Archive for the ‘California Über Alles’ Category

Biz news.

Friday, October 6th, 2023

I thought this was a mildly interesting business story, mostly because it starts out in one direction and then goes in another.

Molekule Group has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Molekule made (makes?) air purifiers. I remember a time when they advertised pretty heavily on some of the podcasts I listened to.

The claimed reason for bankruptcy seems to be wanting to get out of their office lease, because San Francisco.

Molekule started a seven-year lease spanning the entirety of the building in February 2019. The monthly base rent began at $209,231 with an annual 3% increase.
The bankruptcy petition alleges that the company abandoned its headquarters in May “out of concern for its employees’ safety” and attempted to negotiate with its landlord to terminate the lease.
“San Francisco’s homeless crisis created a dangerous environment around the SF Headquarters, especially in the area between the SF Headquarters and the nearest public transit stop,” Tyler stated in his declaration.

Except:

But three former Molekule employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the safety situation described in the filings was an exaggeration. Although there were issues with cleanliness around the office location, the former employees don’t remember safety being a primary concern while they worked there.

According to the former employees, the office was only intermittently used after March 2020, and far from dissuading workers because of safety concerns, Molekule attempted to draw people in by installing a pingpong table and touting the effectiveness of its products in keeping the office clean and safe.

One of the other factors in the company’s bankruptcy listed in its legal filing was a fractured partnership with Aura Smart Air, an Israeli air purifier company.
Aura’s failure to submit source code for a product known as Molekule 360 Hub led to the product’s suspension shortly after its launch and “severely impacted the Debtors’ revenue and growth strategy,” according to the bankruptcy filing.

What gets glossed over in the coverage: Molekule was a scam.

Wirecutter (back in the day when they were decent) called their products “Some of the worst air purifiers we’ve ever tested“. Molekule was forced to withdraw almost all of their advertising claims. Consumer Reports panned it.

How big a scam was it? Big enough that at least one of those podcasts went back and removed the ads, and any mention that Molekule was ever a sponsor, from their feed. There was at least one class action lawsuit which appears to have been settled.

So, yeah, at the very least, this looks like a dodge by a troubled company to get out of their lease by blaming San Francisco’s problems, not a legit example of the Bay Area’s ineffective government.

Quick and dirty updates.

Wednesday, August 30th, 2023

The Elvis gun went for $199,750. I don’t know if that’s inclusive of the bidder’s premium. (Previously.)

I wrote a while back about the criminal charges against Thomas Moyer, Apple’s security head and the somewhat related (I think) case against former Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith.

I missed, however, that the case against Moyer was dismissed in 2021.

But: a California appellate court reinstated the charges last week.

Friday’s opinion, written by Justice Daniel Bromberg, joined by Justices Adrienne Grover and Cynthia Lie, claimed that the evidence presented to the grand jury was “sufficient to raise a reasonable suspicion of such bribery.”

Appellate decision here. Interesting quote:

During the relevant time frame, the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office rarely issued CCW licenses. Indeed, the office’s practice was to not even process an application for a CCW license absent a special instruction to do so. Only Sheriff Laurie Smith and a small number of others in the Sheriff’s Office had the authority to give such instructions. One of those individuals was Rick Sung, who appears to have run Sheriff Smith’s 2018 re-election campaign and after the election became the undersheriff, second in command to the sheriff. Undersheriff Sung also had authority to place license applications on hold even after licenses were signed by the sheriff.

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#108 in a series)

Friday, August 18th, 2023

One of last year’s big flaming hyena stories was about Harry Sidhu, the mayor of Anaheim, who resigned over land deals with the Los Angeles Angels (and his “illegal registration of a helicopter“).

I kind of lost track of this story because California newspapers. But thanks to the Field of Schemes blog, I found out: former mayor Sidhu is taking a guilty plea.

The charges against Sidhu in a plea agreement filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana include lying to FBI agents about not expecting to receive anything from the Angels when the transaction closed — secret recordings captured him saying he hoped to secure a $1-million campaign contribution — and destroying an email in which he provided confidential information about the city’s negotiations to a team consultant.

