Part 57: Will Pay-To-Play End in Los Angeles in 2024? Dealings of José Huizar and Rick Caruso
Published December 29, 2023
Photo of Downtown Los Angeles by author (GoPro Hero 11 Black).
By Zachary Ellison
The walls must be closing in slowly on former Los Angeles City Councilmember José Huizar these days. As Los Angeles Times journalist reported yesterday evening, the U.S. Attorney’s Office isn’t backing down on their case against José Huizar all the way through sentencing. They have continued to request a 13 year prison sentence even as Huizar pleads for a cool 9 years as part of his plea deal concluded January 20 of this year.
His attorneys had sought to move the upcoming January 26, 2024 date with U.S. District Judge John F. Walter to February. As part of the deal, Huizar once flush with cash from his corruption will pay $1,019,174 in restitution to the city of Los Angeles. That’s no small amount of cash, it’s unclear how Huizar would pay such a fine having not served on City Council since his June 23, 2020 arrest by Federal agents and suspension from that body.
Having plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act and one count of tax evasion. As the Justice Departments release notes, Huizar accepted cash, casino chips, prostitutes, political contributions, flights, hotels, meals, tickets and even a “$600,000 bribe in the form of collateral from a billionaire real estate developer for Huizar to confidentially settle a pending sexual harassment lawsuit against Huizar by a former staffer.”
Despite all of his violations, the single greatest desperate act involved a woman, and although an independent investigation panel of retired judges would ultimately find no violation by Huizar in this regard as claimed by Francine Godoy, in the end, José’s still going down because of that deed. Even the leader of FBI Los Angeles Donald Alway piled on to poor José saying: “Mr. Huizar's actions, to include accepting a staggering amount of bribe money and lavish gifts, eroded the trust in the office he held for many years.”
Ouch. Now José didn’t just take himself down, he took fellow City Councilmember Mitch Englander with him along with co-conspirators, and Mitch like José was a stand-up guy, a Republican from the San Fernando Valley in contrast to Huizar’s district stretching from Downtown to El Sereno, the 14th District now held by embattled Kevin de León. The government’s Operation Casino Loyale would snare 10 other defendants in addition to the aforementioned dirty duo.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office would write in their January 25, 2021 press release that Englander, who also served as a reserve officer with the Los Angeles Police Department, “illicitly cashed in on his status as a purported public servant in casino bathrooms and through VIP bottle service, luxury dinners, and behind hotel room doors. Over numerous incidents of escalating corruption and self-preservation, [Englander] sold out both oaths, cheaply and repeatedly,” according to their comparable memorandum.
Whereas say the Mark Ridley-Thomas scandal ensnared officials from the University of Southern California directly, most notably former USC School of Social Work Dean Marilyn Flynn, as well as my former supervisor’s Mark Todd as a cooperating witness in directing the Dean to make the exchange with Ridley-Thomas to the benefit of his son, that perhaps is more similarly stylized to Operation Varsity Blues where the U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI targeted wealthy parents and corrupt officials at USC and other prestigious institutions as part of their corruption crackdown.
No one, not even Rick Singer who orchestrated the scamming of admission processes with phony athletic documents for unqualified students including the likes of actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, nor Ridley-Thomas, will receive a sentence like Huizar has earned. That RICO charge is no joke! The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act became effective on October 15, 1970 after being signed into law by President Richard Nixon. When the Feds come at you with RICO, that’s when you know that a law created to combat the Mafia is being used to slam you as an enterprise.
For a case to meet RICO qualifications, the enterprise must include several elements drawn from a list of 35 crimes, both Federal and State, within a 10-year window of activity. 33 States have adopted RICO including California. RICO is for people who are repeat offenders, who create rackets, that as part of their racketeering activity constitute re-investment into the enterprise in furtherance of the criminal organizations goals. The Huizar-Englander organization if you will was focused primarily on developers, on selling their votes so that they could score.
So what do Englander, Huizar, and Rick Caruso, who like Englander is closely associated with the Los Angeles Police Department having served as President of the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners from 2001 to 2006, have in common? Well they have money, and USC in common. Caruso was a supporter of Huizar, making 4 separate donations to his campaign and officeholder accounts from 2010 to 2014 totaling $2,200. Caruso would similarly back Englander with money, making donations from 2009 to 105 4 times totaling $2,200.
