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Get Loud
e first game at CITYPARK stadium brought the ruckus
Written by BENJAMIN SIMON
Don’t tell St. Louis this soccer game didn’t mean anything. Don’t tell that to Patrick Koetting, who drove two hours from Cape Girardeau, or Sam Wise, who took a half-day off work and started tailgating at 11:30 a.m., or the guy who ran up to Wise and yelled, “This is fucking awesome, Sam!”
Don’t tell that to the St. Louligans fan club. They’ve attended every St. Louis professional soccer game since 2010, as the city rotated through a list of teams, from AC St. Louis to St. Louis FC to CITY SC 2. They’ve been waiting for an MLS team and a stadium to call their own.
The MLS team will have to wait until 2023. But last week, St. Louis CITY hosted its first game at CITYPARK stadium in Downtown West, a game between CITY SC 2 and Bayer 04 Leverkusen, a German Bundesliga team. It was the first time the public saw the highly advertised 22,500-seat, $458 million stadium, with the steepest Supporter Section in MLS and food only from St. Louis vendors.
Don’t tell the fans, though, that they were headed to see a friendly match –– a scrimmage, a glorified practice game. Leverkusen didn’t play their best lineup. CITY SC 2 subbed in a 16-year-old on their academy team. Don’t tell them that. Because the fan club still organized a tailgate outside of Schlafly Tap Room that was supposed to start at 4 p.m. but really started hours before.
At 6 p.m., an hour before the game, hundreds of fans paraded down North 22nd Street toward the stadium. They marched with flags, waving banners, banging drums, wearing flamingo hats, wrapping themselves in CITY SC scarves and covering themselves in red. “St. Louis is wonderful!” they chanted. “It’s the home of toasted ravioli! St. Louis is wonderful!”
Don’t tell Sarah Totten that it was 30 degrees outside, either. It was cold. Really cold. See-yourown-breath-type cold. Can’t-feelyour-toes-type cold. It was windy and, at times, downright miserable. Totten knew it. Her legs were numb, she said, as she stood at the tailgate in front of Schlafly. But she didn’t care. She had taken the Metro from Granite City. She had been tailgating since 2 p.m. She was here to celebrate. She had waited long enough for a soccer team.
Don’t tell Ray Carpenter that this was just another soccer game. He helped build the stadium. For the last two years, he has done civil engineering work every day at CITYPARK. He isn’t a soccer fan. But he bought tickets. He overlooked the pitch on Wednesday evening, his partner by his side, marveling at the crowd, the turf, the red lights –– the place he has reported to work over the past two years, the place he helped to construct.
Don’t tell Gene Poisson that he shouldn’t be excited about an exhibition match. He showed up at the game in his “World Cup” outfit — an American-flag-themed suit and an American-themed cowboy hat, with a St. Louis CITY jersey and scarf. Oh, and under the suit, jersey and scarf he wore a T-shirt that reads “Saint Fuckin Louis.”
“It’s a fantastic fucking environment,” he says of the stadium. He has season tickets, and he can’t wait for 2023. “I’ll be one of them dudes in the club suites jumping up and down like a fool.”
Don’t tell the elevator that no one cared — it broke from overuse. Or the concourse hallway that was so packed with people at halftime you, quite literally, could not move.
Don’t tell Brad Kalish that he should have put his kids to sleep. Forget the late bedtime and the cold weather. Kalish brought his whole family to the game. “I’m crazy,” he admits. But, he says, “it’s history.” The kids tried every single concession stand, he says. More importantly, they can say they witnessed history.
Don’t tell the fans that their team was down 3-0 in the final minute, that the game was never very close and they had no chance to come back. As St. Louis City SC 2 lined up for a corner kick, one minute left in the game, the stadium rocked with noise so loud that someone in the red-and-blue Ferris wheel glowing in the distance at Union Station could have heard them.
Don’t tell City SC defender Joshua Yaro that the night was defined by the loss. “We’ve seen it empty,” he says of CITYPARK stadium. “And just seeing the stadium full with the excitement and with the fans and having everyone around –– yes, [we lost], but the moment itself is huge.”
Don’t tell coaching director John Hackworth that St. Louis isn’t a soccer city, either. “I’ve said it a lot,” he said of the history and talented players in the city. “This is the best city in the country for soccer.”
So don’t tell St. Louis it was cold or it was too late or it was a bad game or whatever –– because, really, it didn’t matter. St. Louis will be there anyway, loud and proud, banging on drums, chanting, “St. Louis is wonderful! It’s the home of toasted ravioli! St. Louis is wonderful!” n
NEWS
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Despite the cold, the $458 million CITYPARK stadium was packed with rowdy fans for its first game. | BENJAMIN SIMON
A Desperate Appeal
One day before Kevin Johnson is set to be executed, the court will hear oral arguments
Written by MONICA OBRADOVIC
The Missouri Supreme Court on Monday will hold oral arguments on whether a death row inmate’s execution should be postponed — just one day before he is scheduled to die.
A special prosecutor appointed to investigate Kevin Johnson’s case found racial bias “infected” Johnson’s conviction and sentence. Monday, he and Johnson asked the court to delay Johnson’s execution so his findings could be considered in court.
The state Supreme Court set an “expedited briefing schedule” to hold oral arguments regarding the prosecutor’s motion to stay Johnson’s execution. The arguments will be held Monday afternoon, November 28. Johnson’s execution was previously scheduled for Tuesday, November 29.
