

Sandor has struggled to get the care she expected from the military since the night she nearly died – June 18, 2004.

She was a driver in a 20-truck convoy during a night mission in Iraq.

She laughs just a little, remembering a conversation with a fellow soldier. She was razzing him for spilling sunflower seeds, a staple during their missions together. Then, a fireball from a roadside bomb came head-on toward their truck.

Sandor woke up pounding on her chest to make sure she was alive. She couldn’t see, couldn’t hear. The voice of a soldier broke the chaos.

“Just keep driving! Just keep driving!”

“If I was that much taller,” Sandor says, putting mere centimeters between her thumb and forefinger, “I wouldn’t be alive.”

After the accident and while still in Iraq, Sandor discovered her superiors lost the paperwork documenting the attack, meaning there was no official record that it ever happened.

“The only reason I have the disability (rating) I have is because I was smart enough to have a video camera on me and we recorded the damage to the truck and we took pictures of everything,” she said. “That is the only reason I have a Purple Heart or disability.”

Since Sandor’s return home in March 2005, she’s been at odds with the Ohio VA system over her treatment.

During her first appointment later that year, she said the VA doctor seemed skeptical of her injuries, treating her as if she never left the base. When she was asked about treatment options, Sandor requested therapy to talk about the attack that injured her. Instead, she left with three prescriptions for anxiety and sleeping. She said she stopped taking the medications because she felt like a “zombie.”

“I don’t think I’ve talked to one female veteran who goes to the VA who has had a good experience, that has been treated and received the care that they deserve,” Sandor said. “I think because the VA has dealt with men for so long, through all the previous wars, they’re not set up to handle females. But we’ve been at this war for 10 years, it’s about time they figure it out.”

She tried group therapy at the VA, but was placed in an all-male group. She left each session feeling guilty, not better, about herself because of the horror stories the men told.

For the last eight years, Sandor has bounced between her civilian doctor and the VA to prove the extent of her injuries — such as the post-traumatic stress disorder the VA denied, but her civilian doctor insists she has, along with ringing in her ears, severe arthritis in her knees, hearing and vision loss, herniated disks, a deviated septum and a brain lesion. She has a 40 percent disability rating.

She tries to dismiss her concerns with the VA, keeping her focus on her 17-month-old daughter and her husband’s National Guard unit, where she volunteers to help other families. She also is pursuing a degree in public health from Kent State University, where she used the Post-9/11 GI Bill to pay for online classes.

It’s been nine years since a roadside bomb nearly killed her, but her PTSD continues to creep into her civilian life both physically and emotionally.

“A lot of people are still like, ‘Why does it bother you? It’s been eight years, get over it,’ ” Sandor said. “It doesn’t go away, it’s with you the rest of your life. I mean, the severity of it might – how much you remember of it might — but that feeling, it’s always there.”

When Hannah Siska left the Marines in 2011, she expected to find a job with the skills she acquired during her five years of service. She was a Marine in good standing. She had strong leadership skills. She had high security clearance.

But she couldn’t get a job, even with her training as a special communications signals collection operator and analyst.

Siska applied for more than 150 jobs posted on Department of Defense websites geared toward applicants with security clearances. The result always was the same.

“They want to hire vets that are males, not females, and that was very apparent,” said Siska, who was deployed to Iraq in 2008 and 2009. “I had everything and my resume looked just like all the other guys that got jobs and I didn’t.”

In September 2012, the unemployment rate for post-9/11 female veterans hit a high of 19.9 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average unemployment rate for female veterans for all of 2012 was 12.5 percent, but that was still 3 percentage points higher than the average for male veterans that year.

“Unfortunately when female veterans come home they aren’t perceived as women warriors,” said John Pickens III, a Vietnam veteran and the executive director of VeteransPlus, a nonprofit offering financial counseling to service members.

A woman’s military experience isn’t seen as suitable for civilian life, despite the fact that they learned the same skills as their male counterparts, he said.

“They can’t enjoy the life they’ve fought to defend and there’s a lot of pride there,” he said.

Siska calls it “the boys’ club” mentality, a perception she worked against during her time as a Marine. When she joined in 2006, Siska said her superiors and fellow Marines gave her extra responsibilities because they trusted her judgment and work ethic. She sought a higher rank, but was not promoted. So she left the Marines.

“I loved it, and I loved the people, I loved what I did, I just didn’t like the political aspect behind being able to move up,” she said.

She described the Marines as “old fashioned,” and based on a ranking system emphasizing running and shooting scores. This mindset hinders the Marines, she said, because it discourages women from joining.

In 2009, women made up 19.5 percent of officers and enlisted members in the Air Force, but only 6.4 percent of all Marines, according to the Pew Research Center.

Now, Siska’s working on a biochemistry degree at Kent State University while caring for two young children. Her goal is to go to medical school and serve in the Navy.

“I want to be a career person and I want to accomplish things and feel like I’m contributing to society or a community or just my family,” she said.

Other than when she is in a Kent State classroom, Aribella Shapiro is always by herself. She walks everywhere because she doesn’t have a car — to school, to Walmart, to the Kent Church of Christ.

On one Sunday, she leaves at least 45 minutes before the 10:45 a.m. service. The dewy grass sticks to her brown suede and rubber boots with fur around the top. She says the boots remind her of being in the Army.

She cuts across the lawn of another church, passes campus, stops to get a Frappuccino at Starbucks and zigzags past Main Street and over to the church.

They’re finishing a Bible study and moving on to the main worship service when she comes in and sits at the back of the 14-pew church. There are fewer than 20 people in the church; Shapiro is one of about three under the age of 35. She said she likes to try out different churches, but wants to connect somewhere so God knows she’s thankful.

“I’m proud because I’m alive and I’m all in one piece,” said the 32-year-old. “I have a lot of friends who have died due to the war and I wasn’t one of them. I’m proud that I fought for America.”

But she’s not proud of everything about the military, namely her rape by a superior officer.

“I didn’t tell anyone because I felt embarrassed,” she said, explaining that her rapist threatened to kill her if she said anything. “I cried for months.”

The crying stopped, she explains, because she talked with other women who experienced similar scenarios, and she realized her story was not unique. The Department of Defense’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office estimates that 26,000 cases of sexual assault or unwanted sexual contact occurred in fiscal 2012. Of that estimate, 3,374 cases were reported, according to that office.

Shapiro joined the Army, knowing her decision to serve would pay her way through college. The Post-9/11 GI Bill brought her to Kent and it’s where she feels the most confident — sitting in class, studying for an exam or helping other students with their homework.

The Post-9/11 GI Bill offers an education to those who served after Sept. 10, 2001, and has paid for nearly 1 million veterans to go to school.

Post-9/11 female veterans who have a high school equivalent degree outperform non-veterans when it comes to post-secondary degree attainment, according to a News21 analysis.

But many women veterans returning home to student life juggle other challenges. Only 15 percent of student veterans are “traditionally” college-aged students. Another 47 percent have children and nearly that same percentage are married.

“We think that women veterans don’t necessarily want to be identified solely as veterans, as a special group, they want to be identified as women students and adult learners,” said Rachel Anderson, director of the Center for Adult and Veteran Services at Kent State University.

The Independent Budget — an annual VA budget and policy analysis prepared by independent veterans service organizations — reported that researchers found women veterans have a difficult time finding support systems upon returning home. Some women reported feeling isolated, and for others this feeling is made worse by the college atmosphere.

But Aribella Shapiro’s life is lonelier than she would like. She dreams of getting her bachelor’s and master’s degrees to teach English overseas, maybe even in Kuwait where she was stationed in 2004. Only this time she wants to go as “friend, not foe.”

Alone in her apartment, Shapiro misses the men and women she served with in the Army. She’s trying to make connections with students in her classes, through the roommate she hopes to get by putting up signs around campus and even with the barista at Starbucks.

But going from being in the Army to being by herself is difficult especially, as a single person, she said. And when asked if she felt welcomed home, Shapiro answered immediately: “No.”

She described the TV shows that show soldiers coming home to their families and the emotional reunions that cue tears and hugs.

“What about us soldiers that were single and we don’t have a family to come home to? Why can’t you appreciate us for what we do too?” she said.

Briana Hawkes’ Army dress blues hang pressed and ready in her parents’ basement in Bristolville, Ohio.

The basement is where Hawkes is living for the next two-and-a-half years. She converted it into her own studio apartment while she’s home and is willing to hang her clothes on a metal rod suspended from the ceiling because she knows it’s only temporary.

The 25-year-old single mother served as an E-5 supply sergeant in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2012 and is home to use the Post-9/11 GI Bill to get her degree and join the ROTC program at Kent State University. After she graduates and becomes a commissioned officer, Hawkes plans to re-enter the Army and continue her military career.

According to the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), many women carry the burden of caring for children while they are deployed. More than 40 percent of women on active duty have children and more than 30,000 single mothers have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2009.

“Especially as more women are involved and we see continued deployments we need to be cognizant how deployments are impacting families,” said Kate O’Gorman, political director at IAVA. “We have to make sure that service members that deploy can’t be worried about their kids constantly. There needs to be a strong system at home so they can execute their job overseas.”

But parents still will worry — both during and after deployment.

Hawkes is young to hold the rank of E-5 supply sergeant. She’s typically in charge of soldiers with at least six years on her, she said, and it hasn’t been easy to achieve this level of leadership. “It’s really cut-throat out there,” Hawkes said, describing the way some sergeants stop soldiers from moving up in rank because they don’t want to be passed up. “I’ve seen it and I’ve been through it and I’ve conquered it.”

Coming home to get a degree and care for her daughter is a major contrast to the rigor of her military lifestyle. She is used to straight lines, strict rules and order. But on campus, students walk around wearing whatever they want, smoking and talking on their cell phones.

You’re not allowed to do that in the Army.

Thinking about going back to the Army in two-and-a-half years is hard, especially after spending concentrated time with her 3-year-old daughter, but Hawkes knows it’s a decision she’s going to stand by.

“I plan on going until there’s no more go in me,” she said. “If that is one star, two star, I’m not stopping ... I have a daughter to take care of and I know she’s going to have needs and college so I’m going to provide.”

Asha Anchan was a Peter Kiewit Foundation Fellow, Kelsey Hightower an Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation Fellow and Caitlin Cruz a Women & Philanthropy Fellow for News21 this summer.

A newly created super PAC appears to have its sights set on West Virginia, a state where Republicans in 2014 hope to pick up both a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate.

A group called “West Virginians for Results” submitted paperwork to the Federal Election Commission on August 29, stating it “intends to make independent expenditures,” though it doesn’t specify in which races it plans to be active and the website it lists is not yet functional.

The address used by West Virginians for Results on its FEC filing is the Washington, D.C., office of the law firm Clark Hill PLC. The super PAC’s treasurer is listed as James “Jim” Tyrrell III, a Clark Hill attorney who did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Tyrrell specializes in campaign finance law and has a strong Republican pedigree.

He once clerked for former FEC Chairman Don McGahn, who now serves as the agency's vice chairman. And Tyrrell previously worked for the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Republican Party of Virginia, according to his online biography.

Records show that he personally donated $1,500 to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2011, $50 to Republican Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina during her 2010 campaign and $1,000 to Virginia GOP Gov. Bob McDonnell during his 2009 campaign.

Ward Wyatt, the executive director of the West Virginia Republican Party, told the Center for Public Integrity that he was unfamiliar with West Virginians for Results, though he was not surprised that a super PAC would be focused on the state.

"You're probably going to see a lot of super PACs pop up," he said.

“Are they for us or against us?” Wyatt asked of West Virginians for Results. "I don’t know.”

Regardless, Republicans in West Virginia see myriad opportunities ahead of the 2014 midterm elections.

Incumbent Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W. Va., is retiring, and GOP Rep. Shelley Moore Capito already has nearly $3 million in her campaign war chest as she seeks his seat. No Democratic contenders have yet announced Senate bids.

Additionally, both the 2nd Congressional District and the 3rd Congressional District are expected to be competitive.

Earlier this summer, state Sen. Evan Jenkins left the Democratic Party and announced he was seeking the GOP nomination to challenge 3rd District incumbent Rep. Nick Rahall, a Democrat who had about $350,000 in the bank at the end of June.

Capito currently represents the 2nd District, and her bid for higher office will open it to newcomers. Former West Virginia Democratic Party Chairman Nick Casey has already raised more than $450,000— including $300,000 of his own funds — although both the Democrats and Republicans may have contested primaries.

At least one in five female veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has screened positive for military sexual trauma (MST) once back home, Department of Veterans Affairs records show. And this may understate the crisis, experts say, because this number only counts women who go to the VA for help.

Young female veterans — those returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — often don’t show up for their first VA appointments, if they show up at all, said Ann LeFevre, MST coordinator at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System in California. “They think they’re alone and they don’t want to talk about it,” LeFevre said. “Especially with new returners, it takes a lot to get them on the VA campus. It can remind them of their base where the assault occurred.”

The assault itself defies the discipline and values of the armed forces, but the problem is exacerbated, experts say, when victims report an assault and their allegations are met with skepticism and possible retaliation.

Even after their military service is over, many sexual assault victims are reluctant to approach the VA, a system intertwined with the military and perceived at times as prescribing drugs instead of meeting their treatment needs.

“There’s a disconnect between what survivors believe they need and the educated treatment community as to what is necessary and helpful,” said Mylea Charvat, a fellow in clinical neuroscience with the Stanford School of Medicine.

Charvat, who worked in the VA system for about 10 years, starting shortly after 9/11, described the department as “slow to respond” to the broad needs of women. “Historically, it’s not a highly responsive system. It’s huge, it’s bureaucratic,” she said. “I can understand women being hesitant to seek care, and frankly, a lot of men, too.”

In 2012, the Department of Defense’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office estimated that 26,000 cases of “unwanted sexual contact” occurred. Of these, only about 13 percent of service members reported their assault.

Now, Charvat is working to develop a new model for effectively treating military sexual trauma and the resulting post-traumatic stress disorder with the Artemis Rising Invisible War Recovery Program, a treatment program inspired by the documentary “The Invisible War.”

“We need to attack this on a multi-faceted approach,” she said. “It’s a complex problem.”

The burden of the problem falls on the Department of Defense — which consistently states it has a zero-tolerance policy for sexual assault — and on the VA — which has been charged since 1992 with addressing the failures of that policy. In 2010, the VA spent $872 million on sexual-assault-related healthcare, records show.

But many veterans feel lost in the void between these two large bureaucracies.

Women like Jessie de Leon and Corey Barrows are veterans who feel the military failed them — not only because the assaults occurred, but also because of what they consider inadequate responses once they returned from their deployments. As a result, they sought their own means of treatment.

“For a while it’s just like I was numb to the world. Just fake happiness, drug-induced happiness,” said de Leon, who was raped while serving as an Army medic in Bamberg, Germany, from 2007 to 2009. “I didn’t realize that this process was going to be more hindering to me in trying to recover from it than it was helping me.”

As a medic, she examined soldiers and their families at the health clinic in Germany and prepared soldiers to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. She also comforted families who lost soldiers in the war.

But back home in Florida, de Leon found no comfort with therapists at the West Palm Beach VA. They didn’t seem to understand the impact of her rape. Their recommended treatment consisted of prescription drugs for sleeping, anxiety and depression.