Sidhu, who pledged to “make Anaheim shine again” after being elected in 2018, resigned after the FBI’s sprawling public corruption investigation into Anaheim became public. At the time, he denied doing anything wrong. Now, he will plead guilty to obstruction of justice, wire fraud and two counts of making false statements.

When FBI agents interviewed Sidhu on May 12, 2022, the agreement said, he “falsely stated” that he expected “nothing” from the Angels after the stadium deal was completed, that he did not conduct city business from his personal email and that “he did not recall ever providing information about the Stadium sale to the Angels consultant during negotiations over that sale.”

Really, seriously, just shut the f**k up.

The plea agreement said Sidhu destroyed emails related to the stadium sale. They include one sent from his personal email account to the Angels consultant and the former head of the Anaheim Chamber of Commerce in July 2020 with an attached document that contained “confidential negotiation information related to the potential sale of the stadium, discussion of issues related to price and other terms of the sale.”

Two of the counts against Sidhu — false statements and wire fraud — are related to his purchase of a helicopter in October 2020. According to the plea agreement, Sidhu registered the helicopter at an Arizona address, despite residing in Anaheim, to avoid paying more than $15,000 in California sales tax.

[Todd] Ament [former Anaheim Chamber of Commerce President – DB] cooperated with authorities and pleaded guilty last year to multiple felonies, including wire fraud, making a false statement to a financial institution and subscribing to a false tax return. Melahat Rafiei, a former state Democratic Party official and campaign consultant, pleaded guilty in April to one count of attempted wire fraud. Neither has been sentenced.

Remember, my people: the coverup is almost always worse than the actual crime.

Obit watch: July 24, 2023.

Monday, July 24th, 2023

Richard Barancik has passed away at 98.

The Monuments Men and Women were composed of about 350 people — among them museum directors, curators, scholars, historians and artists — whose missions included steering Allied bombers away from cultural targets in Europe; overseeing repairs when damages occurred; and tracking down millions of objects plundered by the Nazis and returning them to the institutions, and the countries, they came from.

Mr. Barancik was the last surviving member of this group.

Mr. Barancik (pronounced ba-RAN-sick) was one of four members of what was formally called the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section to receive the Congressional Gold Medal in 2015 in Washington for their “heroic role in the preservation, protection, restitution of monuments, works of art and artifacts of cultural importance.”
On the day of the ceremony, Mr. Barancik told The Los Angeles Times: “The Americans cared about the cultural traditions of Europe. We did everything we could to salvage what the Nazis had done. It’s the best we could do.”

Mike Reynolds.

At first, the murder of Mr. Reynolds’s daughter, Kimber, seemed like just one more statistic. An 18-year-old college student home in Fresno on summer break, she was attacked one night in June 1992 by two men on motorcycles who tried to grab her purse.
When she resisted, one of the men, Joseph Michael Davis, shot her in the head, in front of dozens of witnesses. She was rushed to a hospital and died 26 hours later.

One of the murderers was killed in a shootout with police.

His accomplice, Douglas Walker, was arrested and reached a plea deal for a nine-year sentence with parole after four and a half, despite having a previous felony conviction. Mr. Reynolds decided that there should be a law to keep people like him locked up.

His efforts stalled out at first. Then Polly Klass was murdered.

Almost overnight, public outrage over Polly’s murder turned into support for Mr. Reynolds’s campaign. Calls came in to his Fresno headquarters in such volume that they overloaded the city’s 1-800 system. Within weeks, he had the signatures he needed.
The bill also found a new life in the Legislature, as state and national politicians, facing election in the fall of 1994, raced to appear tough on crime. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, and her Republican opponent that year, Representative Michael Huffington, both endorsed the bill.
This time it sailed through both chambers of the Legislature, and Governor Wilson signed it into law in March. That fall, the accompanying ballot initiative passed with overwhelming support. In the years that followed, two dozen states, inspired by California, enacted their own three-strikes laws.

