Pella Laitinen, 66 years old, retired Birch Harbor Estates groundskeeper, born in Eagle Harbor, walked into the Oakdale Pasty Cafe at 8:14 a.m. Thursday with a manila folder under his arm and a Stanley thermos of black coffee in his other hand. He sat down at the table with me, Hannelore, Sheriff Halford, the Marquette County assistant prosecutor (a 32-year-old named Annika Ronquist, who had been hired in 2022 and was, in Hannelore's words, "the kind of prosecutor who reads the file twice before her first cup"), and Charles Kotila of EGLE District 6 in Marquette.
Pella's manila folder contained 16 photographs he had taken with a flip phone between 2020 and 2023 of the underground fuel tank installation at Birch Harbor Estates: specifically, the gatehouse pump, the unlabeled tank monitor box, the missing observation well caps, the visible groundwater seepage at the base of the concrete pad in spring 2023, and a black tarp the HOA had thrown over the tank truck delivery hose every Saturday morning at sunrise across 41 consecutive Saturdays.
Charles Kotila of EGLE looked at the photographs for 11 minutes without speaking. Then he said: "Mr. Hollis, this is an unpermitted Class C underground storage tank in a documented Lake Superior shoreline zone, in a federally designated wellhead protection area. The EPA is going to declare an Imminent and Substantial Endangerment under RCRA Subtitle I. We will have a regional response coordinator on site within 48 hours. The tank will be pumped, removed, and the soil tested at the HOA's expense. The HOA will be cited for unpermitted operation. The HOA president will personally be subject to civil penalties up to $37,500 per day every day the tank has been operating without a permit. By my count, the days run from May 22nd, 2020 to today."
Annika Ronquist of the prosecutor's office wrote down the number of days on a yellow legal pad. The number was 1,322 days. She underlined the multiplication. She said in the careful voice she used in court: "That is a potential civil penalty exposure of $49,500,000 before federal criminal charges."
The pasty cafe was quiet. Sheriff Halford said: "Wyatt, I don't think Mrs. Kilroy knows." I said: "Sheriff, Mrs. Kilroy does not know. Mrs. Kilroy is, as we sit here, drafting a complaint to the township board requesting the revocation of the commercial license at my gas station. The complaint is on Birch Harbor Estates HOA letterhead. I have a copy. Pella's wife works at the Marquette UPS store where Mrs. Kilroy mailed it. The complaint is scheduled for the next regular township meeting on Tuesday, April 16th at 7:00 p.m. at the Oakdale Township Hall."
Sheriff Halford said: "Wyatt, that is convenient." I said: "Sheriff, 'convenient' is not the word my father would have used." Hannelore said: "What is the word your father would have used?" I said: "Hannelore, my father would have called it Providence."
The two weeks between the pasty cafe meeting and the April 16th township board meeting were the most productive two weeks of my career as Chief of the Oakdale Police Department. I did not work my regular schedule; I worked 16-hour days. Bobby drove up from Marquette every evening to help Cora cover the station. My sister did not complain once.
Across those two weeks, the EPA Region 5 emergency response team in Chicago dispatched a coordinator named Trinidad Vega to Marquette. Charles Kotila of EGLE dispatched a Class A inspector named Petar Barisic to the Birch Harbor property. Petar visited under the cover of a routine wellhead protection survey on the morning of April 8th. He confirmed everything in Pella's photographs. He took core samples of the soil around the tank pad and found hydrocarbon contamination above the state's action level at six of seven sample points, and groundwater contamination at the seventh. The contamination was, in Charles Kotila's professional opinion, moderate to significant for a recent leak from an unpermitted tank.
Trinidad Vega declared an Imminent and Substantial Endangerment on April 11th at 11:14 a.m. via Federal Register filing—not publicly released to the regional press until the morning of the enforcement action, per EPA practice. The enforcement action was scheduled for Tuesday, April 16th at 7:14 p.m., the exact minute the township board meeting would gavel into session.
Annika Ronquist drafted the criminal complaint against Margaret Kilroy across those same two weeks. When she filed it under seal at the Marquette County Courthouse on April 14th at 4:11 p.m., it contained 11 counts: 3 counts of false police reports, 2 counts of consumer fraud, 4 counts of operating an unlicensed retail fuel station under Michigan Act 451 of 1994, 1 count of operating an unpermitted underground storage tank under Michigan Part 211 of NREPA, and 1 count of theft by deception of HOA reserve funds totaling $214,000 across 38 months, embezzled through a sister LLC called Birch Harbor Hospitality Ventures (registered agent: Daniel Kilroy). Annika filed a parallel referral to the US Attorney's Office in Grand Rapids on April 15th for federal mail fraud, wire fraud, and Clean Water Act violations. The US Attorney's Office accepted the referral the next morning.
Joyce Larkin, the Birch Harbor Estates HOA secretary, drove into Oakdale on a Thursday evening at 7:14 p.m. on April 11th in her 2017 Subaru Outback, with a banker's box on the passenger seat and a casserole dish of tuna noodle bake on the back seat. She came to my front porch. She had not been to my house before. She had been waiting nine months, by her own account, for a moment that allowed her to come.
Joyce had been the HOA secretary since 2021. She had been quietly photocopying every document Margaret had asked her to file since approximately the third week of her tenure. Her banker's box contained two and a half years of HOA financial disclosures, 14 of Margaret's Birch Harbor Hospitality Ventures invoices to the HOA, the original 2020 construction permit application Margaret had filed with Marquette County (which she had described as a "covered storage shed" at the amenity park, though the drawings were for an unpermitted underground tank), and a handwritten log Joyce had been keeping on yellow legal paper of every conversation she had overheard between Margaret and Daniel about the HOA finances at the gatehouse pump.
The handwritten log was 31 pages long. It started in October of 2022 and ended on April 10th, 2024.
I sat with Joyce in my kitchen for two hours. She drank three cups of coffee. She did not eat the tuna noodle bake because she had baked it for me and Cora. When she left at 9:31 p.m., I had a second cooperating witness, a complete documentary record from inside the HOA, and the kind of conscience witness whose testimony juries believe without prompting.