Harvard psychologist Paula Caplan has talked with hundreds of veterans, many of whom told her the VA pushed prescription drugs instead of examining the impact of the assaults.

“Women already, so often, feel that they don’t belong in the military, either they’re not wanted or they have to prove to other people or themselves that they deserve to be there,” Caplan said. “When you are traumatized and you’re devastated ... then you think, ‘But I have military training, I’m supposed to be tough, I’m supposed to be resilient.’ ”

De Leon had a young son, she was going to nursing school and she decided to leave the VA. Eventually, de Leon ended up at Healing Horse Therapy Center with other female veterans, located in Loxahatchee, Fla., 15 minutes from her home.

“No one was forcing you to talk, nobody was saying you had to do anything,” de Leon said of the therapy center. “I didn’t realize you could gain so much confidence, gain so much self-motivation, get back your self-esteem, just by working with a horse, who never said a word to you.”

In October, she will graduate from nursing school and she and her 5-year-old son will move to North Carolina to be with her fiance.

“From going through years of a lot of people not caring about what you went through and how you felt about things, and to finally come to a place where you felt safe, it was, it was very wonderful,” she said. “It validates your pain.”

The VA defines military sexual trauma, or MST, as the “psychological trauma, which in the judgment of a VA mental health professional, resulted from a physical assault of a sexual nature, battery of a sexual nature, or sexual harassment which occurred while the veteran was serving on active duty or active duty for training.”

Veterans can seek a disability compensation rating for MST and the related effects. According to the VA, the necessary documentation has been reduced. Despite this, Amanda Schroeder, a union president for employees of the Veterans Benefits Administration in Portland, Ore., said MST claims are complicated and time-consuming to complete because many people do not report their assault.

“Men and women alike are already completely disabused, disempowered and often completely disenfranchised by the time they get to us and so a lot of times the sexual trauma cases take a lot of time because we have to seek so much additional evidence and it’s not all maintained in one place,” Schroeder said.

Because of this, Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, introduced the 2013 Ruth Moore Act, which aims to make it easier for service members to receive benefits for military-related sexual assaults.

“Most people are just shocked to think that we would ask someone to serve in the military and they would be more likely to be sexually assaulted than blown up by an IED (improvised explosive device),” she said.

Pingree said her bill, which passed the House and is pending in the Senate, is needed because of the difficulty she’s seen when victims try to prove they were sexual assaulted. “You can’t just say to someone, ‘Come serve your country, and oh, by the way, you might get raped if you do and we’re not going to do anything about it,’ ” Pingree said. “It’s just unthinkable.”

In January, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he believes sexual assault and harassment continue “because we’ve had separate classes of military personnel.” Identifying men as “warriors” and women as “something else” breeds an environment that can lead to sexual crimes, he said.

A 2013 Institute of Medicine report found a link between MST and long-term poor mental and physical health. Moreover, the Independent Budget, a policy evaluation created by various veteran service organizations about, but independent of, the VA, found that women with MST had a 59 percent higher risk for mental health problems.

Common conditions linked to MST range from PTSD and anxiety to eating disorders, hypervigilance and insomnia. More specifically, LaFevre said the women she works with often show signs of stomach problems, experience weight gain — “They don’t want to get attention from men in any way, so they emotionally eat” — and have a hard time maintaining a job, leading to homelessness. The Independent Budget reported that of homeless female veterans using VA healthcare, 39 percent screened positive for MST.

These side effects remain wide-ranging and lifelong and the resources for treatment vary across the country.

“The assault itself is very traumatizing,” said Jennifer Norris, an advocate with the Military Rape Crisis Center who was assaulted while serving with the Air Force and Air National Guard. “That trauma, you’re going to have it no matter what, for the rest of your life.”

Marine Corps veteran Corey Barrows was raped by a fellow service member while off-post in September 2006, near Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, N.C. When she reported her assault, her master sergeant told her she must have been too drunk — even though she doesn’t drink. “Nobody believed me,” she said.

She deployed in July 2007 to Iraq, where she was coping with her trauma — until her old unit, which included friends of her attacker, deployed to the same installation. Barrows, unable to manage the stress, took a handful of Percocet in an attempt to kill herself.

“We talk so much about unit cohesion being critically important in the military, just how well people work together when they’re serving, and it’s hard to imagine that anything does more damage to that than a sexual assault within a unit,” said Pingree, the congresswoman from Maine. “It’s not good policy to let it happen.”

Barrows was honorably discharged in November 2008. After enrolling in VA healthcare in early 2009, she was prescribed numerous medications for anxiety and depression. She then went to a civilian therapist because she had lost faith in the VA system. Her therapist suggested activities such as yoga and talking with other survivors to aid Barrows’s recovery. Barrows now uses fewer medications.

After her husband was discharged from the Marine Corps, they moved to his hometown of Bozeman, Mont.

“It’s just therapeutic out here. I’m out of the military bubble,” she said. “I still have horrible anxiety, especially with crowds, but in Montana you tend to have less of that.”

News21 Fellow Mary Shinn contributed to this article.

Caitlin Cruz and Mary Shinn were Women & Philanthropy Fellows and Asha Anchan was a Peter Kiewit Foundation Fellow for News21 this summer.

The Federal Election Commission is again threatening Newt Gingrich's presidential committee with legal trouble, saying the former U.S. House speaker's 2012 campaign is flouting federal law by failing to disclose numerous details about its finances.

In separateletters Wednesday to the Newt 2012, the FEC's Senior Campaign Finance and Reviewing Analyst Jill Sugarman cites 11 disclosure deficiencies she says the committee must correct by Oct. 9.

"Failure to adequately respond ... could result in an audit or enforcement action," Sugarman writes.

Among the wrongs the FEC says Gingrich's campaign must right:

• Explain why a recent disclosure report "omits debts itemized" on previous reports
   
• Provide more information about a credit to the South Carolina Republican Party for a debt the committee owes it
   
• Detail the nature of disputed debts owed to various campaign vendors
   
• Balance its books. "Your report discloses debts with outstanding beginning balances that do not equal the corresponding closing balances of your previous report ... These amounts should be the same," the FEC writes.

Newt 2012 treasurer Lisa Lisker and Gingrich's Committee for America— a joint fundraising committee composed of Newt 2012 and the American Legacy Political Action Committee — did not respond to inquiries from the Center for Public Integrity.

This is hardly the first go-around between Newt 2012 and the FEC, which has been badgering Gingrich's debt-ridden committee about disclosure matters for months.

But the FEC has yet to fine or otherwise take enforcement action against Gingrich's operation, according to federal records. 

Lisker, for her part, has ignored much of the FEC's previous disclosure pressure.

Last year, for example, she told the commission that Newt 2012 wouldn't comply with the agency's requests to fully detail cash reimbursements it provided staffers, including Gingrich himself.

"The Committee has reviewed all reimbursements to individuals for other than travel and subsistence and confirms that no further itemization is required under any Commission regulations for these expenditures," Lisker wrote at the time.

Through June, Newt 2012 reported more than $4.52 million in outstanding debts, FEC records show.

That's more money than any other presidential committee, past or present.

An American wanted on organized crime charges in New Jersey and New York shuffled more than $1 million around the world through accounts at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Australia’s ANZ Bank, confidential records show.

State and federal authorities in the U.S. claim that Carmen “Buddy” Cicalese ran a “wire room” in Costa Rica that processed millions of dollars in sports bets for American bookies with the help of a colorful cast of operatives boasting street names such as “Cleaver” and “Lou the Shoe.”

A former New York police officer and a reputed Genovese crime family associate have been charged along with Cicalese, who moved from New Jersey to Costa Rica in 2003 and now is a naturalized Costa Rican citizen.

Records show that Cicalese set up an offshore company based in the Cook Islands in the South Pacific as New Jersey police were investigating the suspected gambling ring in early 2004.

The offshore company in turn opened a bank account with one of Australia’s largest banks, ANZ, funneling at least $1.1 million into the account, bank statements show. Other records indicate Cicalese used hundreds of thousands of dollars that filtered through other banks – including U.S.-headquartered JPMorgan Chase – to purchase real estate in Costa Rica.

Documents outlining Cicalese’s transactions were obtained through a joint investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and La Nacion, Costa Rica’s leading daily newspaper.

Carmen Cicalese did not reply to a request for comment left at his office in Costa Rica.

How well big banks screen their customers to ensure they’re not involved in money laundering or other crimes has become anincreasingly hot issue. Financial crime experts say racketeers and rogues who move money through offshore hideaways rely on access to mainstream banks to shift their assets.

In December, for example, HSBC agreed to set aside more than $1.9 billion to settle an investigation by U.S. officials into evidence that the bank had served as a conduit for dirty money controlled by terrorists and drug traffickers.  In January, U.S. regulators cited JPMorgan for “critical deficiencies” in its anti-money-laundering safeguards.

JPMorgan did not answers questions about transactions linked to Cicalese. A spokesman for the bank has previously said that complying with anti-money-laundering rules “is a top priority for us.” 

A spokesperson for ANZ said the bank couldn’t comment on individual customers, but said it takes its anti-money laundering responsibility “very seriously” and has “a comprehensive framework to ensure we are meeting our obligations.”

ANZ said it continually monitors customers’ activities, reports suspicious activity to regulators and closes accounts “deemed to be an unacceptable risk.”  The bank added that it has “been systematically exiting relationships with international companies and trusts identified as ‘high risk.’ ”

Jersey Boyz

Cicalese was among dozens of individuals targeted nearly a decade ago by New Jersey police and prosecutors as part of an organized crime sting dubbed Operation Jersey Boyz.

Carmen "Buddy" Cicalese.The investigation began inJanuary 2004. Two months later — in March 2004 — Cicalese and his son Anthony set up a secret company in the Cook Islands, according to documents obtained through ICIJ’s “Offshore Leaks” investigation.

The company, RAC Corporation, was established with the help of Portcullis TrustNet, an offshore services provider headquartered in Singapore. After establishing an account through an ANZ branch on the Cook Islands, RAC received several money transfers from Costa Rica and the United States, according to the documents.

New Jersey officials went public with Operation Jersey Boyz in late 2004, lodging a variety of criminal charges against Carmen Cicalese and more than 40 other suspects.

The Bergen County, N.J., prosecutor’s office charged Carmen Cicalese, 73 at the time, with racketeering, money laundering and conspiracy to promote gambling. Others involved in the alleged crime ring were charged with loan sharking, bribery, extortion and truck-jacking, the prosecutor’s office said.  One defendant was accused of setting fire to the vehicle of a bettor who refused to pay up on a $5,000 bet.

Because he was living in Costa Rica at the time, Carmen Cicalese was not taken into custody.

His son, Anthony, was not charged in the case.

The son expressed concern, though, about the possibility of being arrested in the United States — and about keeping the origin of the funds transferred into the ANZ account quiet, documents reviewed by ICIJ and La Nacion indicate.

A file note written by an official with TrustNet, the offshore services firm, describes a telephone conference held in February 2005 with Anthony Cicalese:  “AC has concerns that if he visits the US he may be arrested or subpoenaed in respect of the gaming business he does in Costa Rica.”

The TrustNet official wrote that Anthony Cicalese confirmed that the offshore company would hold proceeds from gambling and that the U.S. considered the betting operation to be illegal. The official assured him that, under Cook Islands law, TrustNet would provide no information if U.S. authorities made inquiries. Any requests for information by American law enforcement officials would have to be routed through the Cook Islands government, she said.

ICIJ sent several questions to Anthony Cicalese about his involvement in RAC Corporation but received no reply.

In April 2005, the ANZ account controlled by the Cicaleses’ offshore company received a transfer of $740,000, records show. The money represented the proceeds from the sale of a house that Carmen Cicalese owned in New Jersey, according to an email from the TrustNet official to an ANZ representative.

Money soon started going out. The records show that in May 2005, for example, Anthony Cicalese asked ANZ Bank to transfer $300,000 to a bank account linked to a company in Panama. “We are purchasing a building in Partnership with this group,” he explained in his request.

More money came in to replenish the ANZ account, bringing the balance above $1.1 million in July 2007, records show.

New York charges

In early 2008, a new front opened in the criminal investigations involving Carmen Cicalese. Federal prosecutors in New York unsealed an indictment charging him and 11 others with illegal gambling and money laundering.

The indictment claims “the Cicalese Wireroom” operated through a toll-free telephone number and various websites, including datawager.com and betwestsports.com. The operation set up accounts that allowed hundreds of bookies in the U.S. to take bets on hockey, basketball, football and baseball. State prosecutors in Queens, New York, later said that bets ranged from $200 to $4,000 per game.

Records obtained by La Nación show that Carmen Cicalese made several large real estate purchases in Costa Rica in the wake of the new round of criminal charges. The purchases, made between 2008 and 2009, included eight houses for which he paid $1.2 million.

For those properties, he made 43 payments, most of them with checks drawn on Banco Nacional de Costa Rica. However, he paid as much as $300,000 in September 2008 with a check from a JPMorgan account, according the records reviewed by La Nación.

In early 2009, Carmen Cicalese caught a break when the New Jersey criminal charges against him were dismissed. Charges were dropped against many defendants in the Jersey Boyz saga after a judge ruled that much of the wiretap evidence in the case was not admissible in court.

Soon after, though, new state court charges in New York were filed against him, to go along with federal court charges in New York that are still pending. Queens County prosecutors allege that Cicalese was the “controller” of a sports betting enterprise that took in $13 million over a 19-month period.

 Cicalese is charged in Queens with 78 counts of promoting gambling, five counts of money laundering, two counts of conspiracy and one count of “enterprise corruption,” Kevin Ryan, a spokesman for the Queens district attorney, told ICIJ.

 Cicalese is considered a fugitive on the state and federal charges in New York, according to Ryan and Jerika Richardson, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s office for the southern district of New York.

In 2012, Cicalese adopted Costa Rican citizenship by naturalization, according to the Web page of the Civil Registry of Costa Rica.

U.S. authorities have apparently not attempted to extradite Cicalese from Costa Rica. U.S. officials have not forwarded an arrest warrant for Cicalese to Costa Rican authorities, according to a spokesperson for Costa Rica’s attorney general.

 Ronny Rojas is an investigative reporter with La Nación, a daily newspaper in Costa Rica.  

If you want to understand how industries are able beat back even modest regulations aimed at protecting the public—whether to limit greenhouse gases from power plants or eliminate cancerous chemicals from children’s products—please check out some of The Center for Public Integrity’s investigative work this week and next.

The pattern—extremely successful from industry’s point of view—is crystal clear. Among the tactics: gumming up the regulatory process; deploying hundreds of high-paid lobbyists (many of whom were former legislators themselves), and making use of well-targeted and generous campaign contributions to line up votes from sitting legislators. The result is often defeat of proposed new regulations or infinite delay, which amounts to the same thing.

All of this is perfectly legal under America’s quasi-corrupt political system. I believe the word corrupt is apt because if an outsider looked at country “A” and saw that money from industry flowed freely to both former and current elected officials, and those former and current elected officials did exactly what industry wanted, we would say that country “A” had a problem. We would have no trouble labeling country “A” as having a corrupt or at least quasi-corrupt political system, even if all of these moves were permissible under the laws enacted by those same legislators.

We are country “A”.

This week’s example of how the system “works” comes from the coal and utility industries, which are waging an all-out influence war over potential new carbon regulations for power plants. Kristen Lombardi, a senior Center for Public Integrity Investigative reporter, pulled back the curtain on this influence war in her latest report on the coal industry’s tactics.  

