After learning that two of his police department’s employees were officially charged in the murder of a mentally-ill homeless man, Fullerton’s esteemed Mayor Dick Jones was finally a talkin.’ He cast out this pearl:
“We are delighted this has come forth,” Mayor F. Richard Jones said. “The DA has done an outstanding job of presenting this. … He was very succinct and clear. … It’s a tragedy for the officers, for the Thomas family and for the city.”
Did you just read that right? Mayor Jones exclaiming a tragedy for the officers?!! Yep, you did read that right.
Well, some may just say that he misspoke, even though he undoubtedly had been coached beforehand by his out-of-town handlers.
And I say that he said exactly what he meant: that the whole obscene episode, and his role in creating the corruption that led to it, and later his downplaying the murderisa tragedy – for himself and the gang of thugs he set loose on Downtown Fullerton.
Of course not a word of sympathy from the good doctor for the actual victim – a sick, law-abiding homeless man. To Jones who’s “doin’ all right” up on his hill, Kelly Thomas was just another filthy bum annoying his cherished booze hall-owning pals.
But of course none of the victims that Doc HeeHaw pulled out of flaming airplane wreckage in Veet Naam had a two hundred and fifty pound cop sitting on their chest electrocuting and pistol whipping them.
No more free ride for you, Mr. Jones. People finally understand what an incompetent, loud-mouthed idiot you really are.
Former Fullerton Police Chief, and now city council recall target Pat McKinley hired Jay Cicinelli. Cicinelli was arraigned yesterday in Suprior Court in the homicide death of Kelly Thomas at the hands of six McKinley proteges.
But among all the pickpockets, thieves, sexual predators, kidnappers, thugs, and murderers hired by McKinley, Jay Cicinelli was special. The recipient of several gunshot wounds including the head shot that cost him an eye and probably useful brain matter, Cicinelli was placed on a permanent disability pension by LAPD who wisely concluded that Cicinelli was no longer fit to be a policeman.
Enter Mike Hillman, an LAPD honcho and old pal of then Fullerton Chief McKinley; Hillman was determined that Cicinelli fulfill his life’s calling as a cop, and public safety be damned. In McKinley, Hillman found his man, and Cicinelliwas put to work with a badge and a gun on the streets of Fullerton. Need some corrobrating testamony? Here’s the money quote from article linked above from none other than Jay Cicinelli:
I think he had a lot to do with getting me this job, I know he was good friends with (Fullerton Police) Chief Pat McKinley. How many departments are going to hire an officer with one eye?
Let’s put this in perspective: doing a favor for an old LAPD crony, McKinley placed the citizens of Fullerton at pysical and financial risk by employing and deploying a cop rejected by LAPD. It was done knowingly, cavalierly, and utterly irresponsibly. Apart from recognizing the alarming potential for post traumatic stress disorder, even the average civilian will have wondered at the obvious depth-perception and peripheral vision issues connected to a one-eyed cop.
Still waiting for his "Authorities" to tell him what to do...
And now that it’s time to take accountability for his actions, his out-of-town handlers won’t let McKinley do at least one honorable thing in his life: resign.
We all know the story. The Old Guard is always squawking about them thar’ outside agitators who come to town with their evil commie agendas about civil rights and other suchlike newfangled eye-d-ers. We’ve already heard it about those protesting for transparency and justice in the brutal beating death of Kelly Thomas at the hands of the Fullerton Police Department.
Hilariously, the Three Blind Dinosaurs – Jones, McKinley and Bankhead – have decided to hire an entire gang of outsiders to defend the indefensible – them. So let’s take a quick look.
Yes. I have a price. And it's remarkably low.
First there’s the mastermind, Dick Ackerman, another Mesozoic castoff who operates a sleazy lobbying scam for the Nossaman law firm, and who was just handed a huge multi-million dollar low-income housing project by his three pals on the council, and who has millions of good reasons to keep these incompetent nitwits on the council. Ackerman is a real paragon of virtue who was busted for illegally lobbying the Legislature, who created a phony charity in order to vacation in Hawaii, and who tried to foist his dimwitted wife as an Assemblywoman on Fullerton by cooking up a fake address in our city; actually Ackerman lived, and still lives behind a guarded gate in Irvine, so of course that makes him a shameless liar.
We just found out that Ackerman is peddling his ass as a expert on how to “manage” angry citizens; oh, you know the sort. The kind who react badly when innocent men are murdered in their streets.