Tiny violin watch:

The law had, and continues to have, its detractors. Critics claimed it would overcrowd the prisons, drive up the cost of incarceration and clog the courts, as criminals facing life in prison would be less likely to reach a plea agreement.
It was also derided as unfair: Even a felony as minor as stealing a slice of pizza could result in a 25-year sentence, a situation that befell one man, Jerry Dewayne Williams. Though a judge later reduced Mr. Williams’s sentence, critics used his case as an example of the law’s unfairness.

More about Jerry DeWayne Williams.

An initiative to soften the three-strikes law failed in 2004, but a nearly identical initiative in 2012 succeeded. Both proposals mitigated the sentencing rules if the third felony was a nonviolent one. Mr. Reynolds strongly opposed them.

Noted.

Wednesday, July 12th, 2023

Leslie Van Houten is out of prison on parole.

Rosemary LaBianca was unavailable for comment.

“And I took one of the knives, and Patricia had one — a knife — and we started stabbing and cutting up the lady,” Van Houten testified in 1971. (Patricia Krenwinkel was a co-defendant and family member.)

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#107 in a series)

Wednesday, June 14th, 2023

LA City Council member Curren Price was charged yesterday with:

... five counts of grand theft by embezzlement, three counts of perjury and two counts of conflict of interest.

There are a couple of things going on here.

The district attorney’s office alleges that Price’s wife, Del Richardson Price — founder of the consulting company Del Richardson & Associates — received “payments totaling more than $150,000 between 2019 and 2021 from developers before he voted to approve projects.” The perjury charges stem from accusations that Price failed to list income Richardson Price received on government financial disclosure forms, according to the release.

According to the complaint, Del Richardson & Associates received six checks from companies either incorporated or co-owned by affordable housing developers whom Price later voted to fund projects for or sell city property to.
In 2021, Price voted to slash the price of a property sold to GTM Holdings from nearly $1 million to $440,000 six months after a company incorporated by GTM Holdings wrote a check to his wife’s firm for about $51,000, court records show.
In 2019, according to the complaint, Price voted to fund a $4.6-million real estate project involving developer Thomas Safran & Associates after his wife’s firm received checks totaling about $35,000 from a company incorporated by Safran.

The second thing that’s going on involves health insurance, believe it or not.

Price is also accused of bilking the city out of roughly $33,000 in medical premiums by listing Richardson Price as his wife on city forms from 2013 to 2017, according to the complaint. Prosecutors allege he used public funds to pay for her healthcare despite the fact that he was still legally married to Lynn Suzette Green. The council member and Richardson Price did not legally marry until 2018, records show.

Noted:

Price is the fourth current or former council member to face criminal charges in four years.

This year, Councilmember Mark Ridley-Thomas was found guilty of conspiracy, bribery and fraud for extracting benefits for his son from USC while voting on issues that benefited the school.
Councilmembers Mitch Englander and Jose Huizar also pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges in recent years after an FBI investigation.

Previously.

Obit watch: April 24, 2023.

Monday, April 24th, 2023

I got a little behind while I was on vacation, so there’s a lot of catch-up here.

Ken Potts (USN – ret.) has passed away at the age of 102.

Mr. Potts was one of the two remaining survivors of the USS Arizona.

He was working as a crane operator shuttling supplies to the Arizona the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, when the Pearl Harbor attack happened, according to a 2021 article by the Utah National Guard.
In a 2020 oral history interview with the American Veterans Center, Potts said a loudspeaker ordered sailors back to their ships so he got on a boat.
“When I got back to Pearl Harbor, the whole harbor was afire,” He said in the interview. “The oil had leaked out and caught on fire and was burning.”
Dozens of ships either sank, capsized, or were damaged in the bombing of the Hawaii naval base, which catapulted the U.S. into World War II.
Sailors were tossed or forced to jump into the oily muck below, and Potts and his fellow sailors pulled some to safety in their boat.

This is the oral history referenced above:

USSArizona.org.

Barry “Dame Edna” Humphries.

