One Address, Two Judicial Officers: The Campaign Finance Trail Linking Judge Kathleen Galen and Her Magistrate

I went looking for a residency answer and came back with a Rolodex.

When a reader sent me Makoski’s July 2024 contribution to an Eastpointe City Council campaign, the first instinct, mine and everyone else’s, was to treat the Warren address on it as one more sign of where he actually sleeps. It isn’t. The address belongs to a law office, and once I pulled Galen’s contribution history next to his, it turned out to belong to her too. That is a better story than the one I went looking for.

What the Hoover Road Address Is

Mark Makoski has given to Macomb County political campaigns since at least 1998. Across the county and state records Clutch Justice reviewed, he made 69 contributions totaling about $7,030 to 55 different recipients. Sixty-seven list Hoover Road. Two list the Warren house he co-owns. Fifty of the 69 went to judicial candidates.

Several of the Hoover Road contributions list his occupation as attorney or his employer as self. The City of Warren’s assessing records settle it: 28479 Hoover is a commercial personal property account, the classification for business equipment and furnishings, registered to Mark J. Makoski, with its name last changed in April 2000. Makoski is a tenant there; the building belongs to an unrelated owner. Avvo’s Warren attorney directory also places Makoski at that address. Hoover Road through that stretch of Warren is offices, dental practices and medical buildings. Michigan’s campaign finance law asks for a contributor’s street address, not a residence, and attorneys routinely give from their office. The Hoover Road entries tell us where Makoski practiced law. They do not, by themselves, tell us where he lived.

What they also tell us, it turns out, is who practiced there with him.

Galen’s Address, Too

Galen’s earliest contributions in these records, from 2008 and 2009, list a different office farther up Hoover Road in Warren, with her occupation as attorney, self-employed. From 2010 through 2016 they list a suite on Gratiot Avenue in Eastpointe. By March 2018 that changes. Her contribution to Dana Freers that month, her three to Alyia Hakim’s district court campaign that year and her two to Julie Gatti’s circuit campaign all list 28479 Hoover Road, and the October 2018 Gatti and Hakim filings list her occupation as attorney. Avvo still lists the Law Offices of Kathleen G. Galen at Hoover Road, with the same ZIP+4 extension that appears on Makoski’s own 2014 and 2018 contributions.

Galen won the 38th District Court seat in November 2020 and took the bench in January 2021. The Hoover Road address did not leave with her law practice.

Galen’s contributions after taking the bench in January 2021, as reported by the receiving committees. Her July 2021 contribution to Kevin M. Smith lists an Eastpointe address.

Three of Galen’s four post-2024 contributions report the private law office address she shares with Makoski. One of them, filed more than three years into her term, describes her as an attorney. Canon 4(H) of the Michigan Code of Judicial Conduct bars a judge from practicing law for compensation. Directory listings go stale and contributor lines are typed by the receiving committee, which is exactly why the question belongs with the judge, who can answer it in one sentence: what is her current connection to the Hoover Road office?

Same Committees, Same Days

Shared offices produce shared invitations, so some overlap in who two attorneys support is expected. The overlap here goes further than a shared mailing list. At least 14 committees received money from both Galen and Makoski between 2008 and 2026. Eight times, the two gave to the same committee on the same date. The first was September 25, 2008, when both wrote checks to the re-election campaign of Carl Gerds III, the 38th District judge Galen would succeed.

Highlighted rows include a same-day contribution. Dates are as reported by the receiving committees. Hakim’s 2018 contributions went to her first campaign; both March 11, 2020 contributions went to her re-election committee.

The April 16, 2024 pair is the most recent. Galen, a sitting judge by then, gave $200 to Patrick Sierawski’s judicial campaign. Makoski, her magistrate by then, gave $100 the same day. Both checks are reported from Hoover Road.

Michigan allows all of it. State Bar guidance under Canon 7 says a sitting judge may contribute to another candidate’s judicial campaign, and a magistrate counts as a judicial officer for these purposes. Together, the contributions show a judge and the magistrate who sits in her courtroom moving through Macomb County’s judicial politics as a unit, out of the same office, years before and years after one of them was appointed by the other.

Beyond the Bench

The judicial giving is the bulk of the record, and two newer entries show how far the network reaches.

