A publisher’s note from Ekewaka Lono
I am one person with a laptop on the North Shore of Oʻahu, mapping a network that includes a Federal Reserve director, the founding family of Hawaiʻi’s only nationally chartered bank, a judge who sat on the commission that polices judges, and the billionaire who owns the state’s investigative newsroom. They have endowed chairs, named buildings, and thirty-one million dollars in foundation assets. I have a domain name.
This is not a fair fight. It was never supposed to be.
The thing about sharks is they don’t need to coordinate. They don’t hold meetings. They just swim in the same water, eat the same food, and leave the same things alone. A guppy doesn’t need to understand shark psychology to map the currents. He just needs to watch what doesn’t get eaten.
That’s what Oʻahu Underground is: a current map. Every issue of this magazine is built from the same materials available to any journalist in the state — financial disclosures filed with the Ethics Commission, board rosters published by the organizations themselves, donor lists the nonprofits post voluntarily, appellate opinions the courts put online. I’m not hacking databases. I’m reading them. The network isn’t hidden. It’s just that nobody with a masthead has any incentive to draw the lines between the dots.
I learned this the hard way. In early 2025, I brought a dossier to Honolulu Civil Beat — documented conflicts of interest, public filings, the works. The initial response was interest. What followed was silence. Not rejection. Not “we looked into it and it doesn’t hold up.” Just: nothing. The story was never born.
Then I understood. Civil Beat can’t investigate the Luke family for the same reason a fish can’t investigate water. The publisher sat on the same school board as the bank chairman for twelve years. The family donates to the newsroom. A former bank security officer writes for the site. These aren’t accusations of corruption — they’re the topology of a small state. But topology has consequences. You don’t bite the hand that passes the breadbasket at the Punahou trustees’ dinner.
So here I am. A guppy with a map.
The advantage of being small is that nobody needs to protect you and nobody needs to flatter you. I don’t have donors whose feelings I need to manage. I don’t have board relationships that make certain phone calls awkward. The only currency I have is whether the documents I cite are real and whether the connections I draw are accurate. If they’re not, I’ll be sued. I haven’t been.
Each issue of this magazine will do one thing: take publicly available records and show you what they look like when you lay them next to each other. Issue by issue, the map gets more detailed. The financial disclosures connect to the board seats. The board seats connect to the oversight bodies. The oversight bodies connect to the courtrooms. The courtrooms connect to the press that should be covering them but can’t.
I’m not asking you to believe me about what happened in Judge Wilson Loo’s courtroom on December 2, 2022. Not yet. First I’m going to show you the system — the per diem judge model, the confidential complaint process, the 90-day loophole, the audio-only recordings — so that when I do tell you what happened, you’ll already understand how it could happen and why nobody reported it.
That’s the guppy strategy: make the map so detailed that the territory explains itself.
The sharks will keep swimming. They always do. But the thing about a good map is that once it exists, other people can read it too.
Welcome to Oʻahu Underground.
— E.L.