CLEVELAND, Ohio — Less than a month after firefighters extinguished the blaze that burned for a week at the former ARCO Recycling Center in East Cleveland, investigators from three federal law enforcement agencies sat down with the man who ran the disposal site.
George Michael Riley confessed that he hadn’t paid taxes on the dump, or any of his businesses, in years. He also had multiple fraud convictions on his record. But that didn’t stop him from becoming a key informant in the push to end corruption in East Cleveland.
Riley told the agents in a proffer interview in November 2017 that he had been paying cash to multiple East Cleveland officials in the five years since he began doing business there, a move to curry favor with the upper echelons of the cash-strapped city.
Over the next 10 months, Riley met with a former mayor and a close ally, multiple current and former police officers and a Cuyahoga County Land Bank employee — all while wearing a wire and under the watch of some of Cleveland’s top anti-corruption FBI agents, according to records obtained by cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.
Riley became a prolific informant behind some of the most high-profile prosecutions in East Cleveland, but he has never been called to the stand to testify about his work for the government. His connection to the cases that made headlines for the last five years was largely kept under wraps.
And while it seems that federal prosecutors quickly ran with some of the things Riley had told them, much of the conduct he described in multiple interviews and phone conversations over several months never led to criminal charges in U.S. District Court.
Authorities never prosecuted Riley for the fire at the disposal site or how he managed his businesses. However, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost’s office sued Riley, his company and its co-founder, and a judge ordered them to pay more than $30 million combined, the largest civil penalty the state has won for an environmental disaster.
Riley is now at the heart of bribery charges against two former East Cleveland police officers stemming from his work as a confidential informant in 2018. Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley’s office brought the case to a grand jury late last year.
If a judge grants a request from one of the officers to withdraw his guilty plea and the case goes to trial, it could usher Riley to the witness stand for the first time.
Riley, who also goes by the name Anthony Costello, now lives in Southeast Ohio. He could not be reached for comment. His attorneys who were with him during the session with federal agents, Ian Friedman and Eric Nemecek, declined to comment.
The bluster
Riley is no stranger to having his credibility challenged in a courtroom.
In one case, government attorneys used him as their key witness, a move that became a major issue. The case ultimately ended with federal prosecutors dropping the charges, including bribery, that were based on Riley’s claims.
In addition to multiple convictions and lawsuits in three states, Riley had a penchant for bragging that he was flush with cash.
In 2008, he worked with a New York-based developer and proposed building a $120 million water park in rural Southeast Ohio. He told a reporter for the Times Herald-Record in Middletown, New York, and a group of potential developers that his mother was Nancy DeBartolo, who he said was related to Edward DeBartolo, the famed former owner of the San Francisco 49ers from Youngstown.
In reality, his mother worked as a housekeeper for the family who owned the property that Riley convinced the New York developer to purchase for $8 million, well above the market value, the paper reported.
Riley made the claims at a meeting that took place eight days after he pleaded guilty in federal court in Columbus to making a false statement on a loan application. He was sentenced to two years in prison in the case. He had also pleaded guilty to financial fraud in Licking County Common Pleas Court after prosecutors said he lied on multiple loan applications.
He told agents during his proffer interview that he regularly offered people a photograph of a bank receipt showing an $800,000 deposit to prove his wealth. In reality, he said, he pulled the picture off of someone else’s Facebook page.
Riley also detailed for agents how he created multiple companies to hide his assets from various entities that had claims against him. He said that he made sure to drop his business bank accounts to zero at the end of each year because he believed that if the accounts had no balance then, he didn’t have to pay income taxes, the documents say.
The cash
Riley portrayed himself to federal agents as a personal piggy bank for East Cleveland officials who frequently complained about needing money — both for the city and themselves — after Riley opened up a demolition business in the city in 2012.
Riley told agents that then-Mayor Gary Norton and a police officer, Von Harris, frequently complained about needing money for personal reasons, and Riley always offered to help.
cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer reached out to Harris’ attorney, John Paris, for comment. Norton, reached by phone, declined to comment beyond denying accepting specific payments from Riley.
Riley also said multiple other officers, including then-Chief Michael Cardilli, regularly stopped by his business to hang out. He recalled officers joking about not feeding inmates in the city jail.
Riley said that Michael Smedley, Norton’s chief of staff, asked him to repair the jail’s heating system in the winter of 2014. Riley said it took him and several workers a week to get the heat back on, and it cost Riley $10,000 in materials and labor. The documents do not indicate whether the city ever paid him for the work.
Smedley, who is Mayor Brandon King’s chief of staff, declined to comment.
At about the same time, Riley said, he was in negotiations with city officials to start a work-release program for inmates at the city jail. Riley said the program would have been a way for him to get “cheap labor,” but it never got off the ground.
In addition, Riley said, he had an account at an auto parts store across from East Cleveland City Hall, where he would take city vehicles, including Norton’s car. Riley said he did not bill the city for the work because “that was not the way it worked in East Cleveland,” he said.
Riley told agents that he did not think he could say no to the requests because he would lose his business with the city, and Norton, as the mayor, had the ability to make his life difficult.
