Prosecutors Seek Five Years in Prison for Corrupt Former Baltimore Mayor Who Scammed the Medical/Hospital System and Diverted Hundreds of Thousands of Taxpayer Dollars into Buying Her Stupid "Healthy Holly" Books

Here was the scam: if you were a health care or insurance organization or hospital that wanted a city contract, you had to please the mayor.

And you know what would really please the mayor?

Spending a half million of taxpayer-subsidized dollars to buy her stupid children's book.

[F]ormer Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh made a killing on sales of her self-published "Healthy Holly" children’s books; for example, she sold 100,000 copies at a total cost of $500,000 to the University of Maryland Medical System, on whose board she was sitting at the time.

Oh, I forgot about that: Yeah, she was often sitting on the boards of the companies that decided to buy her trash book.

Also, the Maryland Automobile Insurance Fund puchased $7,500 worth of copies shortly before Pugh successfully sponsored legislation sought by the company.

More? Kaiser Permanente, which was seeking a city contract, also purchased more than $100,000 worth of the mayor’s self-published books, and a local nonprofit that won a big city contract just happened to purchase $87,000 worth. But when reporters tried to track down copies of this amazing best-selling series, they found 8,700 unsolicited and unopened boxes of "Health Holly" books at a decrepit Baltimore School District Warehouse.

Well they were never really "books" to begin with. They were merely markers, markers for bribery payments, by which monies could be siphoned out of the publicly-funded health system and into the Baltimore mayor's pockets.

Need evidence of that? Well, somehow, she managed to sell the same copies of the same books to multiple organizations with business before the city.

She just kept selling the same "books" over and over.

How did she get away with selling and reselling the same "books"? Well, simple: Most "buyers" wouldn't bother to actually take possession of them, because they weren't ever really "books." They were just Markers for graft. Figments in the accounting books to make it look legal -- from a distance.

posted by Ace at 05:37 PM

| Access Comments