The evidence, said Bamonte, shows that the Cowles family’s River Park Square “public/private partnership” with the City of Spokane turned on criminal fraud involving corrupt public officials. In a process he describes as “exhausting my remedies,” Bamonte explained to Burns that he began compiling the evidence three years earlier.
SPOKANE COUNTY ASSESSOR NAME FULL
He told the ombudsman that the disc’s evidence shows that the Cowles family is engaged in organized crime, and that Spokane Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick is protecting them from prosecution.īamonte seated Burns at his dining room table, which groaned under the weight of thick binders full of printouts of what was on the disc.
“Each of those exhibits provides documented evidence that a crime was committed, accompanied by the request for legal remedy,” Bamonte told Burns. There was no small talk.īamonte handed Burns a computer disc containing several thousand pages of evidence and more than 170 evidence exhibits. The veteran cops-Burns spent 22 years in law enforcement, Bamonte 25-greeted each other cordially. Tony Bamonte, former sheriff of Pend Oreille County, invited him in. He is the new ombudsman of the Spokane Police Department. It was an incongruous setting for what was about to, as cops say, “go down.”Īt precisely nine o’clock, Tim Burns knocked at the door. That’s what happened on Tuesday, April 20, a beautiful spring morning, at a meticulous Spokane South Hill cottage. Even more seldom are such charges brought by a former sheriff with the credentials to make them meaningful. NOT EVERY DAY is a city’s police chief accused of organized crime. The Spokesman-Review, a newspaper operated by a family whose proven conduct fits the legal definition of organized crime, proclaims that Anne Kirkpatrick is the best police chief in Spokane history.