The mystery deepens!

Las Vegas police Capt. Kathleen Suey stole the show at Tuesday’s Clark County Commission meeting, by saying that while police and FBI agents hadn’t found any criminal wrongdoing in their review of airport land sales, they had found a connection with “a connected, current federal investigation.”

Now that’s a plot twist worthy of Lost, one of our favorite shows two seasons running. And as a senior Lostologist, we’re very experienced at making guesses as to what various things may mean. So let’s take a stab at what Suey might have meant:

Could it be “Operation G-Sting II: The Reckoning (for Developers)”?

It makes sense, after all. Developers are said to the be the focus of the second phase of the investigation that began with probes of strip club bribes allegedly given to Clark County Commissioners, including Erin Kenny. And since the airport land deals seem replete with incompetence (best case scenario for county) or corruption (worst case scenario for county) it makes sense that cops and feds would be looking at it.

We can’t wait for the upcoming episodes, either. We want to know how developers like Scott Gragson got deed restrictions lifted from parcels, thus boosting their value overnight. How he got 7.5 acres of county land worth more than $600,000 for free. And how he and other developers were able to “flip” county parcels for big profits in short periods of time.

But while we’re on the subject, let’s correct an error we made in Monday’s blog. We said that real estate appraiser Tim Morse, who worked with Gragson on almost every transaction Gragson made with the county, had estimated the value of a parcel of land owned by a company in which he had an interest. That’s apparently not true. Morse actually refrained from estimating the specific parcel owned by his company, but did appraise every other parcel in a related package. Our bad. And his, too, apparently, as he made no disclosure of the ownership.

And, since we’re still on the subject, let’s address once more what it means to “take responsibility.”

See, we’ve always operated on the Navy model, in which the captain of a ship is entirely responsible for the actions of his crew. That means, no matter what happens, the captain’s ass is always on the line, even if his crew disobey or fail to follow his orders.

Say Cmdr. John F. Steinberger, commanding officer of the destroyer U.S.S. Decatur (DDG 73), is guiding his ship to anchor for a foreign port call. He tells the officer of the watch that he wants soundings every 10 minutes, so the Arleigh Burke-class vessel (displacing 8,400 tons) doesn’t run aground. And say that officer, or the men under his command, forget the order, and the ship runs aground anyway.

Who’s at fault? The men who failed to take the soundings, and the watch officer, most directly. Who’s career in the Navy just ended? Cmdr. Steinberger’s. As captain, he’s entirely responsible for the entire vessel, everyone aboard and everything that happens to her. That’s why, at formal events when guests are announced, you won’t hear Cmdr. Steinberger’s name mentioned. Instead, after the ringing of the traditional bell, we hear “U.S.S. Decatur, arriving.” Cmdr. Steinberger, for all intents and purposes, is the ship.

(By the way, this is no indictment of the Decatur, Cmdr. Steinberger or the ship’s fine San Diego-based crew; we simply use them as an illustration. Carry on, Decatur!)

We go out of our way with that illustration to contrast it to the taking of responsibility proffered by Randall Walker, director of aviation for Clark County. Initially, Walker said the county employee who was supposed to supervise land trade appraisals was subject to “personnel actions” and that employee’s supervisor was “no longer with the county.”

Lame. Walker, like a ship’s captain, is the one who should have been making sure that the employees under him did their jobs properly, and thus he — not they — are the ones responsible.

But in today’s Review-Journal, Walker revises and extends his remarks. “Human errors were made,” he says.

Ah, ha! The unsubtle switch to the passive tense, a dead giveaway since the days of former President Richard M. Nixon that somebody is trying to weasel out of something. Yes, mistakes were made. But by whom? And who is responsible for those mistakes?

“The buck stops at the top,” Walker added. But before you give him credit, consider what he’s quoted as saying next: “Nobody is more upset or disappointed about the actions of some people than I am, which has created a number of these issues. … For employees not to follow policies and procedures that were developed internally for the benefit of the organization, I think, is egregious.”

Looks like the buck has bounced from the top, and rolled downhill, back onto those employees who didn’t follow policies and procedures like they should have. But who was supposed to make sure they followed those policies and procedures?

That would be Walker.

But, as Walker continued to point out, he was in charge of running a very busy airport in the wake of Sept. 11, overseeing a staff of 1,100 people and stepping in to fix the construction mess that is the Regional Justice Center. That might have led to an oversight.

Once again, no joy. Walker gets paid the big bucks to do the job at the airport, and has plenty of resources available to help him do it. If he can’t handle the duties assigned, he should step down, or the county should remove him. But saying you had other things on your mind while developers are getting away with millions that should otherwise have gone to taxpayers is excuse-making at its worst.

An argument can be made that Walker’s department shouldn’t even have been handling land trades in the first place, and that the experts in the county’s real-estate division should have been doing them instead. Why wasn’t it done that way is a good question, albeit one posed in hindsight. But so long as the duty was Walkers, he’s entirely responsible, regardless of what else was going on.

The irony is this: Even if Walker had fallen on his sword, taken full responsibility for the errors, pledged to fix the problems and offered the commission his resignation, he would have been fine. The county obviously values Walker’s skills, and would have kept him on the job. Only in that scenario, he would have come out looking much better.

As it is, my colleague Jon Ralston — who defended Walker in his Las Vegas Sun column today — was forced to acknowledge that “it’s clear he wasn’t paying attention.”

And the R-J called for a probe by the attorney general’s office into the matter, considering Walker’s explanation untenable.

We couldn’t agree more. Not paying attention is no excuse for what happened. The most good that can come out of the situation is to ensure that policies are revised so that somebody is paying attention, so that nobody is able to take advantage of county taxpayers again. And whoever that person ends up to be, it should be made clear to him that he’s the captain, and he either sinks or sails with his ship.