“The District Attorney has been relentless in his pursuit of public
corruption and of lawbreakers within the justice system. He created
the Public Integrity Division that has prosecuted politicians whose
misconduct had gone unpunished for years.” — From District Attorney Steve Cooley’s official website.
Throughout his three terms as LA County District Attorney, Steve Cooley has made a lot of noise about his efforts to investigate public corruption but his actual achievements are barely audible — mostly a few small-town crooked politicians.
The one big case he tried to bring involved a joint DA-federal probe of so-called “pay-to-play” corruption in Mayor James Hahn’s administration wound up netting three public relations guys with Fleishman-Hillard for fudging billing records for a DWP contract. And they were prosecuted in federal court on charges of wire fraud with two facing jail — Doug Dowie and John Stodder — still out on appeals five years later. None of them got freebies or profits from what they did wrong.
Now Cooley is the law-and-order Republican candidate for California Attorney General running against Democrat Kamala Harris, the San Francisco District Attorney.
For Cooley to deserve to win, he needs to back up his overblown talk about being tough on public corruption, he needs to impanel a grand jury and fully investigate Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s flagrant disregard for ethics and the rule of law.
The focus in the media so far is on the tickets worth a couple of hundred thousand dollars that Villaraigosa took from benefactors to attend 81 sports and entertainment events, including $3,100 courtside seats at Laker games and premium seats at the Academy Awards.
Little has been said about the fortune in meals at Mozza, Drago and other high-priced restaurants the mayor has taken as gifts or his taste for fine wines costing $500 to $1,000 that his “friends” have bought for him.
It all adds up to a massive violation of city and state ethics laws that limit gifts from any donor in a year to $420 and require all gifts be reported. These gifts are also taxable by the state and federal governments.
Even more serious then the gift taking is the how the mayor has bestowed valuable favors in public policy and subsidies to campaign contributors and almost certainly to those who provided him with valuable gifts and freebies.
This isn’t pay-to-play the way the mayor works it. It’s “play, then pay” — first the favors are given, then the payback comes from contributors. But it amounts to the same thing and the criminality will come up if enough people are hauled before a grand jury and enough emails and deals are examined by prosecutors.
Villaraigosa got elected mayor five years ago making a big deal about how was a family man unlike Hahn whose marriage had broken up and how the Hahn Administration was the most investigated since the notorious Frank Shaw Administration in the 1930s.
Today, Villaraigosa prefers TV news reporters in his bedroom rather than his estranged wife and oversees the most corrupt administration since Frank Shaw.
It’s time to investigate and clean up City Hall and that’s Steve Cooley’s job. It’s time he stopped looking the other way and hiding out from his responsibilities. It’s time he lived up to his promises and overcame his image as an all talk, no action DA.
The mayor’s feeble defense for his acceptance of valuable gifts is that everything he does is in his official capacity as mayor. Hogwash!
Shockingly, his lawyer Brian Currey now claims the mayor has kept no records of the tickets he accepted as gifts, no records of who gave them or what events he actually attended. Currey does know he paid for tickets once in five years, to a U2 concert in October in Pasadena.
“We don’t have a documentary record
of who provided the tickets, how much they are worth or how many there
were. There were no logs kept,” Currey told Phil Willon in the LA Times.. “There’s just not much
documentation.”
That there are no records for these gifts is unthinkable for a politician who was Speaker of the Assembly, Councilman and Mayor over the last 15 years. “I’m almost speechless,” remarked Robert M. Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies.
For all his lack of character, the mayor has no shortage of chutzpah. He’s “asked” the city Ethics Commission to investigate.
First of all, the mayor and other city elected officials who are all operating inside the rampant corruption of City Hall appoint the five commissioners. Secondly, the commission has a long record of docile treatment of abuses by public officials. Thirdly, city ethics laws are weak and this isn’t a case of a violation or two but rampant abuses.
It’s a criminal, not civil, matter.
So it’s up to Steve Cooley. Rock the boat, Steve, or watch your campaign for Attorney General sink in the passivity to being a bystander to public corruption.
You are so right. Another major Villaraigosa driven hi-jinks is going on over at Van de Kamps “campus”, site of what was supposed to be a Satellite Community College Campus. Your post a few weeks ago laid out how Antonio and his cronies were involved with the abuse of Community College bond funds. They are also part of breaking regulations on federal stimulus funds and laws governing the use of Community College bond fund built facilities. Larry Frank, LA Deputy Mayor is up to his ears in this, as are many on the LA Community College Board and such LACCD execs as Larry Eisenberg and the uber conflicted LACCD vice Chancellor (or Chancellor in charge of vice) Marvin Martinez, to say nothing of the Workforce/Federal stimulus bankrolled Diane Factor of Community Development Department, who will benefit big time from illegal use of CC bonds and other sweetheart deals. The bond funds illegally used to benefit these and other Mayor favored non Community College outfits at VDK is over $7 million that we have identified thus far.
Cooley needs to look into this, or if he thinks it not in his juridiction, promise to do so when/if he is elected. Big chumks of this is under the State Attorney’s umbrella. Brown is too busy getting his picture taken with cute little Antonio to look into it so far.
