It seems to me that criminal activity is less disturbing when you understand it. Timothy Durham’s alleged Ponzi scheme isn’t laudable, but the motives are easy enough to identify. Shootings and assaults that are the product of domestic violence are serious, but they don’t make me as doubtful about the general well-being of my community as random assaults and shootings.

The Associated Press has an article about child molestations in Veedersburg that simply peg my “what the hell?” meter. Samantha Light, a twenty-four year old woman with an apparently good reputation was allegedly molesting very young children – like 3 year olds – along with her boyfriend, Steven Quick and video taping it. People were using Ms. Light as a babysitter and she was betraying their trust in horrific fashion. And, it happened in Fountain County where everybody seems to know just about everything about everyone.

It’s the kind of crime that I can’t begin to wrap my head around, and that is one of the things that makes it so troubling. If you understand a crime, you feel like the means of avoiding it are more within your control. Even the illusion of control helps you place the actual risks of becoming a victim of the crime in some sort of proper context. Without control, the perceived risk looms much larger than the actual risk — think of the difference between being harmed in a car crash versus being harmed in a terrorist attack. The car crash is a far greater risk. It’s not even close. And yet, fear of terrorism is much greater than fear of car accidents. I think it’s because the car is a known risk and one that is, to a great extent, under your control.

The local blogosphere seems to have scooped the main stream media on a filing by the federal government to seize property of alleged Ponzi financier and political mover and shaker Timothy Durham. I read about the filing first at Advance Indiana and Ogden on Politics. Jon Easter at Indy Democrat apparently had the scoop as well via an e-mail from one of his readers. The federal complaint is here.

Carl Brizzi is looking really bad on this thing. He’s the Marion County Prosecutor. He has a close association with Durham. Durham gave him a ton of money to get elected and served as Brizzi’s finance chairman. If the allegations are true, this Ponzi scheme was going on under Brizzi’s nose. The federal complaint alleges that the company was taking money under the pretense of investing in low risk, high yield consumer debt; never actually investing the money; and taking money from new investors to make payments to older investors. And, of course, it appears that Durham was using the company as a piggy bank.

Getting less attention so far is James Cochran, co-director of Fair Financial, who is also part of the allegations. His political contributions have been minor, so far as I can tell – about $1,000 to the Greater Indianapolis Republican Finance Committee.

In any case, the other candidates who took money from Durham will probably get a pass, more or less, unless further facts emerge. Brizzi is in bad shape because he: a) took a ton of money from Durham; b) he has close ties with Durham; and c) he is in charge of prosecuting criminal behavior.

Incidentally, some good stuff over in the Advance Indiana archives I happened upon while Googling around about this article.

#October 2006 entry “Prosecutor’s Office for Sale?”

Brizzi’s single largest contributor by far is local businessman Timothy Durham, who has contributed almost $160,000 to Brizzi’s campaign. Durham is chairman of Obsidian Enterprises, Inc., a private holding company that invests in small and medium-sized companies primarily in the manufacturing and transportation sectors. He’s also a former partner at Ice Miller. He tells Schnitlzer he’s known Brizzi for a long time and pledged to support him before Kennedy entered the race.

#September 2007 comment on an entry about a party Durham threw.

Tim Durham scares the daylights out of me. He’s creepy. Married into the SerVaas family and gets rich. My what a success little Timmy became and then came the divorce. There went his dream of being the “richest man in the world”. Not only would I not let Durham close to my teenage daughter but I wouldn’t so much as trust him to run a lemonade stand. Durham’s a ticking bomb.

Thanksgiving was created, I think it must be said, as a religious holiday. Yet, not being a religious sort, I still find Thanksgiving to be one of the best holidays. The direction of my thanks is, perhaps, more ambiguous, but that doesn’t change the fact that I am thankful for the fact of creation, for having been born in a bountiful place and time, for a good family and for a great deal more. Regardless of whether your thanks is going to a deity, to a particular individual, or to no specific person at all; I think one of the primary benefits of giving thanks is that you stop taking things for granted. It is also an act of humility, a recognition that you are not solely responsible for all that you have. You owe a great deal of what you have and who you are to forces outside of your control. Appreciation and humility are valuable characteristics in a person, and a day devoted to their cultivation is a good one.

And, of course, there is the tremendous amount of good food, time off work, time spent with family and friends, and, with some luck, football. (Even if it is the Lions and the Cowboys.) My plan, as always, is to wallow in dark meat and mashed potatoes. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Moody v. Wellman, LLP (pdf) is a Not for Publication opinion issued by the Indiana Court of Appeals. (“Not for Publication” means it’s not to be cited as precedent — I’m not violating any state secrets by giving out the link). It’s a simple landlord tenant dispute with a tenant who wasn’t represented by counsel. It doesn’t break any new legal ground, but I thought I’d flag it as a nice little snapshot of a case in the life of a small claims court.

