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I watched with relish last Thursday as Mike Carona defense attorney Jeffrey Rawitz hit the ground running in his cross-examination of Don Haidl, Carona’s former friend and assistant sheriff who’d agreed to secretly tape-record conversations with the former Orange County sheriff.
Rawitz was alternately probing, biting and even a bit sarcastic as he opened with some quick-hitters in his first chance at Haidl, the government’s star witness in Carona’s corruption trial in federal court in Santa Ana. How long ago last Thursday now seems. 
Rawitz’s cross-examination since then has settled into a much more pedestrian mode, which may be needed to get the job done but does nothing to sell tickets.
I know, I know, this isn’t the circus. It’s just that Rawitz has the lawyer’s gift to play hardball, and the spectator in me was hoping for some of it. Even Judge Andrew Guilford weighed in. At the end of court today, he politely suggested that anything Rawitz could do to keep things moving "helps the defense and keeps the jury interested."
Rawitz has a great chance Wednesday. In what he told the judge likely will be his final day of cross-examination, Rawitz has yet to confront Haidl in depth on at least two critical aspects of the trial: his alleged $1,000-a-month payoffs to Carona, pictured here, over a four-year period ending in mid-2002 and the secretly recorded conversations, which have been played for the jury and which the government hopes provide the smoking gun to convict Carona.
Haidl is proving a stoic and largely unflappable witness. Rawitz quite possibly has scored some points with the jury, but he needs to deflate Haidl on the alleged payments. Whether he does it Wednesday with a surgical knife or a hammer is the overnight teaser.
Photo: Los Angeles Times
Politics. If it didn’t make you laugh, you’d have to cry.
So I’m sitting here chuckling after talking to Andrew Do, a guy I happen to like and who is Orange County Supervisor Janet Nguyen’s chief of staff. He’s also one of nine candidates running for two seats on the Garden Grove City Council.
One of the other candidates is Trung Nguyen, a Garden Grove school board member whose name is mud in the Janet Nguyen camp. It goes back to the two Nguyens ending in a photo finish for the supervisorial seat in February 2007, in which the lady beat the gentleman. And the fact that Trung Nguyen is a favored son of Van Tran, a Little Saigon person of influence who is politically estranged from Janet Nguyen.
On to the current race. Do has taken pains (and probably enjoyed it) to try to puncture the Trung Nguyen balloon. He told me this week that there are “character” issues with Nguyen and, as part of that, cites the 2007 campaign moment in which a doctored photo made it appear as if Nguyen were standing near Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger at a political event in Little Saigon.
In a campaign mailer, Do says Nguyen was “caught red-handed doctoring a photo to fool voters.”
The shame. Nguyen apologized for the photo.
As part of his current campaign advertising blast at Nguyen, however, Do displayed the newspaper story about the doctored photo. Under the banner of the Orange County Register the headline read: “O.C. Candidate Has Serious Image Problem.”
Slight problem. The story appeared in The Times, not the Register.
Is it possible that Do attached our story to the Register’s banner because it has a wider reach in Orange County? A bit misleading, perhaps? A doctored mock-up of the story?
No way, Do told me. “I’ve got to talk to my consultant. If that got mixed up, I apologize. The design guy must have gotten it mixed up.”
He said his consultant is in Northern California and probably isn’t hip to which paper has the larger circulation in Orange County.
On behalf of The Times, apology accepted.
The federal corruption trial of former Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona is slated to start Oct. 28, a mere 10 months past the point where I predicted he’d cop a plea.
OK, not the first time I’ve been wrong.
But is Carona really going to trial?
I asked a veteran Orange County trial attorney with experience in both state and federal courts for his two cents’ worth. He made it clear he wasn’t familiar with the ins and outs of the case and didn’t want to speak for attribution, but he did underscore the potential dangers of Carona forging ahead.
"You’ve got to recognize, generally," the attorney said, "that defending in either state or federal court is an uphill battle. They [government prosecutors] are in court because they want to be in court. If they thought they had a weak case, they’d kick it, but you can kind of conclude that, especially in a high-profile case like this, if they’re going to the mat, they feel they’ve got the goods on him."
The lawyer couldn’t say how he’d attack the government’s case, and it’s not as though the feds are undefeated over the years. You can beat them.
Uh, slight problem: If you go to trial and lose, you get a longer sentence.