On July 31, 2024, Makoski gave $200 to Cardi DeMonaco Jr., then an Eastpointe City Council member and mayor pro tem. The receiving committee recorded his employer as the 38th District Court. Eastpointe is the funding unit for that court. DeMonaco had given $50 to Galen’s own campaign in 2020. Judicial officers may make private contributions to nonjudicial candidates under current State Bar guidance, so long as they do not publicly endorse. The contribution is permitted. It also put a magistrate’s money behind a council member whose body votes on the court’s budget. DeMonaco lost his seat in November 2025.

The Endorsement Wall, Checked Against the Receipts

Galen’s campaign page, which lists 28479 Hoover Road as its paid-for-by address, has posted 47 endorsement graphics this fall. Forty come from current and retired judges, most of them on the Macomb County bench. The rest come from the Eastpointe mayor, a former mayor, a county commissioner, the county public works commissioner, a former Detroit police chief, the Macomb County prosecutor and the Macomb County sheriff.

Twelve of the 47 had received campaign money from Galen, from Makoski, or from both. Given how widely Makoski has given across the Macomb bench, some overlap is unsurprising. The rows below are the ones where it is specific.

Endorsements as posted on the Re-Elect Judge Kathleen G. Galen Facebook page through October 11, 2026. Contributions are from the Galen and Makoski contributor records reviewed for this article. Highlighted rows received money from Galen. The other 35 endorsers do not appear in either record.

Four endorsers took Galen’s own money, and three of them took Makoski’s too. The sharpest timeline belongs to Alexis Grace Krot, a judge of the 31st District Court in Hamtramck. On June 18, 2026, Galen gave $100 to Krot’s re-election campaign, listing her own occupation as judge. On September 28, Galen’s campaign thanked Krot for her endorsement. Krot’s graphic describes Galen as “a longtime Eastpointe resident,” a curious credential to headline in a race that Galen’s brother spent months trying to win by disqualifying her opponent over residency, and that features a magistrate whose own Eastpointe residency the water meters do not support.

Alyia Hakim, now chief judge of the 39th District Court, received $300 from Galen when she first ran in 2018, every check reported from Hoover Road. On March 11, 2020, Galen and Makoski each gave $100 to her re-election committee, on the same day. The 39th District, which covers Roseville and Fraser, is the same neighboring court the State Court Administrative Office has recommended consolidating with Galen’s overloaded one. Michael E. Servitto received contributions from both Galen and Makoski in the same two months of 2016, with their September checks landing two days apart.

Eric Shepherd’s endorsement adds a detail of its own. Galen gave $200 to his 2024 campaign for the 41A District Court, and Makoski followed with $100 seven weeks later. Shepherd’s graphic says that before he took the bench he practiced regularly in Galen’s courtroom. Anthony Servitto, who received $100 from Makoski in July 2024, writes that he too practiced in front of Galen for an extended period as a prosecutor. Attorneys who appear before a judge, then receive money from her and her magistrate, then become judges and endorse her: the cycle is legal at every step and almost never visible all at once.

One endorsement runs the money in the other direction. Retired Judge William Crouchman’s graphic says that in more than 50 years on the bench he has never met a judge who worked harder than Galen. He has had a close view. As Clutch Justice reported in Seventy Percent, Crouchman was paid $76,132.07 for 192 sittings as a visiting judge in Galen’s court between June 2021 and May 2026, about 70 percent of everything the court spent on visiting judges. His wife, Paula Mack-Crouchman, was paid another $84,837.50 by the court over the same stretch. Together that is $160,969.57 from the court whose judge he is now endorsing.

Two endorsements come from officials whose offices appear in Galen’s courtroom every day the court is in session. Macomb County Prosecutor Peter Lucido, who received $100 from Makoski in 2020, prosecutes the state cases on her docket. Sheriff Anthony Wickersham’s office arrests and transports many of the people who stand before her. Neither endorsement breaks a rule. Both belong in the picture.

Judges are allowed to endorse other judges in Michigan, so long as the endorsement is not used for fundraising, and judges are allowed to fund each other’s campaigns. Nothing in either rule asks anyone to disclose that the endorser was a donee first. For Krot, the order of events is three months long and fits on one line of a campaign statement.

And the Money Coming Back

The checks also ran toward Galen. Her 2020 committee’s filings, with Makoski as treasurer, show contributions from several of the same people she and Makoski had funded, and from people who now endorse her.

From the Committee to Re-Elect Judge Kathleen G. Galen’s 2020 campaign statements, as reported to the Michigan Department of State.

