The alleged offenses include racketeering, bribery, forgery, telecommunications fraud, tampering with records, and conspiracy. But beneath them all is one core question.
Did ex-CEO Chuck Jones, 70, and ex-senior vice president of external affairs Mike Dowling, 61, pay Randazzo a bribe on Jan. 2, 2019 when they wired his shell company $4,333,333?
Twelve jurors, in a courthouse not far from the company’s now-former downtown headquarters, will now need to reach a consensus on the fate of the two Akron natives who came to lead one of the city’s bigger employers.
The answer carries huge political implications. It invokes ritzy dinners and discreet meetings with Gov. Mike DeWine – who appointed Randazzo as head of the agency that regulates FirstEnergy, just five weeks after the $4.3 million changed hands – and his lieutenant governor Jon Husted, who DeWine has since appointed as a U.S. Senator.
Both the politicians dined with Jones and Dowling in December 2018, just before the executives visited Randazzo at his Columbus home, in two key scenes described at trial by Dowling (in a videotaped deposition from 2023 shown to jurors), Husted, and a few text threads and emails memorializing the fateful night.
Any answers about the $4.3 million will remain incomplete at best. Both Jones and Dowling waived their right to testify in their own defense. And Randazzo died by suicide in April 2024, having resigned as PUCO chairman and pleaded not guilty to state and federal criminal charges, all while the Ohio Attorney General’s office pressed to freeze his millions in assets before trial.
In six weeks of testimony lined with former FirstEnergy lawyers and lobbyists, Randazzo’s legal clients, PUCO staff and commissioners, and Husted, state prosecutors made the case to jurors that Randazzo took FirstEnergy’s money. Then he returned the favor with a series of decisions and actions that enriched the company and its executives.
“In this country, the law applies equally to everyone. It doesn’t matter who you are, nobody should be able to buy political favor or pay for policies that tilt the system in their favor,” said Assistant Attorney General Matt Meyer in closing arguments.
“Our government serves the public, and government regulators and government agencies are not for sale.”
During opening statements early last month, Meyer told jurors the bribery scheme was simple, but the explanations would be convoluted.
Weeks later, he rebuffed the defense’s argument that Jones and Dowling sought to pay the $4.3 million to Randazzo’s legal clients, until Randazzo embezzled it without their knowledge. This was a “made-for-trial” explanation, Meyer said, by the “army” of lawyers that wealthy defendants can summon.
“Mike Dowling and Chuck Jones were not Sam Randazzo’s victims,” he said. “They were Sam Randazzo’s accomplices, and the beneficiaries of his corruption. And to avoid the consequences of their actions, they are blaming the dead man. And the victims are the state of Ohio.”
A legitimate ‘business decision’
The defense lawyers (recent court documents list 19 attorneys spanning five law firms, which required the defense team to rent additional chairs for the trial) have maintained that neither Jones nor Dowling paid any bribe.
They’ve conceded certain wrongdoing – Steve Grimes, an attorney for Dowling, said FirstEnergy’s settlement with Randazzo’s clients was sloppily drafted, and that it’s “pretty clear” that Dowling violated rules prohibiting certain meetings and conversations between company officials and regulators “on at least a few occasions.”
And most importantly, defense lawyers say Randazzo was a sophisticated thief, who stole $11.6 million from FirstEnergy alongside Ohio’s other investor-owned utility companies, according to an analysis from a forensic accountant the defense hired.
The latter point is the crux of their defense. They say the $4.3 million was not a bribe but the payment of a settlement between FirstEnergy and Randazzo’s legal clients, the Industrial Energy Users of Ohio (IEU Ohio).
That settlement exists within what’s labeled as a consulting services agreement, of which no signed copy was ever produced in evidence for the trial. The agreement called for millions in annual payments to be made between 2015 and 2024 to Randazzo’s company, the Sustainability Funding Alliance of Ohio, in exchange for IEU Ohio backing off its legal opposition to a FirstEnergy rate case at the PUCO. A lead member of IEU Ohio, Matt Brakey, and others testified at trial that Randazzo at varying points either skimmed off the top or stole these payments outright, without telling his clients.
Jones made a “business decision” to make the payment early as a means of prepaying the company’s debts, given FirstEnergy’s banner year financially in 2018, according to Carole Rendon, Jones’ attorney who was formerly appointed as a federal prosecutor by President Barack Obama.
“Chuck Jones did not bribe Sam Randazzo,” Rendon said. “He made a legitimate business decision to terminate a settlement agreement that was for Sam Randazzo’s clients, the members of IEU Ohio.”
Grimes, Dowling’s lead trial lawyer, said the state’s entire case is based on the “assumption” that the $4.3 million payment was a bribe. A proper understanding of the payment as a legal settlement, he said, and the case crumbles.
If you understand the $4.3 million was stolen, Grimes said to jurors, then you know Dowling is only guilty of “aggressive lobbying.” Randazzo is just another senior bureaucrat advancing the governor’s agenda, and House Bill 6 is “just another energy bill.” The 2024 rate case is “just a policy decision.” FirstEnergy wins some, and it loses some.
“This whole thing is a farce. They’re wrong. And their own documents show them they’re wrong,” Grimes said.
‘Benefit of the bargain’
FirstEnergy employees, some under cover of immunity agreements, painted a mixed picture of the company’s complicated origins with Randazzo, which dates back to at least 2009. By 2013, Randazzo became a highly paid consultant of FirstEnergy Solutions, a subsidiary, even as he clashed with FirstEnergy Corp. in PUCO cases.