"In theory, there should be no penalty for defending yourself," the lawyer says. But, if convicted, the defendant is subject to a tiered sentencing grid that takes into account whether he took responsibility early on for the alleged crime. And, of course, if the defendant testifies and the judge thinks he lied....
Bottom line, the lawyer says, is that copping a plea can shave significant time — at least a year — off the sentence.
Of course, walking away a free man is even better.
What a choice. Cop a plea and know what you’re getting. Or convince all 12 jurors you’re innocent and have a nice dinner that night. Or, dum-da-dum-dum, get convicted and resign yourself to counting off an additional 365 days or more on your cell wall.
If Carona is like most of us, he probably has no idea what to do.
Is that why God invented lawyers?
Finally, something to unify Orange County.
It’s not politics, where Republicans rule but Democrats and independents are gaining. It’s not ethnicity or the dozens of languages spoken in homes. Forget that we have churches, temples and mosques throughout the county, preaching different gospels.
What unites us is the water.
More specifically, the waves.
Come Oct. 5 at 6:45 a.m., the Catholic Diocese of Orange County will host the first-ever ecumenical “Blessing of the Waves” at the Huntington Beach Pier. The diocese says its goal is to “bring together surfers and ocean-minded people, regardless of their faith tradition, to show spiritual appreciation for the ocean resource and all that it gives the planet and its population.”
Southern California is home to many world-class surf breaks and most are in Orange County, the diocese notes. “Our beaches are more than simple geography,” Bishop Tod Brown of Orange County says in a prepared statement, “they are the cultural and spiritual center of our community.”
The event will feature surfing priests and include a ceremonial paddle-out and a prayer, which I’m guessing might sound something like this:
“Lord, On this especially bitchen’ morning which has left us stoked, we give thanks for the righteous waves and ask thy blessing on all the interfaith babes and dudes who ride them. If it is thy wish, grant each of them a killer ride and bestow upon them waves that are especially filthy and tubular. May they hang 10 on thy oceanic bounty and, if it be in accordance with thy gnarly plan, may they not wipe out. Knowing there is but one Big Kahuna, we ask these things in thy name, Amen.”
Should we be outraged that Anaheim city officials have access to such cushy perks as free tickets to the Angels’ upcoming league playoff series?
You bet.
Am I?
Nah. Jealous? Maybe.
But for reasons that may not stand a “consistency” test, I’m much more put out that members of the Orange County Fair Board get freebies to its shows. It just seems to me that Anaheim council members do a lot more for their perks than Fair Board members do for theirs.
Whatever. The thing is, the state Fair Political Practices Commission is likely to change the rules on free tickets for public officials in California. It wouldn’t ban them, but would require they be reported as “gifts” or “income” unless it could be shown how the official’s attendance at the event served a public or governmental purpose.
Off the top of my head, I can’t figure how getting a free ticket to the World Series serves the public, but perhaps creative minds at City Hall could.
Anaheim is arguing against the change, saying potential conflict-of-interest issues could arise that might gum up future council votes. Suspicious minds also know the Angels are playoff-bound and who knows, might win the whole darn thing at Angels Stadium. Who wouldn’t want to watch all that for free?
The 20 or so tickets available for Angels home games are legitimate perks, according to City Atty. Jack White. But he was taken aback when informed that 15 former nuns in a Montebello retirement home had signed a form letter referring to the practice as immoral and unethical and asking that the “pillaging” be stopped.
“Pillaging, oh, my,” White said Wednesday. “OK, we have a difference of opinion.”
White said the city is on firm legal footing against the commission, but noted: “If they’ve got God on their side, then that worries me.”
I had a funny feeling that Debbie Cook could knock off Republican incumbent Dana Rohrabacher in their 46th District U.S. Congressional race this year.
Based on what?
Good question. In barely breaking a political sweat since first winning the seat in 1988, Rohrabacher has consistently scored vote percentages in high 50s and low 60s in his GOP-dominated district that includes northern Orange County coastal towns and continues up the coast into Long Beach.
Rather than the usual token opposition Rohrabacher has faced, however, Cook is the real deal and appears to be his most formidable Democratic challenger ever. A veteran councilwoman and mayor in Huntington Beach, which accounts for a goodly chunk of the voters in the district, Cook has also raised a fair amount of money.