As Kristen describes in detail, President Obama gave a key speech at Georgetown University on June 25 outlining his climate plan. He unveiled a national blueprint for cutting carbon pollution, framing it as “a plan to protect our country from the impacts of climate change.”

The president directed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to “put an end to the limitless dumping of carbon pollution from our power plants,” and laid out a schedule for the agency to issue rules for both new and existing facilities by June 2014.

For the coal industry, the stakes are high. EPA’s carbon regulations could halt construction of future coal plants, as Kristen reported, and potentially shutter many of the more than 500 plants operating today.

So the coal and utility industries and their allies will be pushing back in three fundamental ways, according to interviews with dozens coal lobbyists, utility executives, environmental advocates, scholars and former EPA officials:

• Industry is sure to flex its muscles in the regulatory process, inundating the EPA with comments, analyses, legal opinions and technical documents, and picking apart its draft plans.
• Plan critics will engage lobbyists to influence the rules’ language, enlisting support from other federal agencies, and offering alternatives to the White House.
• And, the coal industry is sure to oppose strict rules in a scorched-earth strategy infused with aid from allies in Congress who will likely seek to tie the EPA’s hands.

This three-part approach is also likely to include industry spokesmen and their legislative collaborators condemning what are often labeled “job-killing regulations” and higher energy costs no matter how balanced or how necessary such regulation may be in practice. Some utility trade groups are already airing TV ads identifying the Obama plan as “a tax we can least afford.”

If past patterns are any indication, these groups will work to delay and weaken the Obama administration’s carbon rules at every turn, from the EPA, to the White House, to Congress and the courts. The coal industry has flexed its political muscle at record levels in recent years. Since January 2011, coal companies have funneled $14.2 million into federal campaign contributions, according to the Center for Responsive Politics; another $41 million went toward lobbying the federal government. Again, all of this is perfectly legal.

But if the EPA is not able to regulate power plants, or is blocked from being able to curb carbon pollution, there will likely be little to show for the President’s new commitment to tackle the threat of climate change. Power plants in the United States produce almost 40 percent of domestic greenhouse gases.

Next week, as part of our Toxic Clout series, look for an in-depth investigation of the American Chemistry Council (ACC) and its so-far successful efforts to prevent states and the federal government from doing anything significant about cancer-causing chemicals in products that are used by women and children every day. The ACC playbook looks a lot like that of the coal and utility companies.

If a legislator can be financially influenced, and new regulations can be quashed, the only question is how much does it take? So far, it is simply a cost of doing business that industries are only too happy to pay in our quasi-corrupt paid-for political system.

Until next week,
Bill 

Over four years, as increasing numbers of veterans returned home from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a charity called Disabled Veterans Services of Pompano Beach, Fla., reported raising more than $8 million in cash and nearly $4 million in donated goods that it claimed would help disabled and homeless veterans.

But barely a nickel of each dollar the charity raised in cash went directly to help veterans, a News21 analysis shows. Although it claimed to have sent about $2.5 million in donated drugs and medical supplies to a Boston homeless shelter, the shelter said it received just one shipment worth about $210,000.

Another charity, Help Hospitalized Veterans of Winchester, Calif., spent only 25 cents of every dollar it raised on arts-and-crafts kits and “craft care specialists” as “diversion therapy for veterans facing extended hospitalization.” Most of the rest of the money, according to the charity’s filings with the Internal Revenue Service, paid for mass mailings soliciting more money and urging Americans to volunteer at veterans’ hospitals and become pen pals with patients.

In the years that the country has been at war, Americans have given over $12 billion to veterans’ and military charities. Donations grew nationwide from more than $615 million in 2001 to more than $1.6 billion in 2011 alone.

Federal and state laws demand financial reporting from all charities, but they require little in the way of reporting the results of services the charities claim to provide, the News21 investigation shows. Though many charities offered needed help, others spent much of their money — sometimes most of it — on the organization’s overhead expenses, rather than services promised to veterans.

“The scoundrels and the thieves and the rip-off artists … that want to make a lot of money know that these are categories of charities where the American public is gravitated, it pulls at the heartstrings and they know that the tendency of Americans is to give impulsively, emotionally with that pull,” said Ken Berger, president and chief executive officer of Charity Navigator, an independent charity evaluator. “They exploit that and they use that.”

Using federal tax filings, News21 identified more than 1,900 public charities across the country working to support veterans, service members and their families between 2001 and 2011.

A review of those filings, called Form 990s, shows charities claim to provide everything from cash assistance and craft kits to housing help and wheelchair repair. But descriptions of their programs often are cursory, which means donors may know little about how their money actually is spent.

Charity experts and watchdogs say at least 70 percent of a charity’s expenses generally should go to programs or services and no more than 30 percent should be used to pay for its management and fundraising. News21 found that seven of the top 12 charities that raised the most in donations from 2001 to 2011 spent 75 percent or more on programs and services from 2001 to 2011.

The Fisher House Foundation, for example, which builds accommodations for families of service members and veterans receiving medical treatment at military bases and VA medical centers, directed more than 95 percent of its spending, about $230 million, to its programs from 2001 to 2011. It spent less than $4 million on fundraising.

The Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society, which helps military veterans or their families during tough times, raised more than $185 million, but spent just 2 percent on fundraising, among the best rates of the charities analyzed for this story.

“We could really care less if you’re collecting millions and millions of dollars. What are the results — are they significant?” asked Kimberly Mitchell, who was deputy director of the Office of Warrior and Family Support for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until early 2012. She is now president of the Dixon Center for Military and Veterans Community Services, a program of Easter Seals.

Disabled Veterans Service, for example, which until recently operated out of a single room in a suburban Florida office building, spent 86 cents of every dollar on private fundraising companies and telemarketers tasked with drumming up more money between 2008 and 2011. Another 9 cents of every dollar was paid to private management consultants to keep the books and prepare state and federal filings.

In four years, with no paid staff or volunteers of its own, DVS reported that it had raised more than $12 million in cash and donated goods for its stated mission, “to help motivate, and offer assistance programs to disabled veterans in order to assist the service related disabled veteran in regaining their position back into society.”

DVS’ primary service involved paying for the shipping of donated goods to homeless veterans shelters. It claims to have received about $3.9 million in such donations, mostly “drugs and medical supplies,” between 2009 through 2011, according to tax returns.

But though DVS says it sent about $2.5 million in supplies to the New England Center for Homeless Veterans in Boston, the center could confirm only one shipment, which DVS valued at about $210,000, was ever received.

“Upon reviewing our records, New England Center for Homeless Veterans can verify a gifts-in-kind donation from Disabled Veterans Services in 2009,” said Charlene Pontbriand, senior vice president for the nonprofit. “A letter of gratitude for that gift was shared with them.”

It has no record of receiving the remaining $2 million or more that DVS says it shipped, she said.

These types of in-kind donations have been the subject of concern, according to the IRS exempt organizations division’s 2012 annual report, because of “poor record keeping of the gifts-in-kind, inaccurate reporting of this activity” and “inadequate discretion and control over the final disposition of the items.” It did not mention any specific organization.

The report also says more cases are being reviewed “for potential examinations, with specific emphasis on organizations with limited charitable activity and excessive compensation.”

No representative of DVS would comment for this story, despite repeated calls. Visits to business addresses associated with the charity or listed in its filings with state and federal agencies revealed most to be post-office boxes. DVS’ only actual business office was vacant in mid-July. A neighboring business owner said it had been vacated six months earlier.

Records show its president is Glen Svensson, who also could not be reached. Efforts to contact him at his last known address in Pompano Beach were unsuccessful; his house was foreclosed on in May.

According to four years’ of IRS filings, the charity raised most of its $8.4 million in cash by hiring telephone solicitation companies. Of that, at least $7 million went to the three for-profit fundraisers — Courtesy Call, Innovative Teleservices and Associated Community Services. Don Tanner, a spokesman for Associated Community Services said, “ACS does not comment on specific clients or client work. The other two did not respond to requests for interviews.

The rest went to outside management services, mainly to a company named FUM Management, which lists as its business address a mailbox in a UPS Store about six miles from the DVS office. For managing the charity, it was paid $340,000 in 2011. Since 2008, DVS paid a total of about $740,000 in “management fees,” though it does not specify to whom, other than that paid to FUM in 2011.

The full extent of FUM’s connection to the charities is an intricate one; Jamie O’Bryan is named president of FUM Management and was listed in records as DVS’ president working 10 hours a week, according to the charity’s 2008 tax records. She lives with Doug Sailors, a convicted money launderer who calls himself a management consultant for FUM. Both were evicted from a luxury townhome in Pompano Beach and now live together in a million-dollar home in Lighthouse Point, Fla.

At News21’s request, Charity Navigator reviewed DVS’ 2011 tax filing. DVS fell short on many of the measures the charity review site evaluates, specifically, among other things, the amount it spent on fundraising.

“We see more charities that are low-rated by us that are in the veterans, firefighters, police and cancer cause areas,” Charity Navigator’s Berger said. “Certainly there are great veterans’ charities, but there are some real horror shows. There’s just some really horrible stuff going on that’s just wildly inefficient.”

The News21 analysis also found that Help Hospitalized Veterans, or HHV, of Winchester, Calif., near San Diego, spent nearly 55 cents of every dollar, about $240 million, on fundraising and activities that combined fundraising with “awareness programs.”

One of those programs, which cost $160 million, mostly involved a direct-mail campaign that sent more than 440 million letters to the public from 2001 through 2011 — that’s nearly four letters for every household in America. Tax filings show that besides soliciting money, the letters called on Americans to volunteer at VA hospitals or become pen pals with veterans.

According to its website, HHV’s primary mission is to provide veteran and military patients with arts-and-crafts kits to show them “someone out there really does care.” The costs for both the craft kits and salaries paid to craft-care specialists who help with veterans’ arts projects - $110 million - made up less than 25 percent of the charity’s spending since 2001.

The question of whether HHV’s direct-mail campaign should have counted as a program or service is part of a lawsuit California Attorney General Kamala Harris filed against HHV in August 2012. The suit also alleges the charity’s founders engaged in self-dealing, fraudulent fundraising and other unlawful activities.

The estimated damages from HHV’s activities were more than $4.4 million, according to the attorney general’s complaint, and included the purchase of a Virginia condominium and $80,000 golf memberships as a “perk” for board members. It also alleges that the charity used accounting “gimmicks” to inflate its reported spending on programs that benefited veterans, “decreasing its reported fundraising costs from 65 percent of total costs to less than 30 percent.”

HHV denied all charges. Lynda Gledhill, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Harris, said the investigation is ongoing. Officials of HHV did not return repeated emails and phone calls from News21 requesting comment.

The national headquarters of Paralyzed Veterans of America, or PVA, spent more money than any other veterans’ charity on fundraising from 2001 through 2011, nearly $350 million, according to the News21 analysis. More than $9.5 million of that went to commercial fundraising companies.

Each year, PVA spent $95 million on average, with $56 million paying for a direct-mail campaign to get money and support for its public education program, according to tax filings. But it also paid for programs that directly helped veterans, such as assisting with disability claims (about $19 million annually), sponsoring sports programs for disabled veterans (about $3 million annually) and research for spinal cord injuries and disease (about $2 million).

“Something you need to understand about a nonprofit — sometimes it’s difficult to measure it based on the financial results, you really have to base it on what’s really going on,” said John Ring, PVA’s chief financial officer. “There’s a lot of qualitative versus quantitative results.”

Ring highlighted PVA’s program that helps veterans complete disability claims, which he said resulted in over $3.2 billion in benefits awarded to veterans.

“Nonprofits have to be better about pointing to impact,” said Lindsay Nichols, a spokeswoman for GuideStar USA, which provides information about charities.

The IRS’s exempt organizations division audited 10,743 returns in fiscal year 2012. “It’s uncommon for a charity to be audited by the IRS,” said Marcus Owens, former director of the IRS’ exempt organizations division. “There usually has to be some kind of trigger,” such as news reports, calls from members of Congress or referrals from employees of other divisions of the IRS, Owens said.

From 2008 to 2009, the Federal Trade Commission and charity enforcement officials from 49 states and Washington, D.C., cracked down on charities and fundraisers claiming to support veterans, police and firefighters. The sweeps led to disciplinary actions against 22 nonprofits or organizations claiming to be nonprofits, 31 individuals and 32 fundraising companies, among them two of the fundraising companies that did work for DVS, Associated Community Services and Courtesy Call Inc.

At least 25 states’ attorneys general have posted warnings on their websites or issued press releases cautioning donors about giving to fundraisers soliciting for veterans’ charities without researching the charities first.

“The single largest problem in enforcement in this community is that as a society we have not yet decided to do more than lightly regulate a sector that’s worth billions of dollars,” said Cindy Lott, lead counsel for a program at Columbia Law School that provides legal research and education to state attorneys general about charity enforcement and oversight.

Chad Garland was an Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation Fellow and Andrew Knochel was a Hearst Foundations Fellow this summer for News21.

The U.S. Agency for International Development is propping up Afghanistan’s national health care system with millions of dollars in direct assistance even though its effort lacks the sort of controls and oversight needed to prevent waste, fraud and abuse, according to the U.S. government’s chief auditor of financial assistance to the country.

The funds are being disbursed to Afghanistan’s Ministry of Public Health for doctor’s salaries, immunizations, prenatal care, hospitals, rural health care facilities and other urgent medical needs. They constitute a small but critical portion of the more than $90 billion Washington has pumped into the country since 2001, the lion’s share of which has gone to direct assistance for the Afghan military and police forces.

USAID officials say their health care investments have decreased maternal mortality and helped boost the average life expectancy for Afghanis by twelve years. But two reports prepared at the U.S. agency’s request in 2012 and 2013 — described in general terms in a Sept. 5 audit by John F. Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction — have warned agency officials that the aid was at risk of being misused or stolen through corruption.

One of the reports found 55 deficiencies in the ministry’s handling of aid and specifically asserted that the flow of cash should be turned off until new internal controls are in place, according to the audit and a copy of the report. And yet the spigot has remained open.

Among the shortcomings: no regular or carefully-planned internal auditing, poor budgeting procedures, an absence of regular reporting on construction progress as funds are spent, monitors who work for provincial officials instead of independent authorities, and a lack of clear procurement procedures. Portions of the report, written for USAID by the accounting firm Ernst and Young in April 2012, were obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.

The report cited a long long list of suggested reforms that it said “need to be made prior to disbursement of funds.” That advice was not taken by USAID officials, however, and Sopko, in his audit, said they had told his investigators that “due to lack of personnel, they have not verified” whether the ministry implemented any of the recommendations.

Sopko cited the warnings as the basis for his conclusion that the agency has “little assurance that the MoPH [Ministry of Public Health] is using those funds as intended.” He noted that USAID’s own policies require strict controls on direct financial assistance programs and said USAID had proceeded improperly, without a proper assessment of the risks.

In addition, he complained that one of the agency’s officers had insisted in a conversation with his audit team that the agency had no responsibility to “address the deficiencies identified or to verify any corrective actions” that the ministry may have taken.

“In our view, this is a reckless disregard toward the management of U.S. taxpayer dollars,” Sopko said in the report, without naming the official who made the provocative statement. “Strong evidence exists that funds provided to MoPH are at risk of misuse,” enough to warrant an immediate cutoff of U.S. assistance until the program's budget is checked and future payments are tied to reform milestones, he added.

