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This is excerpts from a fun story posted at
www.ohiohonestelections.org
###Saturday, July 9, 2005
What Would Samantha Stevens Do? -- Bewitched -- Is a pagan spell behind Tom Noe's scandal?
"Dan Trevas thought he had seen it all in politics. A former reporter who had become the spokesman for the Ohio Democratic Party, Trevas was hanging around outside a George W. Bush fundraiser on Oct. 30, 2003, helping to organize a small demonstration. As about 650 well-heeled GOP donors—including an obscure rare-coin dealer from Toledo named Tom Noe—streamed into the Hyatt Regency to eat lunch with the president and contribute $1.4 million to his re-election campaign, Trevas noticed a young woman in the group of 100 protesters.
While most onlookers were milling about aimlessly, the young woman was holding a large Earth flag and "walking methodically over and over again, following the same little path in the crosswalks," Trevas recalled. "She was on a very focused walk." The woman's name was Brandy Zink, and she had a good explanation for her carefully traced path: She was casting a spell."
"I asked her what she was doing," Trevas said, "and she said, 'I'm a Wiccan, and I'm putting a positive energy vortex on this area.'" "I said something patronizing like, 'Oh, well it seems like it's working,' because we were having a pretty good turnout and the powers that be were noticing us," Trevas said."
"His run-in with Zink might have become just another campaign war story to share over a few beers if recent revelations hadn't conspired to shed a different light on Zink's Halloween Eve stroll. Noe is no longer an obscure coin dealer and backroom wheeler-dealer in Republican politics. Now he is better known as the focus of several state and federal investigations into his rare-coin dealings, along with possibly illegal contributions to the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign.
"Some of the investigations deal with $10 million to $12 million in missing state funds invested in rare coins. But a Toledo grand jury is hearing testimony over whether Noe broke federal campaign laws by giving money to others with the intent that they would contribute it to the Bush-Cheney campaign—many of them via the October 2003 fundraiser."
"Noe and anyone else found guilty of violating federal campaign-finance laws could face stiff fines and jail time."
At the heart of the questions about the questionable campaign donations by Noe is the soiree that attracted Zink to the Hyatt Regency. The truth is out there."
and
"Trevas, now working on the gubernatorial campaign of Mayor Mike Coleman, said his encounter with Zink only offers proof that the Noe scandal of 2005 gets more bizarre each week. "I was thinking to myself: How could this scandal get any weirder? And then I remembered, 'Oh yeah, there was a witch that put a spell on the fundraiser.'"
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