Plus, wasn’t there supposed to be change in the air? And didn’t Rohrabacher’s nine terms in Congress and his unabashed friendship with discredited and convicted former GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff make him especially vulnerable this year? Especially to a woman with a certain amount of star quality to her?
That’s what I was thinking.
Until the 800-pound moose entered the room.
An 800-pound moose named Sarah Palin. John McCain’s vice presidential choice is coming to Orange County Sept. 25 for a fundraiser and she’s already made a difference, says George Andrews, executive director of the Orange County GOP.
“The minute the announcement was made [about her visit], our phones have been ringing nonstop,” he says.
Why should that bother Cook? Because grass-roots activists do the door-to-door precinct walking between now and Election Day. “From Congress all the way down to dog catcher, they will naturally get that bump because we’re canvassing Republican households and making sure they get out the vote,” Andrews says. “Having Palin on the ticket absolutely helps out everyone because more volunteers equals more households hit.”
Andrews isn’t about to concede that Rohrabacher was in trouble. But he predicts that the Palin effect will push the GOP turnout higher than it was in 2006 “and that will negate the inroads that Debbie Cook is making.”
Andrews talks about Palin awakening “the sleeping giant” of GOP activists in Orange County. While the giant slept, Cook had a shot.
Now?
Let’s just say I’ve lost that funny feeling.
After I columnized this week about the rigors facing first-year law school students, an Orange County woman e-mailed me the tale of how her son-in-law coped with the pressure: While a Chapman Law School student, he brewed beer in his campus apartment.
No way.
“My wife and I lived in a little townhouse, it had a garage and I was able to convert it into a brewery,” says Patrick Rue. “I didn’t have any hobbies, I was just studying and hanging out with my wife and sort of needed something I could do for myself. Throughout my three years in law school, I became more serious about brewing than I was about law school.”
Rue hung in and got his degree in 2006. Until his senior year, he thought he might be a real estate tax attorney. Then he noticed that “instead of studying I would be concerned what I’d brew for my next beer.”
Happy ending: A few months ago, he and his wife, Rachel, opened the Bruery in Placentia. While they typically sell to wholesalers, retailers or restaurants, this Friday from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. and Saturday from noon to 6 p.m. the Rues are having an open house so the public can sample their wares.
Any regrets about not pursuing law: “It’s something I can fall back on if I absolutely need to,” Rue, 28, says. “A lot of my law school friends are pretty jealous of me right now.”
Alice Gustafson saw one family-owned cafe tumble into the sea 20 years ago, so a little rent skirmish with Huntington Beach City Hall shouldn’t be that big a deal. But when you’re 77 and you’ve run your own Breakfast in the Park cafe since 1980, well, who wants to fight?
“My intention is to stay here till 2010,” she says of the quaint restaurant that sits in the city’s Central Park and is a habitat for ducks from the lake and customers’ dogs. “Then I’ll be 80 years old. I thought that would be a good retirement age. Everybody wants us here. Hardly a day goes by that someone doesn’t thank me for being here.”
Gustafson, whose late husband John operated the End Cafe before a 1988 winter storm took it and part of the Huntington Beach Pier into the Pacific Ocean, pays “rent” to the city as part of a sliding tax on her sales. The increase the city wants, she says, would double her monthly payment. “I can’t do it,” she says.
I can’t be objective about this fight, having long ago sworn devotion to her cafe’s big, fat cinnamon rolls. Gustafson owns the business, but the city owns the building and says she’s been getting a sweetheart deal for too long.
Gustafson disagrees. So is this the end?
“I don’t expect to leave,” she says. “I’m confident we can work it out.”
Photo: Los Angeles Times
It’s getting harder all the time to be a Good Samaritan. Not long ago, a dashing and thoughtful gentleman (OK, it was me) had finished dinner with an out-of-town friend and was returning to his car in the parking lot of an Irvine retail center.
I noticed a middle-aged woman unloading items, including golf clubs, from the back of her sport vehicle. I asked if she needed help and she said no, quickly adding that the steering on her vehicle had conked out and that she needed to call someone for a ride home. She was emptying the trunk to take the valuables with her.
Always on the lookout for ways to help my fellow citizens, I volunteered to give her a ride. “I don’t even know you,” she said, good-naturedly.
“I don’t know you either,” I said.
