‘Every Politician Has Got to Have Somebody That’s the Hit Man’

Back in Ohio, Neil Clark went by many names: “most powerful lobbyist in Ohio,” “bully,” “superlobbyist,” “godfather of lobbyists.” Clark blamed his “dark Sicilian features and demeanor” for the last epithet, though it might also have had something to do with his fondness for Al Capone and the fact that his father was a soldier for the Cleveland Mafia. He wore each distinction with pride, the complimentary and derogatory alike. As he saw it, a lobbyist without enemies wasn’t much of a lobbyist. But the label Clark relished most of all was “prince of darkness.” It suited his sense of himself: a master of political devilry.

On a spring morning in 2021 — the Ides of March, to be exact — Clark was hundreds of miles away from all that. He was in southwestern Florida, driving around with a loaded handgun. For years, Clark had split his time between the golf greens of the Gulf Coast and the Statehouse in Columbus, where until recently his Republican lobbying firm had been thriving. As he neared a retention pond, Clark pulled over and stepped out into the warm Florida air. He took the gun with him as he walked toward the far side of the pond, where palm crowns burst out of the underbrush. A little before noon, sheriff’s deputies found Clark lying behind the pond, the handgun in the grass between his legs. Still legible through the blood, his T-shirt read, “DeWine for Governor.” A memoir he left for his family to publish — part political tell-all, part extended suicide note — is subtitled “A Sicilian Never Forgets.”

Clark had recently spent a lot of time contemplating where it all went wrong. A few years earlier, he had decided to reconnect with Larry Householder, the powerful speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives. Clark and Householder first met in the late 1990s, a couple of years after Householder joined the Ohio House. Householder was a self-styled outsider, none too fond of the Ohio Republican Party’s Reaganite establishment, which was, in turn, none too fond of him. He hailed from rural Perry County in Appalachia, where his family went back generations. Householder exuded a homespun, aw-shucks style, partial to overalls, Carhartt jackets and his signature camouflage hunting cap. He had a habit of talking up his commitment to “Bob and Betty Buckeye,” a folksy demonym for Ohioans. The establishment wing of his caucus was full of “country-club Republicans,” he liked to say, “and I’m just a country Republican.” His hayseed bona fides were genuine — he lived on a modest farm, which he worked in his spare time — but in the Statehouse, they were also a trap. Unsuspecting rivals who regarded him as some yokel tended sooner or later to learn a hard lesson.

Clark and Householder shared a bellicose sensibility and an appetite for the political dark arts. They put those qualities to work to bring about Householder’s insurgent ascent to the House speakership in 2001. Householder left office three years later because of term limits and spent a decade away from politics before returning to the House in 2017. He planned to retake the speakership, and he soon got in touch with Clark. “Every politician has got to have somebody that’s the hit man,” Clark once explained to a client. At one point over the phone, he and Householder discussed the possibility of publicizing negative information about the families of insufficiently supportive Republicans. “If you’re gonna [expletive] with me,” Householder said, “I’m gonna [expletive] with your kids.” In these moments, his down-home drawl receded, giving way to a flatter, colder affect.

Householder and Clark’s reunion eventually led to what federal prosecutors would call “likely the largest bribery and money-laundering scheme ever perpetrated against the people of the state of Ohio.” In July 2020, the F.B.I. arrested Householder, Clark and three others on political-corruption charges. They were accused of taking tens of millions of dollars in donations from an energy company in exchange for passing a law that awarded the company $1.3 billion in subsidies and also gutted climate regulations. When Clark read the criminal complaint, he was surprised to find it littered with his own colorful locutions — “if you attack a member, we’re going to [expletive] rip your [expletive] off,” and so on. Somehow, the feds had been listening in on his conversations.