The metamorphosis into an oxygen breathing creature was slow and painful.
Then there’s Dick’s hand-picked mud-slinging associate – a despicable toad named Dave Ellis. Rather than delve into this miscreant’s high crimes and misdemeanors we’ll just let Orange Juice Blogmeister Vern Nelson have at him in a brilliant expose. This creep is from Newport Beach.
Now, perhaps, the funniest bit of all – the anti-recall address: 603 E. Alton Ave. Ste. H . Santa Ana, CA! Santa Freaking Ana?! I guess they couldn’t find a convenient PO box in Fullerton.
It’s true that the superannuated drain clogs have engaged the services of a couple of local stooges to give the appearance of grassroots support, but really, outside of a few shopworn drunks at the boozy Chamber of Commerce mixers, who will support the Tumescent Trio?
It likes meal worms.
One of the boosters is a rather loathsome reptile named James Alexander, known in Fullerton City Hall as a small-time influence peddler and bag man for big developers. This guy is a main chance sort of lizard, and his chances are dwindling rapidly.
Then there’s some other guy named Larry Bennett, who not only backs the Dinosaurs with a weird myopia, but also defends the police union in its role in creating the Culture of Corruption in the FPD. I suppose he has to. His boys and the FPOA are inextricably joined at their collective hips, it would seem. And that’s why there’s a recall in the first place. I am also informed that Bennett sells life insurance to all these geezers, so the myopia is explained actuarially, and the circle conveniently closes.
As the recall signature gathering draws to a successful conclusion we will discover how much (and how little) support the Three Blind Dinosaurs actually have in Fullerton itself.
Politicians should always be careful about what they say. The public has a nasty habit of remembering their pronouncements.
Back in 1990 during his failed bid for County Sheriff (remember, right before his “total disability” pension claim), Don Bankhead needed a hook to get folks interested in his bad comb-over, lackluster self. So he discovered that he was really a reformer who was interested in establishing an “ethics unit” at the OCSD, you know to clean up the mess over there. Read all about it in an LA Times article, here. Enjoy the rich irony as Bankhead pontificates:
“We’ll put the shine back on the badge and we’ll all have a good clean Sheriff’s Department,” Bankhead said. “If no one’s rights are violated, we won’t get sued.”
Now fast forward to Tuesday night’s Fullerton City Council Closed Session Agenda that is littered with lawsuits against Fullerton and its lawless police department. If ever there was a department in need of an ethics unit it would be the FPD – over which Bankhead has refused to provide civilian oversight since 1988.
In the past few months the media has learned of FPD personnel charged, convicted, or alleged to have participated in grand theft, credit card fraud, kidnapping and sexual battery, assault, false arrest, and perjury, all culminating in the brutal bludgeoning death of a mentally-ill homeless man. And Mr. Ethics? Silent as a graveyard.
A word of advice, Mr. Bankhead. Time to get going establishing that ethics unit where it will do the most good. In your own department.
And by come home to roost I mean a veritable pile-up of embarrassing and expensive lawsuits we will all have to pay for.
Check out the slew of new legal threats against the city on this week’s agenda, ironically followed by salary and pension negotiations with the unions whose members caused these problems in the first place. I wonder if Bankhead, Jones and McKinley will make that connection. Highly doubtful.
And don’t forget that City Manager Joe Felz is going to take another swing at getting that raise. God Almighty, who is minding the store?
Correction: Felz raise didn’t make it on to the agenda for some reason.
Thus speaketh the frightened rabbits at the anti-recall website, a site so lame and amateurish that I will be regularly featuring its idiocy.
The operators of that site, Mssrs. Alexander, Ellis, Ackerman, and of course the Three Bind Dinosaurs are positively terrified of protesters wearing scary masks. Well, here’s another one, courtesy of our Friends at The OC Weekly.
Stop it kid, you're scaring poor old Bankhead, Jones and McKinley.
FYI, the Kelly Thomas Concert on Saturday was chock full of Fullerton families, including kids who were learning all sorts of positive lessons in humanity and citizenship.
The ironic thing is that the Three Blind Dinosaurs want you to forget the values they have established in Downtown Fullerton: drunken, brawling, lawless, fecal, condom-strewn, that’s DTF. Are these the “family values” being peddled by Bankhead, Jones, and McKinley? Guess so.
Well, old dudes, hope that fact doesn’t upset your lunch of Metamucil and oatmeal.
