From award-winning investigative reporter Winston H. Kemp comes a ruthless anatomy of civic rot and criminal ingenuity in the Great Lakes basin—a bristling investigation into how lines on paper became instruments of violence, and how a city taught itself not to notice. In the postindustrial sprawl west of Lake Erie—where slag hills rim the horizon and the wind smells faintly of solvents—Kemp traces a lattice of bribes, cut corners, and convenient deaths back to the desks where public works were sketched and signed.
Kemp grew up in Harbor City, a river-port wedged between shuttered paint works and a coke battery that smoldered all winter. As a young intern for the Bureau of Building Safety in the late 1990s, he handled coffee-stained plans for the Edgewater Viaduct, the Midtown Transit Hub, and a chain of emergency stair retrofits at Lorain Towers. Two decades later, when a scrap hauler turned up with a box of "as-builts" rescued from a flooded Quonset hut on Industrial Avenue, he recognized a handwriting tic and a mason's square symbol he'd seen before, tucked in the margins like a dare.
Blueprint of a Scandal reconstructs the long con that grew out of that symbol: a quiet fraternity linking permitting clerks, city engineers, and private consultants to three dominant contractors—Peregrine Construction, Stone & Rail Partners, and the O'Hara Inspection Group. A crane boom that folded in 2001 at the Midtown site; a stairwell that sheared off in 2004; a missing surveyor whose transit was found in a cattail ditch by the Ironwater Canal; a fire in a salt warehouse that burned too clean. Each episode filed away as misfortune, each payout logged as a change order. As Kemp overlays accident reports with soil maps, bid tabulations, and meeting minutes, an ugly pattern emerges: engineered weak points, concrete mixes quietly swapped for cheaper, porous aggregates, and inspections pre-cleared before pours.
The book ranges from council chambers on Lorain Avenue to the back booths of Pelican Eddie's, from a retired metallurgist's garage full of core samples to the tunnel under the viaduct where a whistleblower once kept a roll of originals. Kemp's sources—archivist Nita Bhattacharya, union steward Rosie Delgado, and Harold "Red" Klement, a guilt-struck city reviewer—guide him through a labyrinth of FOIA fights, grand jury feints, and one spectacularly botched procurement reform. Threaded through is a parallel environmental history: slag heaps, benzene plumes, lead dust settling on porches, and the slow corrosion of civic attention that made sabotage indistinguishable from neglect.
Part procedural, part civic elegy, Blueprint of a Scandal burrows into the gray zone where construction ends and consequence begins—charting a hidden economy of kickbacks and collapses and the paper trail that should have saved a city from itself.
