Posted on 04/27/2008 11:52:16 AM PDT by buccaneer81
Swearing, after-hours drinking part of staff culture Sunday, April 27, 2008 3:34 AM By James Nash and Alan Johnson THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann cultivates a casual work atmosphere, employees say.
Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann cultivates a casual work atmosphere, employees say. John Estheimer remembers it as the strangest job interview of his 30-year career.
Trying out for the position of Attorney General Marc Dann's personal assistant in February, Estheimer said the Dann aides who interviewed him kept coming back to the question of whether he could tolerate an atmosphere of frequent vulgarity and sharp elbows.
During the two-hour interview, Estheimer said, he heard staff members in adjacent work areas shouting obscenities toward each other.
Estheimer, a former butler and facilities manager, didn't get the job, but he said he did get some insight into the culture of an office that's now rocked by allegations of sexual harassment involving a middle manager and longtime friend of Dann's.
"The interview process was very odd -- to zero in so much on the language and the abusive nature of the lawyers there," Estheimer said.
Interviews with current and former employees of Dann's, as well as hundreds of e-mail messages released last week and the sexual-harassment complaints, point to a casual work environment that often extends into alcohol-lubricated evenings in which work and personal lives blur.
Much of the time, Dann's married, high-level aides -- and sometimes the 46-year-old attorney general himself -- were accompanied in their nights on the town by younger, female staffers.
Some of the partying went on at the Dublin-area condo that, at the time, was shared by Dann and two longtime friends from Youngstown: Anthony Gutierrez, general services director, and Leo Jennings III, communications director.
Both Gutierrez and Jennings, who initially denied that staffers ever socialized at the condo, have been suspended with pay in connection with sexual-harassment complaints filed by two 26-year-old women Gutierrez supervised.
The complaints have opened a window into an office culture very unlike what is known of the buttoned-up state law offices headed by Democrat Dann's predecessors, Republicans Jim Petro and Betty D. Montgomery.
Jennifer L. Urban, an assistant attorney general whose tastes in hard liquor were revealed in the office e-mail messages made public last week, said the more informal and social culture of Dann's office is preferable. Urban, 30, was first hired by Petro's administration.
"Good ideas don't always come between the hours of 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.," Urban said. "If you're friends with people, you tend to work with them better."
Urban often socialized with the 52-year-old Jennings, the 50-year-old Gutierrez, Dann and Dann's 28-year-old scheduler, Jessica Utovich. Some of the get-togethers occurred over drinks after work, while others ended up at the Dublin-area condo. Urban said business was discussed while they socialized at the condo as well. (Jennings, reprimanded by Dann last year for an obscenity-laden e-mail to the interim head of the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, had said workers visited the condo only for work-related purposes.)
During one e-mail exchange with Utovich that was copied to Dann and Jennings last October, Urban revealed her preferences in liquor.
"Jack (Daniel's) and I don't play well together. I rough house with the Captain (Morgan)," Urban wrote.
Alcohol was involved the first time Vanessa Stout met Dann two months before she went to work for the attorney general. Gutierrez called her one evening last September, inviting her to the condo, which was across the street from her home. Dann was there, he said, and "needed some milk for his cereal."
"I walked in and everyone is pretty intoxicated," Stout wrote in a journal obtained by The Dispatch. "Tony introduced me to Leo Jennings, Marc Dann and Marc's scheduler."
Stout said people came and went frequently across the street at Dann's condo, including Utovich. Stout said she was there several times and there was always "lots of drinking."
Numerous e-mails between Dann and Utovich showed that bad language wasn't limited to the spoken word.
"Right. Because you didn't say goodbye. Nice. F--- it. Turn on the fax. I hope you get it," Utovich wrote to Dann, her boss, on Nov. 2, 2007. In October, she told him, "I hate you," adding moments later "FU."That same month, an article circulated among Dann's top staffers concerning a study concluding that "regular swearing at work can help boost spirit among the staff."
The e-mail was titled, "Marc Dann was right all along."
Dann was caught on tape in June delivering an obscenity-laden tirade at a reporter from the Warren Tribune-Chronicle, where his wife worked for several years. Later in the year, the Ohio Christian Alliance unsuccessfully sought an apology from Dann for telling Jennings in an e-mail that "Jesus had it better on Good Friday" than did Jennings, who received some blog criticism that day.
The free-flowing profanity didn't sit well with some holdovers from Petro and Montgomery's administrations.
David M. Kessler, a Montgomery hire who investigated crimes against the elderly, quit in January in large part because, he said, the office environment had become abusive. He recalled a staff meeting in which Dann outlined his goals and objectives for the consumer-protection section and slipped in an f-word.
"If I went into a professional setting and I used (those words), quicker than I could get back to Columbus, I would be reprimanded for my behavior," Kessler said.
Dann's defenders said the occasional use of profanity is typical for any office environment and that the attorney general is trying to encourage freewheeling dialogue.
"You hear a swear word every now and then, but this is a professional working environment," said spokesman Jim Gravelle. "Are we all in jackets and ties all of the time? No."
David Betras, a close friend and former Youngstown law partner of Dann's, said the attorney general's hard-driving style sometimes mixes business and pleasure.
"Marc's a hard-working guy and everything bleeds together," said Betras, who ran the first phase of Dann's 2006 campaign. "That's a strength, but it's also a weakness."
On the night of Monday, Sept. 10 last year, Gutierrez pressured Stankoski to go out with him for a drink, she claims. At three different Downtown bars, he drank chilled shots of Crown Royal whiskey and ordered Grey Goose vodka for her.
Later, after Gutierrez took her to the condo, she said she saw the attorney general there with Utovich -- as well as tequila, margarita mix and boxes of pizza.
Gutierrez appeared to like drinking more than most. In 2006, he had a drunken-driving arrest and Dann, then a state senator running for attorney general, picked up his longtime friend and neighbor and took him home.
At work, Gutierrez showed up one morning after a rough night of drinking looking, in Stankoski's words, like a "hot mess.
"The few hairs on his head were standing up, he reeked of booze and vomit and boogers or vomit were hanging from his nose."
Gutierrez told her later that day that he had been "so drunk the night before at Easton that on his way home he must have fallen asleep and when he hit the state Suburban on a guardrail, that's when he woke up."
As it turned out, Gutierrez took the damaged state vehicle to the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation to be repaired. He exchanged the Suburban for another car, but never filed the required accident form.
The State Highway Patrol is now investigating the accident.
jnash@dispatch.com
ajohnson@dispatch.com
What a bunch.
Id rather have Bluto. He would have been a conservative.
As a former sailor, I'm not sure I see what the problem is...
"I am the motherf***ing shore patrol, motherf***er! I am the motherf***ing shore patrol! Now give this man a beer!
I hear what you're saying. But you and your men were sacrificing and protecting the nation under difficult conditions. You had a right.
These asshats are overgrown adolescents with law degrees, who think they can do whatever the hell they want. And with no oversight. A Captain's mast would have awaited you if you had been accused of the same things as these losers. No wonder this country is damn near a lost cause.
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