USAID officials rejected that conclusion and emphasized that Sopko’s report did not describe actual misspending — just the risk of it. USAID Mission Director William Hammink said in a letter to Sopko last month that the agency “is proud of the achievements realized for the health sector” under its assistance program, currently budgeted at $236 million over a nine-year period ending in Oct. 2014.

In a telephone interview, Larry Sampler, a military veteran who is the assistant to the administrator in the agency's office of Afghanistan and Pakistan affairs, acknowledged that the health ministry “does not have capacity to receive U.S. taxpayer dollars and account for them in ways that we would be comfortable with.” But he said the agency had decided that it “needed to give them money before the assessments said they were ready” to spend it properly — that it was “important to life and limb and eyesight issues in Afghanistan” to get funds “flowing.”

To avoid making the payments directly to the ministry, Sampler said, USAID has sent its funds to a group the agency has financed within the ministry, called the “Grants and Contracts Management Unit,” which he described as an “oversight body” that signs checks to the ministry itself. Sampler said he was uncertain “exactly who is in it,” but emphasized that its personnel have special access to the ministry, which USAID officials cannot visit every week due to what he called “vehicle availability” and other challenges for the U.S. diplomatic corps there.

Sampler also noted that the ministry had reported correcting many of the 55 deficiencies identified in 2012. A spokesman for the agency, Benjamin Edwards, elaborated in an email that the grants management unit “reviews and validates vouchers” submitted by the ministry requesting payment for services, ensuring that “all payment conditions have been met.”

But Sopko’s report makes clear that the unit was already in place when the 2012 assessment privately called for halting further aid, and also when a follow-up report containing similar criticisms was completed in January.

That second report, a review made in anticipation of additional U.S. financial assistance to the ministry beyond 2014, “concluded that the MOPH’s financial management and accounting system, internal controls, and procurement management units did not have sufficient systems and management capacity to implement activities and manage donors’ funds,” according to Sopko’s summary of it. The second report also specifically highlighted the risk of corruption. USAID officials declined to provide a copy of the report to the Center for Public Integrity.

Sopko’s broad warning comes five months after he sounded a separate alarm that USAID had poorly managed the design of two hospitals under construction in Afghanistan’s Paktiya province. One, in Gardez, is 12 times the size of the hospital it is replacing and has a generator that may consume up to $3.2 million worth of fuel annually, an amount that appears impractically large. While USAID officials said the ministry had twice approved the hospitals, “Ministry officials told us that [those] … statements were not based on detailed analyses of operation and maintenance costs but on general assumptions.” One official told his investigators that the local populace did “not need such a large hospital,” according to the report.

Sampler said he did not know which USAID official told Sopko’s team that it had no obligation to address shortcomings in the ministry or verify they had been corrected, describing this as “flagrantly contrary to agency policy.” But he added that he believes USAID’s principal failing has been that it “hasn’t done a good enough job of explaining” how its aid payments go to the special unit within the ministry rather than to the ministry itself.

Federal air marshal Robert MacLean was at his Las Vegas home in July 2003 when he received an alarming text message from the Transportation Security Administration, advising all air marshals to cancel hotel reservations booked in conjunction with their upcoming flights.

MacLean soon confirmed that, for the remainder of that fiscal year, TSA planned to remove air marshals from flights requiring an overnight hotel stay. The cost-cutting measure occurred just days after agency-wide briefings on a potential new terrorist hijacking plot.

After failing to get what he considered a satisfactory explanation from his bosses, MacLean leaked the text message to an MSNBC reporter. His disclosure forced TSA to rescind the order amid Congressional outrage. But his bosses eventually learned of his involvement and fired him in 2006 for leaking “sensitive security information” — even though TSA didn’t officially give the text that label until three years after MacLean’s disclosure.

MacLean, a married father of three, has been in a legal battle with the government ever since, and now faces bankruptcy. The Merit Systems Protection Board, which is supposed to shield whistleblowers on the federal payroll, twice rejected his request for reinstatement. But in April a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit finally decided MacLean is eligible for protections and ordered the merit board to review his case again.

The Obama administration, which has publicly argued for enhanced whistleblower protections, this time came down on the side of the TSA. It appealed the court’s decision favoring MacLean, arguing in a July petition that the case deserved a rehearing because individuals such as MacLean who leak “sensitive” information do not qualify for protections.

But on Aug. 30, the full membership of the court declined to hear the government’s appeal, a decision that brought MacLean, 43, one step closer to reinstatement at his job and an award of back pay with interest.

The legal debate turned on differing interpretations of the Whistleblower Protection Act, instituted in 1989 and amended in 2012, which allows federal employees to expose wrongdoing without retaliation, unless the information is considered classified or is specifically restricted by Congress.

Unlike the documents disclosed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, the text message MacLean leaked was not classified. Instead, the TSA labeled it as “sensitive security information,” one of many categories for unclassified information. However, the text message was not marked as “sensitive” at the time TSA sent it to MacLean’s unrestricted cell phone.

As the Center for Public Integrity previously reported, the Merit Systems Protection Board ruled against MacLean in 2009, stating that TSA regulations define what is considered sensitive, and MacLean should have known the text message fit that description. It also ruled against his claim in 2011.

George Randy Taylor, head of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association’s air marshal unit and a former whistleblower himself, said MacLean had experienced legal harassment for “raising the B.S. flag on mismanagement,” inhibiting other whistleblowing about government wrongdoing. The Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association and the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington, have represented MacLean in this case.

Friday’s decision maintains the appeals panel’s verdict that Congress did not specifically ban whistleblowers from leaking “sensitive” information. The Obama administration had argued to the contrary that government employees and contractors who reveal unclassified but “sensitive” information should be exempt from whistleblower protections. It stated that otherwise the government would be less able to restrict unclassified information that could create a “public safety risk.”

“Individual employees who have access to (Sensitive Security Information) may not understand why it’s sensitive, how it implicates other information to which they do not have access, or how it exposes certain vulnerabilities,” the Justice Department’s petition stated. MacLean's lawyers responded that the argument, "fails to consider the possibility of government misconduct or mistake."

MacLean, who now lives in Ladera Ranch, California and works as a storm restoration contractor, called the court’s August decision a victory for federal employees and contractors who want to reveal unclassified information of interest to the public. However, he expects the legal dispute to continue.

The Merit Systems Protection Board must still decide if MacLean believed the information he leaked helped expose dangers to public safety. Only with the board’s approval can MacLean return to work for the government.

Government attorneys could also appeal the legal ruling to the Supreme Court. Justice Department spokesperson Linda Mansour declined to comment on the case or whether attorneys plan to take it to the nation’s highest court. TSA spokesperson Ross Feinstein said the agency plans to review the legal decision, but declined further comment.

MacLean said that even if he is reinstated, the government may not renew his security clearance because of the financial problems he’s faced since his termination. If he prevails, he said he hopes that “everyone who makes an unclassified disclosure won’t have to worry about what happened to me.”

Update, Sept. 6, 2013, 2:45 p.m.: This article has been updated to reflect comments from the Romney Victory Inc. committee.

A joint fundraising committee led by 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has yet to return a seemingly illegal Election Day campaign donation from an Egyptian billionaire with wide-ranging business, media and reformist political interests, Federal Election Commission records indicate.

The agency is now asking Romney's committee why it hasn't divested of $78,000 from Naguib Sawiris, a telecom mogul and founder of the Free Egyptians Party.

Sawiris' cash, first reported in December by the Washington Times, is the largest among two-dozen donation the FEC deemed "contributions from possible foreign nationals" in a letter Thursday to Romney Victory Inc. Forbes estimates Sawiris' wealth at $2.5 billion.

The FEC gave Romney's committee until Oct. 10 to address the matter or face "an audit or enforcement action." In March, Romney Victory Inc. returned $2,200 it had received from Sawiris, federal records show, but no more.

The agency's letter to Romney Victory Inc. also lists what it considers various disclosure deficiencies, such as improperly reporting aggregate contribution totals.

Romney Victory Inc. treasurer Keith Davis directed questions to chief financial officer Bradley T. Crate, who declined to comment.

But an official for Romney Victory Inc. told the Center for Public Integrity that it intends to respond to the FEC's letter with documentation indicating Sawiris made the donation legally. The official also said the $2,200 it previously returned to Sawiris wasn't related to his immigration status but because Sawiris had exceeded federal contribution limits.

Representatives for Sawiris couldn't immediately be reached for comment. 

As executive chairman of Orascom Telecom Holding, Sawiris' business ventures have taken him across the world, including in 2011 to North Korea, where he met with late North Korean leader Kim Jong Il to discuss business opportunities. Sawiris is also executive chairman of Italian company Wind Telecom.

Romney Victory Inc. is composed of Romney's own campaign committee, the Republican National Committee, National Republican Congressional Committee, National Republican Senatorial Committee and Republican state parties from Vermont, Oklahoma, Massachusetts and Idaho.

Through June 30, Romney Victory Inc. reported having about $825,000 remaining in its account and no debt. Joint fundraising committees may raise large amounts of money from individual donors, then parcel out cash to its member committees that adhere to federal contribution limits.

President Barack Obama's campaign last year faced criticism that his campaign lacked safeguards against illegal foreign contributions and solicited online donations from overseas. The FEC has also cited Obama's campaign for accepting impermissible contributions.

It's not uncommon for political campaigns to initially accept most donations then return those deemed illegal or excessive in subsequent weeks.

Waiting months typically draws scrutiny from the FEC, although the agency itself sometimes waits months to take action against offending committees, if it takes action at all.

HARTFORD, Conn. — In the bare-knuckle war over toxic chemicals, the fight between industry and activists has shifted noticeably from Washington, D.C., to state venues such as the golden-domed Capitol that rises over Hartford like a lordly manse.

What happened this year in Hartford shows how industry — fueled by the American Chemistry Council, a $100-million-a-year advocacy group glittered with Fortune 500 partners — is flexing its muscles from statehouse to statehouse to beat back efforts to disclose harmful chemicals or remove them from the shelves.

In Connecticut, grassroots activists worked with state Rep. Diana Urban, a former professor of economics and politics, to craft a bill they viewed as little more than a baby step toward reform. The measure — An Act Concerning Children’s Products and Chemicals of High Concern — would have allowed the state Public Health Department to identify and list chemicals that posed dangers to children.

The bill came at zero cost to state government.

This session, it was snuffed out by an aggressive lobbying push from the ACC and state business groups, and an outcry from Republican members portraying the bill as an attack on business and duplication of federal efforts. Urban couldn’t even get it to a vote: legislative critics literally talked the three-page bill to death for more than four hours one afternoon, killing it on an appropriations deadline day with question after question that kept the clock ticking to zero.

“It would have been, honestly, a very small first step,” said Anne Hulick, coordinator for the nonprofit Coalition for a Safe & Healthy Connecticut. “The bill we were proposing was not revolutionary. All it was, was a report. Even that — even a report every two years — was something that was very unpalatable to them.”

Her organization has an annual budget of $100,000 — one thousandth of the ACC’s — funding one full-time employee, one part-timer and support for other nonprofits. On the last day of session in June, Hulick found herself literally surrounded by industry lobbyists as she grabbed coffee in the legislative cafeteria, accidentally taking a seat normally filled by an ACC lobbyist and then, after moving, having a toy industry lobbyist sit at the next table. She stepped outside to talk with a journalist.

“I’m pretty beaten down,” Hulick admitted. “Our primary goal was in protecting children’s health. I don’t think we ever got the opportunity to see that.”

For the American Chemistry Council, it was another in a string of victories in state houses from Maine to Washington State — and part of a vigorous campaign to smother toxics reform bills filed in states fed up with logjams at the Environmental Protection Agency. Connecticut is just one snapshot of a larger picture in state capitals across the U.S., a Center for Public Integrity examination found.

“It’s becoming the new battleground for a lot of this work,” said Steve Lester, science director for the Center for Health, Environment & Justice, a nonprofit headquartered in Falls Church, Va., and founded by Love Canal activist Lois Gibbs.

Defeating state bills ranks among the ACC’s notable accomplishments, the group’s tax returns say.

The ACC “helped defeat, amend or postpone the passage of more than 300 flawed bills dealing with chemicals and plastics in 44 states,” the organization said in its tax return for 2010, echoing its other Form 990 reports.

The chemistry council doesn’t shy away from — or apologize for — its lobbying efforts.

“We’re an advocacy organization,” said spokesman Scott Openshaw. “We’re in business to advocate for our industry to ensure that public policy is balanced and formulated in the right way for all Americans, and for the value of our industry to ensure that we can continue to be a global leader. That’s what we do. We advocate for our members.”

The ACC’s influence sometimes reaches deep into the fine print of state rules, the Center found.

In Iowa, a legislator proposed a resolution urging Congress to crack down on dangerous chemicals — only to see his measure diluted to mirror, nearly word for word, the ACC’s own model legislation before being killed. That ACC model, targeting reform of the Toxic Substances Control Act, says a “robust” federal system precludes the need for state laws that could trigger “negative impacts on the national economy.” The ACC model has been introduced in at least five other statehouses from New Jersey to Oregon, the Center found by analyzing a Sunlight Foundation database of bills.

When the Council of State Governments met for a conference on product safety last year, the session was sponsored by ACC member Procter & Gamble at its Cincinnati headquarters, with industry scientists leading talks.

From city halls to state houses, the ACC sometimes maintains strikingly close ties to political power. In Baltimore, where the chemistry council helped delay a potential city ban on Styrofoam cups and containers, the mayor officiated at the wedding of an ACC lobbyist.

In Maine, the commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection, Patricia Aho, was an ACC lobbyist before taking office in 2011. In the 2011-12 session, Aho registered as the ACC’s principal lobbyist on 10 different bills before her ascension to state office, records show. Her support for the organization is clear.

“The ACC represents the companies that make the products that make modern life possible, while working to protect the environment, public health, and the security of our nation,” said Aho’s lobbyist registration form for 2010. Aho declined an interview request from the Center, but her office said any potential conflicts were “thoroughly vetted” before she took office.

Now, as DEP chief, she oversees an agency that this April testified in opposition to a bill seeking to keep toxic chemicals away from pregnant women and children, on the same day as did the ACC.

The ACC and its allies, Lester said, use their resources to build doubt over claims that company products cause harm. “That’s what they’re good at, creating this element of doubt, questioning our science, our speakers, our information,” Lester said. “They see these rules are making progress, and I think they are feeling threatened.”

Big money, big connections — and results

The American Chemistry Council has resources to push back, representing members such as Dow, Procter & Gamble Chemicals Division and ExxonMobil Chemical Company, and listing annual revenue from $100 million to $135 million in recent years.

The ACC spends $8 million to $10 million a year in annual federal lobbying, and raised nearly half a million dollars in recent election cycles supporting federal campaigns. Over the last decade it has backed candidates of both parties, but more often favored Republicans over Democrats. Yet the industry’s financial muscle is many times greater, as those figures represent just ACC contributions. From 2005 through part of 2012, the chemical industry “gave $39 million to candidates for federal office” and “spent $333 million on lobbying at the federal level,” a Common Cause report noted.

In waging state campaigns, the D.C.-based group retains statehouse lobbyists to fight bills from Maine to Connecticut, from Iowa to Minnesota, Oregon to Washington State.

