For the past couple years we have watched our home town struggle to keep the Sacramento Kings basketball team in Sacramento. We have also observed the proposed attempt to build a new $400 million stadium for the team in downtown Sacramento at the old Southern Pacific railroad yards.

We have also followed all the headlines and rumors about how the Kings are “moving to Anaheim.” The NBA and Mayor Kevin Johnson are “trying to keep the Kings in town.” Senate President Pro Tem Darryl Steinberg, D-Sacramento, introduces legislation to keep the Kings in his home town. And developers Ron Burkle and Darius Anderson “pledge to buy the team and keep it in Sacramento.”

It all has a similar ring to when one of us, Patrick Melarkey, was on the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors in the 1970s and the stadium activity began. Back then it was going to be a privately financed baseball stadium put together by a couple of local boys. It was not for a basketball arena.

“It was 1974 when a call came into my office,” Melarkey remembered. “I was president of the Board of Supervisors and two local lads wanted to build a privately-financed baseball stadium. The taxpaying public wouldn’t have to shell out a nickel for it. The two young men, Gregg Lukenbill and Frank McCormack, were both Catholic boys who had met at Sacred Heart Elementary School and they wanted to meet with me because I had been pushing for a new baseball stadium that would cost $1 million. The idea I had for the stadium design was based on the new minor league baseball stadium in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I had made a trip out there, visited the stadium and began thinking about a stadium like it in Sacramento. I thought the new state fair ground at Cal Expo might be appropriate.”

It was in the early stages of this plan when Lukenbill and McCormack came in to see Melarkey. Lukenbill was in his early twenties, McCormack a bit older. They were both dressed in leisure suits, then the current fashion trend, and were eager to outline their stadium dream plan.

“We want to build a state-of-the-art baseball stadium for Sacramento and it won’t cost the public a nickel,” said Lukenbill, by far the more vocal of the duo. “It’s gonna be all privately financed and we’re putting together a team to raise the money. We’re wondering if you might be able to help.”

Melarkey told them he’d do what he could for them and asked them where they wanted to build such a stadium. They had a few ideas, but nothing set in stone. Melarkey waited to see how it would play out.

Baseball in Play

Over the next few years, throughout the rest of Melarkey’s second and final term as a supervisor, he met and consulted with Lukenbill and McCormack a number of times. The baseball stadium idea was still in play. But Lukenbill was interested in any professional sports franchise that would put Sacramento on the map. Gregg said Sacramento was “a world-class city” and deserved such an urban amenity as a professional sports franchise. How the one attribute has anything to do with the other was a mystery.

During these years Lukenbill and McCormack began building their executive and financing team to get a professional sports team. First they hired Greg “Dutch” Van Dusen, the former general manager of the Sacramento Solons baseball team. The Solons were a Pacific Coast League franchise which had broken all attendance records in 1976 playing their home games at Sacramento City College’s Hughes Stadium. “Dutch” came on board the Lukenbill-McCormack vessel in 1978. Then Lukenbill secured the backing of the wealthy Benevenuti family, developers Joe and his son, Richard. Another addition was Frank Cook, a local realtor. The Benvenutis had a large parcel of land in the North Natomas area of Sacramento. Perhaps they could build a stadium there.

The problem was that North Natomas was a political hot potato. Although it had been master-planned as one site for Sacramento expansion in the early 1960s, by the 1970s the local environmental movement wanted to see it preserved. The local No Growth movement had a significant ally in Mayor Phil Isenberg, who was opposed to the development. No way would there be a traffic-generating stadium out in North Natomas, Isenberg vowed.

Now it looked as if there was no way it would even be a baseball stadium. There weren’t any major-league baseball franchises available at that time. But a basketball team could be found. It was the old Rochester Royals franchise, a team that began in the 1920s and won the 1951 NBA championship before it moved to Cincinnati in 1957. Then it moved to Kansas City in 1972, where it was renamed the Kings. This team was now in play and Lukenbill wanted to buy it.

Melarkey was retired from the board when Lukenbill bought the Kansas City Kings franchise in 1983. Lukenbill first vowed to keep the Kings in Kansas City, but only the foolhardy believed it. Lukenbill now had a franchise that could justify the need for a new stadium, and North Natomas was the chosen site.