She was very pleasant, not the least insulting, but made it clear she wouldn’t be taking any rides from strangers on this night. We continued talking for several minutes, and the news somehow escaped that I wasn’t married and that she’d be happy to introduce me to some of her girlfriends. Introduce me to her friends but not accept a ride.
I didn’t want to meet her friends; I just wanted to do a good deed. For some odd reason, it annoyed me even more to find out she lived within a couple of miles of me, making the imposition on me next to nothing but potentially sparing her friend the hassle of leaving home at 9:30 at night to come pick her up.
Yes, I get it. I didn’t blame her for not wanting to roll the dice after dark in a stranger’s car. But while she retained her peace of mind, I lost something — the chance to exercise a basic human desire to help someone out of a bind and want nothing in return.
For some odd reason, that bugged me all the way home.
Some people want convicted child molester Sid Landau to die in hell. He says he expects to die in jail, although technically he’s in a state mental hospital and trying to win his release after being in custody since 2000.
Wherever he dies, the 69-year-old remains a classic study of what happens when the concepts of personal freedom and public fear collide. Landau has admitted to molesting 10 boys but was last convicted in 1988 and served out his eight-year sentence. Afterward, he violated probation twice — neither time for molestation — and was sent back to jail. Before his scheduled release in 2000, prosecutors petitioned to keep him in a state hospital as a potential threat.
Three times Orange County juries have heard his plea for release. He came closest the first time, in 2006, with 11 of 12 jurors favoring his release. But he needed all 12. The second time, jurors voted 8 to 4 to deny him. Last week, a jury did finally give him a unanimous verdict: Unfortunately for him, the vote was 12 to 0 to keep him in custody.
His attorney is appealing and says the strongest element was the judge’s ruling to let prosecutors bring in an outside expert to testify about Landau, rather than use a state mental health specialist.
Those are but details. What hangs over the case is the philosophy of fear. Or perhaps more accurately, the fear of the unknown. Most of us are aware of the legacy of repeat offenses from pedophiles, and it’s a chilling thought to free one who might strike again.
Yet, we also say we value personal freedom and paying one’s debt to society. It’s been 20 years since Landau was convicted. He did his time. No one can say for sure he’d molest again.
But because no one can be sure he won’t, we keep him imprisoned.
Deprive someone of their freedom for a heinous crime?
No problem. Count me in.
Keep them locked up for something they might do?
I’m not God.
We’ve all seen them. Some have elongated heads. Many have unusual-looking fingers. Some could pass for gorillas. Almost all appear to be over-caffeinated.
We’re talking about the folks with those hand-held signs that hawk products or tout businesses on our city streets. A common trick of the trade is to twirl the signs to attract attention. Most likely, it’s to relieve the incredible boredom the sign-holders must be experiencing.
Most of us either ignore them or find them mildly entertaining.
The city of Orange, however, is not easily amused. Citing residents’ complaints about people trying to sell mattresses, property, haircuts, massages and whatever else — creating distractions for drivers and inconveniences for pedestrians — the city council sallied forth months ago to do battle with hand-held signs.
On a 4-1 vote, with only Denis Bilodeau dissenting, the council asked its staff to draft ordinance changes to thwart the sign-twirlers. The loyal staff did its duty, sent a proposal to a compliant planning commission and then gave it to the council Tuesday.
The city sent code enforcement people to photograph the sign people in the act of being themselves. This was no rush job: the 41-page pdf file laying out the whole thing took someone a lot of time to compile.
In the end, council tabled the whole thing, meaning it’s probably a dead duck.
“I don’t want to spend any more time on this,” Bilodeau told his colleagues, adding that if someone wants to dress up in a clown suit on the corner of Tustin and Collins to entice him to get a haircut, let him try.
Read on »
Is there no escape? No place to hide?
For the sake of argument, let’s say some of us don’t want to be reminded every single hour of the day that the stock market is collapsing, taking our retirement income down like so much hair in the bathtub drain. Or that the economy not only does not rock, but is actually on the rocks. Or that a bank might turn out to be nothing more than a pretty building with no money in it.
What if we’d like to be blissfully unaware — at least for a few days — that instead of taking ocean cruises in retirement we’ll be living with relatives?
Good luck.
I’m trying to be one of those people. I don’t want to know how bad things are. At least, not know every hour or so. It’d be like your doctor calling you up several times a day saying, “You remember you have colitis, right?”
