New opinion piece out in the Indy Star about Joe Hogsett and letting that wacky goofy Thomas Carl Cook run Indianapolis.

And it is excellent.

93 WIBC.

It's Kennell the Casey's show.

I'm Rob Casey's out today.

Jim Merritt in for Casey, joined in studio by James Briggs.

You're like the opinion head honcho over at Indy Star. The that you're actually... Opinion's czar. I think Zarr is a good word. And look, this new piece is excellent. It's entitled. You can read it now over at Indystar.com. Hogs that let Thomas Cook run Indianapolis. His legacy is imploding. And the latest revelations obviously are that Thomas Cook was involved in a relationship with this

woman who was helping delegate incentive dollars to various businesses and many of these

businesses Thomas Cook ended up representing after he left the mayor's office.

This is just so egregious that this was going on.

I think one of the things we really learned here, and this is sort of a point of my column that I wrote most recently, was that Thomas Cook's influence didn't just stop when he left the city in 2020. And again, for HR reasons, he left because it was found that he was in an inappropriate relationship, so he was forced to resign from the city in 2020. But I think this new reporting shows that his influence didn't stop there. It continued even as he existed sort of peripheral to city government. And I think that's like a new level to the problematic

relationship that he had with the city that we're seeing right now. It was interesting because

we played earlier, Russ McQuaid from Fox 59 caught up with

Hogset somewhere. And his responses to Russ McQuaid, like, just there appears to be a total

lack of understanding of why this is a big deal, of why people are upset about this, and what

even was taking place and why it was so inappropriate?

Yeah, and so one of the things I tried to do in this column that we're talking about is take a

step back and show what I think the big picture problem is here.

And it is that Mayor Joe Hogset took office and sort of abdicated his role as leader of the city and

sort of let Thomas Cook take over.

And so we've been talking about Thomas Cook for over a year now, and he's still sort of an abstract figure. Like, I don't know that many people in your audience know anything about him or why we're talking about him. Do you mind if I take you down a little bit of a rabbit hole right now? Yes, please, go all the rabbit holes. So, and I want to be clear at top. I don't mean this to say, like, you got to hand it to Thomas Cook. I don't want anyone to be my takeaway.

But Thomas Cook was really good at his job. And I want to sort of set the scene for why he was so effective and why he was given this so much free reign over the mayor's office. Do you guys remember, and I'm sure you do at WIBC, when Jefferson Shreve was running for mayor in 2023 and he came out in favor of gun control. Oh, yes. They called me the day before and said, please be nice to us. Yes, we remember that very well. I said, that's not go fly. So that was Thomas Cook. That happened because of Thomas Cook. So the mayor's campaign had a long-term strategy, and it was multip-pronged. First, the mayor introduced his own

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