The California Highway Patrol’s overtime scandal – in which more than 100 officers from its East Los Angeles branch may have inflated their overtime while helping Caltrans workers stay safe while doing freeway maintenance work – could explode into a statewide scandal. That’s contrary to claims made when the scandal first emerged in February, when CHP officials said a survey of other commands turned up no similar false claims.

Former Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley and a team of attorneys are representing more than 30 of the accused CHP officers. According to a Los Angeles Times report, 14 accused officers are facing termination while 90 more are still being investigated. Cooley says about 40 in total are at risk of being fired.

The main allegation facing officers: That they would seek eight hours of overtime pay after only being needed by Caltrans to work half that many hours or less on protection details.

Overtime spiking called common across state

But in court documents and in comments to the Times, Cooley says he can establish several points countering the CHP’s claims about the case. The most serious: The practice of padding such overtime is common in many of the 103 CHP commands around the state, according to former CHP officers. This would mean that Caltrans was overcharged by far more than the $360,000 that CHP has already documented.

Cooley also alleged that several middle- and upper-level CHP officials, including one who helped launch the East L.A. probe, engaged in the same questionable overtime billing practice when they were lower-ranking officers from 2007 to 2009.

The CHP is so far resisting releasing related documents requested by Cooley’s team and the media, saying the information is related to the ongoing investigation of the scandal.

But the involvement of another state agency with its own reputation to protect makes it seem unlikely that CHP can keep the lid on the scandal, as it tried to do on other internal problems earlier this century.

In February, Caltrans Director Laurie Berman announced that the agency’s inspector general would do a thorough audit of the CHP-Caltrans relationship.

“Caltrans takes violations of the law very seriously and illegal activity of any kind is not tolerated within the department,” Berman said in a statement to the Times. “If it is determined there was Caltrans employee misconduct, disciplinary action will be taken.”

Caltrans has not disclosed a timetable for when the inspector general’s audit will be released.

Scandal echoes those seen in Schwarzenegger years

The scandal marks the end to a decade of relative quiet for California’s largest law-enforcement agency. Among the allegations against the CHP during the Schwarzenegger administration:

• In 2009, the Ventura County Star reported that there was strong evidence that CHP officials impeded a hate-crimes investigation of a local CHP officer involved in a racially charged incident after officers held a party at an Oxnard hotel.

• In 2006, the Sacramento Bee reported that the CHP spent nearly $50 million on helicopters and motorcycles that were not open to competitive bidding. The companies given the contracts – Eurocopters and BMW, respectively – had courted top CHP officials with gifts and meals.

• In 2004, the Bee reported on the “Chiefs’ Disease” phenomenon in which 80 percent of top CHP officials filed for medical disabilities in late career, enabling them to get much more generous pensions. Because police discipline records were then confidential, Bee reporters confirmed the scandal through worker’s compensation claims filed by the CHP executives.

A CHP attorney threatened the Bee with a lawsuit if the records were used in the Bee’s reporting, saying the records were confidential. The Bee went ahead with the story, prompting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to eventually force out then-CHP Commissioner D.O. “Spike” Helmick.

Former California Highway Patrol Commissioner Mike Brown — a person of interest in several CHP scandals and mysteries — was installed Jan. 16 as

Brown, 61, resigned the CHP’s top post in February 2008, then worked for a year in the Schwarzenegger administration before taking a transit safety post with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in Washington. He is married to an Alexandria sheriff’s deputy.

Brown quit after the CHP was sharply criticized in state audits for wasteful spending in using executive aircraft and in buying weapons, motorcycles and technology for patrol cars. 

But Brown’s 2008 resignation also came a month after the state personnel board found that former CHP Commissioner Dwight “Spike” Helmick Jr. and four of his top aides had subjected CHP official Hubert “Art” Acevedo to illegal retaliation after — among other issues — Acevedo complained in 2003 and 2004 about the CHP encouraging pension spiking by improperly allowing officers to work past their 60th birthdays. Acevedo eventually received a $995,000 settlement.

While Helmick was a friend and mentor of Brown’s, Brown was not named in the retaliation complaint. He was tapped by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to succeed Helmick in 2004 when Helmick was forced out after the Sacramento Bee broke a bombshell story about “Chief’s Disease” — a pattern of top CHP officials reporting newly discovered work-related injuries just before retiring, sharply spiking their pensions.

Houston police chief: Brown tolerated corruption

In interviews a decade ago, Acevedo — recently installed as the police chief of Houston after nine years as chief in Austin, Texas — called Brown an enabler of a CHP culture in which corruption and corner-cutting was tolerated.

Eye-opening things happened under Brown when he was CHP commissioner.

The criminal investigation of “Chief’s Disease” was impeded by several CHP witnesses whom Sacramento County District Attorney Jan Scully described as “unable or unwilling” to cooperate in January 2007. Scully dropped her inquiry without filing charges.

In the 2006 gubernatorial race, the campaign staff of Democratic candidate Phil Angelides, the state treasurer, alleged the CHP committed a political dirty trick to keep a cloud over the Angelides campaign and help Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger win re-election.

