Court records first
Pleas, convictions, judgments, sentencing records, and filed court documents outrank rumor.
Pittsburgh Everything · Evidence-led investigations
Exposing Fraud
Evidence-led investigations into fraud, corruption, financial deception, public-money abuse, and accountability failures in Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania — past and present.
PROVENALLEGEDDISPUTEDAUDIT_FINDINGCLEARED
Court records first. Audit findings second. Contemporary reporting for context. Every material allegation must carry a visible legal/evidentiary status.
Status every claim
A charge is not a conviction. An audit finding is not automatically a crime. Disputed facts stay disputed.
Follow the money
Show the mechanism, accounts, contracts, invoices, payments, or control failure whenever the record allows it.
No guilt by association
Being named near a scandal is not proof of participation. Each person and claim needs its own evidence.
Chapter 01 · PLANNED
The Off-Books Police Accounts
How Pittsburgh's Special Events Money Became a Federal Case
How did money flowing through Pittsburgh Police secondary-employment operations end up in unofficial credit-union accounts, and what did the case reveal about the controls around that system?
Chapter structure
- 01
Cold open: the account that should not have existed
Open on the discovery of off-the-books police accounts, then immediately distinguish what was later proven from what was merely suspected during the investigation.
- 02
How the Special Events system worked
Explain secondary employment, who paid for off-duty police details, what administrative money moved through the office, and why the system handled enough cash to matter.
- 03
Follow the money
Build a simple, receipt-driven flow: payer → Special Events Office → unofficial credit-union accounts → withdrawals/debit purchases. Use only amounts supported by federal records.
- 04
The warning signs
Reconstruct the internal-control concerns and the beginning of outside scrutiny. Attribute contemporaneous claims to their reporting and never convert allegations into established facts.
- 05
The federal case
Walk through the indictment, guilty plea, tax counts, and the exact conduct Harper admitted in court.
- 06
The sentence
Document the 18-month prison sentence, supervised release, and restitution without editorializing beyond the record.
- 07
The system behind the crime
Use the City Controller audit to examine weak governance, inconsistent money handling, and why fraud stories are often also stories about control design.
- 08
What changed afterward
Trace later secondary-employment administration changes and separate reforms documented by the City from assumptions about causation.
- 09
The receipt
End with a claim-by-claim evidence table: what is PROVEN, what is an AUDIT FINDING, what was only REPORTED/ALLEGED, and what remains outside the evidence.
Editorial boundary for Chapter 1
The finished story will distinguish guilty-plea facts, later audit findings, contemporaneous allegations, and unanswered questions. No allegation involving another person becomes a finding simply because it appeared during the same investigation.