Ricardo Teamor arrived at John Allega's office around 4:30 p.m. one afternoon in the spring of 2002, intent on getting a bigger piece of the pie. He wanted a larger percentage of the $129 million contract Allega Cement Contractors, Inc. had been awarded for work on the Hopkins Airport runway expansion.

At the time, Teamor ran a law firm that represented Mayor Mike White's city and Etna Parking, a business controlled by White's friend and best man, Nate Gray. Teamor also owned RMC, Inc., which had been certified as a minority-owned business by the city. Allega had listed RMC as a subcontractor for the runway project to comply with a city code requiring certain levels of minority participation in city contracts.

But Allega told Teamor to go pound salt.

Teamor got angry. "I took on George Forbes and beat him and I can take on you and all your Italians and beat you," yelled Teamor, grabbing his cell phone and heading for the door. "I am a crazy motherfucker, John. I will bring the Muslims in to take care of you, too."

After he left, Allega told his assistant to "Get Ted on the phone." Ted Bodnovich is the chief of police in Valley View, where Allega's office

is located. Bodnovich was already gone for

the day, but an officer offered to page him.

By the end of the day, Allega was installing security cameras at his house.

This is a rare look at the dirty side of building a city. We know how this story ends — with Teamor and Gray behind bars for handling similar kickbacks — but we still don't know much about how it began. Or what sort of influence Mayor White might have had over his friends' backroom deals.

Last month, the city's law office finally released the results of a probe into how some Cleveland contractors used minority-owned businesses as "front companies" in order to win city contracts. Commissioned by former Mayor Jane Campbell and completed under Frank Jackson's administration, the report was kept secret for over a year. Included in this report are statements given to Valley View police by John Allega about the incident detailed above. (Teamor acknowledged that the meeting took place.)

The investigation — conducted by law firm Hahn Loeser & Parks — described how Allega allegedly ran a "check swap" scheme with his minority-owned subcontractors, funneling payments back to his business while paying the subcontractors a small kickback for using their company's name to stay under the radar of the Office of Equal Opportunity.

The law firm's report recommends legal action against Allega and other businesses involved in the airport expansion project, and calls for an examination of the system by which city contracts are awarded. If the city pursues criminal charges, Allega could face jail time and/or seven-figure fines. In the meantime, an OEO administrator has found Allega's company to be in "non-compliance" and has asked that it be barred from city contracts for two years.

But does Mayor Jackson have the cajones to fix a system of corruption

that has earned Cleveland's most powerful men — and biggest political supporters — hundreds of millions of dollars?

HERE'S HOW ALLEGA GOT RICH off the airport runway project, according to Craig Owen White, the attorney with Hahn Loeser & Parks who issued the final report. (Keep in mind, this is a model that is rumored to have been tried and tested on many other city projects such as Browns Stadium, the I-X Center, the Water Plant Enhancement Project, the Youth Intervention Center, the Public Library, the City Schools Å  you get the idea. Allega is only one of many local contractors suspected by some of looting the city's coffers under White's administration. Though Allega is the focus of this specific report, his alleged scheme was by no means unique.)

According to Owen White, in order to win the bid to build the airport's new runways, Allega Cement promised to subcontract part of the labor to six minority- or female-owned businesses, including Teamor's RMC; minority-owned Bradley Construction; and Chem-Ty Environmental, a waste clean-up business owned by a woman. Bradley Construction got the biggest subcontract (more than $9 million), Chem-Ty got $8 million and RMC took in nearly $4 million.

Mayor White, leader of the Board of Control — an entity made up of mayoral staff that reviews city bids — voted in 2001 to award the project to Allega's company.

But once the project began, Chem-Ty owner Percy Terri Thomas started to wonder why no one from her company was actually working at the airport. In a sworn statement dated October 3, 2006, Thomas described her role to Lisa Dent, an OEO administrator.

First, there were meetings at Allega's office with Nate Gray, who seemed to be in charge of Chem-Ty's involvement with the project. Later, Thomas spoke to Gray over the phone. "When will we go on site?" she remembers asking Gray. "Be patient," he told her. "Your part hasn't started yet."

Then came the faxes from Allega's accountant Jeff Wallis, titled simply, "Check Swap." These came in on days that Chem-Ty received a check from Allega for subcontract work that was not being done. The fax contained a list of companies to which Thomas was then supposed to write checks — companies like Anthony Allega Inc., Mid American Trucking (where John Allega is president) and Allega Cement. For playing along, Thomas retained 10 percent of the original check; half of that was meant for Gray, who often sent assistants to pick up his share the same day.

"You get a fax and then you get a phone call, then you know what to do," Thomas said. "Sometimes [Gray] would come to the office because he wanted it right now, right now."

When asked if she thought this arrangement was odd, Thomas said, "Well, after I realized that there was not going to be a role for us at all, all I was going to do is write checks, I was really rather surprised. I would have thought we would have been given some work to do."

Investigators at Hahn Loeser & Parks discovered that RMC and Bradley Construction seemed to have similar arrangements with Allega.

"A significant amount of the work that was attributed to RMC appears to have been performed by or under the direction of [Allega Cement]," the reports states. There is also evidence that work done by Bradley Construction "was disproportionably small compared to that which was credited to its subcontract."

"[T]hese arrangements were the result of conscious efforts made with an apparent intent to circumvent the Minority Business and Female Business Enterprise Code," the report concludes.

THE REPORT IS INTERESTING enough for what it contains. But what's missing is even more intriguing.

During the course of its investigation, the law firm interviewed Allega and Teamor. While those interviews remain secret — because they were not conducted under oath — a few details of what they discussed can be found in footnotes attached to the main document.

Teamor ranted about being misquoted by the Plain Dealer and claimed Allega had strong-armed him, controlling who RMC hired and forcing Teamor's company to accept a "nominal profit margin." Allega said that he, Teamor and Gray had negotiated a profit margin and that Teamor wanted to renegotiate because Gray's cut was too large.

And although the report suggests Bradley Construction also served as a front company for Allega, when the city announced in January that it was considering action against Allega and his subcontractors, Bradley Construction was not mentioned by name.

It's no secret that Bradley Construction was the minority-owned business attached to Cleveland's "Home Ownership Zone" initiative — a pet project of Jackson's during the time he served as City Council president.

Jackson's office has revealed that a new probe into how city contracts are awarded was launched after the first report was finished. Details have not been released.

jrenner@freetimes.com