The special prosecutor, Edward “E.E.” Keenan, filed a motion November 15 to vacate Johnson’s judgment after concluding that then-St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch treated Johnson and other Black defendants accused of killing police officers differently than a white defendant, Trenton Forster, in whose case McCulloch did not seek the death penalty. He also alleged McCulloch’s team made a “deliberate” attempt to strike Black jurors from the pool in Johnson’s case.
A circuit court judge overruled Keenan’s motion as well as his subsequent motion to amend Johnson’s judgment or alternatively order a new trial. Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt’s office also moved to strike Keenan’s appearance from court.
Keenan was using a new state statute that has faced opposition from the attorney general’s office each time a prosecutor has tried to use it. The statute allows a prosecutor to file a motion to vacate or set aside a judgment if they have information that the convicted person “may be innocent or erroneously convicted.”
The statue requires a hearing to be held, which St. Louis County Presiding Judge Mary Elizabeth Ott acknowledged in her denial of Keenan’s motion to set aside Johnson’s judgment.
However, Ott wrote in a November 19 order that there wasn’t enough time to prepare to present a case nor for the court to thoughtfully consider it.
Ott wrote she found it “inexplicable” that Keenan’s claims were not brought to the court’s attention until November 15 — 14 days prior to Johnson’s execution. Johnson had requested that the St. Louis County Prosecutor’s Conviction and Incident Review Unit review his conviction and judgment last December. But one of Johnson’s former trial attorneys works in the prosecutor’s office, so the unit could not perform the investigation themselves.
Ott appointed a special prosecutor to handle the investigation in October.
The office’s Conviction and Incident Review Unit alerted the Missouri Supreme Court of the conflict of interest in a letter on July 11, after the attorney general’s office filed a motion to set Johnson’s execution date.
Jessica Hathaway, chief of the unit, requested the court refrain from scheduling Johnson’s execution. The court did so anyway in August.
When Ott appointed Keenan on October 12, he then faced a high task — review 31,744 pages of case files, talk to witnesses, conduct legal research and review 12 boxes of document requests before Johnson’s execution in little over a month.
In a statement yesterday, Johnson’s lawyers wrote Johnson has no control over delays caused by the prosecutors, saying that for the delay to cost Johnson his life would defy “any sense of justice.” n
Kevin Johnson, 37, has a last minute hearing scheduled to postpone his execution. | JEREMY WEIS
Hawley Gets Called Out
As attorney general, Hawley violated Sunshine Law requests to protect his campaign for Senate
Written by SARAH FENSKE
As attorney general, now-Senator Josh Hawley ran an office that knowingly and purposefully violated the Sunshine Law — and did so in ways that expressly benefited Hawley’s political ambitions and kept the public in the dark.
That’s from a ruling issued last week by Cole County Circuit Court Judge Jon Beetem, who granted summary judgment to Hawley’s foes and ordered the AG’s office to pay the maximum under Missouri law: $12,000 in fines, with their opponents’ attorney’s fees on top of that.
The AG’s opponents have 60 days to submit their legal fees to the court for repayment — a bill that will surely be much bigger than the fine.
The litigation goes back to Hawley’s initial exploration of a run for U.S. Senate — and his opponents’ attempts to find correspondence between Hawley and his top advisers, often using private email accounts, in which campaign and government business seemed to uncomfortably mix. The Kansas City Star published an eyebrow-raising series of stories about that mingling in October of 2018, triggering an investigation by the Missouri Secretary of State.
Judge Beetem’s ruling suggests the information should have come out much sooner, if only Hawley’s office had followed the state’s Sunshine Law. His ruling notes that, after receiving a Sunshine Law request from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, or DSCC, in March 2018, Hawley’s office quickly located the records being requested.
But instead of turning them over, its custodian of records, Daniel Hartman, instead stalled — and stalled. First the AG’s office said they needed until April, then August.
Even then, the office didn’t turn over the records. Instead, they went radio silent on the request. The AG’s office didn’t get around to turning over the relevant records until August 2019, nearly a year and a half later — and only then as discovery in an open-records lawsuit filed by the DSCC.
For all the law’s clarity, the designated records custodian, Hartman, had reason to stall: He’s now state director for Senator Hawley, as Beetem notes. His political wagon was hitched to Hawley’s star — not, apparently, the interests of good government.
It’s ugly. Here’s how Judge Beetem explains the AG’s machinations:
“The AGO’s failure to provide any coherent explanation for its substantial delay after failing to meet its second selfimposed, protracted deadline-much less the ‘detailed explanation’ required by the Sunshine Law, § 610.023(3), RSMo, indicates that [the AGO] was not actively seeking to comply with the law. Rather, after identifying responsive documents, the AGO evaded the law’s requirements, deliberately concealing responsive documents. The AGO did not need more time to respond to DSCC’s request: it located all responsive documents on March 16, 2018, and it deliberately withheld these documents without any plausible, lawful rationale for doing so [emphasis added].”
Now, if you follow this kind of litigation, you may find your heart sinking with the realization that Hawley himself is not going to get stuck with the bill for this — not for $12,000 in fines, not for the six figures in legal fees surely to come. Neither will Hartman, his now-state director.
Instead, the taxpayers will get stuck footing the bill. The scheme to delay and knowingly, purposefully obscure public records worked. Hawley got what he wanted. He’s on to D.C. (where he apparently much prefers to live anyway).
So what can you do to hold him accountable?
It’s a small thing, but it may well be all we’ve got. Share this ruling far and wide. Tell people what Judge Beetem said. Help them understand the importance of open records — and how Hawley’s crew violated that trust.
It won’t hurt their pocketbooks. But it should hurt their political reputations. n
Josh Hawley doesn’t just stir up rioters, he also violates laws. | VIA E&E NEWS AND POLITICO
