Anita Senkowski is a blogger in northern Michigan who has written numerous posts about a for-profit charter operator who ripped off taxpayers and is now serving a term in jail for his financial crimes. She read Mark Binelli’s piece in the New York Times about charter schools in Detroit and its surroundings and hopes that he will come to Northern Michigan to see how the fraudster mentality permeates the DeVos charter industry throughout the state.

She writes:

Binelli’s fine piece, focused primarily on districts south of Eight Mile Road, the northern border of Detroit made infamous by former Detroit Mayor Coleman Young in his 1973 inaugural address. Telling “rip-off artists and muggers” to “hit Eight Mile Road” and leave Detroit, Young made few friends in suburban Detroit, especially Oakland County.

As they say in Las Vegas, the house always wins.

And although Michigan gambled on charter schools and its children lost, there have been winners.

One, former optometrist Steven Ingersoll, (whose story I’ve beaten like a rented mule for three years), walked away with millions. Although he’s serving a 41-month federal prison term, no Michigan authority (state or local law enforcement) has expressed any interest in prosecuting Ingersoll for his admitted fraudulent conversion of approximately $5.0 million from the Grand Traverse Academy and another roughly $1.4 million from the Bay City Academy.

If Ingersoll had lived in Mississippi and not Michigan, John Grisham would have already written a not-very-fictitious-sounding novel about him.

In its theory of the case, the federal government asserted Ingersoll’s federal tax evasion case demonstrated the truth of the sayings that “money gives power” and “unchecked power corrupts”.

“Steven Ingersoll obtained control over millions of dollars by creating and running the public charter schools known as the Grand Traverse Academy. The power of that money enabled Steven Ingersoll to corrupt himself, his wife Deborah Ingersoll, his brother Gayle Ingersoll, Roy Bradley, Sr., and Tammy Bradley.

As the person who controlled the accounting books and public funds intended for the operation of the Grand Traverse Academy, Steven Ingersoll ignored his obligation to separate his personal finances from the finances of the Grand Traverse Academy.

Instead, Steven Ingersoll treated the tax dollars provided for public education as his personal piggy bank, ultimately diverting approximately $3.5 million from the Grand Traverse Academy to uses other than the operation of the Grand Traverse Academy.

Steven Ingersoll also manipulated the books of entities he controlled, including Smart Schools Management and Smart Schools Incorporated, to hide his diversion of the public money that had been entrusted to him.”

And Ingersoll, on who reported to FCI Duluth on February 2, 2017 to serve a 41 month sentence for his federal tax evasion and conspiracy convictions, filed a “pro se” motion to vacate on January 24, 2017, seeking “post-conviction relief” based on attorney Martin Crandall’s alleged “ineffective assistance of counsel” — an attorney who’d sued him for nonpayment of nearly $362,000 in outstanding legal fees.

Ingersoll’s motion was denied, and he’s sitting in stir until January 22, 2020 — ironic, since he was an optometrist.

Let’s hope Binelli takes a look back here in Michigan…about 250 miles north of Eight Mile Road.