Intro to the top drawer

When people first started threatening to kill me, my friends, and my family over a lawsuit involving a cannabis company, I doubt anyone thought my response would eventually be:

Pick up a pen and turn the whole damn thing into a case study.

Yet here we are.

Years later, academic credentials came from the work, with more research still underway. A jury unanimously found in my favor on my breach-of-contract claim, and the counterclaims against us were defeated.

And somewhere along the way, the research stopped being only about a cannabis company.

We started asking how the system around it worked.

We followed the records from companies, to regulators, to public-records requests, to the agencies responsible for oversight and eventually to the Illinois Attorney General’s Public Access Counselor.

That’s where things got really interesting.

Because when we started examining the PAC matters that seemingly went nowhere, we weren’t just finding cannabis.

We found police misconduct and discipline. Government grants. Economic development. Public employment. Criminal investigations. Education. Municipal government. Internal recommendations. Regulatory decisions.

Different industries. Different agencies. Different people.

But a strangely familiar question kept appearing:

What happens when somebody asks for the records showing how government actually made the decision?

We’ve reviewed only about 140 of more than 3,000 files so far, so we’re nowhere near declaring the experiment finished.

Meanwhile, F’nAround somehow keeps expanding into music festivals, cannabis events, food, film, entertainment and whatever other rabbit hole catches our attention.

And in the background, the academic side keeps quietly getting deeper.

Apparently we can review fried catfish on Saturday and study institutional transparency failures on Monday.

Range. 

So we present a brief glimpse into what we’ve affectionately started calling the Top Drawer of the Illinois Attorney General’s Office under Attorney General Kwame Raoul:

We Went Looking for the Cover-Up. Then We Found the Top Drawer.

www.fnaround.com/articles/topdrawer

About 140 files down.

More than 3,000 to go.

Turns out threatening the guy with the pen may have been a questionable long-term strategy.