Riley said that, in exchange for his financial support, officials “took care of him.”
He said Harris would run his name through a police database to check to see whether Riley had any arrest warrants out, as Riley was concerned he would be accused of violating his parole.
So when the feds asked Riley to come to the U.S. attorney’s office in downtown Cleveland as the dump still smoldered in November 2017, Riley had plenty to say.
The Land Bank case
In November 2018, federal prosecutors charged Kenneth Tyson, the first person they indicted with Riley as their star informant. Tyson was a Cuyahoga County Land Bank official who oversaw demolition contracts in East Cleveland.
Riley told agents that Tyson agreed to put Riley’s name and company on a list to get demolition contracts in exchange for Riley completing work at Tyson’s home for free. FBI and housing agents went to Tyson’s home in October 2018, 11 months after Riley first told them about the work, and Tyson denied that Riley did work at his home.
U.S. attorneys charged Tyson with multiple counts of bribery, as well as honest service fraud, wire fraud and obstruction of justice. Tyson’s attorneys began challenging Riley’s credibility in December 2019, citing his multiple criminal convictions that federal prosecutors in Columbus called “dishonest conduct.”
Federal prosecutors in April 2020 allowed Tyson to plead guilty to a single count of lying to the FBI. Tyson admitted that Riley and other contractors had done work at his home for free. But other records showed that Riley overstated the amount he did and that another Land Bank employee had handled the application for Riley’s company months before the work at Tyson’s home was completed.
Prosecutors dropped charges that would have required them to prove Riley’s claim of a favor in exchange for a bribe, and they did not seek a prison sentence for Tyson.
The former mayor
In December 2020, U.S. attorneys charged Norton and Vanessa Veals, Norton’s secretary.
The documents reveal that, after Riley began relaying information to the feds, he and Norton talked about forming a construction company together in 2018. Voters recalled Norton from office two years earlier.
The former mayor and Riley both needed to find work, but the two agreed that Riley couldn’t be the face of the company after the trash facility and his reputation in East Cleveland went up in flames. So Norton — the disgraced former politician — would fill that role, the documents say.
Riley, Norton and Veals met about the possible business. After one meeting that Veals did not attend, Norton called her and said she should be glad that she had missed it.
When she asked why, Norton told her that the FBI approached him as he walked out and started asking questions that also involved an unidentified public official, according to the documents.
FBI agents said that they instructed Norton not to disclose their conversation or the existence of the investigation.
Veals said she told Cardilli and another person about the FBI’s investigation.
Eight months after the case against Tyson fell apart, prosecutors charged Norton and Veals with obstruction of justice in U.S. District Court.
Prosecutors said the pair’s loose lips torpedoed a bribery investigation into another public official, whose name was never released.
Norton and Veals each pleaded guilty and were placed on probation.
More than two years would pass before anyone else was charged based on Riley’s work as an informant. In September, O’Malley’s office got a Cuyahoga County grand jury to indict former police officers Von Harris and Demarkco Johnson on charges including bribery. A spokeswoman for O’Malley declined to comment, citing pending cases.
The police officers
Documents show that Riley reached out to FBI agents in April 2018 and told them that Harris had called him up in dire financial straits. Harris had left the department after he said he had injured his knee and couldn’t work as a patrol officer. Cardilli, the chief, refused to reassign him to a detective desk. Harris had fallen behind on his truck and motorcycle payments, and he was in danger of having them repossessed, Riley told the FBI.
Two weeks later, Riley and Harris met at a diner on East 55th Street. Documents show agents gave Riley $200 in cash to give to Harris and outfitted him with two wires. Agents then watched the meeting.
Over the next three months, Riley and Harris met multiple times and devised a scheme for Harris to falsify reports that two vehicles had been stolen from Riley’s property and were recovered in Akron, where they were found destroyed. Riley would then cash out his insurance policy and provide thousands of dollars to those who helped the scheme, according to documents.
Riley insisted he wanted to pay the people responsible for helping file the reports. Harris then went into the department offices and came out with Johnson, the records show. Riley counted out $200 and gave it to Johnson and asked him — twice — if the reports would pass as real.
“They won’t be able to tell,” Johnson told him, according to records.
Harris later told agents that Johnson grew uneasy about the transaction and left $100 in Harris’ mailbox.
Harris told the FBI that Johnson was a good kid. He would never have gotten involved with Riley if Harris hadn’t pushed him into it, according to the records.
Harris and Johnson were indicted in August, four years after the investigation began. Initially, both pleaded guilty to one count of bribery. Johnson is seeking to withdraw his plea because he says his former attorney did not discuss the evidence with him.
His new attorney, Ali Hibbard, sought to call Riley to the stand at a hearing on the issue as a way to show that Johnson may be able to convince a jury to find him not guilty. Cuyahoga County prosecutors fiercely objected to Hibbard calling Riley.
Judge Maureen Clancy sided with prosecutors and prevented Riley from taking the witness stand as an informant. Hibbard declined to comment.
A hearing on whether to allow Johnson to withdraw the plea, which would also result in Harris’ plea being withdrawn, has yet to be held.
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