Just like twins! Rick Caruso the billionaire real estate developer who ran a $104 million dollar campaign in 2022 into the ground losing to current Mayor of Los Angeles Karen Bass must be very disappointed in the terrible, philandering pair of corrupt, federally convicted former LA City Councilmembers. Englander who once appeared on the first ever episode of House Hunters wasn’t a USC alum like Caruso, and he didn’t have the UC-Berkeley, UCLA and Princeton degrees of Huizar who is dramatically overeducated for his stupidity.
Videos of both Rick Caruso and José Huizar giving talks at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy can be found online. Ironically, they discuss much the same topics, how to manage development, particularly public-facing amenities and retail in a growing city. It’s no surprise that Huizar who was a prolific fundraiser took his political cues from the top management of the city, ostensibly putting on a class act even as privately he engaged in sleaze and graft. Huizar starts his talk joking about solving that last math problem at Princeton.
Caruso’s by contrast is more jovial. If Huizar appears comfortable, he’s also aware that his time is limited. Huizar’s talk: “Downtown Los Angeles: Filling in & Growing Up” was posted to YouTube on October 16, 2014 as part of the schools Urban Growth Seminars. Caruso’s by contrast is more top dog, the Athenian Society Dean’s Speaker Series posted on October 24, 2014 entitled – “The Great American City: A Conversation with Rick Caruso.”
I would also see Englander on campus around this time as a student at a similar event, and I would continue to see Englander there where his daughter attended school. Despite not having completed college himself, at the time I though Mitch Englander was a decent person even as his face sometimes read frustration walking across the campus. I knew him only as a City Councilmember, but you can learn a lot about someone just watching their face in a moment where they aren’t expecting sometime to be assessing their expressions.
As time went on, the news broke, and I didn’t see Englander anymore. Now Mitch has already served his time, just over a year and is fully released. Huizar is going to take a much bigger sentence, and it’s well deserved. So if someone sees Rick Caruso, can you please ask him to pass on some ethics lessons with his political donations? Caruso’s act has been dodgier than a cat, failing to disclose his finances accurately even as he pretended to do so during the election of his life, as Capital & Main journalist Robin Urevich wrote on October 3, 2022: “Before Caruso opposed pay to play, he defended the system he now calls corrupt.”
Only days later the LA Fed Tapes would hit the presses starting on October 9 having been secretly recorded on October 18, 2021 and at least one other subsequent date. The recorded conversation of former LA City Councilmember Nury Martinez, current Councilmember Kevin de León, former Councilmember Gil Cedillo and former President of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO Ron Herrera, who would also resign in the wake of the scandal. The primary recording includes discussion of the Huizar scandal as well as Rick Caruso.
About the Ridley-Thomas and Huizar cases, de León after disclosing his friendship with current U.S. District Judge André Birote Jr., he says that after consultation he’s concluded that “it’s a righteous case” against Ridley-Thomas continuing with the comparison, “so in many ways you can say that the case is even worse for Mark Ridley-Thomas than it is for Jose Huizar” contrasting Huizar accepting private developer dollars versus Ridley-Thomas pushing for a more favorable amended contract with USC for telehealth services for LA County.
Nury Martinez despite never having Huizar’s fundraising prowess or support from the likes of Rick Caruso doesn’t believe de León that there isn’t a double-standard being applied to Ridley-Thomas. “They didn’t think twice before judging Jose,” she complains before de León notes that he didn’t criticize Huizar, and doesn’t really know him, before Nury who does, defends Huizar: “And what’s to say que (that) Jose wasn’t doing it to also feed his kids?” before moving on to Sebastian Ridley-Thomas, the son of the elder Ridley-Thomas who he had been trying to ostensibly help with his dealings with USC.
“I mean, this, this is, this is, I mean the connection is Sebastian, but what’s to say que Jose also didn’t have debt at his kids’ school, and trying to figure out how to pay for college,” Martinez says before saying with finality: “That’s probably not the case, but whatever.” The problem comes down to the basics as the leaker of the LA Fed Tapes “Honest-Finding-1581” writes in the note posted on Reddit, what do you do when “the labor movement is in bed with City Hall” much less a rotating bordello-like slew of developers.