One more contributor stands out on those statements. Between September 15 and October 29, 2020, one contributor made four contributions to Galen’s committee totaling $1,000, each reported from the Warren house Makoski co-owns and later certified he had left. Makoski was the committee’s treasurer at the time, the officer responsible for receiving and reporting that money. The contributor’s name turns up again on public payroll listings compiled by the salary database GovSalaries, this time hyphenated with Makoski’s: a City of Eastpointe part-time clerk in 2021 and 2022, the first two years of Galen’s term. The listings do not say which department employed her, and Clutch Justice has not yet matched them against the city’s own payroll records. The department is the whole question. The 38th District Court’s staff are paid by the city, but Michigan law gives a district court’s chief judge the power to appoint, supervise, discipline and dismiss them, and Galen signed the court’s reports as chief judge from 2021 through 2024. If the job was in the court, the hiring authority was hers. The city’s adopted 2022-23 budget lists nine district court clerks, three of them part-time, and its organizational chart shows part-time clerks in other city offices as well. Galen’s certified electronic recorder, the person responsible for the official record of proceedings in her courtroom and also named on the committee’s organizing paperwork, gave $20.

And the Mayor

On October 1, the campaign posted one more graphic, this one from Eastpointe Mayor Michael Klinefelt, branding Galen the city’s hometown judge. The paid-for line at the bottom reads 28479 Hoover, Warren.

The mayor’s city is not a bystander to Galen’s court. Eastpointe is the 38th District Court’s funding unit, and the court is one of its revenue lines. The city’s 2022-23 proposed budget shows court fines and fees of $1,133,736 for 2020-21, the fiscal year Galen took the bench, rising to $1,570,000 in 2021-22 and a projected $1,870,000 in 2022-23. That same budget put total district court revenue to the general fund at $1,915,724 against $1,501,083 in court expenditures. The court was budgeted to bring the city about $415,000 more than it cost to run, in a general fund of roughly $27 million.

Mayors are free to endorse judges, and nothing about Klinefelt’s endorsement breaks a rule. It is still worth knowing that the official whose budget absorbs the court’s fines is the one calling Galen the hometown judge. It is the same court where Galen sentenced a pregnant woman to 93 days after finding that having a job meant she could pay her fines, a finding the Court of Appeals called unsupported by the record. Clutch Justice covered that case in Causing Her Problems.

The Warren House, Three Weeks Later

Because Hoover Road is an office, the residency question comes down to the two contributions that do not use it.

On June 14, 2022, Makoski signed a Michigan Treasury form certifying under penalty of perjury that he no longer occupied his Warren house as his principal residence, effective March 23, 2022. Clutch Justice published that form on October 6. His campaign records show two contributions reported from that same house. The first, to Tom Rombach in July 2020, came before any claimed move. The second, a $150 contribution to Matthew Sabaugh’s circuit court campaign, is dated April 13, 2022, three weeks after the date he gave the assessor.

A contributor address can come from a preprinted check, and the contribution was reported two months before he signed the rescission. Neither point changes the order of events: the record places Makoski’s address at the Warren house after the date he swore he left it. It joins his 2020 treasurer filing, which listed that house as his personal mailing address, and the water records showing sustained use in Warren and almost none at the Eastpointe rental next door to Galen.

Warren’s assessor lists one more property in Makoski’s name: a residential condominium on the city’s south side, with its tax bills mailed to the Hoover Road office and no principal residence exemption claimed on it for 2026. Between the house he co-owns, the condo and the office, Makoski’s paper footprint in Warren is substantial. His footprint in Eastpointe, where the job requires him to be a registered elector unless an adjoining-district exception applies, is a rental whose water meter barely moves.

Across 69 contributions over 28 years, including six made after he says he moved and two filed while identifying himself as a 38th District Court magistrate, Makoski never reported an Eastpointe address once.

Questions for the Judge and Her Magistrate

Clutch Justice is sending both of them the same short list. For Judge Galen: what is her current connection to the Hoover Road law office, why did a 2024 contribution describe her as an attorney, and does Makoski still serve as her committee’s treasurer while sitting as her magistrate? For the City of Eastpointe: which department employed the part-time clerk whose surname is joined to Makoski’s, and when was she hired? For Makoski: why was his April 2022 contribution reported from the Warren house he certified he had left three weeks earlier, and has he ever used his Eastpointe address on any campaign, court or bar record? Any response will be added here.

I keep coming back to a simple picture. One office on Hoover Road. One committee run out of it. One judge, elected from it. One magistrate, appointed from it. And two sets of checks, written to the same people on the same days, from the same address, before and after the robe. Eastpointe voters deserve to know that whole picture before they vote on November 3.