by Mary Spiller
November 30, 2024
Basheer Jones reportedly worked with a “romantic partner” to deceive non-profits out of around $200,000.
The Department of Justice has moved to formally charge former Cleveland City Councilperson Basheer Jones for bribery and fraud. According to Signal Cleveland, Jones was charged with a two-count indictment with conspiring to commit wire fraud and honest services fraud.
The federal court passed the charges on Nov. 25, leading many to believe that the former representative of Cleveland’s Ward 7 has been a cooperative defendant.
According to the DOJ, Jones leveraged his position as a public official for personal financial gain. He reportedly defrauded multiple community stakeholders who trusted him out of over $200,000.
The charge report detailed that Jones and his romantic partner deceived nonprofit organizations into providing funding to what they believed to be projects in Cleveland and the Ward 7 area. He instead kept the funds and distributed them to his other associates.
The fraud occurred from December 2018 to June 2021, but federal investigators have been investigating the incident since 2022. It began when the DOJ delivered subpoenas to a nonprofit community development called the Famicos Foundation. The investigation was headed by the FBI’s Cleveland Division, and supported by the U.S. Department of Housing, Urban Development Office of the Inspector General, and the IRS.
The DOJ claims Jones convinced a nonprofit to hire his romantic partner as a “community outreach consultant” in 2018. The nonprofit then paid thousands of dollars to the partner, who continued to “conceal her relationship” with Jones. The charging document has not identified the partner by name as of now.
According to court papers, Jones encouraged the nonprofit to pay his partner’s company $50,000 to buy items for a community event in 2020. While they were supposed to buy gift cards, backpacks, and other items, Jones and his associates used the money themselves.
Jones served just one term as a representative of the Hough and St. Clair-Superior neighborhoods on the Cleveland City Council from 2018 to 2022.
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