Justin Herdman
As United States attorney for the Northern Ohio District, Justin Herdman said his chief priority was to focus on saving lives.
Herdman took some time last week to look back on his four years as the top federal cop in northern Ohio, at what he did right and what he could have improved upon.
“What we did best in this office was to put deserving people in jail and take their money,” Herdman said. “That was our core competency being in the law enforcement business.”
Friday was the Ohio native’s last day on the job. He handed the office reins over to his first assistant, U.S. Attorney Bridget Brennan.
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David Byrne once wrote that music’s evolution is shaped by the spaces it occupies, filling rooms and halls the way water takes the shape of its vessel. Artists, he observed, “work backward, either consciously or unconsciously, creating work that fits the venue available to us.” And what if no venues were available? He doesn’t say, because before the horrible, terrible, never-to-be-forgotten year of 2020, it would have seemed like a preposterous thought.
The shutdown of performances in America has devastated the music business, threatened its infrastructure long-term, and unnerved its professionals across all sectors. The crisis began in March, when the scale and severity of the global Covid-19 pandemic became clear. In a vertigo-inducing week, the entire live entertainment industry - from megatours to Broadway to coffee houses - went dark. The fate of mid-sized independent venues is particuarly precarious, because they represent the rungs on the ladder every artist must