Melarkey remembers going out there once with Lukenbill and the Benvenutis, standing on the I-880 freeway overpass about a half mile away from the present home of the Kings. Richard Benvenuti pointed from south to north, then west to east, and said, “All this land below us will all be developed as business and office parks if we can get the rezoning through the city council to allow it.” Melarkey thought Lukenbill and the Benvenutis had a king-sized battle on their hands if they intended to take on Phil Isenberg. “The best thing you can do if you intend to try this is to hire Maurice Read,” the Sacramento Public relations wizard, Melarkey told them. “Read and Isenberg are good friends and if anybody can move this stadium forward, it’s Maurice Read.”

Baseball and Development

Then Melarkey stopped following the stadium action. Lukenbill did achieve his plan to build a new basketball arena in North Natomas after a development plan was reached between the developers and the local environmental community in 1987.

Over the next years, Gregg Lukenbill and the Sacramento Kings had a chaotic tenure in Sacramento. The team moved to a different stadium in 1986. Lukenbill sold his part of the franchise in 1992. Frank McCormack, his original partner, was never paid by Lukenbill for his 3 percent share of the franchise. Dutch Van Dusen and Maurice Read moved on. The Benvenutis still had their share of the franchise and the value of property they owned in North Natomas shot through the roof.

The Kings may be in danger of leaving Sacramento, but they have left a lasting mark with the fortune they made for some of their benefactors, such has the Benvenutis.

One beneficiary was Leonard Padilla, the celebrated black-hat bounty hunter most recently seen during the Casey Anthony murder trial. Upon advice from the Benvenutis, in 1979 Padilla bought a 60-acre parcel in North Natomas for $240,000. He received an offer of more than $12,000,000 for the land in 2005, according to a Feb. 25, 2005 story by Sacramento News & Review reporter Cosmo Garvin. Using the same formula provided in the article on Padilla, between 1980-2005, the value for the 4,000-acre North Natomas property held by the Benvenutis increased from $3 million to $400 million.

Two years ago there was an article in the Sacramento Bee about a proposed land swap that involved building a new arena for the Kings at Cal Expo. It seemed that the wheel had come around to where it began.

But the differences were huge. This was no privately-financed stadium; this was a $400 million monster that the city of Sacramento was supposed to finance for the owners. This new plan was called the Convergence Plan and it called for a huge land swap. Cal Expo would be “given” to local developers. The second part of this trifecta called for moving the fair to the site of the present Kings Arena. The final piece in the deal would be a new publicly financed basketball arena in downtown Sacramento adjacent to the old Southern Pacific railway station.

The deal seemed screwy. It was actually proposed by NBA Commissioner David Stern and backed by Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, a former NBA star with the Cleveland Cavaliers and Phoenix Suns.

The questions that came to mind were these: Why should Cal Expo be opened up to developers such as the Lennar Corporation, which would likely make a fortune, while the state fair left town and took with it the revenue that comes annually to Sacramento? Was the Kings basketball arena site too small to accommodate the state fair? And how about the cost of the new stadium, estimated at $400 million. Would local taxpayers approve such an expenditure given the state of the fragile economy? Not likely, and in fact they voted down a proposed 0.25 percent sales tax in 2006.

The Anaheim Royals?

In the interim, a decade ago the Maloof family acquired the Kings. When the Convergence Plan went kerflooey, the Maloofs began looking for greener pastures. They thought they found them in Anaheim. The Maloofs went to Anaheim to showcase their wares. The City of Anaheim was interested and the talks began. They would rename the Kings the Royals and the franchise would have a new home.

But moving the Kings to Anaheim would cost a lot of money. The Maloof family would have to pay off the $67 million they owe the City of Sacramento, plus a $9 million early repayment fee. And according to Wikipedia, “In June of 2011, the Maloof brothers, Joe and Gavin, Sold majority share of the Palms to a lending company, Leonard Green & Partners LP in Los Angeles and TPG Capital in Texas, allowing them to continue building their stadium.” Professional sports leagues frown on owners being associated even with legalized gambling.

David Taylor, the local developer flavor-of-the-month in Sacramento, was deputized by the Sacramento City Council to study the feasibility of a new arena in the city. Taylor hasn’t yet met with the Maloofs. Taylor also is waiting for market studies the Kings have promised him.

Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson said of all the basketball maneuvering, “As a city, we can only control what we can control. If [the Maloofs] decide they don’t want to be in Sacramento, that is a choice they have to make.”

And on it goes, up to the present, with the future of professional basketball in Sacramento uncertain. Will Kevin Johnson and his new allies, billionaire developers Ron Burkle and Darius Anderson, deliver on their promise to keep the Kings in Sacramento? Or will they buy an existing NBA franchise, such as the financially troubled New Orleans Hornets, and bring it here? Maybe they will, but Burkle and Anderson still want a new publicly financed downtown arena if they do that. And while basketball franchises may be the stalking horse, in Sacramento the name of the game is still the same: the insider developers who benefit from voter-approved public projects, whether their names are Benvenuti, Burkle or Angelo Tsakopolous, the local developer of record for the Southern Pacific site.

It was like déjà vu all the way back to the Gregg Lukenbill-Frank McCormack plan for a privately financed baseball stadium. That was the original Field of Dreams, and the only one that still makes sense for Sacramento.

Yo ho ho and and a pot of redevelopment gold.

For 15 years San Francisco has tried to transform Treasure Island from a sandy former Naval base into a gold and jobs-generating new urban community with 40-story skyscrapers interspersed by parks and marinas. The idea came from then-Mayor Willie Brown as far back as 1995.

On June 15, 2011, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee finally signed the formal approval to allow the redevelopment of Treasure Island to begin. While the city has been remarkably patient in its mission to secure approval for the $1.5 billion project, this project represents a golden opportunity to build a new city center for 19,000 new tax-paying residents.

There will be huge new skyscrapers secured into the volatile landfill with earthquake-proof foundations, a number of community parks, a seawall to prevent tsunamis and tons of sand imported to stabilize the land-filled island. Before the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, Treasure Island stood 18 feet above sea level. After the quake, it was at 6 feet. The new sand will be compacted into the existing soil to provide a solid base for the coming towers.

Mark Sarkisian of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the firm’s chief structural engineer on the project, said the towers and the other new buildings will be safe. He said, “We did shaker-table modeling and computer-generated effects to see how the new buildings will perform and we’re satisfied they will be able to safely withstand a 7.5 earthquake.”

Critics like Aaron Peskin, the former president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, don’t think the seismic or traffic issues have been thoroughly explored or tested. “I’d say that if you believe that the seismic issues are resolved, then you’re either a total optimist or an absolute fool,” said Peskin, who is presently weighing the idea of pursuing a legal action against the Treasure Island Development Authority (TIDA). “If we do bring an action, it will likely relate to the EIR [Environmental Impact Report] for the project.”

Indeed, as Anthony Pignataro reported on this site last year, Treasure Island has a toxic problem. He wrote that “a disputed portion of Treasure Island — the Navy says just a few sites, others say possibly the entire island — is radioactive. What to do about the radiological contamination has become the great unmentionable in the quest to turn the old, rapidly decaying base into San Francisco’s ‘premier date-night locale’….”

Opponents Outgunned

At this point, Peskin and Treasure Island development opponents appear to be outgunned. TIDA’s attorney-of-record on this is Tina Thomas, of the Sacramento law firm Ramey-Thomas. When she served in the first Jerry Brown gubernatorial administration, Thomas wrote the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) in 1974. Now she tends to serve developer interests, such as Sacramento’s Angelo Tsakopolous and Ron Burkle, the billionaire who is involved in the Treasure Island redevelopment plan.

The TIDA project involves Florida-based Lennar Properties, Wilson Meany Sullivan and Kenwood Investments (the Burkle-Anderson group) who say they hope to break ground early next year. The city of San Francisco is also a partner on the deal, since it’s chipping in $700 million in bonds; while Kenwood et al. are in for $500 million. The developers are projecting $370 million in profit at build out, and the city gets a taste of  it.

Over the next few decades, Lennar and friends will transform the island into a state-of-the-art neighborhood with a mix of affordable and market-rate energy efficient homes. Massive weight will compact the soil, keeping the island stable during earthquakes. A 30-foot seawall will guard against sea-level rise and possible tsunamis. Plans call for the ramps to and from the Bay Bridge to be redesigned and dedicated bus lines to run from the island to downtown San Francisco.