It illustrates the ability of a person to tie up a case without having a lawyer or a defense to speak of. He just filed paper after paper alleging one thing or another: he’s looking for a lawyer; the court should appoint him a lawyer; the judge is biased; he needs another continuance, etc. When, a year after the case was filed, it finally got time for him to explain why he didn’t owe the money, he had nothing to say. Cases like this shed a bit of light on why small claims courts can be a little abrupt with litigants and why small claims practitioners can become a little jaded to the people they sue. That doesn’t make it right, of course. I still try to separate the people merely stalling for time from the people with legitimate disputes. I’m sure I don’t always succeed, but it’s worth trying.

Actually, it started last night, but in any case the FBI investigation and arrest of Tim Durham has the Indianapolis blogosphere lighting up (and, contrary to Mr. Shella’s assertion, it’s a bi-partisan pile on – with Advance Indiana and Ogden on Politics featuring prominently.) The IBJ’s Greg Andrews seems to have been taking a prominent role (if not the leading role – I haven’t followed it that closely yet) in reporting on this story. Durham, an Indianapolis businessman, seems to have been playing fast and loose with an Ohio based finance company he owns.

Indianapolis businessman Tim Durham has treated Ohio-based Fair Finance Co. almost like a personal bank since buying it seven years ago, and now Durham, partners and related firms owe it more than $168 million, records show.

Fair, a consumer-loan company, listed no insider loans under prior ownership. The extensive borrowing—which represents 70 percent of Fair’s assets—worries some investment-industry observers at a time parts of Durham’s financial empire are strained.

That would be just another installment of the financial Masters of the Universe financiers being revealed as humbugs behind the curtain except that Durham appears to be an exceptional douchebag in terms of his showiness and he has ties to Indiana’s political establishment, especially – it seems – the Indianapolis Republicans. Durham had been married to the daughter of former City-County Council President and business tycoon Buert Servaas. He has also contributed generously to Marion County Prosecutor, Carl Brizzi ($150,000). But Brizzi isn’t the only one, Durham has contributed to. His money has flowed widely, mainly, but not exclusively (looking at you Rep. Hill ($4,600) to the Indiana Republicans.

Knowing as little as I do about this matter, I still have to admit having my views colored by an immediate schadenfreude. Not because of the guy’s politics, but because of the guy’s lifestyle. I’ll never be rich and flashy. I’m not sure I’d even be comfortable if that lifestyle was available to me. But, at a glance, it does look cool. Instead, I went with a slow and steady career and a committed family life. As with most things that are worthwhile in this life, the path is slow, subtle and, at times, hard (that last applies mostly to work – I haven’t yet seen what is especially hard about family life: pick a good spouse, don’t be a complete jackass, and raise your children as best you can. The rest seems to more or less take care of itself. Perhaps my kids’ teen years will be a rude awakening.)

But, in any case, it’s gratifying when things that look too good to be true turn out to be too good to be true and to see a guy cheating to get ahead brought low. This is all a little preliminary, I guess. Maybe all the negative reporting about this guy is premature and wrong. But there is a lot of smoke all of a sudden, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find that there was fire. All of the local politicians should probably review their connections to the guy, review the contributions they received from him and his organizations, and be prepared to explain themselves.

Today is the Great American Smokeout 2009, the American Cancer Society’s annual effort to get smokers to quit for a day in the hopes that it will convince and enable them to quit permanently.

Hoosiers need this program more than most. Per capita, Indiana has the second greatest number of smokers, behind only West Virginia. It’s bad for you. Really bad for you. Everybody knows that now despite years of obstruction by the tobacco industry and claims that the science is inconclusive. It’s also addictive. That’s a rough combination.

So, congratulations to all those who have kicked the habit. I have a number of friends and family members who fit into this category, and I couldn’t be happier for them. Congratulations to all those who never started. You chose . . . wisely. And, to those who still smoke but want to stop, good luck. Maybe today is the day you stop.

This is just going to be a drive-by post, since I haven’t thought it through and probably don’t have the expertise to think it through if I tried. But, it seems to me that health care financing has both a risk management component and an entitlement component. Maybe we need to break those things apart to have a rational method of financing health care.

The idea of insurance is to manage risk. You know that, in a given population, Bad Thing X will happen a given number of times and you know that the total cost to the given population of Bad Thing X will be $Y. You just don’t know which individuals will suffer from Bad Thing X. So, for that population, it makes sense for everybody to pay into a pool of money that will be used to pay the $Y in costs when Bad Thing X inevitably happens to someone. Where everyone’s risk is more or less equal, it makes sense to buy into the pool. (Interestingly, Congress has passed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act which, as I understand it, prohibits decision making about risk management based on genetic information. In a sense, this requires the risk manager to maintain a fictitious level of uncertainty. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but as a policy choice, it’s very interesting.)

