Corruption in Los Angeles: An Update from City Hall
The persistent showers pelting southern California this past week served as poetic foreshadowing for the hard rain that’s about to fall on some of the well-dressed crooks who control Los Angeles. Mayor Eric Garcetti’s absurd delusion that he’s somehow “presidential” is about to end. Charlatans posing as “community leaders” soon will be exposed. Once powerful men will end up in prison.
What many of us have known for some time will be made clear to all: the City of Los Angeles’s planning and development process is thoroughly corrupted. You want to build a skyscraper? An apartment building? A garden shed? You gotta pay to play. And if you do pay, you can play however you want, even if it hurts entire neighborhoods of less wealthy people.
In the midst of an unprecedented rise in homelessness and fall in affordable housing, Garcetti and his cronies on the City Council have fast-tracked approval for numerous luxury condominium projects, including several so inappropriate – an 80-story tower on top of an Earthquake fault? A shopping center directly next door to an elementary school? – they don’t pass the smell test. The stench, the unmistakable odor of rot, has wafted all the way to Washington, DC, so strong even the FBI could smell it.
In November, Councilmember Jose Huizar, who “represents” much of Downtown, was stripped of his chairmanship of the vital Planning, Land Use and Management (PLUM) Committee after his home and office were raided by the FBI, which is conducting an
ongoing inquiry. What are they looking for? Possible bribery, extortion, money laundering and other crimes.
The net is widening. Now, PLUM member Curren Price, one of the more aromatic lowlifes on the Council, is another target in the Pay to Play probe. So are Eric Garcetti’s recently retired Deputy Mayor Raymond Chan, whose son landed an internship with the lobbyists who represent the Millenium Earthquake Tower; Board of Public Works Commissioner Joel Jacinto and his wife Ave Jacinto, who, at an earlier stage in their lives, before being ushered into the Garcetti mafia, were best known for serving the Filipino community; Huizar’s Planning Director Shawn Kuk, and Huizar’s former Special Assistant George Esparza.
Esparza slammed Jose Huizar in the Los Angeles Times, saying that he quit as Huizar’s assistant after Huizar “wielded his political power in ways in which, while he apparently had normalized, I did not feel aligned with how I wanted to live my political 
and personal life … so I got out before I became collateral damage, and I took steps to protect myself.”
Uh-oh. This is getting serious.
The FBI investigation isn’t a far-fetched fishing expedition. It’s not going away; it will only get bigger. The storm clouds are gathering over City Hall, and it’s about time. This city could use a good cleaning.
The Coalition to Preserve LA, the leading critics of Garcetti’s broken development model, offered an intriguing glimpse of the near future: “Our own investigation of pay to play shows that Crossroads and other projects sail through the approval process on a river of cash donations, and wining and dining of officials, including Councilmembers Jose Huizar and Curren Price who are under investigation — as well as officials not yet named in the investigation,” said Coalition to Preserve LA executive director Jill Stewart.
The Crossroads Project Stewart references is emblematic of how stinky the Garcetti development process is. The story is revolting yet commonplace; it deserves it’s own book, a kind of case study for “How Los Angeles Works . . . and Why ‘How it Works’ is Through Badly Concealed Corruption.”
Here are some smelly highlights:
Councilman Curren Price’s wife, Del Richardson, whose company works closely with developers to remove tenants to make way
for gentrification projects – and what a spiritually fulfilling job that must be – moved her operations inside an historic Latino apartment complex housing eighty families, many of whom had been there for decades, and pressured them to accept as little as $800 as “cash for keys.” State law says families are due at least $8,000 each for relocation.
From 2013 through 2016, Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell, one of the most reliable lapdogs in the developers’ kennel, held multiple private meetings with Morton La Kretz, founder of Crossroads Management; Crossroads executive Linda Duttenhaver, Crossroads Management attorney, Jerry Neuman; Harridge executive David Schwartzman and developer lobbyist Kyndra Casper. Suggestion: Call O’Farrell’s office as a concerned private citizen and see if you can get a meeting.
During that same period of time, Crossroads developers showered key Councilmembers and Mayor Eric Garcetti with $16,500 in campaign cash — plus more in “lobbying” lubricated with fine food and wine. This is according to City records.
All the chicanery is legal, or quasi-legal. But whatever semantics you prefer, legal or not, the behavior makes a mockery of “public service,” similar to how calling a 26-story greenhouse-gas-spewing office tower on the site of Amoeba Records “a sustainable community.”
Once the FBI exposes the naked greed and duplicity at the heart of LA’s real estate development process, a good number of the controversial (and likely corrupted) projects around town will come to a halt.
