Si still owes people their computers he took

Simon Leis Jr. is the longtime sheriff and a former prosecutor and judge in Cincinnati's Hamilton County. The 77-year-old Republican is like the Joe Arpaio of Cincinnati. But now he's retiring at long last.

Leis crusaded for years against porn - but eventually, the local citizenry stopped giving a shit about what folks were reading in the privacy of their homes. After attitudes started changing, he seemed just pathetic. About all he did after that was demand a sales tax increase to pay for a new jail nobody wanted. (The tax hike never passed.)

But in 1995, when Leis was at the top of his game, he assembled a task force to raid computer bulletin board systems, accusing them of distributing pornography. Leis even sent his task force across the state line into Kentucky, which was outside their jurisdiction. Countless computers were illegally seized by the task force. These computers contained private e-mails of the users of these BBS's. One BBS operator's tax records were seized too.

It turned out that one of the cops on the task force ran a BBS that offered premium services that competed against one of the BBS's that was raided. But nobody was allowed to say so publicly. My life was ruined when I pointed this out.

Local BBS's never recovered from this set of raids. For several years after, there was a bunker mentality, and most area BBS's winked out of sight. Those were awful, awful years.

BBS operators and users sued the sheriff's department over the seized computers and lost e-mails. But years later, I saw a tiny article in the local blab that said the court had - for some fatuous reason - ruled in favor of the despotic sheriff. So the victims of these roguish raids never got their computers or e-mails back. Ever. To this day, Simon Leis is probably still pounding out warrants with the Chicago font using one of the confiscated machines.

To add injury to insult, Leis's task force did absolutely zippo about the wave of Internet harassment I encountered sometime after the raids. Somebody should have gone to prison for a good long time over that garbage. If I supported the death penalty, I would have absolutely favored it for the type of harassment I experienced. But instead...nothing.

The Leis era has been a living example of conservatism's warped mores. They try policing private conduct, but at other times, it's always about "me, me, me."