CommentsONE MAN’S OPINION-People are all atwitter about former LA City Councilmember Mitch Englander’s indictment -- oh dearie, dearie, what’s next?
What heads will roll? Angelenos wouldn’t recognize a cover-up if it were written out in a 27-page October 2019 Grand Jury indictment number 20CR00035.
Considering that the country is headed by the mad Twitter-in-Chief, it takes a lot of stuff hitting the fan to compete with Trump, but this Englander indictment makes the grade. Richard Nixon must be twisting in his grave that he didn’t have this Grand Jury to pin all the blame on Erlichman and Haldeman.
The FBI Selects the One Project out of 10 Gazillion on Which the City Council Did NOT Vote
Read the indictment (above). If you look at what it says and ignore what it omits, you might think the FBI is actually pursuing a legitimate investigation rather than a massive cover-up of Los Angeles corruption. In December 2016, LA Superior Court Judge Richard Fruin accepted as true the allegation that LA City Council habitually violates Penal Code § 86 by its established vote trading scheme. Judge Fruin merely ruled that plaintiffs could do nothing about city council’s criminal vote trading system because the council’s behavior was “non-justiciable,” i.e. above the law.
Are we to believe that the lofty FBI is so mentally dense that it believes that 10,000 consecutive unanimous votes are the result of a legal voting system? Creo que no. About the only time which I recall that this vote trading requirement was slightly modified was for the Mobility Plan 2035 when certain councilmembers objected to the citywide plan as it impacted their own districts.
Councilmember Cedillo actually invoked the vote trading agreement. The compromise was that Councilmembers Koretz, Cedillo and Ryu could vote No, and then later, their subsequent modifications would get unanimous approvals. (Ok another time: Englander got to vote No once because he had promised a major campaign contributor that if elected, Englander would vote No. We know this fact because Council President Wesson stopped the proceedings in order to explain to the other councilmembers why Englander, who was a newbee at the time, got to vote No.)
It Doesn’t Take a Genius to Understand Fruin’s and the FBI’s Protection of LA Corruption
Penal Code § 86 criminalizes a city councilmember’s vote when it is given in return for another Yes vote on a different project. When each councilmember must vote Yes on other councilmember’s projects so that, in return, all the other Councilmembers must vote Yes for his projects, then the unanimous voting is part of the illegal vote trading system. The system is so integral to LA City Hall that the vote tabulating machine automatically votes Yes even for councilmembers who are otherwise preoccupied in the restrooms.
Penal Code §86 carries a maximum four-year prison term, a maximum financial penalty of $10,000 and loss of right to hold political office for life for each illegal vote. Let’s say some councilmember of voted Yes for 90 projects in other council districts in order to get unanimous approvals for 10 projects in Hollywood. That would mean 100 Penal Code § 86 violations with a theoretical 400 years in prison, $1 million in fines and being unable to ever hold public office again. If all other councilmembers had the same number of illegal projects, that would mean 6,000 years in prison, $15 million in fines and all 15 councilmembers would be out of politics forever. To me, that sounds like what LA needs, especially the part about being barred from political office for life.
And as for the billionaire developers, FBI action against the City Council’s vote trading system would kill illegal approvals of the horrid projects that are destroying LA’s quality of life. These illegal projects not only involve money laundering but also result in the destruction of rent-controlled housing which in turn has created the homelessness crisis, resulting in the deaths of many homeless individuals at a pandemic rate. Furthermore, corruption has priced so many Family Millennials out of the housing market that Los Angeles is losing population, decimating its future tax. Heaven forbid that we hold criminals accountable and place our quality of life ahead of developer profits.
The Essence of the Cover-up
It’s easy to divine why the FBI chose Englander to investigate. It needed a corruption case that did not involve a city council vote, thereby excluding the criminal vote trading system from the lawsuit. Since the FBI does not take me into its confidence, I can only guess at the specifics of the Englander deal. I suspect Englander is forbidden to mention the vote trading system, the very thing that enabled him to demand such bribes. Why would any developer pay bribes if the Councilmember could not guarantee the project’s unanimous approval?
Didn’t City Councilmember Jose Huizar’s projects get unanimous city council approvals? That sure seems like a good reason to drop going after Huizar and select a case that did not involve a city council vote. Oops, Englander’s defense attorney might raise this anomaly if the case were to go to trial. When you read his indictment, it looks like a bizarro Law and Order episode where they set up a sting for a drug king pin and as his car rolls dockside for the big exchange of cash for heroin, then the cops swoop in and arrest his driver for a busted tail light. (For non-Angelenos, Council President Wesson and Mayor Garcetti are the king pins.)
More likely than not, Englander’s guilty plea in all this foolishness, and the light sentence he is sure to receive, will include the unspoken detail of a multi-million dollar pay off once his sojourn at Club Fed is completed. But this, of course, will be predicated upon his silence about the city council’s criminal vote trading system.
(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney and a CityWatch contributor. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
