From the N&R:

David M. Powell, the former Triad economic development executive and Wilmington businessman who was accused of embezzling more than $240,000 from the Piedmont Triad Partnership, took his own life Saturday…

Powell was charged in January 2016 with two counts each of embezzling and obtaining more than $240,000 by false pretense from the partnership, which is the Triad’s main economic development agency.

Locke Clifford, the Greensboro attorney who had represented Powell, said in a statement Sunday night that his client killed himself. Clifford declined to say how Powell died but said he suffered from depression.

Depression, my ass. This was a psychopath who got caught and couldn’t do the time.

This is not a cautionary tale, but merely the cost of doing business.

Powell was not an anomaly. He was the best of the best.

I regret not coming down harder on this POS, while he was alive. But I do find solace in the notion that maybe he thought about me at the end.

Powell has also robbed the community he was paid to serve of contrition and penance.

Even in death, you will not escape me.

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Those were my thoughts this morning, after I drove to the store in the rain, vacuumed and took out the trash.  But properly drunk this evening, I am much more prepared to comment upon this rotting piece of shit.

David Powell, much like Jeff Varner of CBS’ Survivor, isn’t reviled for being an asshole, but for having been caught.  Whether at the country clubs he preyed upon here or in Wilmington, the ultimate sin was existing as a reminder of what might easily become them all. Thus, he was granted absolution like Pentangeli in The Godfather or the Roman before him.

And so this piece of shit is dead, by his own hand and at great and cruel expense to his family.  That is his real legacy.

Everybody steals.  I’d like to tell you that some able local journalist is gonna chronicle the sad descent into Kure Beach oblivion, but that ain’t gonna happen, so here I am.

For every crazed and lonely blogger, David Powell is the prize and proof of  unsubstantiated suspicion regarding elected officials.  The public/private partnership is a particularly insidious target environment.

The obvious conclusion is that Powell had a tin ear for politics.