This “conflict of interest” was “bulls—-,” the company’s associate general counsel Mark Hayden wrote to his boss, Ebony Yeboah-Amankwah, who indicated agreement. A 2015 amendment to that contract, which she negotiated along with Dowling, attached millions of payments to Randazzo’s company to the consulting agreement. The defendants say these payments were settlement dollars intended for the benefit of Randazzo’s clients, even if the dollars flowed to bank accounts solely controlled by Randazzo.
That contract is the basis for the forgery charge brought by the state. Prosecutors say it’s “spurious” in that it’s a deliberately vague instrument used as a topcover to convey a suspect, multimillion-dollar transaction.
Forces collided for the company in late 2018. DeWine and Husted won an election. And two seats opened on the PUCO. It’s in this context that Jones and Dowling, trial evidence shows, began maneuvering to close out the Randazzo contract early and lobby the company’s preferences on the opening. They also arranged a dinner with Husted and DeWine, to be followed by a visit to Randazzo’s home.
Their private text messages indicate that immediately after the meeting, all three agreed to pay out the remaining $4.3 million and discuss the notion of Randazzo as PUCO chairman.
Yeboah-Amankwah, a witness granted immunity by the state, said she advised Jones against paying Randazzo’s company the money. She said FirstEnergy had no obligation to do so, as a federal regulatory decision left the company without the “benefit of the bargain” of the contract. But on cross examination, she said this was her “business advice” and not her legal opinion. Dowling, she said, urged Jones to pay it.
Jones paid the money. And from there, Randazzo, as PUCO chairman, acted in a host of different ways to benefit FirstEnergy. Prosecutors say he acted as an unregistered lobbyist, advocating for public subsidies of FirstEnergy’s nuclear plants, weakened audits meant to track that money, more favorable rules to the state’s “significantly excessive earnings test” for the company’s three Ohio utilities, and a “decoupling” policy, all worth billions to FirstEnergy.
And as a regulator, Randazzo oversaw an agency that granted FirstEnergy a hotly contested energy broker’s license, softened criticism regarding the company’s use of ratepayer dollars for capital expenses, and nixed a comprehensive regulatory review of the company’s pricing slated in 2024. The latter decision was worth an estimated $150 million in revenue per year, according to the company’s director of rates.
Prosecutors honed in on the 2024 rate review. Greg Price, a longtime administrative law judge at the PUCO, testified how Randazzo ordered him to shoehorn the matter into an order from a related case, and Randazzo rebuffed Price’s concerns on the matter.
And several company executives testified how at an industry conference in Philadelphia in November 2019, Jones boldly predicted to company investors and stock analysts that there wouldn’t be any rate review in 2024. The company officials testified of their concerns about the statements, given requirements of honesty and accuracy to investors. And less than two weeks after Jones’ comments, Randazzo and the other PUCO commissioners voted on the ruling that absolved FirstEnergy of its requirement to undergo a rate case.
Defense attorneys sought to mar some of the testimony about the investor meetings in Philadelphia. They suggested the concerns were overblown, and that Jones was simply exuding the confidence required of a CEO. Rendon, Jones’ attorney, asked FirstEnergy Treasurer Steven Staub why he didn’t report what he suspected was foul play to the company’s ethics hotline.
“I did not trust the ethics hotline in our company at that point in time,” he said. “It was a different company back then. The fear of retaliation existed. The person on the other side of it was not someone that really had any skill set in ethics and compliance, and it just was … not something that would end well.”
A trail of convictions, hundreds of millions in fines
In July 2020, the FBI arrested ex-Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder on his farm, accusing him of accepting what was described as a $60 million bribe in exchange for successfully championing House Bill 6 into law. The state prosecutors didn’t charge Jones and Dowling in relation to Householder, though they did accuse the executives of implementing Randazzo as an illegal lobbyist to help pass the bill.
By November 2020, the federal investigation had expanded to include the Randazzo payment, which the company first acknowledged to shareholders around that time.
Judge Susan Baker Ross blocked jurors at the state trial from evidence of external investigations. But out of the jurors’ view, FirstEnergy and some individuals associated with the scandal have faced serious consequences.
Householder is now serving a 20-year sentence for racketeering. Three others were convicted or pleaded guilty on the same federal charge. And one other man, lobbyist Neil Clark, died by suicide before his trial. In 2021, FirstEnergy began cooperating with the FBI and admitting to its guilt as a company, pinning the blame on Jones and Dowling while replacing much of its board of directors.
Since then, it has racked up a series of expensive fines. Most significantly, that includes the recent $275 million refund to its customers resulting from a PUCO investigation; the $230 million penalty from the federal criminal investigation; a $100 million settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission; a $49 million settlement from a class action lawsuit with its customers; a $20 million settlement with the state as a result of the criminal investigation; and some other smaller settlements.
The prosecutors charged Jones, Dowling and Randazzo in February 2024. Later that year, after Randazzo’s death, Sustainability Funding Alliance of Ohio, his company, pleaded guilty via Randazzo’s widow to a charge against the entity.
Some $1.4 million of the money went to the state, with about $192,000 plus about $550,000 worth of property of the company going to IEU Ohio.
Meanwhile, the case of the company investors who sued Jones, Dowling and other executives for alleged securities fraud remains pending. Some of the lawyers representing the company investors have been monitoring the trial by Zoom.
The office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio indicted Jones and Dowling for bribing both Householder and Randazzo. That case has been on ice out of deference to the state charges. And the SEC’s case against Jones personally is ongoing.
Signal Cleveland is a nonprofit news organization covering local government, education, health, economy and public safety.
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