On July 22, 2005, Attorney General, Petro, said Noe stole millions of dollars by using a "Ponzi" scheme to fabricate profits.
On August 27, 2005, Noe took a swipe at Taft, when his attorney released a statement saying that on May 13, 2001, Noe told the Governor about the rare-coin fund he operated for the BWC at a Toledo area golf club, after Taft had claimed that he did not know anything about the coin investment with Noe until April 3, 2005, when the Toledo Blade first reported it.
The first hammer dropped on October 27, 2005, when Noe was officially charged with illegally funneling $45,400 to the Bush-Cheney campaign that was raised at a $2,000-a-seat fund-raiser in Columbus, Ohio in October, 2003, by Noe making contributions in the names of others.
The scheme allowed Noe to ignore the $2,000 limit on individual donations by passing the money through 24 friends and associates, described as "conduits" by investigators.
Some of the known "conduits," are 4 current or former Ohio elected officials, including Toledo City Councilman Betty Shultz, Lucas County Commissioner Maggie Thurber, former state Representative Sally Perz, and former Toledo Mayor Donna Owens.
Court records also show that Noe’s brother-in-law, Joe Restivoand, and 2 former aides to Governor Taft also served as funnels.
All of the conduits signed donor cards that stated they were the source of their donations even though each knew that Noe made the contributions, prosecutors said. Each politician now faces state ethics charges for failing to disclose the money they received from Noe.
On May 31, 2006, critics took it as a sign that the hammer may be ready to fall on a whole slew of crooked politicians when Noe entered a guilty plea in the Federal US District Court in Toledo to 3 felony charges related to violating campaign finance laws and told the judge that he agreed "to accept responsibility to spare my family and friends the further embarrassment of any additional court proceeding."
On June 1, 2006, the Blade reported that Bush and the RNC returned a total of $6,000 in direct contributions from the Noes and said, “State and federal politicians from Mr. Taft to Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, the Republican nominee for governor, to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger - have returned tens of thousands of dollars in contributions from Noe and his wife.”
At the time of Noe's indictment, a senior Justice Department official said the case represented the largest campaign money-laundering scheme prosecuted by the DOJ since the new campaign finance laws were enacted in 2002.
Ironically, its now known that Bush's reelection could have been derailed by a reporter at the Toledo Blade, the same newspaper that has been out front on the investigation into this whole matter from the beginning.
According to Bill Frogameni in Salon.com on October 6, 2005, the Blade's chief political columnist, Fritz Wenzel, was told of Noe's campaign finance violations as early as January 2004, but never gave the information to the Blade.
He learned of the violations from a Republican by the name of Joe Kidd, who was then the director of the Board of Elections, who was actually fueding with Bernadette Noe at the time, and retaliated against her by telling Wenzel that Noe was illegally funneling money to the Bush-Cheney campaign and running a questionable coin investment with the state.
According to Salon, sources confirmed that Kidd told them he had this conversation with Wenzel at the time.
However, as it turns out, both Wenzel and his son had personal relationships with the Noes, who even attended the son's wedding.
In fact, in March 2004, a couple of months after Wenzel got the tip, his son was elected to the Lucas County Republican Central Committee, and from April 15, 2005, to the end of May 2005, Wenzel's son was on the payroll of the Ohio Republican Party.
