Tale of a ‘rainmaker’

By Joel Thurtell

Well, well. So Abe Munfakh, the “self-made man,” is running for state senate.

Seems just yesterday that his $10 million inside deal — the no-bid contract his engineering firm received from the Western Townships Utilities Authority while he was a member of the Plymouth Township board — got him run out of office.

Munfakh, an incumbent on the Plymouth Township board in 1992, placed last in a field of seven candidates.

The voters smelled the deal a crowd of cronies cooked up to enrich lawyers, engineers and public relations hucksters in the scandal that came to be known as Sewergate.

On a website, Munfakh’s profile describes the retired chief of the Ann Arbor engineering firm of Ayres, Lewis, Norris and May as a “rainmaker.”

Rainmaker, indeed.

Eighteen years ago, plus a couple months, the Detroit Free Press published my articles about the back-room dealing that created WTUA. It was an arrangement, now in the ground and operating, that called for piping sewage from Canton, Northville and Plymouth townships across watersheds to the Ypsilanti Community Utilities Authority near the Huron River for processing, then pumping a like amount of fluid back to the Lower Rouge in Canton.

While the insider-trading stories brought down such politicians as Munfakh, Maurice Breen and Georgina Goss, they also looked like opportunity to a Livonia lawyer few had heard of. Sewergate opened a career in politics to a greenhorn candidate named Thaddeus McCotter, who won Breen’s seat on the Wayne County Board of Commissioners and now is a Republican congressman from Livonia.

Abe Munfakh waited a while, then got himself elected back on the Plymouth Township board.

Guess memories are short.

Here’s the story I wrote on election day, August 5, 1992, about the trouncing of the WTUA gang. It ran on August 6, 1992. Soon, I’ll post the main sewer story I wrote for the Free Press editions on Saturday, February 22, 1992. Published with permission of the Detroit Free Press.