O'MALLEY - Replaced by a colleague who doesn't like questions.

A couple questions to the acting county recorder was all it took for two Free Times reporters to get physically escorted out of the County Administration building on Monday.

Thomas Roche currently heads up the recorder's office. He replaced Patrick O'Malley, who resigned last week after pleading guilty to one count of importing illegal porn through a computer. Roche has known O'Malley for years - he was his personal lawyer for a time and served as his chief of staff.

Starting last week, Free Times sent Roche a list of questions and requests for public documents, all pertaining to computer hard drives that were replaced in the recorder's office before O'Malley's hastened departure. As of Monday, Roche had not answered the questions or honored the public-records requests. So Free Times reporters visited and found Roche in the lobby of his office.

We asked if we could speak to Anne T. Collins, O'Malley's secretary and campaign treasurer, to confirm what sources had told us: that Collins' computer hard drives had been replaced at least twice in the last few months.

"You will not speak with Collins," Roche said.

When asked why he had not released the public records, he said, "I choose not to."

Roche then spoke briefly with a man in his office, who walked to the security guards positioned in the second-floor lobby. A few minutes later, as we tried to enter other offices, three security guards physically removed us from the building. (See freetimes.com/freeblog for a more detailed account of the incident.)

It's a troubling picture — public records withheld, reporters thrown out of county offices. But it's likely to get worse before it gets better. O'Malley's troubles might not end with his pornographic proclivities. There's the nagging question of why hard drives in his office were recently replaced. And a candidate for county recorder claims O'Malley tried to bribe her into dropping out of the race.

On January 11, Cathy Luks parked her Lexus outside Shula's Steakhouse, a favorite for area politicos, and prepared for a lunch meeting with O'Malley, already outside the restaurant entrance. He'd suggested meeting a week before, when she ran into him at the board of elections while dropping off her filing petitions. Luks, the former mayor of North Royalton, was planning to run against O'Malley.

On the advice of a friend, Luks took a small voice recorder to the meeting at Shula's.

Inside, O'Malley introduced Luks to Chris Redfern, chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, and Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason, who were dining separately. O'Malley and Luks then took seats of their own. The two chatted about why she was running, Luks says, and about people they knew in common.

"He kept trying to impress upon me that I couldn't win," Luks says. "That I wouldn't have enough support, financially." And even though Luks could never beat him, she recalls O'Malley saying, her candidacy would mean he would have to fundraise - work that would take him away from his kids this summer.

As they finished lunch, O'Malley had one more thing to add: "He suggested I come and work for him after the primary and take my name off the ballot," Luks says. "He offered me a job for $50,000 a year as an outreach specialist. I was stunned. I just stared at him."

"Why don't you just think about that?" O'Malley said, according to Luks. He added that he'd deny the conversation if she told anyone about it.

"I thought that was ironic because I had just recorded the whole thing," Luks says.

Luks gave the tape to the Plain Dealer, which reported last month that O'Malley can be heard saying, "If you decide to work for me ... if you drop out of the race, you've got to do it by Tuesday." The Plain Dealer reported that O'Malley denied offering Luks the job.

Steve Huefner, a law professor at Ohio State University and an expert in election law, contends that grounds for looking into Luks' allegations lie in Ohio's bribery provisions.

"The bottom line here is that [O'Malley allegedly is] offering a public position to Luks," Huefner says. "Public jobs should be about qualifications, not favors being handed out. So it's not about the election law so much as how we're staffing public offices - via bribery, one can argue."

In Ohio, bribery is a third-degree felony that forbids anyone, before or after an election, from offering something of value to influence other candidates. "The county prosecutor would be the lead law enforcement agency for this," Huefner says.

In Cuyahoga County that means Bill Mason, O'Malley's college roommate, whose campaign loaned O'Malley $15,000 between 1999 and 2000 to run for recorder. For the moment, Mason is deferring to the feds. When asked what he was doing about Luks' allegations, Mason replied through his spokesman, "It's the understanding of this office that Cathy Luks took her issue to a federal law enforcement agency."

Luks cites Mason's close connections with O'Malley as the reason she never considered going to the county prosecutor. She says Mason has not asked her for the tape.

But there's no reason why Mason cannot initiate a review of O'Malley's actions. Scott Wilson, spokesman for the Cleveland FBI office, had no comment on federal investigations into O'Malley. However, Wilson said that, in general, "If there's violations of federal and state laws, certainly a county prosecutor can go after the state law violations."

In the case of conflicts of interest, most legal experts agree, a case should be farmed out to a special prosecutor.

Rob Frost, the chairman of the Cuyahoga County Republican Party, says any investigation into O'Malley by Mason's office would be rife with conflicts of interest. "The first resource for justice is for the county prosecutor to do something about this," he says. "You can only surmise why Mason hasn't yet appointed a special prosecutor."

"I don't know that you won't see charges in Cuyahoga County by Mason," says Redfern, the ODP chairman. "We don't know that he won't [seek an indictment]. Mason's job is much more important than a friendship. Guilt by association won't wash here."

Also worth investigating: why several hard drives at the administrative or higher staff level were replaced in the recorder's office in the last seven months.

A source inside the county administration building says the old hard drives have been removed and placed in boxes that lie in a corner of the recorder's office. The source, fearing retaliation, spoke to the Free Times on the condition of anonymity.

Anne T. Collins, O'Malley's personal secretary and campaign treasurer, had her county-issued computer hard drives replaced twice in the last seven months. The second time was shortly after the March primary. Public records reveal thousands of dollars spent as recently as April on new hard drives.

Acting Recorder Roche won't say anything about hard drives. The county's Information Services Center, under the county auditor, inventories computer equipment for county agencies, but has no data for the recorder's office. For the last four years, if not longer, O'Malley kept audit staff out, says Dan Weaver, the director of ISC. "We'd send summer students over" to do inventory, Weaver says, "and he'd throw them out."

Auditor Frank Russo has ordered a review and hopes to release findings by Friday.