In the states, the ACC has developed a playbook that is at once boilerplate and effective: Convincing decision-makers that bills aimed at identifying, and potentially banning, chemicals would only kill businesses. And, stressing that state bills would merely duplicate federal efforts and add layers of government.

“The chemical industry keeps their message simple. Chemicals: Good. Business: Good. Banning chemicals: Bad,” said Connecticut’s Urban, who witnessed that success first-hand this session.

In killing bills from coast to coast, legislative critics sometimes echo power points developed by the ACC and its lobbyists. “It’s an onslaught,” said Urban, a Democrat. “It’s very hard for me to fight that. You go into a committee and they’re out here grabbing legislators one after another.”

In Washington State, the ACC helped kill the Toxic-Free Kids and Families Act. The 2013 bill would have banned two toxic flame retardants from children’s products and furniture, and prevented manufacturers from replacing them with retardants identified by the state Department of Ecology “as a high priority chemical of high concern for children.” The bill was weakened in the Senate to ban retardants already being phased out by industry — but failing to grant the larger state powers. Then, as supporters tried to revive the original measure, it died.

“They do an all-out confrontation when these bills are drawn up,” said state Sen. Sharon Nelson, a Washington State Democrat. “They nitpick. ‘This isn’t quite ready. We are not quite there.’ So they just delay, delay, delay.”

In Oregon this session, the ACC helped defeat a bill that would have allowed the Oregon Health Authority to maintain a list of "high priority chemicals of concern for children's health.” The bill remained deadlocked in the Senate, 15-15, in the session’s final day. “We never got a commitment from a 16th person, so it was not heard in the Senate,” said Democratic Rep. Alissa Keny-Guyer, a co-sponsor. “I was really disappointed.”

In Maine, the bill Aho’s office fought — An Act To Further Strengthen the Protection of Pregnant Women and Children from Toxic Chemicals — was also watered down before winning approval, with the ACC among the critics pushing back. The initial bill would have identified products using the 49 “worst of the worst” chemicals and sought to remove them from reaching children. The final version would have effectively required $1 billion companies to disclose their use of Bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical that some studies suggest can impact the brain and behavior of children, in food packaging.

Then, in July, Gov. Paul LePage, who appointed Aho as commissioner, vetoed the bill over the objections of protesting parents.

D.C. red tape prompts states to act

The tussle in the states is fallout from the slug-like pace of reform in Washington, D.C., embodied by the Toxic Substances Control Act. TSCA was passed in 1976, granting the EPA power to require testing of dangerous compounds. But in the nearly four decades since, the EPA has rarely used that power — and for years has been tied up in a protracted effort to update TSCA.

“We’re not getting much leadership at the federal level,” said North Carolina Rep. Pricey Harrison, who has attempted reform efforts in her state for six years. “It’s a little bit frightening to think there are 80,000 chemicals out there in commerce that haven’t been studied. It’s frustrating for those of us who have public health as a priority to have the lack of leadership in the federal level, so we need to do it in the states.”

In state after state, officials echoed Harrison: The federal government is stuck in time, forcing states to act. The Government Accountability Office has also raised questions about the pace of EPA reform. Even with some changes, “it is unclear whether EPA's new approach to managing chemicals will position the agency to achieve its goal of ensuring the safety of chemicals,” the GAO concluded in June.

The EPA reports modest progress under TSCA: Under the act, the agency said, it has “only been able to require testing on a little more than 200 existing chemicals,” and banned five.

In September 2009, the EPA announced a set of principles to “update and strengthen” TSCA. “Restoring confidence in EPA’s existing chemicals chemical management program is a priority for EPA and the Administration,” the agency said in a statement, saying it aims to “modernize and strengthen the tools available in TSCA to increase confidence that chemicals used in commerce, which are vital to our Nation’s economy, are safe and do not endanger the public health.”

In large measure, the ACC is fighting both the states and the feds. Even as it tells the states to leave the job to Washington, the chemistry council has attacked the fine print of some proposals to reform TSCA.

The group, for instance, cited “fundamental flaws” in legislative proposals to strengthen the act. In a November 2011 press release titled “ACC Expresses Concern with Safe Chemicals Act,” the group wrote: “We believe we can develop legislation that will give consumers confidence, learns from the success and missteps of reforms undertaken by other countries, and fosters innovation and job creation.”

Meanwhile, to states, the chemistry council cites “EPA’s Actions to Strengthen the Chemical Management Safety Net,” as the group wrote in correspondence opposing Connecticut’s bill. “ACC urges this committee to consider this information and, in light of it, to ask itself whether HB 6526 is even necessary and whether it would provide significant public health benefit to the children of Connecticut.”

It’s an argument the ACC had made elsewhere, providing fuel for legislative critics to douse state bills.

The chemistry council is not in conflict by challenging both states and Washington, spokesman Openshaw said. Instead, he said, the ACC supports tangible reform to TSCA through the Chemical Safety Improvement Act, one of the last bills filed by Sen. Frank Lautenberg, the venerable New Jersey Democrat who died earlier this year.

“Our No.1 priority is to see the Toxic Substances Control Act, the national law that regulates chemicals in commerce, we want to see that reformed. It’s time to do that now,” Openshaw said. “It’s an approach that will benefit all states when it comes to ensuring the safety of chemicals for consumers and workers and also ensuring that the U.S. remains a leader in innovation around the globe.”

The chemistry council’s model plan said consumers should have confidence the products they buy are safe, and that federal rules should “preserve America’s role as the world’s leading innovator and employer” in the chemical field.

While Lautenberg’s bill has gained momentum and awaits congressional hearings, some environmental groups and states worry that the measure, cemented after compromise with critics, could weaken standards in some instances. The ACC said it strikes the right balance. “It was the first time in 40 years we actually have a bipartisan approach to reform TSCA,” Openshaw said.

From Washington to the states, the ACC makes one thing clear: It supports reform — but only on its terms.

Iowa: The ACC lends a hand

In Iowa, Representative Charles Isenhart filed a proposed resolution in 2011 that would have prodded Congress to mandate reforms to TSCA, “the only major federal environmental statute that has never been updated or reauthorized,” his proposal said.

“There was not an effort at the national level to address these issues in a meaningful way in Washington, so some of us … decided to take a run at those issues,” Isenhart said in an interview.

His resolution included strong language, saying “children and developing fetuses are uniquely vulnerable to the health threats of toxic chemicals,” and noting that “a growing body of peer-reviewed scientific evidence links exposure to toxic chemicals to many diseases and health conditions.” The General Assembly resolution would have put the onus on chemical manufacturers to “prove that all existing and new chemicals are not harmful to human health.”

“The toxics resolution in particular was opposed by the American Chemistry Council,” Isenhart wrote the Center.

When his resolution came out of Iowa’s Committee on Commerce, it was noticeably altered. Gone was language citing chemical dangers to children and fetuses. Gone was language forcing industry to prove its chemicals weren’t harmful.

Instead, the substituted language adopted a clear concern for industry. It said the EPA’s chemical management program “should preserve the role of the United States as the world’s leading innovator and employer in the manufacture, processing, distribution, and use of chemicals.” Federal reforms “should encourage companies and the EPA to work together to enhance public access to chemical health and safety information.”

The substitute language mirrors, nearly verbatim, the ACC’s model TSCA legislation.

What happened? Isenhart said the commerce committee member assigned the legislation, Republican Rep. Ralph Watts, introduced the ACC language. State legislative records show an ACC lobbyist, John Easter, registered as “for” the final version, after originally registered as “undecided.”

Isenhart said he tried to change the language back, but to no avail. The resolution never came for a vote. “The bill was dead,” he said. “They weren’t interested in having a debate. I have a feeling Representative Watts just wanted to curry favor with the chemistry council, taking their language.”

The initial proposal was “totally unacceptable,” Rep. Watts countered in an interview. “As I recall, the proposal that Representative Isenhart made went way too far in adding more toxicity regulations,” he said.

Initially, Watts said he didn’t recall the ACC playing a role. Told lobbyist Easter registered on the item, Watts said: “As I recall John might have offered some suggestions on the bill, on the resolution.”

Lobbyist Easter, reached in August, said he was at lunch and couldn’t talk. He later said his office was preparing a statement, but the office did not follow up.

Iowa’s experience was not unique. The ACC model was introduced in state houses in Oregon, Illinois, Iowa, New Jersey, Michigan and Texas — and adopted, in some form, in Michigan, New Jersey and Illinois but not in other states, the Center found.

In Iowa, several other toxic reform bills failed to move forward in recent sessions, an environmental health legislation database maintained by the National Conference of State Legislatures shows. “Iowa is an Ag economy,” Rep. Watts said. “We’re sensitive to over-regulation that sometimes is proposed that is damaging to industry and has no sound science background.”

How much sway does the chemistry council hold in the state? “I think probably people will listen to them, just like a lot of other lobbyists,” Watts said. “We listen to lobbyists of all stripes. Some we agree with; some we don’t.”

Maine: ACC lobbyist-turned-environmental chief

In Maine, the ACC’s connection to the top is decidedly direct: The state’s environmental chief was, until her arrival to the Maine department in 2011, a registered ACC lobbyist.

Lawyer Patricia Aho was the principal lobbyist for the ACC on multiple bills in the 2011 session, her filings show, after representing the chemistry council and other clients for years. Among the bills she registered on behalf of the ACC in the 2011-12 session:

• An Act To Ensure That Children's Products Are Free of Cadmium
• An Act To Provide the Department of Environmental Protection with Regulatory Flexibility Regarding the Listing of Priority Chemicals
• An Act To Amend the Process for Prioritizing Toxic Chemicals in Children's Products

Aho joined the Maine Department of Environmental Protection in early 2011; that September, Gov. LePage named her commissioner. Aho has long touted her connection to business. Her official bio on the governor’s website, for instance, notes that the Kennebec County Chamber of Commerce honored her “advocacy on behalf of the business community.”

Under her watch, Maine has been slow to adopt toxics reform.

This session, the ACC was among organizations opposing the proposal to “further strengthen” protections for pregnant women and children from chemicals. In filings to the state, the ACC cited TSCA reform as one reason the bill was not needed. “In sum, TSCA’s New Chemicals program is considered one of TSCA’s major regulatory successes,” the organization wrote.

As it had in Connecticut, the ACC asked whether the proposal was “even necessary and whether it would have any public health benefit to the children of Maine.”

Advocates were trying to build upon earlier progress. Already, Maine had adopted a list of 49 chemicals of high concern, making it one of the few states to publicize such a list. But, heading into the 2013 session, supporters said, the state had not taken steps to remove products tainted with those same toxins.

“The bill will identify which products contain the 49 ‘worst of the worst’ chemicals and set priorities for action to get those chemicals out of household products that Maine children encounter every day,” wrote the Maine Conservation Voters. The bill would have pushed the state DEP to each year prioritize two chemicals, from the 49, and set about studying alternatives to replace them.

With the ACC and business leaders fighting the bill, it was seriously scaled back.

By session’s end, the bill was narrowed to effectively require companies with $1 billion in annual sales to disclose their use of BPA in food packaging. But it would not require the state to keep adding high priority chemicals to the list.

“There was a clear shift … to more of a transparency bill, but it’s important that we make progress,” said the bill sponsor, then-Senate Majority Leader Seth Goodall. “And in the current climate here in Maine we had to be realists and pragmatic and move forward.”

Aho’s department had voiced objections, damaging the bill’s chances.

“This bill is complex and includes many interwoven components that would greatly expand the reach of the current program, the consequence of which would be a big government program focused on churning out rules and processing paperwork, rather than engaging in meaningful analysis and informed decision-making,” a DEP director testified in April.

Three months later, the governor vetoed it.

Aho’s revolving door from industry lobbyist to state regulator drew scrutiny in a recent series in the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, entitled “The Lobbyist in the Henhouse.” It described how environmental regulation and enforcement has slowed considerably under her watch.

The Center for Public Integrity, exploring Aho’s dual roles, sought an interview with the commissioner. Aho declined the request, but a spokeswoman said Aho had been an attorney in Maine since 1982, practicing government and regulatory affairs.

“And her background is no different than many other attorneys who have or are serving in agencies or departments in the state of Maine,” said the statement from DEP spokeswoman Jessamine Logan. “And any questions about her potential conflicts of interest were thoroughly vetted when she joined state government over two years ago and later during her confirmation process as commissioner, where she was confirmed with overwhelmingly bipartisan support, 35-0.”

The attention over her dual roles triggered a firestorm, with the Sierra Club pressing Republican Gov. LePage to oust her. LePage’s anger, instead, turned toward the press — not his director, who remains in office.

Following the critical reports, Aho dispatched an email to staffers in June, with the subject line ‘Welcome to Summer.’ It said the agency was moving to protect Maine’s natural environment. “I remain committed to taking my responsibilities of environmental stewardship seriously and am proud that our DEP is a resourceful, respectful, and responsive agency,” she wrote.

Aho added, “The protection of our environment and natural resources and a robust economy do not have to conflict.”

Beth Ahearn, political director for the Maine Conservation Voters, said Aho had been respected as a lobbyist for being reasonable to deal with and having “a lot of integrity.”

But her rise to the top environmental post raises larger questions.

“How do we separate our background from the decisions we make? And that’s a tougher question,” Ahearn said in an interview. “Obviously she knows those companies or worked with those companies really well, and has that perspective, the company’s perspective.

“We want the commissioner of environmental protection to be all about environmental protection.”

Reform bills filed, and fought, from Florida to Washington State

Across the country, a pattern has emerged: State officials pitch proposals to identify and potentially ban toxic chemicals, grassroots groups rally behind the proposals — and the bills die in committee or get watered down, with the ACC, business groups and legislative critics pushing back.

To many, Washington State is a leader in toxics reform. The state adopted a “Chemicals of High Concern to Children” list, 66 chemicals from formaldehyde to benzene to BPA the state considers potentially hazardous. Other states have tried to follow suit and create their own lists — the first step, advocates say, in ultimately removing products that can sicken children.

This session in Washington State, advocates filed the Toxic-Free Kids and Families Act, a bill aimed at banning two forms of toxic flame retardants from reaching children — and barring manufacturers from replacing them with similarly dangerous products. Even there, the larger reform butted up against opposition.

“The main opposition is the American Chemistry Council. It’s a well-funded, well organized force and they are able to come in, organize in-state business and out-of-state businesses — Wal-Mart and Target come to mind,” said Ivy Sager-Rosenthal, with the nonprofit Washington Toxics Coalition. Opponents are “able to sow enough doubt in legislators’ minds that some put the brakes on this type of legislation.”

“The ACC and their allies,” she added, “their main tactic is to delay any meaningful reform.”

In the Senate, the bill was weakened to target only products already being phased out. It failed to revive in the House and died entirely, said bill co-sponsor Sen. Nelson.

“Once again the chemical industry won the fight in Washington State,” Nelson said in August. “We had the chemical industry and Association of Washington Business, the usual suspects, sitting in the gallery making sure once again protections for children die in the state.”

Lobbyist Mark Greenberg, who represents the ACC in Washington State, routed a Center interview request to the chemistry council. The AWB, the state's “premiere advocate for the business community,” said it pushes an economic climate benefiting “all citizens.”