Bud Shuster (R – Pennsylvania).

During his 28 years in Congress, including three terms as chairman of the House Transportation Committee, Mr. Shuster managed to divert a disproportionately large share of federal highway trust funds into pedestrian crossings, access roads, interchanges, buses, road widening and the Bud Shuster Highway, which links State College, Altoona and the Pennsylvania Turnpike in southern Pennsylvania.
By 1991, he had perfected the earmarking of federal funds to his district so successfully that when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, was asked which state had reaped the biggest slice of the highway trust-fund pie, he replied, “The state of Altoona.”

Richard Riordan, former mayor of Los Angeles.

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#103 and #104 in a series)

Friday, March 31st, 2023

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Donald Trump. This is well covered everywhere, but I don’t want anyone saying that I’m not an equal opportunity promoter of hyenas in flames. I try very hard to be impartial in my coverage.

Mike the Musicologist sent over an interesting story: Joanne Marian Segovia is the executive director of the San Jose Police Officers’ Association, which I guess is their union.

Ms. Segovia has been indicted for smuggling fentanyl.

A federal criminal complaint states that Segovia used her personal and office computers to order the drugs between October 2015 and January 2023, including fentanyl. At least 61 shipments were mailed to her home from countries including Hong Kong, Hungary, and India, the DOJ said.

Law enforcement first learned of the connection to Segovia, who has been with the SJPOA since 2003, when investigating a network in India that ships drugs into the United States. A network operative’s phone was searched, and Homeland Security agents found messages that mentioned “J Segovia” at an address in San Jose, including the words “180 pills SOMA 500mg,” the complaint shows.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection records showed that five shipments to Segovia’s address were intercepted between July 2019 and January 2023. The packages contained more than a kilogram of controlled substances such as Zolpidem (a sedative used to treat insomnia) and Tramadol (a narcotic used to treat pain), per the court document.
The packages mailed to Segovia’s home had innocuous labels, such as “Shirts Tops,” “Chocolate and Sweets” and “Gift Makeup,” according to the DOJ. Homeland Security said shipments from several foreign countries with such labels often contain illicit drugs.

I’m not sure if this falls under “dumber than a bag of hair” or “narcotics are a hell of a drug”:

Vargas said he believes Segovia continued to order and pay for controlled substances after being interviewed by Homeland Security agents. He also believes Segovia knowingly gave false information to investigators.
Segovia is charged with an attempt to unlawfully import valeryl fentanyl. If convicted, she faces up to 20 years in prison.

To be clear (and I feel like this is kind of buried in the story) she was a civilian employee, not a sworn member of the SJPD. Also, trying to give her some grace, she may have been dealing with an addiction, or self-medicating for chronic pain. However, the article seems to indicate that she wasn’t just ordering drugs, but she was also sending them to others: in one case, she gave the return address as the SJPOA’s office.

And, of course, for both of these: “All suspects are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

Murder, he wrote.

Sunday, January 15th, 2023

As best as I can determine, Elizabeth Short was murdered either on January 14 or 15, 1947: it isn’t clear which day.

So I can claim that this is timely: “Black Dahlia: On the Anniversary of Elizabeth Short’s Murder, a Guide for the Hasty Reporter“, by Larry Harnisch. This is a re-run of an article originally published in the LAT, but now paywalled.

And as an extra bonus for you, freshly posted, and featuring Mr. Harnisch himself:

Very brief update.

Thursday, November 3rd, 2022

Former Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith: Guilty on every count.

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#98 in a series)

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2022

Good news, everyone!

Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith resigned Monday morning.

You may remember that former Sheriff Smith was indicted by a civil grand jury last December on corruption charges. You may also remember that those corruption charges (mostly) involved her issuing concealed carry permits to large campaign contributors.

What you may not know (and I missed it too) is that the corruption trial is going on right now, and the jury is actively deliberating whether she should be removed from office. Obviously, the fact that she’s resigned sort of takes the air out of the jury deliberations.

