As the video from June 26 reveals, Gary Rapport is ultra sincere as he tells a business group how important entrepreneurism is to the future of Wood River Valley, Idaho. But the newly hired Ketchum Community Development Corporation executive director abruptly resigned his post on July 8. And now the former director of a Garden Grove seniors meals nonprofit is returning to Orange County—in handcuffs.
A Blaine County, Idaho, judge on Thursday cleared the way for Rapport to be extradited to Santa Ana, where he faces charges of burglarizing the Seal Beach Leisure World Market in June 1997, and failing to appear at a June 2002 court hearing on the burglary rap. Rapport also faces charges in Bozeman, Montana, for allegedly trying to strangle his wife in December 2007.
An embarrassed Neil Bradshaw, Ketchum Community Development Corp.'s president, told Idaho Mountain Express reporter Terry Smith that the CDC failed to do a criminal background check on Rapport.
It was Rapport's grand plans for Ketchum that led to his arrest.
The Express covered Rapport's June 26 presentation to the Jigsaw group, which explores nontraditional ways to boost business in Central Idaho. In the comments section of the online version of the Express story, a reader posted allegations that Rapport had a criminal record.
As the walls started crashing in, Rapport then informed the Twin Falls Times-News that the CDC board was investigating the allegations against him, but he claimed that anything he'd ever been arrested for had been cleared up years ago.
It was if just saying that would make everything go away. But the day after he resigned from the CDC, Ketchum police arrested him on the outstanding Orange County warrant. The OC District Attorney's office then sought the extradition that Judge Mark Ingram granted Thursday.
The resume Rapport used to get the CDC job stated that he was director of operations with Hearts for the Homeless in Fullerton from January 1999 to December 2000. He listed being director of development and community relations with Garden Grove's Senior Meals and Services from December 2000 to May 2002.
Apparently those groups also did not conduct criminal background checks; Seal Beach police allege Rapport was responsible for the '97 burglary of several thousands of dollars worth of goods from the Leisure World Market shortly after his employment ended there. The Seal Beach job was not included on the resume.
But Rapport's supposed work in Indonesia, the Middle East and Michigan Indian reservations was played up both on his resume and by the CDC board, which before learning of their new executive director's past hailed him as a “global problem solver.”
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.