Nelson, trying for three years to adopt the change, said she won’t give up. “I’m a mom and I’m going to be a grandma possibly this week,” she had said in May. “It just makes me more committed to have something that is this clear that we need to ban. To have corporate interests continue to try to roll us on it makes me more committed to wanting to get it done.”

In Oregon this session, House Bill 3162 would have required the state to list “high priority chemicals of concern” present in children’s products from car seats to toys, jewelry and pacifiers. Under the initial bill, manufacturers would have to disclose if they used potentially toxic chemicals, and then phase them out in certain products.

Bill co-sponsor Keny-Guyer said she targets public health issues involving women and children. “I’m also very concerned about toxics in our environment, because we’ve had an explosion in chemical development over the decades, and our regulatory system has not kept up,” she said.

She quickly encountered resistance. In public hearings, the ACC and Toy Industry Association squared off against bill public health backers including Oregon nurses. “The American Chemistry Council, the Toy Association of America, the Associated Oregon Industries, Procter & Gamble, the pulp and paper industry, the International Fragrance Association ... have all opposed the bill and they are putting up a really pretty big fight,” Keny-Guyer said in June, with the bill still in play.

“Their arguments are it’s a slippery slope, they think it’s an undue burden on business, and it should be done at the federal level.” Her reply: “The feds have not kept up with the development of chemicals and are not adequately addressing this.”

By session’s end the next month, the bill never made it to the Senate for a vote, even as sponsors scrambled to save the measure by cutting out some elements. “In order to try to gain support in the Senate, we pared back the bill,” said Keny-Guyer. “The amendment was to take out the entire phase-out piece and only have disclosure. And even that could not get the 16th vote.”

Industry pushback, she said, doomed it. “I mean they brought in lobbyists in the end who kind of banded together and fought it tooth and nail,” the representative said.

In other states, some legislators are finding it hard to muster enthusiasm reforms will ever take root.

In Texas, Rep. Carol Alvarado, a Houston Democrat, tried for three years to push a bill banning the sale of children’s products containing “bisphenol-A or certain other substances identified as known human carcinogens or banned hazardous substances.” BPA is an industrial chemical found in plastic bottles and metal cans that federal agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, say have “potential effects … on the brain, behavior, and prostate gland in fetuses, infants, and young children.”

Alvarado’s proposals never came for a vote. “I wasn’t surprised,” Alvarado said, knowing politics in Texas. “With these type of issues you keep pressing and moving forward, you can’t get bogged down. … You have to keep it moving forward and hopefully get some public discussion going on.”

In Florida, Rep. Mark Danish co-sponsored a bill this session to identify chemicals of high concern. The idea was to let consumers know which products contain potentially toxic chemicals, with Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection posting the information online.

As in Texas, his bill never came for a vote — one of a string of toxic reform bills extinguished in the Sunshine State, the state legislative database shows.

“My bill got absolutely no traction whatsoever. People took notice of it, said ‘nice bill.’ I could not even get it to its first committee. Never even saw the light of day,” Danish said in an interview.

After he proposed the bill, he said, Florida’s agricultural industry called a meeting, worried he was targeting pesticides. Danish said he tried to calm nerves by saying he aspired only to inform the public about household chemicals of potential concern to pregnant women and children. No matter. The bill did not move forward — the victim, he believes, of legislative pushback against new regulations, along with resistance in the Republican controlled House to bills pitched by Democrats.

“It was kind of a shame, because I thought it was a good bill,” Danish said.

In North Carolina, Democratic Rep. Harrison proposed the Toxic Free Kids Act this session. Its aim: Protecting children “from harmful chemicals in their toys, furniture, car seats and other products that children touch, lick, inhale and snuggle up with every day,” advocates said.

It, too, failed to come for a vote, but instead was deemed by the House Commerce Committee to be a “study bill,” meaning it was going back for more study and could return next year.

“This is a legislature that’s highly anti-regulatory and there’s very little support for enacting stricter regulations on anything. This time around we had a Republican lead sponsor, we recruited a couple of Republicans to be on the bill,” Harrison said. “But unfortunately we couldn’t get the bill moved into the session, so we turned it into a study.

“I’ve been trying to get this issue studied forever.”

In other states, some reform measures have moved forward — after compromise with industry.

In Minnesota, State Sen. Katie Sieben helped sponsor a bill this session that bans BPA in toddler and infant food. It passed.

“It certainly took some negotiating with industry. One thing that helped was that BPA was already banned in Minnesota in sippy cups, and we were the first state in the nation to do that,” Sieben said in July, a baby bouncing on her lap during a phone interview. “And there are manufacturers who produce baby food without BPA in it, so there was a viable and known alternative.”

The final version was scaled back from an earlier proposal, which could have applied to any food targeted to children, to focus solely on toddler and infant food and formula. “There was a lot of pushback from food manufacturers. ‘It was too sweeping. Anything could be defined as children’s product,’ ” Sieben said. “Ultimately we had to take a more measured approach.”

Connecticut: ‘Baby step’ bill falls flat

In Connecticut, advocates thought they, too, had taken a measured approach.

Their bill, they thought, was simple: An Act Concerning Children’s Products and Chemicals of High Concern. Initially the bill would have followed the leads of Washington state and Maine, which already compile lists of chemicals of high concern. Citing states that had made strides in toxic reform struck some the wrong way in Connecticut.

“When we reference the list in Maine and Washington, the minute we reference those lists it becomes a huge red flag with industry,” said Urban, who later deleted reference to the states and scaled the bill back to simply allow the state to compile a list, every two years, of potentially harmful chemicals. It was crafted so it would not cost the state a penny.

Critics, led by the ACC, turned the conversation away from the potential harm to kids to the potential harm to Connecticut businesses, portraying the bill as an intrusion by state government into a job already held by the feds.

“They can’t win on science,” said Hulick, of the Connecticut advocacy group. “It became not about the health of kids. Somehow, that became second.”

She added, “Obviously, they are afraid of something.”

And opponents put lobbyists into play in a state with 187 legislators and more than 1,000 registered lobbyists. “The lobbyists for the toy and chemical industry are much better funded,” said Noele Kidney, project coordinator for the Connecticut Public Health Association. “They have a huge presence here, all day long, every day.”

Hughes & Cronin, “Connecticut’s Oldest Contract Lobbying Firm,” represents the ACC in the state. Founder Carroll J. Hughes did not respond to a July interview request. The ACC said its lobbying push is centered on supporting change at the federal level — change it said would aid the states.

For bill advocates, the low point was a four-hour hearing before the Connecticut Appropriations Committee April 23, the deadline day for the committee to move bills forward. In a hearing room filled with mostly empty chairs, Urban opened with a brief overview.

“The purpose behind this bill,” she said, is to “start to get a handle on what kind of chemicals are out there that might be a problem for our children.”

Republican opponents didn’t see it that way, probing the three-page bill for hours, sometimes asking Urban to define words in the proposal, or explain how it compared with practices in Europe. Critics pitched their own amendments, each one triggering more questions — and more delay. Seventeen Republican critics took turns picking the bill apart word by word.

Twice, legislators invoked the ACC by name in challenging the proposal. Several echoed the chemistry council’s chief argument, saying the EPA was already on the case.

“I know the implications and the harm that come to commerce when we as a state start to nitpick into issues that very frankly we are not the ultimate authorities in. We should leave this to the EPA,” said Republican Rep. Mitch Bolinsky, citing “very, very deep concerns.”

Connecticut businesses “are not feeling reassured by the openness of our state government to doing everything possible to make it easy to do business in this state. In fact, quite the contrary,” said Republican Rep. Gail Lavielle, who asked, among other questions, how the word ‘biological’ was used as a noun, and for the definition of ‘polyester resins.’

Lavielle did not respond to an interview request. During the hearing, she said her multiple questions were necessary “due diligence” for a measure drawing supporters and detractors.

“We’re just putting too many restrictions on businesses,” added Republican Rep. Jay Case. “From what our governor tells us, we are open for business and we need to keep the tax rolls coming in.”

Nearing hour four, Republican Rep. Al Adinolfi noted that the proposed list could include chemicals of high concern “after considering a child’s or developing fetus’ potential for exposure.”

He asked: “Now, what would be the definition of developing fetus?”

Urban, taken aback, replied: “I’m not the person to make a definition of what is or is not a fetus.”

“Many of us believe that a fetus is formed immediately after conception,” Adinolfi continued. “So does that mean if this bill becomes real … that when these lists are given to us by these commissions … that we can amend that and add the morning after pill as not legal?” Adinolfi, rehabbing from surgery, was not available for comment, his office said.

Urban became flustered at times — “Madam chair, I believe that we are really getting into minutiae at this point,” she said after the first wave of questions from a half dozen legislators — and focused at others, trying to shift discussion to the bill’s focus. “This is the first baby step toward protecting our children and getting a handle on these chemicals” that could be carcinogenic, she said as the final minutes ticked away. “It’s merely creating a list.”

In a statehouse controlled by Democrats, Republican critics held sway that day. At hearing’s end, with continuous criticism of a “one-sided” bill opponents said gave industry no voice, the gavel was pounded. Discussion over, bill dead. Another victory for the ACC. “It was a filibuster,” Urban said later. “It was very clear they were killing the bill. They decided to talk it until 5 o’clock.”

Republican State Sen. Rob Kane, ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, was among opponents holding the floor with amendments, questions and more amendments. In an interview on the session’s last day in Hartford, Kane said the intent was not purposeful delay, but to drill down into the bill’s particulars.

“We have a great deal of questions with regard to the policy, the science and the economic impact,” he said, noting that “proponents of the bill certainly are in the majority of both houses.”

Why did the committee spend so much time focused on the impact to businesses? “That’s because it was the appropriations committee,” Kane said, where the focus is on finances. “Anytime you add more hurdles, it makes it more and more difficult for businesses.”

Legislators’ fear over toxics reform could be felt in other bills, too. This session, Connecticut pushed a bill creating a Mental Health Task Force to deal with emotional issues following the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., in December 2012. Among other issues, the task force will study the impact of nutrients, genetics and psychotropic drugs on the mental health of children.

Urban, one of the bill’s prime backers, said she initially included the phrase “environmental toxins” among the issues to be studied. She said the leadership told her to strike the phrase. Initially enraged, she said she closed the door for 30 minutes by herself “and used four-letter words as a stress reliever.” Then she looked at the “greater good” — a measure to help children.

That bill passed. Her toxics bill did not. “It’s dead,” Urban said in the exhaustion of the session’s final day. “Night, night. Bye, bye.”

The bill died even though the Connecticut Department of Public Health supported the final version, which came at no cost to state government.

“The legislation could have helped the Legislature understand what our research is showing, and opened communication a little bit more in this area,” said Gary Ginsberg, a state toxicologist. “So I think it’s a loss in that regard that the Legislature doesn’t have that automated reporting mandated. But there are other ways for us to get our message out to the public.”

When she crafts a bill, Urban said, she is mindful of how industry and critics will attack. So she wrote a bill targeting the most vulnerable. “And I’m thinking, how do you say no to babies?” she asked, in an interview at the Capitol. “But guess what? They were able to say no to babies.”

Visibly worn, Urban admitted she “didn’t realize the extent of their negativity early enough.”

She has learned, she said, that critics engage in what she calls “The Ali Rope-A-Dope” — bobbing and weaving, doing anything to avoid a hit, just as heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali used rope-a-dope to frustrate foes in the ring.

“It’s rope-a-dope, and I know it’s rope-a-dope.”

She sighed. “I don’t know how to get this done just yet. But I will.”

Chris Zubak-Skees contributed to this report.

The American Chemistry Council’s influence is so deeply entwined with local and state government, it sometimes feels like a marriage. Sometimes, it is.

In Baltimore, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is so close to ACC lobbyist Lisa Harris Jones, the city leader officiated at Jones’ Nevada wedding to a partnering lobbyist. The Harris Jones & Malone law firm doesn’t shy from such connections — it boasts about them. ”Power Couple’s Vegas Nuptials Draw Host of MD Political Notables,” said a May headline formerly linked on the firm’s website.

Another link cited a report listing Jones as the 3rd top earning lobbyist in Maryland in a recent six month period, with $864,625 in compensation.

The website lists political fundraisers and spells out the firm’s long list of corporate clients, including the ACC. The links between mayor and lobbyist have drawn attention in local media, including the Baltimore Brew website. Another account detailed how the mayor visited the lobbyist’s Rehoboth Beach getaway.

There’s also scrutiny of how the ACC lobbyist helped beat back city reform. In June, Jones helped the ACC delay a proposed bill that would have made Baltimore the first East Coast city to ban foam cups and containers for carryout food. The ACC testified against the ban, which was postponed the same day Jones lobbied against it in City Hall.

Mayor Rawlings-Blake did not respond to four interview requests made with her office by the Center for Public Integrity.

Reached for comment, Jones asked the Center for questions in writing. She did not respond to written questions about the ACC’s Baltimore bill opposition or her ties to the mayor.

The closeness between mayor and lobbyist raises significant questions, ethics advocates say.

When the Council of State Governments met last year to discuss product safety, the session was sponsored by Procter & Gamble at its corporate headquarters in Cincinnati, with all presentations led by company scientists and members.

The government council said it took strides to avoid a “one-sided” agenda, and the company said it merely set out to inform, not influence, decision makers. But the session shows the closeness between industry and government in shaping environmental health agendas — and the stage industry is given in framing dialogue.

“The audience was a lot of us who sponsored toxic state legislation at the state level,” said North Carolina Rep. Pricey Harrison, who has encountered hurdles securing reform in her state. “They were trying to show us what industry was doing to keep us safe.”

The two-day session, held July 7 and 8, 2012, drew 25 Council of State Governments members from across the country, who heard P&G-led talks titled “Fundamentals of Human Safety,” “Fundamentals of Environmental Safety,” and “Regulatory Compliance of Consumer Products.” The closing day explored “Current Issues with Safety Science and Public Policy,” with a focus on the Environmental Protection Agency’s chemical policy program.

“The purpose of the event was to provide an educational curriculum to policymakers regarding their use of scientific data, studies and reports when considering policy in their home states,” the council wrote the Center for Public Integrity. “P&G provided access to members of their scientific community who in turn served as speakers and resources during the event.”

Why did the council, founded in 1933 to foster “the exchange of insights and ideas to help state officials shape public policy,” turn to a Fortune 500 company to sponsor the event for its Policy Academy on Consumer Product Safety?

Finances were one factor, the council said. “Given the limited budget for the event, it was determined that the best option would be to take the policy academy event to the resources/speakers, rather than incurring additional travel costs for the speakers to travel to another location,” the CSG said. The council — headquartered in Lexington, Kentucky, with offices from D.C. to California — stayed at a Cincinnati hotel whose meeting space was booked. “Therefore, P&G agreed to house our event on their nearby campus utilizing their conference facilities.”

As it planned the event, the council acknowledged “concerns that such a program could be perceived as one-sided.” To address the issue, the group said it convened a bipartisan council of state leaders to help develop the agenda. "The Council of State Governments hosted the event with material and in-kind support provided by P&G,“  the council said. "At no time did P&G have control over the program."

For its part, Procter & Gamble said its intent was to educate. “We weren’t trying to influence decisions other than giving state legislators the tools they need to evaluate issues from a scientific standpoint,” said spokesman Tim Long, who took part in the forum. “It was intended to educate them on the process used by industry in general to evaluate safety in ingredients in products.”

