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L.A. Now

Bell jury selected, stage now set for corruption trial

By Corina Knoll
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A jury of eight women and four men has been selected to determine the fate of half a dozen former Bell City Council members accused of plundering the small city’s treasury by drawing enormous salaries for their part-time work and collecting pay for serving on boards that rarely, if ever, met.

The trial for Luis Artiga, Victor Bello, George Cole, Oscar Hernandez, Teresa Jacobo and George Mirabal will open Thursday morning. All six face potential prison terms if convicted.

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The municipal corruption case exploded more than two years ago when the council members and ranking city administrators were accused of raiding the town’s money by paying themselves huge salaries, lending out municipal funds and imposing illegal taxes on residents.

FULL COVERAGE: Bell corruption trial

The former administrators -– onetime chief executive Robert Rizzo and assistant city manager Angela Spaccia –- are expected to be tried later this year, though Rizzo’s attorney had already said that he will ask for the trial to be moved out of the Los Angeles Times’ circulation area because of the publicity that the case has drawn.

In a two-day push, attorneys plowed through about 150 juror questionnaires before settling on the panel, which includes six alternates.

In the early going, some people were dismissed on the weight of the questionnaires alone. One would-be juror said the ex-city officials had “raped constituents”; another said she was “riveted and repulsed by the greed.”

Other jury candidates had only a vague recollection of the case, which left the L.A. County city on the edge of insolvency and made the town the butt of jokes about municipal mismanagement.

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-- Corina Knoll

L.A. Now
Corina Knoll

Corina Knoll is a former reporter for the Metro section of the Los Angeles Times. She was on the team that investigated corruption in Bell — which led to the paper’s 2011 Pulitzer Prize for public service — and went on to cover the trials of the city’s former officials. She later contributed to the paper’s coverage of the San Bernardino terror attack that won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news. As a regional reporter, she wrote features about the San Gabriel Valley and the Westside. During her courts beat, she covered high-profile criminal cases and civil disputes, including the Jackson family vs AEG and Bryan Stow vs LA Dodgers. She and two colleagues investigated sheriff’s deputies whose histories of misconduct landed them on the department’s top-secret Brady list. She left The Times in January 2019. Raised in the Midwest, she is a graduate of Macalester College.

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