The Infamous Ex-Chief

09/10/2026

A prosecutor got handed a bag of cash the night before closing arguments in a double homicide case. He said no.

Owen wrote a book about this case, Convergence, and reads his own closing argument word for word in the audiobook.

Full sit down with former Cook County prosecutor Greg Owen drops soon. This is just the preview, and it already explains a lot about why the biggest judicial corruption bust in American history happened in that same courthouse a few years later.

What would you have done in that room?

09/09/2026

The Kinney v. Village of Creston federal lawsuit just dropped, and yes, it is exactly what it sounds like.

The same Acting Chief who sent a Brady/Giglio letter targeting Bret Haven just got hit with one himself, eight days after he reported suspected LEADS misuse to the state. Norris. Meshew. The Village. All named defendants.

A lot of you have been asking for the full complaint. It is up now in the receipt locker, no paywall, no login wall, just the documents.

www.theinfamousexchief.com Go read it yourself. Its in the Receipts Locker!

Welcome to The Infamous Ex-Chief, where we uncover misconduct and corruption in the justice system while celebrating the honorable men and women in law enforcement. As a former police chief, I’m committed to holding bad actors accountable and highlighting the positive stories that often go untold....

09/09/2026

Wadsworth denied my records request outright. Then sat on it. Then the same week I had a legal complaint ready to file, they handed over everything.

Full audit logs, full event logs, the works. Once they moved, they moved right, the chief gave me real answers, not a runaround. Both things are true here and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

Also addressing something from the comments. A guy named Jackson said taxpayers paid for my training and that I'm profiting off public records. I took out my own loan for law school and I'm still paying it down. Every record I pull goes free on Discord when this drops. That's the opposite of monetizing.

09/08/2026

He offered them a deal that cost nothing. Zero dollars. They filed a motion instead.

Scott Gardner put a free, no-damages settlement on the table for the Village of Mantua, just get one unanswered legal question in front of the Court of Appeals. Their attorney's response wasn't a yes or a no. It was a motion arguing that a business address on file with the Ohio Secretary of State isn't good enough, and that a journalist has to prove it with a federal tax ID before the village owes him anything.

Full documents are posted. Read the filing and decide for yourself if that argument holds up.

What would you have done with a free off-ramp like that?

09/08/2026

The Kinney story just got more complicated, and I'm the one complicating it.

Back in May I reported on Jeffrey Kinney's record as former acting chief of Creston PD. I stand by every word of it. But while I was inside Creston on a totally different investigation, something landed in front of me that I couldn't sit on. Now there's a federal civil rights lawsuit, Kinney vs. the Village of Creston, Mayor Brendan Norris, and former Chief Brian Mashue. Allegations aren't findings. But the paper trail is pointing somewhere I didn't expect.

Does an original story change for you when new facts complicate it, or does it stay locked in as reported?

09/03/2026

Even the mailman couldn't get an answer from Wadsworth today.

09/02/2026

Episode 6 is up.

I told you Episode 5 was the end. I was wrong.

Got the special prosecutor’s own investigative memos in the Bernhardt case a couple weeks ago — his actual words, not somebody’s summary of them. Took a while to go through everything and figure out what it actually meant.

Turns out there’s a lot. The legal reasoning behind why nothing got charged. A messaging pattern that started before the victim even turned 18, not after like everyone assumed. A written statement the whistleblower tried to hand-deliver and got turned away at the door. And a documented Standards of Conduct violation the department put in writing themselves — then just… nothing happened. He retired with his pension intact.

Every bit of this traces back to an actual document. Watch it here: https://youtu.be/nxwJOTGWqfI

The Infamous Ex-Chief — investigating how Rocky River handled the Michael Bernhardt case.

I finally have Michael Maloney's actual memos. Not a summary. Not s...

09/01/2026

They wanted to charge me for a thumb drive. I said no, and I'll tell you exactly why.

This is a full status check on the Medina County Flock camera records project. Some agencies handed over everything, no fight, no fee, no excuses. Others are a different story: a delivery fee dispute that's now in front of a law department, a flat denial I don't think holds up.

09/01/2026

Florida just banned these cameras from every state road — thirty days to remove them. What surprised me is why. Florida's about as police-friendly as it gets, and their own transportation department said it straight: misuse, privacy concerns, surveillance schemes. The governor even cited an officer using this tech to track an ex-girlfriend — same pattern we will be discussing soon. Flock's response? By year's end, most searches require a case code tied to an actual investigation. That's the company admitting what I've been finding in Medina County isn't a local fluke. Be loud. Be heard. Shake the system until the truth falls out.

The Florida Department of Transportation is giving law enforcement agencies 30 days to remove license plate readers from all of the state roads it maintains