High-Paying Jobs

There are numerous reasons to welcome the new development at Treasure Island from a policy standpoint. It will create high-paying construction and engineering jobs for the length of the 20-30 year build out. It will also increase tax revenue and provide new housing for maxed-out San Francisco.

There are other reasons to abhor Treasure Island from a political process standpoint, for the redevelopment of this naval base is easily one of the sleaziest deals ever put forward in a city where political sleaze has reigned supreme since the octopus of Southern Pacific Railroad extended its tentacles over the city at the end of the 19th century.

Grand jury investigations into Treasure Island have occurred. The governing agency for the project, TIDA, is a bit of a mystery as to what kind of agency or corporation or city entity it is exactly, and recent rulings have relaxed the ethical questions that have characterized the process since it started.

Willie’s Plans

In 1998, reporter Chuck Finnie of The San Francisco Examiner wrote a story,  “Mayor’s Pals find Treasure on Island,” in which he laid out the plans that Mayor Willie Brown then had for Treasure Island.

Finnie reported:

“Political patrons of Mayor Brown who are favored for a Treasure Island redevelopment deal would pay The City at least $1 million less than the other two bidders, a Port of San Francisco financial report says…. The project is one of several in which the mayor’s staff and city commissioners have been asked to make business decisions involving people close to Brown…. Anderson worked as a volunteer raising money for Brown’s $2 million mayoral campaign.

“Burkle, who is backing Anderson’s bid financially, is a Los Angeles investor and former law client of the mayor’s during Brown’s days as speaker of the Assembly.

“The report, obtained by The Examiner under state public records law, raises questions about why the mayor is recommending the deal go to Treasure Island Enterprises, the creation of Anderson and Burkle…. [A] mayor’s selection committee judged Anderson and Burkle’s proposal best.” 

One of Lennar’s partners in the Treasure Island deal, Kenwood Investments, is the outgrowth of the original company hand-picked for Treasure Island by Willie Brown in 1998. Kenwood is headed by Burkle and Anderson.

Theme Park Plan

Willie Brown’s Treasure Island plan was first put forward in a document, “The Treasure Island Reuse Plan.” This plan would have transformed the former U. S. Naval base into a tourist-oriented theme park. The lead agency for the conversion would have been the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency.

In 1995, Willie advanced the idea that it would make a suitable location for Indian gaming casinos. In 1998, Willie tried to enlist reclusive Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing to develop it as such. But Li wouldn’t bite. “It was sort of a unique time,” said Larry Florin, who oversaw Treasure Island for the city in the late 1990s. “Land-use planning in San Francisco is like hand-to-hand combat, and you had this detached piece of property that no one thought about, so it was an opportunity for some free thinking to occur.”

Sweetheart Deal

Free thinking is one way to describe it. Treasure Island has been a sweetheart deal ever since the process got underway in the late 1990s. After Brown failed to get the project moving, the next mayor, Mayor Gavin Newsom, took a bite at the Treasure Island apple during his term. Newsom was figuratively caught with his pants down at a fund-raiser for him hosted by Burkle’s partner Darius Anderson in Sacramento in 2004. Again, the plan didn’t fly.

Present Mayor Ed Lee finally succeeded where the previous two had failed — despite a narrow, 4-3 approval by the San Francisco Planning Commission before the Board of Supervisors passed the plan unanimously by an 11-0 vote.

The Treasure Island project envisions a new ecologically friendly, “smart growth”-oriented, “sustainable” mini-city of 19,000 residents. It would have set-aside proportions of 20 percent of the new housing units designated for “low-income families” and the homeless with shining new high-rise commercial and residential towers interspersed among “pedestrian-oriented” retail units. All of it will be served by new ramped-up ferry services from San Francisco and the East Bay to Treasure Island to insure the “sustainability” quotient.

Most of the main players in the San Francisco Democratic Party Insider Club are also on board the Treasure Island Express. Besides Willie Brown, Gavin Newsom, Darius Anderson and Ron Burkle, the Treasure Island gold miners include Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, and some of her family.

