WHO WE ARE-As the sun was rising over the San Gabriel Valley one morning in early June of 2012, District Attorney investigators with the Public Integrity Division armed with a search warrant arrived at the home of Nick Conway, the driving force in efforts to raise $3 billion in grants for the region and give it a stronger voice with government officials.
It was the start of a nightmare for Conway. Like everyone who has ever been swept up into a criminal prosecution, especially one in the media spotlight, it is the nightmare that doesn’t end even when it seems to be over and the charges are thrown out of court.
A private contractor who had served as executive director of the San Gabriel Valley Council of Governments since 1995, Conway navigated a political battlefield mined with the egos and competing interests of officials of 31 cities, three water agencies and three county supervisors’. He was widely credited with helping get the Gold Line light rail project for the area and in making substantial progress on transportation, environmental and planning issues.
Three weeks after his home and the office of his firm, Arroyo Associates, were raided and computers and records seized, DA Steve Cooley’s office charged Conway with four felony counts alleging he violated the 1090 provision of the penal code covering conflicts of interest.
Four months later, his reputation soiled, Conway was fired by the COG’s board and lost the other clients of his government consulting business.
Conway’s living hell didn’t end even when the DA’s legal case fell apart when state appellate judges ruled in another LA County case that the 1090 provision did not apply to contractors, only to elected officials and their appointees to commissions and other public bodies.
Still, Deputy DA Dana Aratani persisted with the prosecution only to see his factual case fall apart just as the legal case did.
In all four alleged conflicts of interest involving additional payments to Conway’s firm for extra work needed to administer contracts, the defense showed all the contracts were done with approval of the COGs lawyers and the COG board in public – including getting the support of the two COG board members who had sought his prosecution.
“The court feels there is no crime here, period,” Superior Court Judge Norman Shapiro declared in dismissing all charges in July 2013. “People in city government maybe had an ax to grind with Mr. Conway … (who) got caught up in a disagreement after he had done everything in the open. He may have benefitted, but the people who hired him to perform, they benefitted also."
When the case was thrown out, lead defense attorney Kenneth White declared: "It was fundamentally unfair that this man was being made a scapegoat for a structural problem for someone who had a political bias against him."
Added former California Attorney General John Van de Kamp who assisted in the defense: “To go for a felony prosecution case like this did not make any sense whatsoever …He was able to provide services that were very reliable and efficient and came at a cost that is lower than they are paying now."
Indeed after Conway was fired, most of his staff was retained by the COG as public employees instead of private contractors, given substantial raises with the heavy additional cost of pensions and benefits.
Conway wasn’t so lucky. His reputation in tatters, his business ruined, he went after a settlement with the COG that would include attorneys’ fees and most of all to be vindicated. It took more than a year to get a settlement.
“I wanted a public apology from the COG and that’s what I got,” he said in an interview this week. “Nothing can restore what I lost but I wanted them to acknowledge they were wrong and that I didn’t do anything wrong.”
The settlement agreement requires that Conway be paid about $250,000 by Oct. 3 and states that “the parties agree that the filing of charges by the District Attorney was unfortunate, unfounded and frustrating to the SGVCOG, Conway and AAI (his firm) and that the SGVCOG is sympathetic to the impacts on Conway and AAI…”
That’s not much consolation for having your life ruined by a wrongful prosecution engineered by a couple of local officials of COG cities who were out to get Conway at least in part because he questioned how they were using grant money on a public works project.
“We’re glad for the settlement but it certainly doesn’t make him whole,” said White. “He wants to move on with his life and put this behind him but it isn’t easy. This was completely unjust, he didn’t deserve it.”
White, a former federal prosecutor who has handled other cases like this, said that once prosecutors “get the idea in their head that somebody is guilty and the train is moving, it is very difficult to get them to back down.”
“The truth is he’s not unique, this is way the system treats people. It chews them up and spits them out without caring about the collateral consequences. What’s scary is how people are wrongfully charged all the time and even if they are vindicated, their lives are ruined.”
Just last Sunday, the LA Times published a detailed account of how federal officials in Utah used a man in the depths of a psychotic episode in a sting operation that entrapped dozens of people who for the most part were scavenging in the desert for ancient Indian artifacts as a hobby.
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Two targets of the sting and the guy who set them up killed themselves. Most of those charged got small fines and probation. The officials who masterminded the operation were honored and got promotions.
So don’t think they only go after the bad guys. Nobody is safe when there are no safeguards and government has access to all your emails and phone calls, your banking and credit card records and just about anything else about you from schools, employers and other aspect of your life.
Most of us will never become a “person of interest” that will lead to a witch hunt. Most of us will never make the kind of political enemies Nick Conway did.
Ironically, the only people who are outside the information retrieval system are those for whom there are no records, the millions of illegal immigrants. In a sense they are freer than the rest of us as long as they remain invisible.
(Ron Kaye is a lifetime journalist, writer and political observer. He is the former editor of the Daily News and the founder of the Saving LA Project. He writes occasionally for CityWatch and can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 78
Pub: Sep 26, 2014
