CHESTER RICHARDSON (1958-2007)

Thursday, Jan. 4, 2007 | 7:01 a.m.

Chester Richardson broadcast the tale in a minister's voice, standing at the center of his chaotic living room.

I looked up from a crowded couch, trying to keep pace.

He blurted acronyms of federal offices, pointed to laws, sifted through pages piled on the floor, detailed years of misused millions of dollars meant to help the Las Vegas Valley's poor.

That night three years ago, Richardson secretly laid out a road map for a reporter to find the truth behind the Economic Opportunity Board, a nonprofit organization that had grown with the Las Vegas Valley to field a $60 million budget.

He pointed to broken promises with the Housing and Urban Development and the Health and Human Services departments, and described what he called a "shell game," where cradle-to-grave grants were poured into one bank account and used to pay whatever bills came in the mail. He had made federal Freedom of Information requests; the piles of paper on the floor were the result. He had filed a complaint with a federal inspector general.

"I'm trying to give my colleagues at the board a chance to see how serious things are and what should be done," said Richardson, a black Republican.

"I'd rather take being ostracized and save the agency."

Instead, the board gave him the boot within months, but it was too late for the organization to avoid exposure.

Most of what he said was borne out in more than 80 stories in the Sun that followed our meeting at his tumble-down house blocks from Martin Luther King and Lake Mead boulevards. The last of those stories, six months ago, detailed the organization's demise.

And although Richardson made himself available for comment many times as his allegations were proved true, his role in exposing the organization has never been disclosed.

It seems fitting to do so now, however, after his brother Patrick called Wednesday morning to announce that Chester Richardson had gone "off to a better place." He died Tuesday night at 48 of lung cancer.

Looking back, the arc of events from that night at his house has been like a Baptist sermon, one the Lafayette, La., native could have given, although I never saw him exercise his title of reverend before a congregation. The truth shall set you free.

The truth of Richardson's world also included allegations that he ran for North Las Vegas City Council without meeting residency requirements and that he spent days in jail for failing to appear at a child support hearing. He also had a cell phone that always rang, his many friends asking for leads on jobs, on grants, on answers to some problem. And the Louisiana Baptist's religious background helped form his activism, a moral compass that made him just as likely to rail at the valley's decades-old black power structure as at the Man.

Our three-hour conversation that night drew me into his encyclopedic knowledge of the federal government's 40-year-old War on Poverty. Richardson had just come back from Washington. He was surrounded by open suitcases with ties spilling out, piles of meeting minutes and binders with federal rules and regulations. He had been surprised to see a Capitol Hill official reading one of the early Sun stories digging into the organization's mess.

That night came back in a chill Wednesday when I unearthed the stapled green notepad sheets from the interview.

His words, in my hand on the page - "I've waited a lifetime" to serve on the board of an agency such as EOB . But the role he had waited so long to play was as complex as he was, because he had gathered enough information to bring the organization down, a fate he said he didn't want and was sure could be avoided by cleaning up the poverty-fighting bureaucracy.

It was not meant to be, and the EOB collapsed.

Richardson was also not meant to go gently, and so he moved from the EOB to another poverty-fighting behemoth, the Southern Nevada Workforce Investment Board, a little-known agency that uses millions of federal dollars to help people get jobs. There he played a similar role, asking for proof that things were working, that money was being well spent, that the people were getting a fair shake.

It didn't make him many friends, at least on those boards.

Not that he wasn't aware of this. Again, from that night: "I've been criticized, beat up, thrown down ..."

Richardson spent his last months in the care of a friend, confined to a bed with a view of pomegranate trees. The last time I saw him, we fell quiet as Lucinda Williams sang on an album I gave him. "Once I get to Lafayette, I won't mind one little bit," she almost cried.

He said he had reached peace.