“There is no question there is a concerted effort to make this a political issue by some,” said Nancy Pelosi, speaking on the issue in 2010 when a new mosque was being proposed for Ground Zero in New York. “And I join those who have called for looking into how is this opposition to the mosque being funded. How is this being ginned up that here we are talking about Treasure Island, something we’ve been working on for decades, something of great interest to our community as we go forward.”

Indian Casinos

Pelosi, then-Mayor Gavin Newsom and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus signed the transfer agreement on Tuesday, June 10, 2010. It included a section of neighboring Yerba Buena Island, where Native American Indian remains were found in 2003.  That makes Yerba Buena Island a potential site for Indian gaming casinos.

Pelosi has used her power to push the crony-infested project for years. She pushed hard for legislative language that would have forced the military to grant highly valued properties at no cost to the local communities.

“Treasure Island is not a case of a small town that has relied on a local military base for its livelihood for decades. It is a land grab by politicians for well-connected developers,“ said Tony Hall, the former executive director of the Treasure Island Development Authority and a mayoral candidate. The authority is the firm that grew into an entity that Aaron Peskin said is “one of the great mysteries of our time. It’s a non-profit that grew into a LLC that then became a city agency.” Hall called the city’s effort to develop the island a “den of corruption.”

Peskin quoted a news story back to me: “A proposed Treasure Island development plan slates 90 percent of the developed acreage for residential use, 7 percent for commercial property and 3 percent for parking. An illustration shows about a dozen high-rise blocks of shoreline condominiums with stunning views of the city, plus 300 acres of park and recreation land.”

“This would hardly be ‘affordable housing,’ the $5 billion investment that Mrs. Pelosi claims would have to be recouped by the developer, Peskin snorted. “The only long-term jobs created from this plan would be for maids and doormen for the high rollers privileged enough to live there.”

The likelihood of a successful legal challenge to TIDA isn’t good. There are powerful political and economic forces at work here, and the whole Democratic Party team out of San Francisco is backing the plan. Willie Brown’s dream of gold on Treasure Island seems to be coming true.

By RICHARD TRAINOR

When I met Richard Fine in the summer of 2001, he was riding high. Shortly after that he was rotting in jail.

A prominent attorney with a thriving practice in Beverly Hills, in the sunny days of 2001 Fine was a political insider with powerful connections to U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Rep. Henry Waxman and political commentator Arianna Huffington.

Fine fought and won important cases, such as one in 1997 against the sale of the Long Beach Naval Air Station to the Chinese Overseas Shipping Company. He was most famous in California for taking on the governor and the Legislature in 1997 for paying state employees before a budget had been passed. In 2003, the California Supreme Court found in favor of Fine when they ruled that employees couldn’t be paid without a budget in effect. That action gained Fine considerable notice and public notoriety as news outlets poured in to cover the story. Both the Los Angeles Times and the Sacramento Bee ran extensive coverage on Richard Fine from 1997 until 2003.

In 1998, Fine took on a case involving property owners in Marina Del Rey. What grew out of this is either “the biggest case of judicial corruption in the history of the United States,” as Fine claims it is, and that he became a political prisoner as the result of it; or it was a personal vendetta being staged by Fine over spilled milk, as his detractors claim. The answer to that is still being debated.

Kenneth Ofgang of the Metropolitan News Enterprise reported at Fine’s disbarment hearing before the State Supreme Court on February 12, 2009, “The hearing judge [Richard Honn] said Fine ‘engaged in what amounts to an almost never-ending attack on anyone (including attorneys and judicial officers) who disagreed with him or otherwise got in his way’.” Fine, Honn said, “kept digging himself into deeper and deeper problems” and failed “to appreciate the harm he has imposed on so many people and on the court system.”

National Review’s Alex Alexiev saw the Fine case as political repression. When Fine’s appeal to overturn his disbarment and was denied by the Supreme Court, Alexiev wrote, “On April 23, 2010, the Supreme Court of the United States denied the petition for ‘stay of execution’ by attorney Richard I. Fine in the case of Richard Fine v. Leroy Baca, Sheriff of Los Angeles County (09-1250). In doing so, the highest court of the land has refused to rectify a clear-cut case of judicial corruption in the state of California.”

