Comments@THE GUSS REPORT-Despite denying for the past year that he is a bigamist, Los Angeles City Councilmember Curren D. Price, Jr. is on the precipice of getting what he has pursued for the past dozen years: a divorce from Lynn Suzette Green, a Trenton, NJ, attorney, to whom he is presently married. Price is also presently married to Delbra Richardson, a Los Angeles real estate professional.
But this case, BD556209, has never been about just bigamy. It is about repeated instances of alleged perjury, mail and/or wire fraud and a bizarre 1 in nearly 3,500,000 incident of likely identity theft….and more.
Pull up a front row seat to witness how the corrupt Los Angeles legal, government and media cabal treat powerful people differently than the rest of us.
At center court, as it were, is Judge Marc D. Gross, whose ratings on judicial evaluation site TheRobingRoom.com, vacillate between his being incompetent and corrupt. Most commenters there agree on one thing: Judge Gross does not read the briefings, and rules on his gut rather than the law.
There are now enough red flags in the Price case that Judge Gross’s boss, Judge Thomas Trent Lewis, Supervising Judge for the Los Angeles County Family Law court system, should step in and re-assign the case or take it over himself.
Red Flag #1: Judge Lewis needs to order Mr. Price to furnish a copy of his marriage license to his second wife, Del Richardson-Price, because it asks two critical questions. First, “has either party been previously married?” And second, “if either party answers “yes,” on what date was the prior marriage dissolved?”
If Mr. Price answered that he was not previously married, it would be perjury and possible mail or wire fraud. If he answered yes, he would need to explain the date he claimed it was dissolved. And we know his first marriage was never dissolved because as of today, February 12, 2018, it is still an intact marriage.
(Disclosure: For the past half year, I have been in and out of courts across the County, including in front of Judge Lewis last month, seeking release of what I believe may be Price’s confidential marriage license, since there is no known public marriage license between Mr. Price and Del Richardson-Price in any of the cities they have been known to reside in.)
Red Flag #2: After I broke the story on Price’s bigamy, Mr. Price quietly changed his Los Angeles City Ethics Statements of Economic Interest (SEI) forms to include real estate holdings that he previously concealed. Lying on those financial disclosure forms would be perjury, too. Judge Lewis needs to ask Mr. Price – who has a law degree, but not a law license – “did you fail to list property and income on your multiple SEI forms to conceal them from a potential asset split with your first wife, Lynn?”
Judge Lewis then needs to order Mr. Price and both of his wives to turn in their past years’ personal tax returns, as well as those for Lynn Suzette Price’s law practice and Del Richardson’s real estate business, to see whether ownerships of those concealed properties were handled differently on their tax returns than they were on Mr. Price’s financial disclosure forms. If they were, that, and the marital tax filing status Mr. Price used on his returns, might be federal tax fraud.
Hey, Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey, are you following this? How about you, FBI and the IRS?
Red Flag #3 – Before this divorce case went dormant for the past several years, Price and his previous attorney, “Little” Al Robles, and their process server Antonio D. Inocentes, fraudulently represented to the court that they could not locate Lynn Suzette Price for the purpose of serving her with divorce papers. Odd, since her Trenton, New Jersey, law practice has a website, phone number and street address, and her voter registration in Mercer County, New Jersey, is a public record.
Judge Lewis needs to sit the parties down and ask why they attempted to serve divorce papers on Lynn Suzette Price (wife #1) at a luxury home at 4519 Don Arturo Place in Los Angeles. That property is owned, and leased out for substantial rental income, by Mr. Price’s second wife, Del Richardson-Price.
“Which of you decided to serve her there,” Judge Lewis should ask, “and why?” Attorney Stephen J. Kauffman, another attorney and former spokesman for Mr. Price, acknowledged that Lynn Suzette Price never lived at the Don Arturo house.
Yet right at that time “someone” changed Lynn Suzette Price’s long-dormant LA voter registration address to Don Arturo Place, without changing her Trenton, New Jersey, voter registration. The odds of that happening are 1 in 3,490,118.
Only two people out of nearly 10 million residents of Los Angeles County have a financial motive to have this question ignored, and Judge Lewis should not grant this divorce until he gets straight answers.
Red Flag #4: Since there is legitimate reason to believe that Lynn Suzette Green’s identity was stolen, Judge Lewis needs to ask Judge Gross why, in the course of his allowing this case to be revived rather than re-filed, has he accepted a faxed stipulation from Ms. Green, provided to the court through Mr. Price’s newest divorce attorney, Sven Buncher? Why, in a region where a divorce takes about a year to process and this case is now in its twelfth year, are you not requiring at least one physical appearance by Lynn Suzette Price?
And then, there is the big elephant in the room that none of the participants appear to have addressed.
(Note: Within hours of my outing Mr. Price last year as a bigamist, I appeared at a public meeting at LA City Hall where the Los Angeles Police Department suddenly revoked the press pass it issued to me, and charged me for, after I passed an FBI background check and application process. On camera, various LAPD officers, including a Commander, a Sergeant, and a Deputy LA City Attorney repeatedly and loudly threatened to have me arrested if I didn’t turn in the press pass (I refused to) which was subsequently changed to “if I used it again,” violating my civil rights and due process. More on that story in the coming weeks.)
(Daniel Guss, MBA, is a member of the Los Angeles Press Club, and has contributed to CityWatch, KFI AM-640, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @TheGussReport. Verifiable tips and story ideas can be sent to him at [email protected]. His opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
