The Incest of Small-Town Politics

The nature of small-town politics is inherently incestuous. The smaller the community, the more its members will defend each other against criticism -- especially well-grounded criticism -- when delivered outside the bounds of hushed rumor. Gossip is fine; spectacle is not. The critic is held the worse criminal for having spoken truth in public.

Thus yours truly has endured plenty of disdain over the years for calling Roger Lovelace a crook. let me state again here emphatically and without reserve that Lovelace is a criminal who deserves to be in prison. And after years of hearing what a fine upstanding gentleman Lovelace is, this week has delivered vindication: Lovelace was arrested for impersonating a police officer.

Florence police officials said 62-year-old Roger Lovelace, 236 Indian Springs Road, Florence, was arrested Sunday just after 8 p.m. The charge is a Class C felony, which carries the punishment of one to 10 years in prison if convicted.

Until 2005, Lovelace was the head of Florence, Alabama's gas department. During his tenure the entire city knew he was crooked. In private, citizens reported numerous instances of irregular billing and improper fees assessed for service. Lovelace treated the department as a fiefdom, sending department employees to work on his own property on city time.

Of course, these employees complained to friends and neighbors who told their friends and neighbors. But to raise this accusation in the city council meetings brought instant fire from the council members. District One councilman Sam Pendleton described Lovelace as a "good Christian" -- possibly out of concern over his own financial connections to Lovelace. But then again, Sam has plenty of his own skeletons that need to stay closeted.

Lovelace wasn't satisfied with misuse of public funds for his own sake. He was very good at spreading the wealth around. By giving preferential treatment to his brother-in-law's contracting company, Lovelace also cost the city tens of thousands of dollars in overruns. His brother-in-law was so happy with the arrangement that he gave Lovelace a motorcycle for Christmas. Yet when a reporter at our local paper investigated these rumors, and editor killed the story out of concern that the sitting council would stop giving him access to city hall. (Ironically, voters threw out five members of the six-seat council just a few months later.)

Lovelace's biggest crime was the creation of an internet service provider. Designed to sell excess city bandwidth to the public, FLOWEB was a spectacular disaster because the project never offered (and could never offer) broadband. It was a dial-up flop that cost the city hundreds of thousands of completely unaccounted-for dollars. When the company was shut down, routers and other equipment disappeared for a time until the new administration, elected in 2004, ordered an audit -- at which point the quarter-million dollars of electronics reappeared as mysteriously as they'd vanished. The incident caused James Barnhart, a new council member, to wonder in a work session whether the equipment had any dust on it.

Lovelace's crimes against the ratepayers and taxpayers of Florence were enumerated in an audit in 2005. That audit was swiftly shoved out of sight by the new mayor who'd ordered it, but a copy is available as a PDF here. A sympathetic member of the city hall aristocrats had to sneak it out of there, passing it to me in a coffee shop in a scene straight out of a spy caper. "You didn't get this from me," the source whispered. "I don't want to lose my job."

Incredibly, Lovelace was never charged with a crime. In fact, he was allowed to take a decorative desk job for the better part of two years and receive his full pension benefits. This despite the fact the new mayor, Bobby Irons, had been elected on promises to clean up city hall. Sources have told me mayor Irons, concerned that criminal actions against Lovelace would result in embarrassment to major campaign backers, caved in to blackmail from Lovelace. No money was ever recovered and no one was ever punished in any meaningful way.

So imagine my absolute lack of surprise to read that this new project of Lovelace's, namely pulling over cars and waving a police badge, had apparently been going on for some time:

Florence detective Capt. Ron Tyler said during the past two months the department had received other reports of someone riding around trying to stop motorists. Tyler said that according to the reports, the person involved matched Lovelace's description and the car described in the reports was similar to the gold-tan Mercury Montego that Lovelace was driving at the time of his arrest.

The only reason Lovelace was caught was that he made the mistake of pulling over a police officer. The crime was that, absent a uniform, he waved an actual police badge. This detail has been kept out of the Times Daily, but has been confirmed for me today by a member of the Florence Police Department who shall remain anonymous. Also confirmed was the source of that badge: Florence Chief of Police Rick Singleton, a fact that will never see headlines no matter how much it screams "WHAT THE HELL WAS OUR POLICE CHIEF THINKING?"

So why on Earth was Lovelace playing traffic cop? Sholanda has an interesting take that's been seconded by Times Daily web forum users: maybe Lovelace missed being the feudal lord of his domain. Maybe his day job at Brinks Home Security wasn't satisfying to a man who was once able to fill out purchase orders for enough pipe to pull gas from Birmingham (more pipe than the city could ever need; what the heck was he planning to do with it all, anyway?).

But no matter how much more there is to this new story, the truth won't reach the pages of the Times Daily. This new crime (a class C felony, according to the paper) will drop off the radar because Lovelace is a "good Christian." In all likelihood, Lovelace will plead insanity and take a relative slap on the wrist. Life will go on, and so will business as usual. The police chief will never tell us why he gave Lovelace a numbered FPD badge and we will never know what was really going on in Lovelace's mind.

Worse, those of us who dare to publish these facts and talk about them in public will we denounced as liars, disgruntled ex-employees, and (horror of horrors!) impolite.