California Gulag

Alexiev saw the case as reminiscent of the Soviet gulag. As he wrote, “[T]he judicial machine moved to get rid of Fine once and for all by having the California State Bar disbar him for ‘moral turpitude,’ a course of action reminiscent of the Soviet Communist regime’s practice of declaring political dissidents criminally insane and locking them up in psychiatric wards.”

On February 26, 2009, Fine addressed a town hall meeting in downtown Los Angeles. Dressed in his trademark diplomat-formal blue suit and one of the colorful bow ties he favors, Fine begins an address to the crowded room, “We have three branches of government here in California: the executive branch, the legislature, and the judiciary. What’s happened in California is that the judiciary has gone bad.”

Fine hardly looks the part of a rabble-rousing revolutionary. He’s more like an academic don you picture from the novels of Saul Bellow or Vladimir Nabokov. Fine was educated at the University of Chicago, where he obtained a doctorate in law in 1964, the London School of Economics and Political Science for another Ph.D. in International Law and the Hague’s Academy of International Law. When we met was also the Honorary Counsel to Norway. He lost that position when he was incarcerated.

Two days after the town hall meeting, Fine held a rally on the steps of the Los Angeles County Courtroom and delivered essentially the same message. Three days after that, Fine was hauled away to jail where he sat in solitary confinement for a year-and-a-half before he was released without charges by the very judge who sent him there and had him disbarred from the practice he’d excelled in for 42 years.

Trust Buster

A former U.S. Justice Department attorney in Washington, D.C. under the legendary Robert Morganthau, Fine headed up the anti-trust division there from 1968-1972 and later went on to specialize in class action litigation when he opened a private practice in Los Angeles in 1974.

In 1998 Fine, took on the case that grew into his crusade to expose judicial corruption. To understand how that grew into such a contentious battle, it is necessary to go back in time to the case that prompted it.

After years of legal maneuvering on a class-action litigation, on June 14, 2007, Fine filed a petition for writ of mandate in the case of Marina Strand Colony II Homeowners Association vs. County of Los Angeles, LASC Case No. BS 109420, as the attorney for the Marina Strand Colony II Homeowners Association. The petition sought to overturn the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors’ approval of an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) in favor of the redevelopment of an apartment complex in Marina del Rey.

Fine’s petition alleged that the EIR violated the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Among the numerous other complaints was Fine’s allegation that Los Angeles County did not receive any positive financial benefit from the project, as required by CEQA. Los Angeles County was the Respondent in the case.

L.A. County won the case.

The judge who ruled in favor of the county was Superior Court Judge David Yaffe, who resigned from the bench in September 2010. Yaffe was also a Los Angeles County employee being paid $47,000 a year in addition to his $176,000 state salary as a Superior Court Judge. He couldn’t fairly judge the case, Fine reasoned, because he had a conflict of interest. The county was paying his salary, and Yaffe was ruling for the county.

Double Dipping

Fine said the judges were guilty of double-dipping by drawing the county salaries. In addition to their voter-approved salaries of $176,000 per year, the L.A. County judges, commissioners and supervisors were also receiving an additional $47,000 per year in salary, retirement and medical insurance. No, these were “benefits”, according to Los Angeles County and the California State Legislature.

No, they weren’t, countered Fine; they were bribes. “They were bribes being paid to judges to throw the case whenever a case came up involving Los Angeles County,” thundered Fine in a videotape from his jail cell with the Full Disclosure network. “Between 2005-2008, not one of the 827 cases involving LA County decided by a Los Angeles County Superior Judge ever went against the county. In 2008, there might have been two that they lost, but we’re not sure because of the way the cases were reported. Any way you look at it, it’s one hell of a track record: 827 to 2, or 829 to nothing.”

In 2008, Yaffe ordered Fine to reveal his assets and pay $46,000 to the county in order for Fine to receive his legal fees on the Marina Strand case. Fine refused and Yaffe threw him in jail.

The Fine-Yaffe tug-of-war might be dismissed as a nasty personality clash that grew into dysfunctional proportions if it didn’t involve such basic questions as due process, habeas corpus, and the passage of ex post facto laws by the state legislature.

In fact, it does: Fine was held for a year without charges, ergo the habeas corpus question. And Fine brought an action against L.A. County for the illegal payment of county employees deciding public cases, including the Board of Supervisors and L.A. County judges. At the time, such payments were prohibited under the state constitution.