In this weekly column, former health insurance executive Wendell Potter offers commentary on matters relating to U.S. health care reform 

Since 2010, the year President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, more than $400 million has been spent by the law’s opponents to turn Americans against it, according to an analysis earlier this summer by the Campaign Media Analysis Group at Kantar Media. That compares to just $75 million spent by supporters to defend and explain the legislation.  

The vast majority of that anti-Obamacare advertising has been misleading and in many cases downright false, but, hey, this is a free country and truth-in-advertising rules don’t apply. People who have an agenda, motivated by political or financial gain, just make stuff up. And then they use TV ads and the Internet to make sure the made-up stuff is repeated often enough so that gullible Americans eventually accept it as truth. Or at the very least grow confused and skeptical.

It is because supporters of the law have been outspent more than 5 to 1, and because opponents in the House of Representatives have voted 40 times to repeal all or part of it, that most of us don’t have a clue how the law will affect us. A sizable percentage of Americans actually believe the law has been repealed.

It hasn’t and, despite all that money to condemn and mislead, some of the most far-reaching provisions of the Affordable Care Act will be going into effect over the coming weeks and months.

In fact, the way many of us buy health insurance will change forever just three weeks from tomorrow when the health insurance marketplaces, also known as exchanges, go online in every state. Just three months after that, insurers will have to behave in much more consumer-friendly ways.

Among other things, they won’t be able to blackball us because we’ve been sick in the past. And they won’t be able to cancel our policies when we get sick in the future, sell us coverage that provides little more than a fig leaf of protection, charge women more than men or bamboozle us with incomprehensible jargon and fine print. Furthermore, we’ll be able to find coverage that fits our budgets thanks to a  truly competitive insurance marketplace and subsidies that will be available to help most uninsured Americans pay their premiums.

But don’t just take my word for it. Set aside 3 ½ minutes and let 21-year-old Maggie Ditré lay it out for you in a remarkably simple and informative video she did as a favor for her father.

Maggie’s dad is Joe Ditré, executive director of Portland, Maine-based Consumers for Affordable Health Care, a nonprofit advocacy group. Disclaimer: Joe and I are friends. We both have served as consumer representatives to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. Joe still performs that role, in addition to his day job at CAHC.

Joe and his staff recently applied for and received a small grant to update the organization’s website and to produce a video to tell Mainers what they need to know about the state’s insurance marketplace and how they can benefit from the new world of health insurance.

CACH solicited bids for the work and quickly realized from the responses they got that web and video design firms wanted far more money than the group’s budget would allow.

When Joe mentioned that to Maggie, a senior majoring in political science and theater studies at Yale, she volunteered to help. It turns out Maggie knows a thing or two about how to communicate with just a few simple tools: a whiteboard, a set of colored pens, a camera and her voice.

CAHC’s consumer assistance program manager Emily Brostek volunteered to write a script for the project and Maggie set aside a few hours to work her magic. The result looks like animation but is really a series of drawings you see Maggie’s fast-moving hand create while you watch.

With no funds for a studio, Maggie mounted a camera on a ceiling beam above her desk and over six hours drew and drew and drew, everything from computers and keyboards to a smiling Maine family. Then she edited it all down to 3 minutes and 26 seconds and recorded Emily’s script.

Among the things you learn is that federal subsidies to help defray the cost of premiums will be available to U.S. families earning up to $94,000 and that 90 percent of the 133,000 uninsured Mainers will qualify for a subsidy.

What was the most challenging thing to draw? The state of Maine, with its long ragged coast. When she was done she wished the Ditré family lived in rectangular Colorado.

As you watch Maggie’s magic YouTube video, be aware that even if you aren’t a resident of the Pine Tree State, everything except the Maine-specific stats apply to your state, too. So pass it around. And tell the consumer groups in your state they should hire Maggie to customize the video for them. They won’t need millions. Maggie’s budget: $250.

Editor's note: Nearly five years ago, on Sept. 15, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed for Chapter 11, the largest bankruptcy in the nation’s history. The move set off a series of dramatic actions in Washington, D.C., and on Wall Street as bankers and regulators sought to avoid a shutdown of the global economy. To mark the anniversary, the Center for Public Integrity is publishing a three-part series on what has happened since the meltdown.

• Today, we focus on the Wall Street bankers who fed the subprime mortgage machine, without regard to risk.
• Tomorrow, in “Subprime lending execs back in business five years after crash,” we revisit key executives of the top 25 subprime lenders, companies whose loans nearly brought down the banking system.
• On Thursday, in “Ex-SEC chief now helps companies navigate post-meltdown reforms,” we examine the regulators who oversaw the collapse and look at what they are doing now.

Five years after the near-collapse of the nation’s financial system, the economy continues a slow recovery marred by high unemployment, hesitant consumers and sluggish business investment.

Many of the top Wall Street bankers who were largely responsible for the disaster — and whose companies either collapsed or accepted billions in government bailouts — are also unemployed. But since they walked away from the disaster with millions, they’re juggling their ample free time between mansions and golf, skiing and tennis.

Meantime, the major banks that survived the crisis, largely because they were saved with taxpayer money after being deemed “too big to fail,” are now bigger and more powerful than ever.

The Center for Public Integrity looked at what happened to five former Wall Street kingpins to see what they are up to these days. None are in jail, nor are any criminal charges expected to be filed.

Certainly none are hurting for money.

Take Richard Fuld. Five years after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., the 158-year-old company he ran, collapsed under the weight of bad investments and sent a tidal wave of panic through the global financial system, Fuld is living comfortably.

He has a mansion in Greenwich, Conn., a 40-plus-acre ranch in Sun Valley, Idaho, as well as a five-bedroom home in Jupiter Island, Fla. He no longer has a place in Manhattan, since he sold his Park Avenue apartment in 2009 for $25.87 million.

The other four bankers the Center caught up with — Jimmy Cayne (Bear Stearns), Stanley O’Neal (Merrill Lynch), Chuck Prince (Citigroup) and Ken Lewis (Bank of America) are also living in quiet luxury.

Meltdown primer

A quick crisis refresher: During the early years of the last decade, U.S. home values were soaring, fueled by ultra-low interest rates.

Wall Street investors, eager to get in on the party, developed an enormous appetite for bonds backed by the mortgages of everyday homeowners. Firms like Lehman would buy up thousands of mortgages, pool them together into a security, and sell the cash flow from the mortgage payments to investors, including pension funds and hedge funds.

The bonds were thought to be almost as safe as U.S. Treasuries, but they carried a higher interest rate.

The demand was so great that eventually mortgage lenders loosened their underwriting standards and made loans to people who couldn’t afford them, just to satisfy hungry investors.

When the housing market turned down in 2007 and homeowners began to default on their loans, the whole system began to crumble.

In March 2008, Bear Stearns almost collapsed and was sold. Six months later, Lehman failed, setting off a chain reaction that killed dozens more banks and mortgage lenders. Weeks later, Congress approved a $700 billion bailout of the financial system and soon nearly every major financial institution was on the dole.

The ensuing recession destroyed as much as $34 trillion in wealth and sent the unemployment rate soaring above 10 percent for the first time in 25 years.

“Every single one of these companies was insolvent,” said Neil Barofsky, the former special inspector general overseeing the bailout, which was called the Trouble Asset Relief Program.

“Clearly there was a large underpinning of fraud,” said Barofsky, a former federal prosecutor, who argues the government didn’t adequately pursue criminal charges against those who caused the crisis. “There was never really a comprehensive investigation. The Justice Department largely outsourced this to the Securities and Exchange Commission.”

Five years after the meltdown, the potential for a criminal prosecution of any of those involved in the events leading up to the collapse has faded as the statute of limitations for financial fraud ran out.

The five ultra-rich former Wall Street chieftains have simultaneously faded into luxurious obscurity while the survivors — Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs — have only consolidated their power as they alternate between being seen as great villains or near statesmen depending on the changing fortunes of their companies.

Fuld checks in

Five years after Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, Fuld is keeping a low profile. He’s not giving interviews or lectures, and he’s not done an apology tour.

At times he picks up the phone and calls up former Lehman co-workers — those whom he considers friends — to check in.

Kevin White, a former managing director at Lehman, says he hears from Fuld about once a month. The former CEO asks about White’s family, checks on how business is at the hedge fund White founded after Lehman, offers to help, and perhaps introduce him to someone.

“Dick’s a family man and he’s someone who takes this whole Lehman bankruptcy very personally,” White says. He admits that some of his former colleagues hate Fuld and don’t understand why White stays in touch.

Fuld has been widely criticized, by former Lehman workers and in official investigations, for allowing the firm to drown itself in too much debt. When it went bankrupt, for every dollar of capital Lehman held, it was borrowing at least $30. Some reports say the rate was higher than 40 to 1.

That gave it no cushion to absorb losses when the market began to decline.

The myriad investigations into the causes of the crisis revealed that under Fuld’s watch, Lehman executives toyed with the company’s finances to make that leverage look better than it really was using what some Lehman employees called an “accounting gimmick” called Repo 105, according to the official bankruptcy report by Anton Valukas of the law firm Jenner & Block.

The tactic allowed the company to characterize a short-term loan as an asset sale and then use the money from that false sale to cut debt. By doing so, Lehman appeared to have less debt and more cash. Lehman used Repo 105 transactions to cut the debt on its books by as much as $50 billion just before it announced quarterly earnings, giving investors a false impression of the bank’s financial health.

In a legal filing in an investor lawsuit, Fuld and other Lehman executives said investors were informed that Lehman’s leverage was often higher than it was at the end of each quarter.

"Lehman specifically disclosed that its balance sheet ‘will fluctuate from time to time’ and could be and at times was larger than its balance sheet reported at quarter- or year-end,’ the filing said.

Fuld, in testimony before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, blamed Lehman’s failure on the government’s decision not to give it a bailout.

“Lehman was forced into bankruptcy not because it neglected to act responsibly or seek solutions to the crisis, but because of a decision, based on flawed information, not to provide Lehman with the support given to each of its competitors,” he testified.

“There is sufficient evidence … that Fuld was at least grossly negligent,” Valukas wrote in his report.

Negligence isn’t necessarily a crime, however, so Fuld has faced no punishment for the wreckage caused by his company’s collapse, save perhaps banishment to irrelevance.

Last year a federal judge approved a $90 million settlement of a class action suit brought by Lehman investors against Fuld and several other company executives and directors. The judge, Lewis Kaplan, questioned whether the settlement, which will be paid entirely by Lehman’s insurers, was fair given that none of the individuals would pay out of pocket. He agreed to the deal, however, because litigation expenses for a trial were likely to deplete the funds available for compensating the investors.

Fuld quietly opened his own advisory firm called Matrix Advisors in a Third Avenue office building in Manhattan, across the street from the headquarters of Avon, the cosmetics company. He’s landed a few clients, according to news reports, SEC filings and court records. Matrix advised AT&T Inc. on its failed bid to purchase T-Mobile. And it has consulted with GlyEco, a company that recycles the chemical glycol, and Ecologic Transportation Corp., a company that rents out environmentally friendly cars.

He was recently spotted at Doubles, the private dining club in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in Manhattan, according to a former Lehman employee.

Still, companies haven’t been eager to have their names associated with Fuld, so landing clients hasn’t been easy, according to two people familiar with the business.

Fuld, through his lawyer, declined several interview requests for this story. He wasn’t in his office when a reporter paid a visit in July. His assistant, through a security guard, declined to say where he was.

Even if business is slow, it may not matter much to Fuld. Unlike many of his former employees, and unlike the millions of people still out of work after the 2008 financial collapse, Fuld has money.

When Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 15, there was a sense that if Fuld had mismanaged Lehman to death, at least he had lost a load of cash in the process as the value of his company stock dropped to nothing.

And he did lose plenty.

Fuld’s 10.8 million shares of the company that may have once been worth more than $900 million, according to a study by Harvard University Professor Lucian Bebchuk, became worthless.

However, he wasn’t exactly on his way to the poor house. From 2000 through 2007, Fuld took home as much as $529 million from his Lehman job. That includes his salary and cash bonuses, as well as the Lehman shares granted him by the company that he sold before the bankruptcy in September 2008.

That total comes from an analysis by Oliver Budde, a former Lehman associate general counsel who left the firm in 2006 because, he says, Lehman was underreporting its executive compensation to shareholders.

That income allowed Fuld to buy some very high-end real estate.

In Greenwich, he has an $8 million, nine-bedroom home with a guest house. He and his wife, Kathleen, bought the house in 2004 after they sold their previous Greenwich home to Robert Steel, a Goldman Sachs executive who became undersecretary of the Treasury in 2006 under Henry Paulson. Steel then became CEO of Wachovia, which nearly collapsed 11 days after Lehman and was sold to Wells Fargo at the direction of federal regulators.

When he’s looking to get out of Greenwich, Fuld can head south to Jupiter Island, Fla., a ritzy barrier island that’s home to Tiger Woods and Greg Norman. He transferred ownership of the $10.6 million beachfront home, with a pool and tennis court, to his wife in November 2008, a common strategy for protecting assets from legal judgments.

He also spends a lot of time at his 40-plus-acre ranch in Ketchum, Idaho, in the center of the Sun Valley resort area. The spot offers “ultimate privacy,” according to Daryl Fauth, CEO of Blaine County Title in Ketchum.

The ranch is located just five minutes from downtown Ketchum, east of the Baldy Mountain ski resort and west of the Reinheimer Ranch, a 110-acre spread that’s owned by the Idaho Foundation for Parks and Lands and can’t be developed. The house is situated on a bend in a river that runs through the property.

Fuld even managed to make a killing in real estate during the depths of the collapse. A Park Avenue apartment that he and his wife bought in 2007 for $21 million was sold in 2009 for a $4.8 million gross profit.

What he hasn’t done is make any public statement or gesture or obvious effort to rehabilitate his image. He hasn’t made any public overtures to major charities.

He appears to have wound down his family foundation after Lehman went bankrupt, distributing the last $10,948 in 2009, according to tax filings. And last summer Fuld sued his estranged son-in-law seeking to recover money he had lent the younger man to buy a home with Fuld’s daughter.

Fuld was looking to be paid in cash and stock by those he advised, according to a person familiar with the company. That’s the type of agreement he struck with Ecologic, which paid him a $10,000-per-month retainer and granted him options to buy 2.29 million shares of its stock at 25 cents per share.

Jimmy’s playing bridge

While Fuld has tried to stay in the business, Jimmy Cayne of Bear Stearns has withdrawn completely.

Cayne, who lives in a $25 million apartment in New York’s Plaza Hotel, can be found almost every day in cyberspace hosting an online bridge game.

Last month in the Hyatt Regency hotel in Atlanta, Cayne sat for hours in a crowded ballroom with orange, brown and yellow swirled carpet competing for the coveted Spingold Cup.

Cayne sat in a crisply pressed shirt with his team — two Italians and two Israelis — chomping a cigar and talking in hushed tones over one of the dozens of folding tables. He likely pays his players more than $100,000 a year each to help him remain atop the world rankings, according to two people who have played in tournaments against him.

He’s ranked 22nd in the world, according to the American Contract Bridge League. Last month he lost in the round of 16 of the Spingold knockout match.

That he’s opted for bridge over finance is telling, as Cayne was much criticized for spending more time on golf and bridge than on dealing with the crises that were crushing his firm.