And while everyone’s on hiatus from giving and collecting bribes, they might have time to build a homeless shelter or two.
The real problem is that nobody goes to jail. So they just keep doing it. If there were real consequences, they might stop or at least slow down…but there are too many clever lawyers out there, too many soft judges (when it comes to white-collar crime), and a public that stares at TV like mindless idiots. Sometimes things have to get really bad before they can get better. As long as the public has its bread and circuses, there won’t be enough meaningful outrage to change anything. The irony is that Garcetti is delusional enough to think that he’s going to run on his record as mayor in a bid for president…Villarigosa thought the same thing, and how did that work out again? But then again, we just elected a governor that turned San Francisco into a shithole….and his party has an unstoppable majority in the legislature. So…really…who knows?
Crossroads of the World, TIMELINE:
March 21, 2013 Morton La Kretz, founder of Crossroads Management, donates $1,300 to Eric Garcetti’s campaign for mayor.
April 1, 2013 David Schwartzman, CEO of Harridge Development Group, donates $1,300 to Eric Garcetti’s campaign for mayor.
April 5, 2013 David Schwartzman, CEO of Harridge Development Group, donates $700 to Mitch O’Farrell’s campaign for City Council.
April 8, 2013 Morton La Kretz, founder of Crossroads Management, donates $700 to Mitch O’Farrell’s campaign for City Council.
April 25, 2013 Bradley Woomer, the CFO at Harridge Development Group, LLC, donates $250 to Mitch O’Farrell’s campaign for City Council.
September 20, 2013 David Schwartzman, CEO of Harridge Development Group, donates $700 to Mitch O’Farrell’s campaign for City Council.
November 18, 2013 FIRST BACKROOM MEETING between Los Angeles City Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell, Morton La Kretz, and Linda Duttenhaver of Crossroads Management.
November 22, 2013 Bradley Woomer of Harridge Development Groups donates $250 to Mitch O’Farrell’s Officeholder Account.
November 22, 2013 David Schwartzman, CEO of Harridge Development Group, donates $500 to Mitch O’Farrell’s Officeholder Account.
September 30, 2014 David Schwartzman, CEO of Harridge Development Group, donates $700 to Marqueece Harris-Dawson’s campaign for City Council.
January 6, 2015 David Schwartzman, CEO of Harridge Development Group, donates $700 to Gloria Molina’s campaign for City Council.
January 27, 2015 Marc Annotti of Harridge Development Group donates $700 to Mitch Englander’s campaign for City Council.
February 12, 2015 Marc Annotti of Harridge Development Group donates $700 to Nury Martinez’s campaign for City Council.
March 26, 2015 Yuri Gurevich, a consultant at Harridge Development Group, donates $250 to Carolyn Ramsay’s campaign for City Council.
March 26, 2015 James D. Hearn, an attorney at Harridge Development Group, donates $700 to Carolyn Ramsay’s campaign for City Council.
March 26, 2015 David Schwartzman, CEO of Harridge Development Group, donates $700 to Carolyn Ramsay’s campaign for City Council.
March 26, 2015 Bradley Woomer of Harridge Development Groups donates $700 to Carolyn Ramsay’s campaign for City Council.
April 20, 2015 SECOND BACKROOM MEETING with Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell, O’Farrell deputy Christine Peters, O’Farrell deputy Gary Benjamin and Crossroads attorney Jerry Neuman and Crossroads executive Linda Duttenhaver.
May 20, 2015 David Schwartzman, CEO of Harridge Development Group, donates $500 to Gil Cedillo’s campaign for City Council.
May 29, 2015, more than two years AFTER cash donations began flowing from Harridge and La Kretz to O’Farrell and others, THE MEDIA LEARNS that a triple skyscraper is being proposed by Harridge Development Group and Mort La Kretz. Curbed LA breaks the “news” of this secret project that has been sailing along for two years in BACKROOM MEETINGS with City Councilman Mitch O’Farrell:
Curbed LA: “As these preliminary renderings show, the Crossroads complex—which is both a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument and on the National Register of Historic Places—will be completely “restored to its glory,” says Glenn Gritzner, a rep for developer Harridge Development Group. (Crossroads owner Mort La Kretz will continue to control the land the project sits on.) …
“In addition to the reintroduction of retail at the Crossroads, the project will create eight new mixed-use buildings rising on parts of the two blocks between the complex and Highland Avenue to the west, and the block immediately to the north of the complex on Selma: a 308-room, 31-story hotel, a 32-story apartment tower, and a 30-story condo tower with 950 units total (including 70 units of designated affordable housing), 95,000 square feet of office space, and a total of 185,000 square feet of retail/commercial uses (including the 60,000 square feet at Crossroads). The shorter buildings range from two to six stories tall. (Curbed Los Angeles, May 29, 2015)
The money flowing from developers Harridge and La Kretz to City Hall elected leaders, and the BACKROOM MEETINGS with Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell, ratchet up.