Silent Mainstream News Media

During his incarceration, the Los Angeles Times and the Sacramento Bee were notably silent. Instead, Fine’s case was taken up by a woman named Leslie Dutton who posted a number of videos of Fine on Full Disclosure.

The L.A.County Sheriff, Lee Baca, was threatened with a lawsuit before Dutton was allowed access to Fine. Judicial Watch, the public interest law firm, filed the suit on her behalf in late 2009. As Judicial Watch’s Connie Ruffley talked to me about Ernie told me about the actions of Ernie “Stirling” Norris, “When Ernie, the lead attorney for Judicial Watch in California, was contacted by Sheriff Baca, he was asked, ‘What will it take to make this go away?’ Ernie said, ‘Let Leslie Dutton in to tape some interviews with Richard Fine’.”

The judges had their defenders, too. Shaun Martin, a professor of law at the University of San Diego, posted this comment on the California Appellate website on October 15, 2008 when Fine won an appeal against the judges for the dual salary question: “It’s bad enough that your investments are plummeting, your house is worth only a fraction of what you paid for it, and your retirement accounts are completely tanking. But, in the midst of all of this, the Court of Appeal publishes this opinion…. which reverses the trial court and threatens to take away a large amount of money from state court judges not only in Los Angeles, but across the state as well.”

Then Martin waxed prophetic. “Moreover, as a practical matter, at the end of the day, I think it very likely that state court judges don’t have much to worry about from this one, since there’s …a strong likelihood that, if nothing else, the Legislature will step in to clean this problem up and make sure that judges get their benefits.”

Retroactive Immunity

In the summer of 2009, the Legislature passed a bill giving the supervisors and judges retroactive immunity from judicial prosecution, civil liability and disciplinary action, ergo the ex post facto question for the dual salaries. When Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, was asked about it, he said, “Yeah, we passed a bill restoring their benefits.”

Steve Ipsen, a deputy district attorney with Los Angeles County, seems deeply troubled by some of the precedents he sees in the Fine case. As he told Dutton in an on-camera interview, “When the employer [Los Angeles County] is paying the judge who is making the decision regarding the employer, any appearance of impropriety must be avoided. If even the perception of pressure is there to decide favorably for the county, it’s a very grave danger.”

Richard Fine is now working as an independent strategic consultant for a private firm in Los Angeles. He is keeping a low profile, at least for the time. He is planning his own strategy of getting his license to practice law restored. Whatever chance he might have of doing so and bringing an action against the judges who jailed him for exposing their dual salaries is unclear. Although the limelight around him may have dimmed considerably since the days when he regularly won his cases, the reflected light of Fine’s lonely battle burns bright.

By RICHARD TRAINOR

The California State Victims of Crime Program (VCP) is a neat little boutique agency designed to assist crime victims. It’s officially known as the Victims Compensation and Government Claims Board, or colloquially as the CalVCP.

Formed in 1965, CalVCP is the oldest such crime victims program in the nation. It serves more than 50,000 crime victims per year and has an annual budget of more than $100 million. The program has a state-federal funding mix, getting 55 cents in federal money out of every dollar it spends.

So far, CalVCP has provided over $2 billion in compensation to crime victims. Its new Executive Director, Julie Nauman, crowed about it when the $2 billion milestone was reached:

This is a significant moment for CalVCP and calls attention to the thousands of victims whose lives were permanently altered by violence and had nowhere else to turn. Besides paying for the expenditures associated with crime, which often leaves families financially devastated, our program plays an important role in the healing process, allowing many victims to pick up the pieces and move on with their lives in some shape or form. [Note: the CalVCP link for this quote recently was taken down by CalVCP. It formerly was here.]

In some shape or form, though, sometimes not good ones.

The CalVCP program has routinely been the subject of remedial legislation, and has been investigated by the Little Hoover Commission and by the State Auditor General’s office in 2005. The program has sometimes taken three years to discharge an approved claim.

When a victim of a crime is treated for his or her injuries by a doctor, a hospital or an emergency technician, the victim is supposed to be provided with a handout on the Victims of Crime program and told how to apply for it. The application must be completed within a year and the total amount that a victim can be compensated is $55,000.

