Rare was the new grad student asked to present at the semester’s first Fresno Poets’ Association reading. I just sat on the bench,” Hill would tell his English Department cadre, making it clear that, playing time or not, the experience impacted his character. Or go on about his time on the Maryland Terrapins baseball team. If being a buzzed-about, Bob Hope-knowing rich kid didn’t impress the mostly Valley natives enough, Hill would talk about his time as a staffer for Sen. This would be the same grandfather who introduced him to Bob Hope and got pissed when the boy expressed insufficient adulation. ![]() Stocky and brash at 21 and - as associates would learn - inclined to do more than brandish his flamethrower wit.Ībout the car: There is apparently a grandfather back east - wealthy and just as shadowy as anything else in Hill’s pre-Fresno narrative. Picture a young, high-energy Paul Giamatti. This is grad school Hill in 1988: an unknown quantity from Jersey, by way of the University of Maryland. “How does it feel,” asks Hill, “to know that my car cost more than your house?” Adam looks the new home over and asks how much the prof paid. Rappleye Investigative Journalism Award and GV Wire.Īdam pulls up in a black car that stuns Steve in a way automobiles don’t usually affect him. The caliber of unanswered questions around the deceased supervisor is high enough that in September the local daily newspaper editorialized against candidates using him to smear past associates now running for local office.įollow enough cannabis industry corruption episodes, and patterns will form.īut Adam Hill’s path to corruption is a tragically specific tale.įunding for this story was provided by the Los Angeles Press Club’s Charles M. Even his sister in New Jersey declined to discuss her brother. Among those declining to be interviewed at all were some of Hill’s closest political, professional, and personal allies. More than two dozen sources talked to me for this profile, many requesting not to be quoted by name. A locally popular indie-news site with deep sources and an intense following - which you’ll hear more about later - has placed the number of SLOcals interviewed by the FBI at more than 40. Two years later, the progressive politician would be dead, San Luis Obispo County’s biggest weed dealer nailed by the feds for bribery, and SLO political culture rocked by conspiracy allegations. And - for reasons long forgotten -that gorgeous Central Coast vacation realm felt suspect. crib, there were bribery issues in Adelanto, for sure. Whispers about shady weed commerce in Sacramento emerged. Since my decades-ago stint at The Collegian I’d gone on to tell many kinds of stories, and in the year of this start-up federal investigation I’d begun to report and write the WeedWeek California newsletter. Hill hadn’t crossed my mind much beyond a passing glance on LinkedIn - until 2018, when word got out that the FBI would start examining corruption within the state’s emerging cannabis industry. We quietly went at it, over style, and I fired him mid-semester. Hill signed his weekly column copy “adam craig hill,” a lower-case bit of posturing that caused my eyes to roll. ![]() He was a grad school poet trying to break into prose, and I was the top editor at Fresno State’s Daily Collegian. I worked with Adam at a critical juncture in our young adulthoods. ![]() But the demise of Adam Hill happened in an American pocket that only Central California residents and tourists are checking for, and the bribe he took to shape county cannabis law meant immense trouble for this little paradise. In a New York deal? The Dayspring money might not get you to the table. The money he pocketed from a local cannabis entrepreneur named Helios “Bobby” Dayspring - $32,000, according to the feds - might not even cover parking for a bonafide San Francisco legal weed crime. SLO is a place that Oprah once called “the Happiest Place on Earth.” Yet, in that season of COVID-induced isolation and with the FBI bearing down on him and twisting his mind, suicide began to make a kind of sense. At his Shell Beach home two Augusts ago, the Fresno State English Department product took his own life - months after winning election to a fourth term.
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