PROOF WE ARE BECOMING MEXICO

Cluster of SoCal cities caught in string of corruption cases

By: MICHAEL R. BLOOD - Associated Press
December 3, 2006

LOS ANGELES -- Handcuffed and led away to 10 years in prison, the former treasurer of South Gate became the latest in a growing parade of officials from the gritty suburbs south of Los Angeles jailed for government corruption.

The area abutting Los Angeles and the coastal pearls of Manhattan Beach and Rancho Palos Verdes is known for clotted freeways and fading neighborhoods, but the tally of charges has generated unwelcome notoriety for thieving, bribe-grabbing public officials.

Illegal schemes on a scale usually associated with big Eastern cities have devoured tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, prosecutors say, paying for everything from a seaside condo to massages.


South Gate Treasurer Albert Robles aspired to build a "power machine" to secretly control cities throughout the economically struggling area, according to trial testimony. One now-jailed former mayor sought to steal $6 million by steering city contracts to a shell company he owned.

With little civic involvement by local residents and only glancing media scrutiny, the cities "essentially laid themselves open for corruption, not through any fault of anybody's, but more or less through some sense of benign neglect," said Jennifer Lentz Snyder, an assistant head deputy in the Los Angeles County district attorney's public integrity division.

She believes the corruption is more pervasive than prosecutors have uncovered.

The cities that dot the area -- South Gate, Lynwood, Bell Gardens, Maywood, Huntington Park, Vernon and others -- don't get boldface listings in tourist guides. Postcard California is nowhere in sight.

Once blanketed with cauliflower and berry fields, the area was marketed decades ago as a suburban refuge where homes were affordable, the weather mild and opportunities rich.

Within a generation, there has been great change. A largely white, middle-class population mostly vanished, replaced by many Hispanics, including a large immigrant population.

Corruption charges have cut across racial lines.

"When new groups come to power, and become entrenched ... then they tend to rule it as a fiefdom," said Jaime Regalado, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute of Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles. "What they are is fledgling machines."

And what might be driving the corruption?

"It's a combination of the local, insular political structure ... with the context of poverty and limited opportunity," said Becky M. Nicolaides, author of a book about Los Angeles' working-class suburbs. "That's a recipe for problems."

California government has roots in the century-old Progressive Era, when reformers sought to curb official corruption and unchecked corporate powers. But such cases have recently given southeast Los Angeles County at least a whiff of rogue politics that are the stuff of legend in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago.

In the South Gate case, Robles, 41, was sentenced Nov. 28 to 10 years in federal prison for extracting nearly $2 million in bribes from contractors that he funneled to family and friends.

"There are different levels of hoodwinking, but I didn't think hoodwinking was a crime," Robles, who was recalled by voters, said in court.

The case's federal prosecutor said Robles turned South Gate into a "pay-to-play" city where bribes were a cost of business.

Some other cases in southeast Los Angeles County include:

-- In March, the former mayor of Lynwood was sentenced to nearly 16 years in prison for funneling millions of dollars in city contracts to a sham consulting company he secretly controlled. Paul Richards, 50, was found guilty of multiple counts of mail fraud, money laundering, extortion and making false statements to investigators.

-- Long-serving Vernon Mayor Leonis Malburg was charged with voter fraud in November, and a former city administrator was accused of bilking $60,000 in public money to pay for massages, golf outings and other personal perks. Critics have long depicted the tiny city as a virtual company town, where election shenanigans, secrecy and even thuggery were used to maintain power for a few. Malburg has pleaded not guilty.

-- In 2004, Compton's self-proclaimed "gangster mayor" Omar Bradley was sentenced to three years in custody for misappropriating public funds and making an unauthorized loan. He and two others were charged with using city-issued credit cards as "personal piggy banks."

-- Two former mayors and one City Council member in Carson received prison sentences ranging from home detention to nearly six years for a series of bribery schemes that cost the city more than $12 million. "I have failed you," then-Mayor Daryl Sweeney told residents in a July 2003 statement, after pleading guilty to 15 corruption charges.

To Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley, whose office created a special unit to concentrate on public corruption, the run of cases can be easily explained.

"I think it was going on all the time," he said. "No one was investigating it."

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Comments On This Story

I think it is the culture of corruption wrote on December 03, 2006 4:00 PM:"we have imported along with the illegal immigrants"