Sorting Through All The Crazy

I was going to post some links to different posts I thought worth reading.  But the first one is probably more than enough.  

The real Joe Gerace   - Lex Treinen worked on the article that exposed Bronson's Anchorage Health Department head for adding non-existing  masters degrees to his resume and led to Gerace's resignation.  This link takes you to background on that piece - the work and revelations that led up to it.  It's good, open book, here's-how-I-got-this-information type journalism.  

"A few days later, I was in Fairbanks sitting on a beach. I called a former business associate of Gerace.

'I’m surprised Joe’s in charge of the homeless in Anchorage,” the man said, “I remember we used to drive down 3rd Avenue where the homeless shelters used to be. Joe would talk about taking out his rifle and shooting the people camped there.'”

After lengthy background investigation and some personal interactions earlier, Treinen finally calls Gerace to confront him with the evidence he's found of padded resumes.  While Treinen thought he might be hung up on, the interview lasts over an hour.  It seems like Gerace knows he's cornered and while he starts out putting up some resistance, it's just bravado. before he gives up.   He's almost begging Treinen to not be too harsh on him. 

I asked him about his guard service. He dodged. I pressed again, trying to nail down a detail, or at least an acknowledgement of dishonesty on his resume. He squirmed like a slippery salmon. Sometimes his words were too confusing to understand his answers. Sometimes he made excuses. But sometimes he acknowledged he’d lied, like when I asked him about the 5 combat deployments he listed on one of his resumes.

Me: Were you deployed in combat? 

Gerace: No. 

Me: You wrote on that Visit resume that you have five combat deployments.

Gerace: Did I write that? 

Me: You wrote that. Do you know why you would have written that?

Gerace: Can you show that to me? Does it say that? 

Me: Yes. On the Visit resume that was shared with me. 

Gerace: I don’t think I wrote that Lex. 

Then Treinen moves on to the masters degrees.  Here he just folds completely.  He knows his lies have caught up with him.  Perhaps a load has been taken off him as he confesses.

" I asked him about his MBA, which he said was from Henry Cogswell College. 

Me: We checked with them, and they said they don’t they didn’t offer a Masters of Business in the year that you got. How was it you could have got it?

Gerace: I don’t know. I don’t know. I can’t answer that question.

Me: You don’t know how you got a master’s degree? 

Gerace: Wait, wait, stop. I do. I went to the classes in Everett, Washington.

Me: Do you know why they would say that they don’t have any record of that in the state of Washington doesn’t have any record of that degree? 

Gerace: I don’t know, because I’d have to ask them because there was some when the school closed, there was some heavy confusion about how to even get our stuff.

He refused to say where he would have got his Masters in Physician Assistant Studies as well. I wound down the conversation an hour and a half into it and he promised to send me copies of his degrees before the end of the day. Still, it was surprisingly cordial. Several times he tried to elicit sympathy, talking about protecting his former partners from harm that might be caused by publishing this story, or talking about the decades of service for people he’d claimed. He told me a stroke he had last week had left him partially paralyzed on his left side, and he was having trouble concentrating. Finally, he half-heartedly begged for some sort of mercy. 

'You’re gonna destroy my credibility all over I mean, I get you have to do it. Can you just not say that Joe’s not — fine, Lex, just do whatever you need to do,' he said."

Definitely worth reading for Anchorage folks. 

 My sense is that Bronson got elected because of two issues - the COVID mask requirements and the Golden Lion planned conversion to a drug rehabilitation facility.  The Kriner crowd supported him on the masks and a group of Geneva Woods NIMBY's supported him so he'd shut down the Golden Lion plans.  And that seems to be his basic agenda.  I'm sure there's also some national GOP help since they are so into local government control.  And censoring libraries is a big deal for them, which would explain our library director fiasco. 

Oh, yeah, he wants to buy a giant tent to put the homeless in.  The Assembly blocked that and it looks like Bronson might have pushed the homeless to the Centennial campground so he could argue there's no option left but going back to the tent idea.  So now we have to find the link between Bronson and the tent manufacturer.  I'm sure it's there, but it's just one more thing I haven't had the time to pursue.