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| Sharpe |
Michael Sharpe, former Jamoke Academy charter school CEO in Hartford, Connecticut, had been hiding in plain sight for years, yet he was invisible to employment overseers in the state of Connecticut. No one saw him because no one was looking. Then too, once a criminal needle is buried in Connecticut’s public employee haystack, it is difficult to locate necessary data for purposes of hiring and firing.
Sharpe was just clever enough to omit unsavory information
on his hiring forms, but not clever enough to abandon his criminal activity.
Even so, he had left behind himself a blood red trail of offenses that easily
should have been detected in routine background searches. And what one might
call for reasons of concision Sharpe’s “rap sheet” could not fail to impress
any career criminal.
Sharpe, first came to the notice of prosecutors when he was
convicted of forgery “for falsifying documents he used to obtain a $415,000
loan from the city of Hartford to redevelop an apartment building,” according
to a recent story in the Hartford Courant.
Sharpe then relocated to the West Coast “where he was hired
as real estate manager for the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in San Francisco
and was ensnared in a federal corruption investigation that resulted in his
conviction in 1989 for embezzling more than $100,000. He served 2 1/2 years in
prison, was released, and returned to prison in the early 1990s for a probation
violation.”
Having come back home to Connecticut in 1995, Sharpe “worked
for a year and a half before being fired as a case worker for the Department of
Children and Families. A former colleague said he worked at least part of the
time at a satellite office, then in Rockville, and was dismissed on complaints
that he was dating at least two of the mothers of children on his caseload.”
Two short years later, Sharpe found employment as a paraprofessional
at Jumoke Academy, a school founded by his mother, Thelma Ellis Dickerson.
Sharpe was appointed Jumoke CEO in 2003. Awarded $53 million in state grants,
Sharpe “expanded the school into a network of schools and was pitching his
program in Bridgeport, New Haven and elsewhere in the country.”
Sharpe’s best laid plans have now been torn asunder by
sharp-eyed cold case squad investigators in Connecticut’s Division of Criminal
Justice who, through diligent investigation, unearthed a needle in the
haystack. Their inquiry began only a few months “after Sharpe pleaded not
guilty in August to rape charges that date from home invasions and gunpoint
attacks in 1984,” according to the Courant account. “Four rape victims, single
women between the ages of 25 and 30, gave police at the time similar accounts:
their attacker late at night entered through sliding glass doors and, appearing
at their bedsides with a gun, told his victim he had shot someone and would
shoot them too unless they cooperated. He then blindfolded and assaulted them.”
Investigators were able to connect Sharpe to the rapes: “People
with knowledge of the investigation said a distant Sharpe relative, working on
an academic project, purchased a DNA profile kit from a company that sells
genetic analyses. The relative put her profile into an open source database
consulted by people doing a similar research.
“There was a match between biological evidence collected
from the rapes and the distant Sharpe relative. Further research narrowed the
pool to four targets — Sharpe and three other blood relatives.
Sharpe’s garbage, taken from the home where he lives with his daughter,
provided a definitive match, prosecutors said.”
There is a question dangling like a Damoclean Sword over
state agency watchdogs. “The DCF allegation, the reporter notes in his story, “now
raises another question about how, in spite of his record, Sharpe was able to
obtain state work with at-risk children and, later, collect tens of millions of
dollars in state grants for his charter school network.”
How was Sharpe able with impunity to speed through so many stop signs without having his license pulled? The answer to that question may lie in the all too familiar connection between a burgeoning unelected state apparatus and political force. Some fortunate office holders are able to call upon special privileges to leapfrog processes put in place to assure equity in hiring. It’s not what you know in state service that matters so much as who you know, that and the tensile strength of networking. Sharpe was the son of a deservedly praised mother, education reformer Thelma Ellis Dickerson.
For politically privileged people, process doors open
magically, eyes are averted, and in the semi-darkness women are raped.
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