The Missouri State Highway Patrol and Vernon County Prosecuting Attorney's office are investigating the theft of close to $40,000 from the city of Nevada.
A state audit report issued Tuesday indicated receipts totaling $39,701 were collected between January 2002 and April 2004, but were never deposited.
Auditors said "the city does not track payments for various types of tax revenues to ensure all payments are properly received and recorded in the city's accounting records.
"As a result, cigarette and franchise taxes totalling $24,445 received by check were deposited into the city's bank account but were not recorded in the city's accounting records. These checks were substituted into the city's deposits and recorded cash receipts were not deposited, and (were) apparently misappropriated."
An additional $15,256 was apparently stolen from the city's pool and golf course, the audit said.
The audit is still in progress.
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I suppose you can't blame prisoners for doing anything they can to try to gain their freedom, but too often courts end up ruling on the same thing over and over again.
Such is the case of Brent Londagin, 30, Joplin, whose effort to get his conviction tossed out by the Missouri Court of Appeals for the Southern District was rejected for a second time Aug. 26.
Londagin was convicted in 2003 after a Jasper County jury found him guilty of sodomizing a mentally retarded man at a Joplin nursing home. For the second time, he was appealing his conviction, claiming that he had an incompetent lawyer.
According to court records, Londagin was working as a life skills trainer at the Regional Center in Joplin from July to November of 1998, providing assitance to people with disabilities.
Court records indicate that Londagin's forcible attack on his victim caused him permanent damage, giving him a perforated colon and forcing the man to have a permanent colostomy.
During the trial, a Joplin Police detective testified that Londagin had admitted to sexually abusing the man. Londagin later claimed that he was pressured into making the statement. In his petition, he says his lawyer should have done more to impeach the detective's testimony.
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A follow-up on yesterday's item about former Neosho Daily News Publisher Kenneth Cope's upcoming induction into the Missouri Press Foundation Hall of Fame. I received my copy of Missouri Press News last night and Cope's photo was on page one.
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Another item in the magazine, in a column looking back at things that happened long ago at Missouri newspapers, indicated that this month marks the 50th anniversary of the end of Lamar's days of having two daily newspapers. The Lamar Leader sold out to the Democrat in 1954. The Democrat continued as a daily until 1981. For a time, it thrived as the smallest daily (I should say Lamar was the smallest town to have a daily) in Missouri. Those days came to an end after Boone Newspapers bought the paper from David Palmer in 1978 and appointed Tommy Wilson publisher in 1979. Wilson hired 22-year-old Dave Farnham to become the new editor later that year and the two proceeded to alienate most of the business community with a string of negative articles.
The problem reached the point where a group of businessmen enticed the publisher of the XChanger, a shopper fixture in Butler, to start XChanger2 in Lamar. The XChanger began winnowing away advertisers from the Democrat, including Lamar Supermarket.
Eventually Wilson and Farnham were sent packing, and Doug Davis, a long-time troubleshooter for the Boone company, was sent on a rescue mission to Lamar.
Davis immediately began stressing the positive, adding the Today in Barton County feature on page one of each day's paper, with different people contributing articles, including representatives of business, Community Betterment, and most memorably, the historical memories of Reba Young.
The number of pages had to be reduced, due to the lack of advertising and eventually there were many days when it was only four pages long. Davis finally had to cut publication from five days a week to one in early 1982.
I was brought in November 1982 to pump up the local content of the paper and I guess it must have worked. The newspaper was bumped back up to a twice-weekly midway through 1983 and there was even talk of publishing it three times a week shortly before I left for The Carthage Press in April of 1990.
Another trip down memory lane.
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It has been an unpleasant trip down memory lane for Lord Conrad Black, former CEO of Hollinger International, the company which once owned The Neosho Daily News and The Carthage Press. His alleged siphoning of more than $400 million from his company again made headlines in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and other major newspapers over the weekend and early this week.
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A Stockton lawyer may be sanctioned by the Missouri Supreme Court later this month.
According to court records, Thomas G. Pyle allegedly forged the signature of a client on a deposition and had his secretary notarize it as though it had been signed in her presence.
Pyle claims it was just a "minsterial error" according to court records and says he did not tell the notary how to do her job.