This illustrates how Down Playboy,Anotnio’s corruption, has tainted so many others by pushing, luring and paying them off to play dirty pool for he and his cronies’ benefit. This is how a bad apple left to rot ruins a lot of the others in the barrel. Go Ron.
- Miki Jackson for The Van de Kamp Coalition at vandekamps.org
Cooley is keeping LA safe from that old codger in Switzerland. He hopes that will be his ticket to AG. He is next door to the most corrupt administration and thinks everyone in LA is dumb enough to vote for him. I’m going with Kamala, unless he investigates not only the Mayor but several corrupt Councilmembers.
I belong to numerous business and trade groups all politically active.
Being on many committees that review who we should or should not support have had numerous discussions about Cooley’s lack of willingness to pursue the corruption.
These groups would normally all favor Cooley. However, he has lost a number of those organizations support.
WHOA! Before granting Cooley’s office sainthood or Obama godliness, he needs to answer why his office never prosecuted cases of massive fraud at the Los Angeles Housing Authority!!! Why did he always gave in to any pressure to investigate and prosecute millions of dollars of fraud by HACLA and its political partners?? Several whistleblowers (some former District Attorney investigators) provided evidence for prosecution and he did nothing but allowed honest whistleblowers swing in the wind!!! TRue colors of leaders and integrity is what will someone do when the times get tough. Cave in or man up…We know what Cooley does…His office could of recovered millions of dollars of fruad that was allowed by HACLA administration and Section 8 multifamily landlords for the past ten yrs.
Why doesn’t Cooley prosecute misfeasance (or, nonfeasance and malfeasance) in office?
These are crimes set out in our Constitution and laws.
I hear he and some other Southern California prosecutors only send a political corruption case to the grand jury if there is an actual theft of public funds or personal benefit going to the public official.
OK, sure, that’s a crime under other laws. But it’s also a crime for public official to be aware that what he is doing is illegal and doing it anyway. The failure of public officials to carry out the laws they take an oath to uphold is a more subtle corruption of our government but it is irrevocably damaging the public’s confidence. Cooley’s failures in this arena are staggering and they explain how Villaraigosa and his labor union corruption machine is killing the City.
Who can prosecute Cooley for failure to enforce the laws? That’s malfeasance on his part, right? After all, he must know that non, mis and malfeasance are crimes he could be prosecuting and refuses to do so….
Even if the “don’t have records” on who gave the Mayor what, there is the Mayor’s calendar (remember the LA Weekly article about the 11% Mayor?), eye witnesses, and photographic evidence of the Mayors attendance at various venues throughout the years.
A first year researcher, let alone an FBI investor, should be able to piece this one together
A staff of 200, and noone could keep his calendar. The tickets must be left at his door in a brown paper bag.
Mayor failure is corrupt, crooked and sleazy. Most of his staff (including attorneys) have all left because they knew what was coming. His administration has always been on a slippery slope. His staff, like he, is unqualified, inexperienced and then when they figured out what mini mayor was really about they would flee. The truth will come out. Even the LA Times is on to him. The honeymoon is over for the worst mayor in history.
You can’t expect that existing staff can keep up with where he is ALL the time. Maybe Villarparker and the other ex-newscaster girl friend would pitch in to help (grand jury style). The ex-wife may be willing to provide some info for the few months the “family man” was with her as a sitting mayor. (Oh, he was standing?) That’s 89% of the time that they have to account for so regular staff would have to provide the rest of his itinerary and gifts he accepted.
With all this required documentation that has to be collected, the mayor will probably change the budget to hire another obedient staffer that is also deaf, mute & blind. Any takers at $100,000?
The best way not to be prosecuted by Cooley is to donate to his campaign, or hire an attorney who did. Just ask Philibosian or Salcido.
I’m not a fan of the mayor’s but at least he made his calendar known. According to one reporter, Cooley refused to share his appointment calendar when asked, citing some Supreme Court ruling that allowed a Governor not to share his.
And, wasn’t it under Cooley’s watch that a press was closed down to obtain documents via a search warrant instead of the acceptable subpoena approach that would have yielded the same results?
http://www.edwardhumes.com/articles/cooley.shtml
I have a friend who was prosecuted by Steve Cooley’s office on false charges. My friend’s crime? He was named in a will that revoked a prior will in which a friend of Cooley’s was named along with his wife as the sole beneficiaries. The friend of Cooley’s was a former member of law enforcement and one of his two sons was a deputy sheriff and the other was high up in the Highway Patrol. There never has been such a prosecution in the history of legal jurisprudence. The California Court of Appeal threw out all of the felony charges. This case got zero publicity. It was a shamefully corrupt criminal prosecution to help the DA’s friend obtain the inheritance that should have rightfully gone to my friend. I could never vote for this man for any office let alone for the Attorney General of California. I am of no relation to Kamala Harris.
Occasionally men and women are layered that adheres to that. There’s something completely different below than what’s on top. However at times, there’s a third, even deeper level, understanding that one is similar to the superior surface one.