The OC Register is reporting, here, about one Albert Morales, a former Sunny Hills band instructor charged with sodomy of a then sixteen year-old student in 2006.
If you notice item 12 on the Fullerton City Council agenda for Tuesday, good for you. It means you have pondered other idiocies – from the moronic CSUF “College Town” boondoggle through the closed session legal embarrassments involving Chief Danny Hughes and his goons in blue.
Which is a nice segue back to item 12. According to staff the City’s insurance well is dry due to a couple of big payouts in 2012. That’s bad news because now the City will have to issue a big chunk of debt so that the FPD payouts can proceed apace and Garo Mardirossian can get that 2014 Ferrari.
Of course the cash, raised by the sale of bonds will cost the General Fund a nifty $500,000 a year for the next couple of decades. City Manager Joe Felz will be enjoying his massive pension by then, so who the Hell cares, right?
Ironically, the cases of Veth Mam, Trevor Clarke, Edward Quinonez and Ron Thomas will drain the coffers yet again, requiring even more debt for fiscal year 14-15. The staff report says we need to protect Fullerton’s credit rating by issuing new debt. That’s a creative argument. I think we could protect Fullerton’s credit rating by eliminating the Culture of Corruption.
Manny Ramos and Jay Cicinelli, two of the six Fullerton cops who presided over the death of transient Kelly Thomas on July 5th, 2011 were told today by Superior Court judge Froeberg that they would be standing trial in June for the death of the schizophrenic homeless man. Their running buddy, Joe Wolfe the third Fullerton cop charged, has another hearing to dismiss in March.
According to the judge there was sufficient evidence to go to trial. Of course we already knew that; and we also know that newly minted Chief Danny Hughes, the boss of the Fullerton Six told them they did a good job that night. He also claimed there was no Culture of Corruption in the FPD, and other bedtime fairy tales.
Kelly Thomas was killed eighteen months ago.
Another effort by the lawyers for the FPD cops charged in the murder of transient Kelly Thomas has failed.
The Voice of OC(EA) has the story succinctly, here. Apparently the issue will be revisited again on the 18th in Judge William R. Froeberg’s court, but from the statements made by the judge it sure looks like this will go forward.
Of course everybody in City hall knew the dirty little secret. The illegal 10% water tax that was hidden by the confusing name of “in-lieu fee.” Year after rancid year the City Fathers and Mothers – from daffy and angry liberal spendthrifts like Molly McClanahan and Jan Flory, to supposed conservatives Dick Ackerman and Chris Norby blessed the scam and put their imprimatur of approval upon it.
Of course they knew, or must have suspected, that the 10% was nothing other than a greasy rake-off that made their jobs easier and rewarded their friends in the bureaucracy. And they knew, or must have suspected, that the various City departments were already charging directly to the Water Fund – in direct contravention to the purpose of the original Resolution that created the”fee.”
This means that because the City departments were already charging to the Water Fund, that cost too jacked up the tax. Double Dip.
And all that free water wasted by the City over the years? You guessed it: the cost jacked up the illegal water tax. Triple Dip.
The fee was set at 10% of gross water revenue, meaning that every time the commodity cost of water went up, or transmission cost went up, so did the absolute amount of the tax itself. Quadruple Dip.
Naturally, the water tax itself was considered to be part of the gross “cost” of the water works, meaning that as the absolute value of the 10% increment rose, so did total of the tax!! The true amount of the tax was 10% of cost plus 10% of the 10%!!! Which is why the tax was actually about 11% of the true cost. Got it? Quintuple Dip.
The defenders of the Old Culture of Corruption and its slimey shakedown want you to believe that everything is pretty okay, that no harm was done, and that refunding any part of this felonious rip-off would just be a big waste of everybody’s time.
Wrong. Accountability and responsibility have their cost. Sooner or later you have to pay the piper.
OC Register excuse for a journalist, and notorious bad-cop-story-misser, Lou Ponsi, really outdid himself today with a ridiculous “story” about all the excuses his pals on the force heard from folks who wanted to dodge a traffic citation. Real tough, hard-hitting piece there, Lou.
I wonder if Ponzi will ever tire of writing stupid fluff pieces for one of the most notorious police forces in California. I also wonder if writing salacious cop-accounts of wanton females is the best story line, given the well-documented behavior of FPD serial sex batterer Albert Rincon, whose activities were essentially known, and condoned by the department.
Anyhoo, that’s all introductory to my own version of a real human interest piece, something of which we are all too familiar, by now. And that’s the excuses doled out by the cops themselves to try to explain away their own malfeasance – crap subsequently sucked up by drones like Ponsi. Enjoy.
