Whipped Cream Difficulties

Joe Wolfe has either resigned or been fired from the Fullerton, CA police department. Former Officer Wolfe was involved in the (warning!) Kelly Thomas beating death (as always, graphic image warning at that link), but has not yet been charged with a crime.

Add Compton to the bankruptcy watch. With a $42 million deficit, I doubt even a tax on rap groups with platinum records will help.

…the city has consistently fallen behind on payments to vendors, including its sheriff’s contract.

Remember when Compton was talking about reopening the Compton PD and spent $1 million on “equipment” before giving up? Good times, good times.

More recently, the city’s independent audit firm refused to sign off on the annual financial statements and quit, after Mayor Eric Perrodin wrote a letter to the state controller’s office alleging fraud might have contributed to the city’s financial issues and asking for an audit.

I’ve avoided blogging this next story because I felt like there was a limit to what my readers (many thanks to both of you) would put up with. Surprisingly to me, though, these banana republican updates have been among the most popular recent posts on my blog. You put up something thoughtful and original, and it gets ignored, but people seem to love California political corruption.

Anyway, there’s an ongoing case involving the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and accusations of bribes and kickbacks. The Coliseum is nearly broke, and USC is in talks to take it over.

A bunch of people have been indicted in the case. Former “general manager” Patrick Lynch has already pled to conflict of interest charges and agreed to repay $385,000 he got from a man named Tony Estrada.

Estrada is a former contractor with the Coliseum, and has been charged with “embezzlement and conspiracy”. Estrada is also a fugitive from justice.

Today’s LAT has an interview with the fugitive Mr. Estrada.

Tony Estrada, rocking the ski mask.

No joke. Mr. Estrada claims to be “somewhere in South America”; the interviews that make up the story were conducted by telephone and over Skype. (It is unclear to me how the LAT verified that the man in the mask was actually Estrada.)

And:

Estrada regards himself as a whistle-blower — and some Coliseum officials described him that way in the past — because he came forward to tell a government lawyer and an outside investigator about alleged kickbacks he paid to former stadium General Manager Patrick Lynch and about other purported misconduct by stadium employees. Those payments are the basis of the charges against Estrada, who said Lynch pressured him for money as a condition of keeping his janitorial contract.

This just in: our old friend Cudahy City Councilman Osvaldo Conde (of the bimbo and the badge) has agreed to plead guilty to extortion and bribery. Actually, make that former city councilman: Conde resigned yesterday.

Conde is the last of the three indicted city officials (the others being former Mayor David Silva and former code enforcement head Angel Perales) to take a plea in the case.

Fullerton PD officer Manuel Ramos is no longer with the department as of July 3rd.

Former officer Ramos faces murder and manslaughter charges in the beating death of Kelly Thomas. (Graphic image at that link.) The department did not state whether officer Ramos was fired or resigned. Ramos and officer Jay Cicinelli (also charged in the Thomas death) have been on “unpaid leave” since October.

In other news, the LA County Sheriff’s Department was apparently in the habit of passing out “official looking” badges to “civilians with no law enforcement duties”, like local politicians.

Now they’ve decided they’re going to take back about 200 of those badges.

At first glance, the badges closely resemble those deputies wear, with the same six-pointed star design. Instead of identifying the person as a “deputy sheriff,” the badges read “City Official Los Angeles County.”

Why are the badges being recalled? Well, they’ve been a source of concern since the attorney general issued an opinion in 2007, stating that the badges “created the potential for civilians to falsely pose as law enforcement officers”. The department swears that the badge recall is prompted by that opinion, and has nothing to do with the arrests of the Cudahy council members.

And why would anyone think this had anything to do with the Cudahy council members?

That’s why. That photo was taken in a nightclub in Cudahy. The badge she’s wearing is one of the badges in question; specifically, indicted Councilman Osvaldo Conde’s badge.

(Obligatory.)

It looks like San Bernardino is the next city up on the bankruptcy watch.

And retiring police chiefs are making out like bandits when they cash in their unused sick leave and vacation time:

Those employees include Roy Campos, Downey’s former police chief, who was paid $594,000 in 2009 after cashing out more than 3,300 hours of unused sick and vacation time. The same year, Monterey Park’s outgoing chief, Jones Moy, earned $531,000, including cash-outs of about 2,700 unused hours. In 2010, Santa Clara’s police chief, Steve Lodge, left his job with almost $600,000 in total pay thanks to a variety of cash-outs.
In contrast, [Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie] Beck earned $297,000 last year and [Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee] Baca made $334,000.

More:

Over his thirty-plus years with the department, [El Monte Police Chief Thomas] Armstrong was permitted to bank unused hours without limit, then cash them out at the hourly rate he made as police chief. Some of the unused sick hours also counted toward his CalPERS safety pension, which at $229,000 a year is among the largest in the entire state. Armstrong’s pension is also higher than the largest base salary he earned, $217,000.

(The LAT notes that the El Monte PD had 110 officers, for a city of 113,000, and that El Monte’s credit rating has been downgraded to “junk bond”.)

And more:

[Former El Monte chief Ken] Weldon’s and Armstrong’s contracts permitted more than three months off each year. That total covered one month of vacation, about three weeks of leave, as many as 12 sick days and 14 holidays (including Admissions Day, a September holiday that celebrates the date California became a state).

I picked the wrong profession. I should have become a police chief in California.

Edited to add: Here’s a shocker that either I missed, or that wasn’t in the original LAT story about San Bernardino:

City Atty. James Penman said city budget officials had falsified documents presented to the mayor and council for 13 of the last 16 years, masking the city’s deficit spending.
“For the last 16 years the budget prepared for the council showed the city was in the black,” Penman said, not naming those allegedly responsible. “The mayor and the council were not given accurate documents.”

If the city attorney’s assertions are true, I would expect criminal indictments somewhere down the line.