A few years ago when I was Down East to look at some beach erosion problems and a proposed inlet relocation project, N.C. Coastal Federation director Todd Miller asked me if I had time to look at another place that worried coastal conservationists. I did.
He opened the throttle on his flat-bottomed skiff and we roared down Bogue Sound and around a spoil bank to a new channel that had been cut into the western shoreline.
It opened onto a squarish basin carved out of the Carteret County soil - room enough for docks and slips for 75 boats surrounded by lots for pricey homes. It was barely minutes off the Intracoastal Waterway at one of the most popular areas of what the Chamber of Commerce likes to call the Crystal Coast.
Knowing of the reputation of the Coastal Management Division for making it difficult for real estate developers to get major environmental permits, I wondered aloud how the developers were able to get the permits to dredge the basin, cut the channel and provide utilities so the land could be turned into highly profitable residential lots.
It's a long story, Miller said. And it was. It went back nearly 20 years to the 1980s, when Raleigh businessman Steve Stroud, a GOP contributor, proposed a 278-acre marina and residential development called Broad Reach on the site of a 1,500-year old Indian village on Bogue Sound's western shore. Stroud wanted permission for 150 slips but somewhere along the way the project ran into permit trouble.
The story goes that then-secretary of the state's environmental agency, Tommy Rhodes, pressured the director of the coastal management office to grant the permit. The director promptly wrote a memo about that phone call and put it in the file - where anyone who asked for it would see it.
Someone did, and when the story hit the newspaper the project ran into even more flak. The project was downsized, a permit was eventually issued and a basin was finally dredged, but the economy had soured enough that the project went nowhere for years.
Nowhere, that is, until just a few years ago when Charlotte developers revived it with new financing, new plans and new friends in the governor's office.
This time it was called Cannonsgate, and businessmen Gary and Randy Allen had well-placed allies. There was McQueen Campbell, an Eastern N.C. businessman and friend of Gov. Mike Easley who flew him around the state and who bragged that if you needed help, he had contacts in the governor's office. There was Lanny Wilson, a Wilmington financier who Easley named to the State Board of Transportation and who became an Easley contributor.
And there was Wilson's new friend and Easley's right-hand-man Ruffin Poole, a bright and talented young lawyer who could get things done.
Poole had a fast rise on Easley's staff, moving quickly from a deputy press secretary to his inner circle, handling appointments, fund-raising duties and helping cut red tape. He was good at it. Developer Wilson appreciated his abilities - and his help with permits for a Brunswick County development.
He appreciated Poole so much that, a federal grand jury said in a 67-page, 51-count indictment Thursday, he began providing trips and parties to Poole - gifts that Poole did not disclose on his state government ethics forms.
On a 2005 trip to New Orleans Poole learned about Wilson's plan to help finance Cannonsgate and the possibility of a 30 percent return on money within a year. Wilson told him he could invest, the indictment said. That spring, Poole helped developers with permits. At Campbell's suggestion he called certain environmental officials to urge them to keep permits moving because some bureaucrats "are apparently trying to hold things up." Poole promised to work on it. Before long permits were moving again.
That August, the indictment indicates, Poole called in his IOU. He told Wilson he was ready to put money into the Cannonsgate financing.
Wilson didn't need the money because the project's lots were nearly all spoken for, but he let Poole buy in, the indictment said. For a $100,000 investment, Poole recouped a $30,000 profit and ran it through a family business to hide the transaction, the indictment showed.
That was not the only time Poole helped with permits for a development that he put money in, but it was the one that resonates with the public. That's because Easley and his wife also purchased a Cannonsgate lot and not only got a good price on the lot, but also a big discount of $137,000 at closing that Easley had not disclosed.
So far we have only an indictment of Poole, and only one side of what happened. He's a long way from a trial. Yet to a public increasingly wary of politicians and weary of the constant news about allegations of corruption, this latest twist in the Cannonsgate story only reaffirms the widely held conviction that there is a pay to play system at work in Raleigh - and that all you need to succeed are gobs of cash and the right friends in the right places.
But if grand jurors are right, some of those friends may soon be behind bars.
Jack Betts is a Charlotte Observer columnist and associate editor based in Raleigh.