However, where it’s certain that Bad Thing X will happen to a particular individual, it does not make sense for other people to buy into a pool with that person. At this point, you’re not managing risk, you’re just subsidizing that person’s costs. However, as a society, we have made policy choices that we won’t allow unmitigated suffering from certain Bad Things even if a person doesn’t have the funds to pay for treatment of the Bad Thing. If someone hits a certain poverty level, we pay for certain things. If someone is having a heart attack at the emergency room, we require treatment. There are humanitarian concerns here as well as some direct benefits. (For example, if you subsidize proper medical delivery, that might reduce the number and long-term societal costs of birth defects. Or, if you subsidize vaccination, that might reduce the overall costs of disease.)

I wonder if it would be possible to bifurcate the risk management aspects of health care financing from the entitlement aspects. Pay for the former through typical principles of insurance and pay for the latter through a general system of taxation.

Today is Organization Day at the State House. Legislators meet for a day to perform mostly ceremonial functions and then don’t typically return until January when they get to work. Organization Day always struck me as being a little like the first day of school – any divisions between legislators are mostly forgotten and lawmakers are just happy to see each other again after summer break.

Organization Day is used in election years to choose House and Senate leaders and adopt legislative rules for the next two years. But in non-election years like this one, the day is primarily symbolic.

“Organization Day helps to get re-engaged, to begin to focus on the issues coming up,” said Rep. Jeff Espich of Uniondale, the House Republican fiscal leader.

It also marks the first day that members of the House can begin filing bills — senators started a couple of weeks ago — and chamber leaders can start assigning bills to committees.

For me, it means I can start looking at the LSA website for legislation to talk about. I feel like I’ve been spinning my wheels here on the blog for awhile.

Good has defeated evil, Frodo has dropped the Ring in the Cracks of Doom, Aragorn has claimed his crown, and none of it would have been possible if Sauron hadn’t stupidly decided to go for it on 4th & 2 at his own 28 instead of punting.

And Collinsworth is still a tool. The last Sunday night game, Collinsworth was talking about how Manning couldn’t be in the same conversation with Marino in terms of great quarterbacks until Manning had won at least another Super Bowl. This time he was running his mouth about how the Colts had trouble playing high caliber teams.

For those who didn’t watch the game, the Colts came back from a big hole against the Patriots. They were down 17 points in the 4th quarter (31 – 14). They pulled within 6 and kicked the ball to the Patriots and then stopped them, leaving them with a 4th & 2 on their own 28 yard line with about 2 minutes to go. Clearly you punt this one. But Bill Belichick is an arrogant jackass and decided to go for it and failed, turning it over on downs at the 29. Manning had to kill clock on his way to a Reggie Wayne touchdown pass with 13 seconds left. Colts win 35 to 34 in their second or third greatest comeback ever. (First is clearly the AFC Championship game following the 2006 season. Vying for second is the Tampa Bay game in 2003).

So, the Colts go to 9-0, but still have some tough work to do in terms of teams they play. But, with seven games left, they have a four game lead over the rest of their division and a two game lead over Cincinnati. The complexion of the rest of the season looks a lot different with a win tonight than it would have with a loss.

I tell friends from elsewhere that, despite what they may have heard, Hoosiers aren’t a bunch of rubes. Then, I see things like the report that Indiana is passed only by West Virginia in percentage of adult smokers. At 26.1%, we have more smokers than Kentucky. In this day and age, what in the world would possess you to start or continue smoking? Of course, the fact is, while starting smoking is a free choice, once the habit is established, the decision to stop smoking is not a simple matter of choice. Your body is addicted, and your mind is no longer the free agent we contemplate in simplistic economic scenarios. An Indy Star editorial notes the General Assembly’s failure to adopt a smoking ban and the correlation between smoking cessation efforts in states and lower smoking rates in those states.

It occurs to me that some of the arguments made by social conservatives against normalizing homosexuality in our society actually make some sense when applied to smoking. Smoking is a choice, not how you are born. Smoking is harmful behavior. There is a Tobacco Industry agenda to convert young people to make a lifestyle choice. Smoking in mainstream culture may make my kids think it’s o.k., and cause them to choose a harmful lifestyle. So, while I don’t necessarily support criminalizing smoking, I might be open to the idea of getting the behavior into the closet.

I freely admit to not being perfectly dispassionate on this topic. I grew up with smoking and didn’t like it. I’ve seen family members suffer from health problems attributable to smoking. I’ve seen family and friends wanting to quit but being unable.

Smoking is not a self-contained behavior which causes efforts to paint smoking regulation as solely a property rights issue to miss the mark. Property owners aren’t entirely free to discharge toxins even on their own property, particularly if they hold themselves open to the public.

The Indy Star editorial has this to say about reducing the number of smokers:

Numbers likewise don’t lie when it comes to fighting back against this scourge. The CDC report confirms that states with the lowest incidence of smoking are those that spend the most on tobacco cessation and charge the highest cigarette taxes.

They also are more likely to have state and/or city laws forbidding smoking in all indoor public spaces.

Fewer smokers means a healthier population, lower health costs, and maybe a little extra money at the end of the month to pay bills. This is anecdotal, but in my collection practice, I can’t tell you how many people unable to pay their bills seem to smell of fresh cigarettes, suggesting that they are foregoing paying their obligations in favor of buying another pack of smokes.