Down the Coast with Dana Parsons
I’ve long assumed that former Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona would plea-bargain the federal corruption charges against him, if only to avoid the likelihood of a stiffer sentence if convicted. The scamp in me, however, hopes he goes to trial, largely because some of Carona’s private comments — selectively released in court papers by both sides — read like something from a provocative movie trailer.
Good drama always blends multiple elements. Carona gives us plenty of raunch, a touch of defiance, even a hint of pathos. I can’t wait to get this guy on a witness stand! Sometimes he sounds like he just stepped out of “Pulp Fiction,” and other times he sounds like Rocky Balboa wondering where his life is going.
It’s hard to find a stretch of Carona transcript that can be included in a family newspaper, but let’s try: In one secretly recorded exchange with friend Don Haidl, Carona says, “The one thing that I will say, I may be a whore, but I never used my job to [mess] with people or to, you know, to twist somebody for something.... And that one you can hit me with sodium pentathol and put me in the box.”
In another exchange with Haidl on a different day, Carona apparently is talking about unfavorable press accounts: “[To heck with] you guys. By the same token, I’m happy to get in front of the camera at the drop of a hat and call b.s. on any of these things.”
He then concludes the thought by saying, “Now, my preference is I never draw my sword. My goal is, I might just walk away from this deal, fly off into the sunset, spend time with my kid, do whatever I want to do with the second half of my life and fade into anonymity. I don’t want to [mess] with anybody. I don’t need to be the big man on campus anymore. But while I’m here, I ain’t taking [guff] from anybody anymore. Because there’s nothing you can do to me.”
No one knows how the second half of Carona’s life will go. But we know this: He’s way too far down the road to fade into anonymity.
