Bribes from Philly charter school exec land a former Milwaukee school board president in prison for two years

The former head of Milwaukee’s school board was sentenced to two years in prison Wednesday for accepting more than $18,000 in bribes from a onetime executive at a Philadelphia-based charter school nonprofit founded by music legend Kenny Gamble.

Michael Bonds, who oversaw the city’s schools from 2007 to 2018, chalked up his willingness to accept payoffs from Rahim Islam, former CEO of Universal Cos., as a “bad decision” — one that ended up hurting the school district he’d been elected to represent.

But as U.S. District Judge Gerald A. McHugh fashioned Bonds’ punishment Wednesday, he credited a better choice the former administrator had made: his early decision to plead guilty and to testify against his onetime benefactor, helping prosecutors secure Islam’s conviction earlier this year.

“There’s no question that Dr. Bonds has an inspiring life story, and he overcame great hardship to rise to a position of prominence,” McHugh said shortly before announcing his sentence. “And there’s no question he’s done a lot of good … for the Milwaukee community.”

Still, McHugh continued, addressing Bonds, a price had to be paid for criminal conduct.

“What’s serious about this offense is the betrayal of public trust — a betrayal because you overcame so much and the power and influence [you held] affected so many across the city of Milwaukee,” the judge said.

Bonds, 66, emerged as a key government witness at Islam’s trial in March, offering testimony that ultimately led jurors to conclude that the former executive had embezzled more than a half-million dollars from Gamble’s nonprofit, then bribed Bonds as part of a scheme to cover up the cash crunch brought on by that theft.

At the time, Islam had been seeking to expand Universal’s charter school operations into Milwaukee, hoping they would prove more profitable than the seven financially struggling campuses the company oversaw in Philadelphia.

Bonds backed Universal’s efforts. And in 2012, the nonprofit was approved to operate two charter schools in the city, though both failed to meet enrollment targets and became, as former employees would later describe them, costly money pits.

Still, Bonds backed Islam’s request in 2014 to open a third Milwaukee campus, and two years later voted to defer $1 million in payments Universal owed on a district-owned property it was leasing for one of its schools.

All the while, Bonds has since acknowledged, he was accepting bribes from Islam, disguised as payments for books and art to a company Bonds owned — that had not had a legitimate sale since 1994.

“I wanted to do the right thing,” Bonds later told jurors of his decision to flip on Islam, by “telling the truth about what happened.”

In the end, none of the expansions or concessions Bonds obtained for Universal helped put the nonprofit’s Wisconsin venture in the black.

Prosecutors have described the entire foray into Milwaukee as “a disaster for everyone associated with it.”

“Universal lost money,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Dubnoff wrote in court filings last year, “and in the middle of the 2016 and 2017 school year, [it] terminated its contract to provide charter services” and never paid its deferred lease payments back.

In court Wednesday, Bonds acknowledged the district had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in the deal, due, in large part, to his actions.

Still, he and defense lawyer Franklyn M. Gimbel sought to shift blame to Islam, who was sentenced to seven years in prison in July.

“I got caught up in all the hype of things [he said] he was going to do to help the neighborhood,” Bonds said. But “my activity did the opposite — it ended up having a negative impact on the district.”

At one point during his address to the court, Bonds said he should have been more up-front about the “vendor issue” posed by his relationship with Islam.

McHugh later corrected him.

It wasn’t a vendor issue, the judge said, “you were taking bribes.”