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.

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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2012 at 6:00 pm and is filed under California Über Alles, Clippings, Cops, Law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.