As more and more dirty details emerge in the multiple investigations into Katherine Kealoha and her hapless husband, the former chief of the Honolulu Police Department, several questions arise from the murky depths of this incredibly tangled situation:
One, why didn’t anybody know?
And two, who has that kind of time to be doing all that?
The answer to the first question is that people did know, or at least had suspicions, and those people are either helping the feds make their case or on the receiving end of a target letter. But how is it that the community didn’t know? This is a place where rumors fly, people talk and word gets around and around. How was it possible that while these multiple alleged schemes involving reverse mortgages, trust funds, fraudulent loan applications, a handsome firefighter, Alison Lee Wong, prescription opioids, fake mailbox- stealing and various monkeyshines in the city prosecutor’s office were allegedly going on, most of Honolulu was blissfully unaware?
The mailbox incident, which now seems so long ago, kicked off a bunch of speculation, but before that, Honolulu residents were busy working and surviving and complaining about traffic while trusting that all was copacetic with the police chief and the city prosecutor’s office. Hawaii may be rapidly morphing from small town to crowded big city, but it is still a place where everybody knows everybody’s business. Somehow all this rumbling was below the community collective radar.
Second, how is it that Katherine Kealoha allegedly had time to allegedly do all this allegedly illegal, dirty and convoluted stuff? The allegations revealed thus far would seem to require an incredible amount of work and finagling and exhausting storytelling and track- covering and almost daily maintenance. She was a professional woman with a demanding job, the wife of a man with the top job in a high-profile organization, a working mother. All that. Much respect for a person who can multitask, but wow, if all that stuff ends up being proved in court, Kealoha could spend her post- conviction years giving lessons on how to keep your day job, run your side hustle, drive your Maserati and throw fancy parties for the men in your life. Seriously impressive. Some people can pull more stuff by 9 in the morning than others can do in their whole life.
Maybe the biggest question is why people aren’t more outraged. Oahu residents seem perfectly satisfied to sit back and watch this unfold in the media, like waiting for the next installment of a Netflix documentary. There’s no water-cooler gossip, little discussion around the dinner table. There’s plenty of chatter online, but it’s from the same 12 people. If all of this is true — heck, if even some of it is true — Honolulu will break into the roster of crooked and corrupt big cities where the public’s trust of the criminal justice system is eroded and the feds have had to come in and mop up the whole stinking mess.
Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.