1. He was running.
2. He was fighting.
3. He disobeyed a legal command.
4. He was reaching for his “waistband” (whatever that is).
5. That donut was supposed to be jelly-filled.
6. We put our lives on the line every day.
7. Our belts weigh 80 pounds.
8. We die at average 53 years old.
9. We try to arrest the right guy.
10. He thought he was beating up the right guy.
11. That’s POBR covered. Can’t talk about it.
12. It was not just honking. It was excessive horning.
13. No, it’s not tax deductible, but give us your money anyway, you’ll get a decal.
14. The job stress hooked me on those pills.
15. I just set my bag of chicken on that iPad. After that I don’t know what happened.
16. I got mad at my DAR and smashed it against the wall.
17. We slammed his head against the bars as we removed the dead body.
18. Those ladies weren’t like you.
19. Just wait to see the video. You’ll change your minds. I’ve seen it 400 times.
20. There were broken bones.
21. There was only one, maybe two deeply involved.
22. He was breaking into cars.
23. He was high on PCP.
24. He was a gang banger.
25. I feared for my safety.
26. The 90 pound girl with the jack knife entered the 22 foot radius so we had to shoot her 18 times.
27. Ron Thomas was never a deputy sheriff.
28. He was just a smelly bum.
29. The free sandwiches and beers are just a small perk for an otherwise unrewarding job.
30. My second wife doesn’t understand me and my girlfriend just wants a chunk of that pension.
31. It was suicide by cop.
32. He was a terrorist.
33. It was just a bong from the evidence room. It’s not like i was going to use it or anything.
34. Once you take a guided tour of the station you’ll feel differently about everything.
35. it was really all just a misunderstanding.
36. They are either misinformed or lying.
And now, feel free to add your own.
As expected, the new council voted 3-2 to begin “negotiations” with Dan Hughes to become Fullerton’s police chief.
Flory, Chaffee and Fitzgerald took their vote even as questions remain unanswered about Hughes’ role in the aftermath of Kelly Thomas murder, and accusations that Hughes himself was involved in an incident which is now the subject of a lawsuit against the City; and of course ongoing suspicion that Hughes has been an active part of the Culture of Corruption every step of the way.
Now watch ’em give away the store.
Oh, and yeah: you will not be getting a police oversight committee.
Yes, Friends, elections do have consequences. But you already knew that.
The results of the November election mean that the tepid and incompetent reign of Fullerton City Manager Joe Felz and City Attorney Dick Jones will continue as they preside over policies (or lack of policies) meant to evade accountability for your employees and electeds in City Hall.
Acting Chief Danny Hughes, the legacy boss of the FPD Culture of Corruption will soon see his title made permanent, even as the accusations by Ben Lira about Hughes’s direct involvement in cover-up and brutality, continue to swirl.
(No, you will not get a refund in any part for the illegal $27,000,000 tax that City Hall stole from you. But in the larger scheme of things, that’s small change)
I want to talk about justice.
In our State the cops can do damn near anything they want with impunity. Our spineless politicians have given them wealth, influence, and most importantly, virtually no accountability to anyone. The justice system itself, run by District Attorneys surrounded by ex-cops, has little interest in pursuing justice against their own allies, even when this means coddling the very perjuring cops that have scuttled many of the DA’s own cases. And when the cops themselves actually commit crimes, the law enforcement establishment immediately springs into action to defend the indefensible.
Think about what happened to Veth Mam. An innocent man was assaulted, arrested and falsely prosecuted. Fullerton cops knew the real truth and lied under oath to hide the fact that they beat up and arrested the wrong guy. Were there any repercussions? Of course not. Remember the Martinez kid who spent five months in jail thanks to the Fullerton cops? Well, Goodrich said everything was just fine – a slight error. Trevor Clarke says the FPD beat him, gave him a few sadistic “screen tests” just for fun, threw him in jail, and robbed him for good measure. Ben Lira says Danny Hughes was one of the instigators. Will anything happen? Not very likely, is it?
Let’s let the Albert Rincon case be our guide: we know that Albert Rincon serially molested women in the back seat of his patrol car. We know because of the depositions of just two of his victims (there are said to be a dozen). But the obscenity of what occurred, and importantly the roles played by Patdown Pat McKinley and Mike Sellers in covering up the whole mess, and worse, putting the creep back on the streets shall never be known. Why? because there was a settlement; a settlement approved by by-then Councilman McKinley himself.
The lawsuit settlement is the mechanism to hush everything up, from brutal and sadistic cops and an immoral FPD leadership, to a feckless city manager and city attorney who condoned the Culture of Corruption. If you wondered how the FPOA and the FPD/City Hall crowd could share a common goal, this is it.
And the path to settlement is the route no doubt most favored by Garo Mardirossian, the lawyer who is representing a whole slew of FPD/FPOA victims of brutality and perjury. For a lawyer a big payday without having to risk anything is a gift. And co-incidentally the same result will be a gift for Joe Felz, Pat Mckinley, Danny Hughes, Barry Coffman and the rest of the gang.
Your new council majority of Chaffee, Flory and Fitzgerald will make sure that Fullerton returns to the normalcy where no bad deed goes reported.
Of course it won’t be their money that goes to pay off Veth Mam and Kelly Thomas’s relatives. It will be yours.
And you will be poorer but no wiser.
The union brother Fullerton cop union boss Barry Coffman says is a cancer talks to The Fullertonian, here.