Which seemed to be part of her evil plan:

But in court Monday afternoon, her attorney, Allen Ruby, asked the judge in the corruption trial to dismiss the charges against Smith, arguing the primary penalty she faces — removal from office — is now meaningless since the jury cannot oust Smith from a job she no longer holds.

Except it didn’t work:

A judge has ruled that the civil corruption trial for Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith will continue even after Smith suddenly resigned Monday and asked the court to dismiss the case now that she can’t be kicked out of office.

Fineman’s response to the arguments highlighted the lack of precedent for removal-from-office trials spurred by a civil grand jury; the only other one in known memory in the South Bay was in 2002 when a Mountain View city councilmember was ousted. The trial is conducted in the same structure of a criminal trial and adheres to a reasonable doubt standard for guilt, but is held in civil court. Fineman is presiding because the local judiciary recused itself, and the county also recused itself, which is why the prosecution is headed by Markoff, a San Francisco assistant district attorney.

Markoff and Ruby also sparred over the collateral consequences of not allowing a verdict to be reached. Fineman and Markoff mentioned pension implications and eligibility to hold office in the future.
That touched on another ambiguity by the hybrid standing of the trial. A 2013 law penalizes a public official’s pension benefits if they are found guilty of a felony corruption crime, and bars them from holding public office again. Both Fineman and Markoff discussed how the law might apply because some of the current trial counts allege criminal elements.

A guilty verdict on any of the counts would prompt the court to expel Smith from office two months before her previously planned retirement, at the end of her sixth term in January. Her resignation undercut the trial, now in its final stages, by effectively removing its stakes and throwing into question whether the jury should be allowed to reach a verdict.
Both legal observers and Smith’s critics suspected that was a strategic move for her legacy, since an aborted trial means she can’t be formally cast in the public record as a corrupt public official thrown out of office for wrongdoing.

It isn’t clear to me: if she resigns and then is found not guilty, can she run again for the same office in the next election? If she is found guilty, is she barred from running for that office again? For any office in California?

As noted above, there’s not a lot of precedent for this. It does seem, based on the article quoted above, that it is very likely she will be found guilty of at least one charge:

Larsen and other experts nitoring the trial also believed the resignation was influenced at least in part by Smith and her attorney’s anticipation that jurors would come back with a guilty verdict on at least one of counts she was facing. Three of the counts were relatively cut-and-dry, asking jurors to decide if she accepted a San Jose Sharks luxury suite — which violates gift limits for public officials — and if she intentionally masked the suite use by buying cheaper tickets for the same game. Detailed and direct testimony from Smith’s staff seemingly confirmed those allegations.

(Hattip: Mike the Musicologist.)

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#90 in a series)

Tuesday, May 24th, 2022

Yesterday was one of those “Day For Yourself” days that my company has been granting since the recent unpleasantness began. In my case, I used a large chunk of it to go down and renew my DBA for Low Fat Heavy Industries, which was a less than fun experience. (The people in the assumed names/corporate filings branch of the county clerk’s office were awesome. The problem was that the county clerk’s office has a horrible shortage of parking: it took me longer to find a parking space than it did to get the DBA renewed. And this is not downtown: the county clerk’s office is located near where Airport hits I-35.)

So I missed covering this yesterday, but I’m only a little behind: Harry Sidhu resigned as mayor of Anaheim. He still hasn’t been charged with anything.

Also resigning:

The announcement in a two-paragraph statement from his attorney came after another prominent figure caught up in the probe, Melahat Rafiei, announced she was stepping down as a member of the Democratic National Committee and state party secretary.

…Rafiei identified herself to local media outlets as the confidential witness referenced in an affidavit supporting a criminal complaint accusing Ament of lying to a mortgage lender. The affidavit said the witness — identified as CW1 — was arrested in October 2019 on a federal bribery charge, but the complaint was dismissed at the government’s request after the witness agreed to cooperate. But no further cooperation is expected.

That’s Todd Ament, former head of the Chamber of Commerce, aka “Cooperating Witness #2”. (Previously.)

And more from “Field of Schemes”.