Turn on the TV, there it is. Talk radio, there it is. Pick up the newspaper, there it is. Talk to friends on the phone, there it is. The main headline in Wednesday’s Times: "Economic concerns deepen."
Even when you’re watching non-economic news on TV, those little trailers keep running across the bottom of the screen with the bad news, like dancing elves of torture. Or you’ll be watching a happy story on CNN or Fox and, before you can change channels, there’s the red arrow showing the Dow dropping again. How about a green arrow once in a while?
A couple of weeks ago, I told my financial adviser I didn’t want to look at my quarterly mutual fund statement. “Good idea,” he said. A few days later, though, when I said I needed to review my 401K at work but couldn’t do so without seeing how much I’d lost in recent months, he said, “We can’t hide our heads in the sand.”
To the contrary, sounds like an excellent idea.
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.
The children of John Crean, the Newport Beach RV tycoon who died last year, are in court fighting over whether their mother needs a conservator and who it should be.
The back-and-forth in the court filings in Orange County Probate Court range from the petty to the more bitingly personal. One of the disputes is whether John Crean’s gold-and-diamond belt buckle should have been melted down and the gems divided among the children so replicas could be made for them. Johnnie Crean says his mother wanted him to keep the belt and, because of its sentimental value, didn’t want it destroyed. He wanted to write checks to his siblings to make replicas.
From afar, it’s kind of funny because we all understand what family disputes can become. Likewise, we all know that words on papers — even court filings — can’t fully explain family dynamics.
But here’s something we can’t relate to: Johnnie Crean notes that separate trusts were established several months ago for the four children — and staked with $18 million each.
Which just goes to prove what the Beatles sang, money can’t buy you love.
Some of the postmortem chatter about Sandra Hutchens’ appointment as Orange County’s new sheriff focused on the notion that being a woman sealed the deal for her. I did some chattering myself but found that argument rather chauvinistic and unfounded.
But if the presumption is that Hutchens’ gender will bring a different kind of sensibility to local law enforcement, it bears repeating that of the two finalists, she was the only one who had ever shot and killed someone on the job. It happened New Year’s Eve 1980 when Hutchens was on patrol with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. The district attorney considered it a justifiable shooting, but a jury in a civil case awarded the dead man’s family $1.4 million, later reduced to $1 million after the county appealed.
An incident such as that, even from 28 years ago, usually translates to "street cred" for the top cop in a department. Deputies like to know that the sheriff understands what it means to have been in the ultimate life-altering situation. But Hutchens took it a step further in an interview recently with Times reporter Stuart Pfeifer. Enough of a step, in fact, to make you wonder about any new sensibilities that a woman might bring to the job.
"If I looked in someone’s personnel file and didn’t see anything in there, I’d wonder, ‘What have you been doing?' " she said. "I’d expect to see some more citizen complaints or use-of-force or something."
I think I know what she meant. (More after the jump)
Read on »
Dodged a bullet — I mean, missed a chance to do my civic duty last week — when my name wasn’t called for jury selection. I’m kidding; I’d like to be a juror someday. Kind of weird, but I suddenly got a little verklempt in the courtroom when Orange County Superior Court Judge Kelly MacEachern talked about jury duty being one of the country’s most hallowed responsibilities.
I’ve had two previous chances to sit in the box and was bumped both times by a district attorney’s option. They apparently don’t like things I’ve written about prosecutors, but what they don’t realize is that I’m perfectly willing to convict someone if the evidence, fairly obtained, is there. This time, they got the 12 jurors and one alternate they needed without my being called, so it was a morning down the drain.
However, the session did reinforce what a curse alcohol can lay on society. Because the case was a DUI, jurors had to talk about their own experiences to gauge whether they’d be biased. Of the couple dozen people who spoke, we learned that one woman’s brother-in-law was left a paraplegic by a drunk driver, another man’s brother was the drunk driver of a car that killed two people and that another middle-aged man, when he was 16, had to bail his father out of jail on a drinking-related charge. Another woman broke down crying while she attempted to discuss an episode from her past and was excused.
Pretty intense drama before lunch. Maybe there’s no way around it, but too bad that people think they’re heading for jury duty, only to find themselves on an “Oprah” show and recounting a terrible moment in the presence of total strangers.
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