CEO, Speaker worked closely to pass tainted energy bill

CLEVELAND (AP) — One was a millionaire CEO of a large publicly traded utility looking for 11th-hour help to save two nuclear power plants that hung like millstones around the neck of his company’s bottom line.

The other was a former legislator seeking to restore his political power after more than a decade on the sidelines.

They shared similarities as well, both large men in size and personality, skilled at glad-handing and cajoling, and, when necessary, dealing with those who stood in their way.

Today, they share tattered careers and future worries as prosecutors continue to investigate former FirstEnergy Corp. CEO Chuck Jones’ involvement in a $60 million bribery scheme secretly funded by the company to win a $1 billion legislative bailout for the plants and potentially hundreds of millions more in annual revenue guarantees for its three Ohio electric companies.

Former House Speaker Larry Householder, who shepherded the bailout bill through the Legislature with FirstEnergy money, is now a political pariah facing a federal racketeering charge.

Jones was fired in October along with two senior vice presidents. Householder lost his speakership and later his House seat.

“This is likely the largest bribery, money laundering scheme ever perpetrated against the people of the state of Ohio,” then-U.S. Attorney David DeVillers said when the scheme was revealed last year. “This was bribery, plain and simple. This was a quid pro quo. This was pay to play.”

Prosecutors have accused Householder of benefiting from the scheme, using nearly a half million dollars of secret FirstEnergy money on his 2018 House campaign, toward his Florida home and on legal fees.

Householder appears to have readily embraced a plan audacious in both size and scope that worked to near perfection until...