The flap began in September 2006 after Angelides aides surreptitiously provided audiotapes to the Los Angeles Times that they had found on the governor’s official website in which Schwarzenegger made risque comments about “very hot” Assemblywoman Bonnie Garica, R-Cathedral City. Both the CHP and the Attorney General’s Office began investigating the incident as a possible cybercrime.

The attorney general’s investigators quickly concluded no crime was committed. But CHP didn’t close its investigation until four months after Schwarzenegger won re-election. As the Los Angeles Times reported, the agency faced questions at the time about whether this decision was politically motivated.

In May 2011, it was revealed soon after Schwarzenegger left office that he had fathered a child with a former housekeeper at his Brentwood estate. The Associated Press wrote a story raising the prospect that the CHP detail serving Schwarzenegger had aided him in his hiding his illicit relationship and second family. If the CHP facilitated Schwarzenegger’s extramarital escapades, it’s difficult to come up with a scenario in which Brown was not involved.

This complex, checkered history got little to no coverage from the Washington, D.C., media. The Washington Post’s story about Brown’s hiring concluded with a laudatory quote from Alexandria City Manager Mark B. Jinks: “Chief Brown’s remarkable career has put him at the forefront of neighborhood protection, community policing, traffic safety, strategic planning, and other areas of concern here and around the country.”

The present CHP commissioner is Joseph A. Farrow, who has been with the CHP since 1979 and was appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2008 to succeed his boss, Mike Brown, after a series of scandals. In 2007, then-Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia, R-Cathedral City, accused Brown of tolerating a sordid atmosphere at CHP’s Inland division, including looking the other way when a senior CHP leader seduced a subordinate whose husband was deployed overseas. Garcia said Brown acted to oust two CHP leaders in her district for their gross unprofessionalism only after he was told that she and then-state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, were going to Schwarzenegger to complain.

Whom did Brown appoint to shape up the troubled Inland division? Tim Clark, a CHP senior officer who had already been implicated in a scandal of his own related to close ties between senior CHP officials and vendors. This is from a Sacramento Bee story in December 2006:

All told, the state spent nearly $50 million on the new equipment, effectively excluding competition from other brands. As a result, California’s sky and highways today are branded: Eurocopters monitor its cities and landmarks from above, while BMW motorcycles patrol below.

 

As the CHP assembled those fleets, its bosses accepted hospitality from the companies, including visits to the companies’ European headquarters, dinner at an upscale Sacramento restaurant and a party at the home of a company lobbyist that featured a flyover by a CHP helicopter, the investigation found.

 

Commissioner Dwight “Spike” Helmick, the CHP’s top boss at the time, even got a jacket from BMW the same month the department awarded a contract to a BMW dealership.

Mass pension-spiking tolerated at highest level

Helmick, who was CHP commissioner from 1995 to 2004, is central to the criticism of the CHP over its internal culture. He and his proteges were the key figures in the biggest CHP scandal of this century. The Bee broke the story in 2004. Here’s the AP summary:

SACRAMENTO – Fifty-five of the 65 high-ranking officers who retired from the California Highway Patrol since 2000 filed workers’ compensation claims within two years, entitling them to lucrative disability settlements and medical pensions with tax-free income.

 

The practice is so widespread among the roughly 150 CHP chiefs and captains that rank-and-file officers have dubbed it “chief’s disease,” boosting costs in a department that pays the highest rate in state government for injuries and medical pensions.

The payments are in addition to routine pension benefits that let CHP officers retire at age 50 with up to 90 percent of their pay.

Nearly 70 percent of CHP officers retire on disability, and the department pays among the highest percentage of workplace injury claims, The Sacramento Bee found. The combination cost taxpayers $75 million two years ago.

“It turns out we need to be policing the police,” said state Sen. Jackie Speier, D-Daly City, chairwoman of the Select Committee on Government Oversight.

CHP Commissioner D.O. Helmick, who is being nudged into retirement next week by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, has asked the Public Employees’ Retirement System to determine if he, too, should be granted a disability pension because of injuries from vehicle accidents in the 1970s and 1980s, said spokesman Tom Marshall.

CHP officials ‘unable or unwilling’ to cooperate in 2007 probe

Acevedo, the well-regarded Austin police chief since 2007, won a $995,000 judgment from the CHP and the state after establishing that he had been subject to egregious retaliation by top CHP officials for objecting to the pension spiking. The California State Personnel Board concluded that he had made a persuasive case of mass perjury among top CHP officials.

But a criminal investigation by Sacramento County District Attorney Jan Scully was stymied. In 2007, her office said top CHP officials were “unable or unwilling” to testify about details related to the mass pension spiking.

I interviewed Acevedo on a number of occasions. He said Helmick and his predecessor, Maurice Hannigan, encouraged a macho, secretive culture in which leaders and rank-and-file officers alike believed it was OK to look the other way when wrongdoing occurred.

Hannigan was notorious for punishing CHP officers who arrested or cited his daughters for driving offenses, including suspicion of DUI.