While at Bear, Cayne would leave every Thursday and take a helicopter to his New Jersey beach house for long weekends of golf at the Hollywood Golf Club. He’d emerge from the chopper behind sunglasses and chomping the trademark cigar, according to people who saw him there.

Cayne had survived the bankruptcy of two Bear Stearns hedge funds the summer before but succumbed to the inevitable when, in the fourth quarter of 2007, the company had to write down $1. 9 billion in bad home loan bets, leading to its first quarterly loss ever.

He retired as CEO in January 2008, two months before the firm collapsed under the weight of its subprime mortgage investments, but remained as board chairman. As the market became doubtful that the mortgage bonds on Bear’s books were worth what the company claimed, companies pulled their business, suddenly and en masse.

Bear Stearns was sold on March 16, 2008, in a late night deal to JPMorgan Chase & Co., which eventually paid $1.2 billion, about what it would have cost to buy the company’s Madison Avenue headquarters.

The company’s leverage ratio was 38 to 1 or higher, according to Phil Angelides, the chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. Cayne acknowledged in his testimony before the commission that it was too high.

“That was the business,” he said. “That was really industry practice.”

He told Angelides that he believed in Bear so strongly that he almost never sold its stock. “I rarely sold any of the firm’s stock except as needed to pay taxes,” he testified on May 5, 2010.

Like Fuld, Cayne lost about $900 million on paper when Bear’s stock plunged, but he took home plenty before the crash. He earned $87.5 million in cash bonuses from 2000 to 2007 and sold stock worth about $289.1 million in those years, according to Bebchuk’s study.

In addition to the Plaza Hotel condo, he and his wife have a second apartment on Park Avenue. They put that home on the market last month for $14.95 million. When they want to get out of the city, they can head to their $8.2 million mansion on the Jersey Shore, about a mile from the Hollywood Golf Club, or their $2.75 million condo at the Boca Beach Club in Boca Raton, Fla.

Cayne, like many of his fellow CEOs, has apparently worked to shield his assets from potential liability.

In November and December 2009, he transferred ownership of four pieces of real estate to four separate limited liability companies, called Legion Holdings I, II, III and IV, for a total of $21. Some of the LLCs share Cayne’s Plaza Hotel mailing address in public tax records.

“I take responsibility for what happened. I’m not going to walk away from the responsibility,” Cayne told the FCIC.

He hasn’t had to take any for the demise of Bear, however. He’s paid no judgments or settlements from any lawsuits, according to his lawyer, David Frankel.

Chuck Prince is helping his friends

While Fuld went down with his ship and Cayne remained until close to the end, two of their CEO brethren were pushed aside earlier — when the subprime collapse began taking its toll on profits — only to watch their companies falter from a distance.

Charles O. Prince III resigned as CEO of Citigroup on Nov. 5, 2007, when the company announced it had lost between $8 billion and $11 billion on subprime mortgage bets.

“Given the size of the recent losses in our mortgage-backed securities business, the only honorable course for me to take as Chief Executive Officer is to step down,” he said in a statement. Prince walked away with a golden parachute worth about $33.6 million.

From 2000 through his resignation, Prince took home $65.2 million in cash salary and bonuses, according to an analysis by the Center.  There are no SEC reports showing that he sold any shares from 2000 through 2008. It’s unclear whether he’s sold any since he resigned.  Citigroup shares were priced at more than $300 the week Prince resigned and today hover at about $50 after a 1-for-10 reverse stock split.

His downfall came only months after he famously justified Citi’s continued involvement in subprime:

“When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing,” he told The Financial Times in July 2007.

Prince was succeeded by Vikram Pandit, a former hedge fund manager whose firm was acquired by Citi just months earlier for $800 million. While Pandit was trying to right the listing ship, the company continued to provide Prince with an office, an administrative assistant and a car and driver for up to five years, a package worth $1.5 million a year, according to SEC filings.

By the end of 2008, Citigroup had received $45 billion in bailout money from the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve had guaranteed hundreds of millions of dollars of its debt.

Prince apologized for the disaster that the financial crisis caused in testimony to the FCIC in 2010. "I'm sorry the financial crisis has had such a devastating impact for our country," he testified. "I'm sorry about the millions of people, average Americans, who lost their homes. And I'm sorry that our management team, starting with me, like so many others, could not see the unprecedented market collapse that lay before us."

After Citigroup, Prince joined the global consulting firm Stonebridge International, which was founded by former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger. The company merged in 2009 with the Albright Group, founded by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to form Albright Stonebridge Group.

Prince described his move to Albright Stonebridge as “helping my friends with their activities,” in a 2009 interview. When pressed about what his exact job was he said, “I’m just a friend.”

He’s no longer listed as an executive on the company’s website and a spokeswoman for the company did not respond to an email and phone call seeking an update on his status.

He serves on the boards of directors of Xerox Corp. and Johnson & Johnson Inc. He’s represented by the Harry Walker Agency as a speaker for hire on topics including “Corporate Governance: A Five-Point Plan to the Best Business Practices,” and “Inside the Current Financial Crisis.”

Last year Prince, along with Citigroup and several members of the company’s pre-2008 board, settled a class action lawsuit for $590 million that accused them of misleading investors about the amount of subprime-related securities the company held on its books and underreporting losses related to those investments. Prince and the other defendants didn’t admit any wrongdoing in the settlement.

It’s unclear how often Prince went to the office held for him at Citi, but what is clear is that Prince had plenty of other places to spend his time.

He has a $3.6 million Nantucket getaway and a $2.7 million house in a Jack Nicklaus golf community in North Palm Beach, Fla., called Lost Tree Village.

Stan O’Neal goes to the Vineyard

Prince’s ouster from Citigroup was prefaced just days earlier by the departure of Stanley O’Neal from Merrill Lynch.

O’Neal had taken over Merrill when it was mostly a retail brokerage firm and turned it into a major manufacturer of collateralized debt obligations, a type of security, backed by home mortgages.

By 2006, it was the biggest underwriter of CDOs on Wall Street and a year later the company had $55 billion worth of subprime loans on its own books that no one wanted to buy.

As the losses mounted, O’Neal made overtures, first to Bank of America, then to Wachovia, about buying Merrill Lynch — without the approval of the board, according to a 2010 interview O’Neal gave to Fortune Magazine. When in October 2007 Merrill announced it was writing off $8 billion of its mortgage-backed securities, and then news broke that O’Neal was thinking of selling the firm, it was over. He was fired.

O’Neal floated out of Merrill comfortably, however, buoyed by a golden parachute worth $161.5 million. In the eight years leading up to his ouster, O’Neal earned $68.4 million in cash salary and bonuses, and he sold Merrill stock at a profit of at least $18.7 million, according to a Center review of annual reports and SEC filings.

He was succeeded by John Thain, a former CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, who convinced Bank of America to buy Merrill Lynch for $50 billion just as Lehman was imploding and taking much of the financial system with it.

(Thain himself was eventually fired after it became public that he spent more than $1 million renovating his Merrill office — including $87,700 for a pair of guest chairs — as the company was on the verge of bankruptcy.)

O’Neal, however, is flush. On top of his $161.5 million, he and his wife have a Park Avenue apartment. NBC anchor Tom Brokaw sold his apartment in the building for $10.75 million in 2011. O’Neal  transferred full ownership to his wife in November 2008, a common strategy to protect the home from any legal judgments.

The couple also owns a $12.4 million vacation home in Martha’s Vineyard through an LLC called KZ Vineyard Land.

Today he sits on the board of Alcoa Inc., the world’s top producer of aluminum and is on the audit and corporate governance committees.

Ken Lewis moves to Florida

Kenneth Lewis survived the September 2008 bloodbath and even came out looking like a hero to some when he arranged Bank of America’s hasty purchase of Merrill Lynch — O’Neal’s former employer — for $50 billion on the same weekend that Lehman failed, possibly saving it from the same fate as Lehman.

It soon became clear that Merrill was no bargain. That, combined with Lewis’ ill-advised purchase of subprime giant Countrywide Financial just as the housing market went into free fall, led Bank of America to start hemorrhaging cash.

It eventually got $45 billion in bailout money from the federal government to stanch the bleeding.

Lewis knew of Merrill’s excess losses before shareholders approved the final deal, according to his 2009 testimony to then-New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.  He said he kept the losses hidden under pressure from Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson who worried that, if the deal fell through, it would hurt the already wounded market and overall economy.

Bank of America last month was accused by the Justice Department in a civil lawsuit of understating the risks that the loans included in $850 million of mortgage-backed securities would default. The Justice Department said the company was so hungry for loans to securitize that it let its quality controls slide and didn’t adequately verify borrowers’ incomes or ability to repay. The suit did not name Lewis as a defendant.

The company already settled a civil fraud suit with the SEC for $150 million and another lawsuit brought by pension fund investors for $62.5 million.

Lewis retired in September 2009 with a going-away package worth $83 million, even though the company was largely dependent on the federal government for its survival. He had already banked at least $86.4 million from Bank of America stock sales between 2000 and 2008, according to SEC filings. He also brought in $52.4 million in salary and bonuses in that time.

He and his wife Donna sold their house in Charlotte, N.C., in January for $3.15 million and their mountainside mansion in Aspen for $13.5 million, $3.35 million less than what they paid for it in 2006.

They appear now to have only one home, a $4.1 million condo in a beachfront high-rise in Naples, Fla.

The winners

While Lewis and several of the CEOs that led their companies into the thicket of mortgage-backed securities have ended up rich but unemployed, two have seen their fortunes soar.

Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein, the leaders of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., today stand atop the global financial system, their banks bigger and more powerful than ever and their personal fortunes growing.

Blankfein was a magnet for scorn and envy before the crisis when Goldman awarded him a $68 million bonus in 2007, just as the economy was going bad. He then became the target for much of the public wrath that followed the collapse of the economy when he flippantly declared that Goldman was doing “God’s work” by lending money to businesses.

His reputation plummeted to its lowest point in 2010 after revelations that Goldman Sachs packaged and sold mortgage securities that appeared designed to fail, and then shorted the bonds, making a killing for the firm while customers lost money.

The company was sued by the SEC over one such deal, called Abacus, and Goldman settled the case for $550 million without admitting any wrongdoing.

While Blankfein was the villain, Dimon was treated as a rock-star statesman.

He was welcome at the White House and lauded as one of the only bankers who didn’t need a bailout — even though he took one, allegedly at the direction of  Paulson.

Obama sang his praises in February 2009, just weeks after entering the Oval Office.

“There are a lot of banks that are actually pretty well managed, JPMorgan being a good example,” Obama said. “Jamie Dimon, the CEO there, I don't think should be punished for doing a pretty good job managing an enormous portfolio.”

Dimon’s popularity in the White House began to fade because he was a vocal opponent of many of the financial reforms being advocated in response to the crisis. Then in 2012, JPMorgan announced it had lost billions because of bad bets by a rogue derivatives trader in London.

Dimon came under investigation for minimizing the issue to investors — he called the problem “a tempest in a teapot.” The company was sued by the SEC, and Dimon had to testify before Congress. Last spring he barely survived a shareholder vote that would have separated his two jobs, chairman of the board and chief executive.

Last month the company said it was under civil and criminal investigation by the Justice Department over its subprime mortgage-backed securities.

When he hit the nadir of his troubles, Dimon reportedly sought advice from Blankfein on how to weather the storm and maintain his and his company’s reputation.

Earlier this summer, Blankfein held forth before a roomful of journalists and lobbyists at Washington’s swank Mayflower Hotel where, like an elder statesman, he was asked about everything from immigration reform to his first job selling hot dogs at Yankee Stadium. BusinessWeek Magazine wrote a story about the fashion impact of his new beard.

Through the ups and downs, neither CEO has suffered financially.

Blankfein was paid $21 million last year and he was the highest-paid chief executive of the 20 biggest financial companies, according to Bloomberg. Dimon earned about half that, or $11.5 million, as a result of the derivatives loss that became known as the “London whale.” Blankfein owns about $256 million of Goldman shares, according to Forbes magazine.

Dimon bought a Park Avenue apartment in 2004 for $4.9 million and bought a second unit in the same building this year for $2 million. He also owns a $17 million estate in Mt. Kisko, N.Y. Blankfein’s Central Park West penthouse is valued at $26.5 million, according to New York property records. Late last year, he and his wife also bought a 7.5-acre estate in the Hamptons with a pool and tennis court for $32.5 million. Forbes estimates Dimon owns $223 million of JPMorgan stock.

While Dimon and Blankfein held on to their power, the banks they lead, and other U.S. megabanks, have grown larger and more powerful.

JPMorgan’s assets — one common measure of bank size — have grown to $2.44 trillion from $1.78 trillion shortly before Lehman failed in 2008. Bank of America’s assets have ballooned to $2.13 trillion from $1.72 trillion, while Wells Fargo more than doubled to $1.44 trillion from $609 billion five years ago. Goldman Sachs, which wasn’t on the list of top 50 bank holding companies in 2008 because it was a pure investment bank at the time, is now the nation’s fifth largest with $939 billion in assets.

Citigroup, beset by financial problems, is the only one of the top five banks whose balance sheet has shrunk in those years.

Total assets don’t even adequately measure the full size of these institutions because the measure does not take into account derivatives contracts or off-balance-sheet items that could still put the banks at risk. If those assets were counted, JPMorgan’s size would rise to $3.95 trillion, according to a worksheet prepared by FDIC Vice Chairman Thomas Hoenig.

‘Bad guys everywhere’

Since that epic month in 2008 that began with the bankruptcy of Lehman early Monday, Sept. 15, and ended with the $80 billion bailout of insurance giant American International Group and the sales of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America, Wachovia to Wells Fargo and Washington Mutual to JPMorgan, thousands of hours and millions of pages have been filled trying to determine what happened.

The most comprehensive, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, said the financial collapse was avoidable.

“The captains of finance and the public stewards of our financial system ignored warnings and failed to question, understand, and manage evolving risks within a system essential to the well-being of the American public. Theirs was a big miss, not a stumble,” the report said.

That those “captains of finance” have suffered few consequences of that “big miss” is now part of the legacy of the crisis, and has cast a shadow over the U.S. justice system, which prosecutes small-time offenders but appears to turn away from what many see as crimes of the wealthy.

“This is the greatest white-collar fraud and most destructive white-collar fraud in history and we have found ourselves unable to prosecute any elite bankers,” said Bill Black, an economics and law professor at the University of Missouri and author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One. “That’s outrageous.”

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder appeared to confirm that view earlier this year when he said he’s hesitant to criminally prosecute big banks because he’s afraid of the damage such a move could do to the economy.

“When we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy … that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large,” he said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in March.

Since that time, the Justice Department has walked back those statements and assured lawmakers and the public that they have aggressively investigated and pursued any criminal acts related to the financial crisis.

The hurdle, officials say, is that to prove a crime, they must prove intent. That means if the government wanted to bring charges against any of the CEOs of the companies that led the nation to financial disaster, prosecutors would have to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that these individuals intended to commit fraud.

“They tend to have to work in a much more black and white misconduct universe,” said Jordan Thomas, a former lawyer for the SEC who worked with Justice on many financial fraud cases. Proving criminal misconduct is such a high hurdle that the government has resorted mostly to civil charges, where the burden of proof is lower. That doesn’t mean, Thomas says, that nobody did anything wrong.

“The financial crisis had bad guys everywhere,” he said.

Ben Wieder contributed to this report.