June 30, 2015: Marc Annotti of Harridge Development Group donates $700 to Jose Huizar’s Officeholder Account.
October 2015: Initial Environmental Impact Report (EIR) is released.
BACKROOM MEETING, November 2, 2015: Private meeting with O’Farrell Staff Christine Peters, O’Farrell deputy Chris Robertson, O’Farrell deputy Dan Halden with attorney Jerry Neuman.
BACKROOM MEETING November 10, 2015: Private meeting with O’Farrell Staff Chris Robertson, O’Farrell deputy Christine Peters, O’Farrell deputy Dan Halden with attorney Jerry Neuman.
November 12, 2015 David Schwartzman, CEO of Harridge Development Group, donates $700 to Bob Blumenfield’s campaign for City Council.
November 14, 2015 Public scoping meeting held, finally ALLOWING THE PUBLIC to see the skyscraper multi-tower plan.
December 23, 2015 James Hearn, an attorney at Harridge Development Group, donates $700 to Mike Bonin’s campaign for City Council.
December 23, 2015 David Schwartzman, CEO of Harridge Development Group, donates $700 to Mike Bonin’s campaign for City Council.
December 30, 2015 James Hearn, an attorney at Harridge Development Group, donates $250 to Herb Wesson’s Officeholder Account.
December 30, 2015 Bradley Woomer of Harridge Development Groups donates $700 to Curren Price’s campaign for City Council.
December 30, 2015 David Schwartzman, CEO of Harridge Development Group, donates $700 to Curren Price’s campaign for City Council.
December 31, 2015 James D. Hearn, general counsel at Harridge Development Group, donates $700 to Gil Cedillo’s campaign for City Council.
December 31, 2015 Bradley Woomer of Harridge Development Groups donates $700 to Gil Cedillo’s campaign for City Council.
December 31, 2015 David Schwartzman, CEO of Harridge Development Group, donates $700 to Gil Cedillo’s campaign for City Council.
August 5, 2016 James Hearn, an attorney at Harridge Development Group, donates $700 to Mike Bonin’s campaign for City Council.
August 5, 2016 David Schwartzman, CEO of Harridge Development Group, donates $700 to Herb Wesson’s campaign for City Council.
August 5, 2016 Bradley Woomer of Harridge Development Groups donates $250 to Herb Wesson’s campaign for City Council.
August 16, 2016 Harridge applies for “CEQA streamlining” to avoid complying with California Environmental Quality Act. Harridge also seeks Zone Change and Height District Change exemptions from the City Council to override the Community Plan and zoning in Hollywood.
August 26, 2016 David Schwartzman, CEO of Harridge Development Group, donates $700 to Joe Buscaino’s campaign for City Council.
August 26, 2016 Bradley Woomer of Harridge Development Groups donates $500 to Joe Buscaino’s campaign for City Council.
BACKROOM MEETING September 26, 2016 between Councilmember O’Farrell, O’Farrell’s deputy Amy Ablakat, O’Farrell’s deputy Christine Peters, O’Farrell’s deputy Dan Halden with Friends of Hollywood Central Park president Laurie Goldman, Harridge executive David Schwartzman, developer lobbyist Kyndra Casper
September 28, 2016 Marc Annotti of Harridge Development Group donates $100 to Karo Torossian’s campaign for City Council.
December 1, 2016 David Schwartzman, CEO of Harridge Development Group, donates $700 to Gil Cedillo’s campaign for City Council.
December 31, 2016 Gil Cedillo’s campaign returns $700 donation to David Schwartzman.
What Did the Crossroads Developers Get?
UPDATED, JAN. 2019: Harridge requested, and L.A. elected and appointed officials agree, that the project should be rewarded a fast-track waiver around California’s CEQA environmental standards by calling the project an “Environmental Development Leadership Project.”
How does this corruption in Hollywood extend into the updates of the Hollywood Community Plan? The new update, like the one that Judge Alan Goodman threw out, will have an ordinance appended to it that upzones hundreds of parcels and makes this type of corrupt pay-to-play unnecessary. Many of these illegal projects could then be built by-right and no longer need zone changes, zone variances, and density bonuses. They would be legal from the get go.
Soooo horrible it’s overwheming! Will comment on this further later. Kim actually read one of your posts, this one, and he is upset too.