I keep hearing persistent rumors that the Fullerton City Manager Joe Felz has had discussions with high level County officials about the possibility of abolishing the Fullerton Police Department and replacing it with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.
Apparently the hook is not just the recent revelations of FPD misconduct, perjury, cover-up, crimes high and low, a spokesman caught blatantly lying, and the attendant PR curse that the department has visited upon itself. There is an issue of huge cost savings. And I mean huge.
While the prospect of getting honest, competent and respectful police services from the Sheriff’s Department is probably only marginally more likely than with the FPD (and there’s no way in the world it could be worse), extrapolating from current costs in contracted cities, using the OCSD could save the taxpayers of Fullerton as much as $13,000,000, per year from the FPDs bloated budget of $37,000,000.
That’s a whopping 37%, and $13,000,000 could go to a lot of things Fullertonians hold near and dear.
In this era of government fiscal constraint brought about in large measure by irresponsible decisions by dimwits like Don Bankhead, Dick Jones and PatMcKinley, to hand out exorbitant pay and benefits to “public safety” employees, everything should be on the table.
Yes it’s been a long, long time. When he first climbed the steps to his throne and surveyed his Fullerton domain the year was 1988. Ronald Reagan was president.
Don Bankhead has been on the Fullerton City Council for 23 years. With a few weeks off for bad behavior – an unnecessary Utility Tax and subsequent recall in 1994 – this monument to sub-mediocrity has been demonstrating his dubious mental faculties every other Tuesday night since dirt was young.
I will always fondly remember when Dick Ackerman referred to him as Don Blankhead. Now how many times did Don hear that as his fellow Fullerton cops chuckled at the dunderhead behind his back?
So now let’s take a moment or two to review Mr. Bankhead’s singularly inept career in Fullerton.
Back in 1988 Bankhead tried to get the job of Fullerton Chief of Police. He failed when the council chose somebody else. Ironically, Dick Ackerman who was on the Council then, was well aware of Blankhead’s utter incompetence. And so, out of spite, he ran for the city council: Lo and Behold he won! On the city council he believed that no one would would laugh at him anymore. And he believed people would laugh with him instead of at him. He was wrong.
Bankhead also suddenly revealed what he never told anybody when he interviewed for the Chief job, or even when he ran for County Sheriff in 1990: that he was a virtual cripple from a series of earlier alleged mishaps that, if true, would have made Inspector Clouseau look like an Olympic gymnast. His scam made the news, but the nice people in Fullerton were too polite to say anything. But we all knew.
In the past ten years he has smiled that dim, senile smile as he turned downtown Fullerton into a booze-soaked battle field that costs the taxpayers of Fullerton $1.5 million every single year, all to the benefit his cynical and parasitical “supporters.” He had the effrontery to claim that without his interventionist Redevelopment Fullerton itself would be a ghost town! He tried to lie his way out of that idiocy. It didn’t work.
or to put it another way:
A darling of the cop union he voted for the bank-breaking 3@50 pension formula that has created a massive and permanent unfunded liability for the taxpayers of Fullerton; he continuously voted for the illegal 10% utility tax on the water ratepayers of Fullerton, money that has gone to pay his own bloated pension.
Of course Bankhead was propped up every step of the way by his “public safety” union allies for whom he performed such acts of generosity with our money.
What Bankhead doesn’t want anyone to know is that in the course of his political career he has pulled down hundreds of thousands of dollars snoozing through footling meetings of various agencies and commissions about which he knows absolutely nothing – but for which he applied the same rubber stamp he has wielded so disastrously in Fullerton.
Although Bankhead is a Republican, and supposed to be some sort of conservative, the inescapable fact is that he is big-government in a big way. And if big-government could help him or his developer buddies score big, so much the better. After all who was really watching? FFFF, that’s who. Here we busted Bankhead for blowing $1200 staying at a four star Long Beach Hotel, on our dime – a mere 25 miles from his house in Fullerton!
This year, finally, the extent to which Bankhead has aided and abetted an incompetent and criminal police department has finally surfaced, and the extent of the damage this simpleton has caused Fullerton has become crystal clear.
Will Bankhead become the first man in California history to be recalled from the same office? Let’s work for it!
Don Bankhead, this is your life: a sad, belabored death march of cognitive meltdown, incompetence, lackeydom, and buffoonery. Fortunately your quarter century misrule is coming to a merciful conclusion. Fullerton is finally waking up and finally deciding that it wants real leaders – not clownish cartoons – on its city council.