As Capital and Main’s report by Urevich on Caruso’s reform proposals stated, his main proposal was to take “away the City Council’s ability to make land use decisions, so that developers can’t buy influence with money or gifts.” This hasn’t happened under Karen Bass, even as she announced on November 30 of this year new restrictions on gifts to her own office’s entities, the Mayor’s Fund and the Getty House Foundation along with the appointment of Ruth Kwon as Deputy Counsel and Ethics Officer to the Mayor and a “Collaboration with Norm Eisen, White House Special Counsel for Ethics and Government Reform for the Obama Administration.”
Bass caps off her announcement by declaring “Mayor Bass has directed her counsel’s office to implement a more robust vetting process than ever before.” Meanwhile the Los Angeles City Council has struggled to even fully seat its own Ethics Commission even as it moves forward actions against Councilmember John Lee, who now holds Englander’s seat and was also allegedly caught up in Operation Casino Loyale as the unidentified “Staffer B” to Englander. To the extent that Mayor Bass can lead the City Council it hasn’t happened, and while filling these roles seems promising, in the end, there’s little she can do to stop voters from such mistakes.
If Los Angeles wants to end pay-to-play, it has the ability to create powerful new checks and balances. We’d be dreaming though if we thought everyone in the city wanted the same thing. The truth is that corruption exists because there are people willing to pay in order to play the game. They want to buy their place in line ahead of you, and if there’s a corrupt politician like José Huizar willing to accept their gifts despite having a spectacular education that’s just the way it’s going to be, and that will keep the U.S. Attorney’s Office busy well into 2024 and beyond.
It isn’t that all developers are corrupt, or that even Caruso ought to know his limits, but rather that by failing to collectively make the changes we need on any reasonable timeline we just guarantee another repeat of the same players. Change means that there needs to be some reformers in the room, but when all the important deals are made behind Closed Doors well then it’s really just a dog and pony show. It’s not that our elected officials don’t care, or were born corrupt, but rather than City Hall is corrupting place like USC is a party school.
What José Huizar escaped from birth in Jerez, Zacatecas, Mexico before coming to America, collecting his degrees, winning elections and then taking the most spectacular nosedive in local electoral criminal history is frustration. The angst of a Latino community in California desperate for meaningful leadership, and ripe for the machinations of a political machine like Caruso’s pay-to-play operation. That his corporation puts a great philanthropic face is no different than the many collaborative events José Huizar put on with allies like USC, with his district including its Health Sciences Campus.
José had the American Dream, and he blew it. Provided he really is getting no less than 9 years, we can only hope for his 4 children that the lesson will have been learned. Like a young Rick Caruso agonizing over his father Henry Caruso being sent to prison before founding Dollar Rent-A-Car, it’s the hustle that’s impressive. Say what you will about José Huizar and Rick Caruso as a political power couple that could have been, plus or minus Mitch Englander, their dream of a developers Los Angeles actually sells at an exceptional rate, corrupt, or not. It’s almost sexy at this point to think that LA is a hopeless morass, even as we mostly do actually want better.
Zachary Ellison is an Independent Journalist and Whistleblower in the Los Angeles area. Zach was most recently employed by the University of Southern California, Office of the Provost from October 2015 to August 2022 as an Executive Secretary and Administrative Assistant supporting the Vice Provost for Academic Operations and the Vice Provost and Senior Advisor to the Provost among others. Zach holds a Master’s in Public Administration and a Graduate Certificate in Sustainable Policy and Planning from the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. While a student at USC, he worked for the USC Good Neighbors Campaign including on their newsletter distributed university-wide. Zach completed his B.A. in History at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon and was a writer, editor, and photographer for the Pasadena High School Chronicle. He was Barack Obama’s one-millionth online campaign contributor in 2008. Zach is a former AmeriCorps intern for Hawaii State Parks and worked for the City of Manhattan Beach Parks and Recreation. He is a trained civil process server, and enjoys weekends in the great outdoors.
