Comments@THE GUSS REPORT-Did the three most powerful politicians in the City of Los Angeles, namely Mayor Eric Garcetti, City Council president Herb Wesson and City Attorney Mike Feuer, criminally conspire to protect Garcetti by closely scrutinizing potential misconduct in some civil lawsuits against the city, while ignoring others?
Let’s dig in…
On last Wednesday’s City Council agenda, there were seven proposed civil lawsuit settlements. All but one of them was yanked from the agenda at the last minute by Wesson. (The only settlement that went forward was a $12 million one for the egregious misconduct by disgraced former LAPD Detective Marcella Winn, who previously cost taxpayers $8.3 million in another settlement. Both cases relate to wrongful murder convictions resulting in lengthy prison sentences served by factually innocent people. In the earlier case, an LA Times reporter hid crime scene bullet shells given to him by LAPD detectives as souvenirs that were later proven to be exculpatory.)
But why did Wesson, almost certainly at the direction of Feuer, put the brakes on those other six civil settlements? And more importantly, why did they wait until March 27 to do it?
According to insiders, Feuer and Wesson stopped City Council from voting on those other settlements because they were overseen by Feuer’s Chief Assistant City Attorney in charge of civil cases, Thomas Peters, who recently, stunningly and abruptly resigned from his quarter million dollar job after it was learned that he may have received referral fees from outside law firms, including some which have ongoing business with the city. Disturbingly, Feuer denies having any knowledge of Peters’ controversial side income. Feuer’s Communications Director Rob Wilcox refuses to state whether Feuer referred Peters’ alleged misconduct for investigation to the FBI, California Attorney General or the State Bar of California.
The likeliest reason Feuer and Wesson waited until March 27 to hold back the other lawsuit settlements, was because the whistleblower lawsuit filed against the City by civic hero, and now-retired LAFD Deputy Chief, Fire Marshall John Vidovich was formally settled just one day earlier, on March 26.
And that is no coincidence.
That’s the case nobody in City Hall wants scrutinized, but should be looked at closely by the FBI, given that Garcetti allegedly removed Vidovich from further exposing corruption in LAFD’s Fire Prevention Bureau in exchange for $350,000 in campaign pledges from firefighter unions, including UFLAC, for Garcetti’s mayoral re-election.
Yes, some of you might recall that LA Times reporter Dakota Smith erroneously reported back on February 20 that the Vidovich case was settled for $800,000.
Five days later, on February 25, this column exposed Smith’s misleading claim, and records show she became aware of her inaccuracy minutes after my column was published. If Smith genuinely did not previously know that she reported untruthfully, a few clicks on the court file at that moment would have confirmed it for her. Instead, she sat on her untruthful claim…while simultaneously reporting on Peters’ resignation on March 23, knowing that Peters was still, at that time, gumming up the Vidovich settlement.
So why did Feuer allow the Vidovich case to settle on March 26, while putting the brakes on all of the other proposed settlements involving Peters on March 27?
Perhaps it’s because the Vidovich case, unlike the other lawsuits, directly involved the bribery-scented Garcetti, and Feuer’s office fought tooth and nail to keep Garcetti out of a deposition, which would have subjected the Mayor to intensive scrutiny about his personal life and his conduct in office at a time he played campaign footsy with the media. Had Garcetti been deposed, everything, including his misuse of a private email account to conceal government communications, would have been cracked open for the entire world to see.
That’s why the FBI needs to dig in and find out just what’s going on with Feuer’s office, and why it handled the Vidovich whistleblower case much differently than all others.
On that note, the Times’ ongoing and misleading reporting on the Vidovich case smells eerily like its untruthful reporting by Emily Alpert Reyes, who claimed two years ago last week, on March 29, 2017, that Feuer’s office filed criminal charges and scheduled a hearing against puppet-wielding City Hall crackpot Wayne Spindler, an Encino immigration attorney. More than a week later, it was still untrue. Spindler claims the charge which was later filed against him – which was eventually whittled down to a non-criminal disturbing the peace citation (even though Spindler never actually disturbed the peace) – was fraudulently filed by Feuer’s office to cover the Times’ backside when it appears it never intended to file a charge against him at all.
Who is the common thread in the misleading reporting by the Times’ Smith in the Vidovich case and the Times’ Alpert Reyes in the Spindler case? It might very well be Rob Wilcox, Feuer’s Communications Director, who goes silent whenever asked about untruthful information leaking from the City Attorney’s office that keeps winding up in the hands of the hapless LA Times.
While Wilcox’s leaky exchanges with Times reporters might be described as cozy, soft corruption, the bigger question is whether Feuer, Wesson and Garcetti criminally conspired to settle the bribery-scented Vidovich case on March 26, instead of scrutinizing it as closely as all other civil settlements that were suddenly yanked from City Council’s agenda the very next day.
Who would believe such a coincidence when it involves politicians named Garcetti, Wesson and Feuer?
(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. Join his mailing list or offer verifiable tips and story ideas at [email protected]. His opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