The program is supposed to provide free in-house advocates to aid the victim so he or she can avoid hiring an attorney to press their case. If a claim is approved, the victim is notified within 90 days and can then collect their checks.

But often, crime victims are left to twist in the wind on their own and provide their own legal, medical and rehabilitation services, at their own cost.

Administrative costs add up

Michael Siegel, a Loomis-based attorney, is often hired by crime victims when the approval of their claims is in danger. About CalVCP, Siegel said, “They’re worse than ever. They’ve cut back on service payment amounts for doctors and counselors, for lawyers and for the victims themselves.”

Siegel puts the CalVCP’s administrative costs figure at 40 percent. CalVCP media spokesman Jon M. Myers disputed that. Myers said, “That’s an exaggeration; it’s closer to 20 to 25 percent.”

Siegel disputed Myers’ figures, saying, “They’re passing along some of their overhead to other uses, but it’s still money that should go to the victims.”

One client of Siegel’s is a woman named Krista Clem-O’Sullivan. Her story is tragic. Her husband, John “Scully” O’Sullivan, was murdered in August 2009 on their ranch in El Dorado County. Reported the Oct. 11, 2010 Irish Central:

Ken Zimmerman is on trial in Amador Superior Court in northern California accused of the murder of Irish man John O’Sullivan.

In August of last year, fourteen months ago, John O’Sullivan was found dead in his tractor with shotgun wounds in his back. His neighbour Ken Zimmerman, with whom he had recently had an argument, was arrested and charged with homicide.

According to evidence heard at the trial, O’Sullivan had rammed through Zimmerman’s locked gate and assaulted him before the fatal shooting.

O’Sullivan’s wife, Krista Clem-O’Sullivan, has alleged intimidation of her and her family during the course of the trial.

According to the Oct. 28, 2010 Amador News, a jury “found Kenneth Zimmerman guilty of second-degree murder.”

Krista Clem-O’Sullivan remembered:

We had four young children. My husband was on his tractor when he was shot in the back by the neighbor’s caretaker. This man had been harassing us for years, and he had even assaulted Scully with his truck. No matter what we did, the DA would not press charges on the man.

Eventually, we filed a federal civil rights case, against both the DA and the guy who shot my husband. After the murder, the DA kept our tractor as “evidence.” I asked that they rent one for me. They would not. After my husband was buried, I sought reimbursement for the funeral expenses from Vic Comp. They denied my claim, stating that my husband may have somehow “participated” in the crime. They said that the police report stated that my husband had run over the murderer’s foot with the tractor and slapped him. But you can file an appeal, they said, and we’ll even pay for the attorney.

So I hired Mike Siegel. We went to trial, and it was proven that it was physically impossible for my husband to have done either of those things. So my appeal to CalVCP still hasn’t been heard. I asked why the delay? They’re still relying on the police report, I was told. I said, What about the DA, and the experts, and the jury verdict of second degree murder with enhancements for an intentional act with a gun, and the 40-year (minimum) to life sentence? I am still waiting.

Foreclosed

Krista and her kids have had a hard time. Since Scully’s death, the family has witnessed foreclosures on their homes, the ranch where they all lived together in El Dorado County and the “Lighthouse” in Shelter Cove where Krista and the kids moved after her husband was killed. She is currently staying with Scully’s family in Ireland, living in a trailer.

Siegel says that the program is now further refining their torture:

Recently VOC started requiring personal information from county social workers filing VOC claims for county dependents, or they will return the claim as “incomplete.” They’re asking for birthdates and/or Social Security Numbers of the Child Protective Service workers, saying they need that information to protect the privacy of the child claimant if a CPS worker calls VOC for information on the claim.

In the past 40 years, they haven’t required this. I believe this is just one more way VOC is attempting to stall these applications or make it so onerous that DCFS agencies will stop sending in claims. Of course, this would result in longer waiting lists for the few, underpaid therapists who agree to take Medi-Cal for these kids.”

The maximum amount an attorney can be paid by the Victims of Crime Program is 10 percent of the total victim’s claim (which averages in the $2,000 range), with a ceiling set at $500. That’s now about to fall to $300.

For the past eight years, I’ve followed the VCP’s antics objectively as the state spends considerable money by staffing the program and often ripping off the program itself by snatching their state funding at the end of the fiscal year and kicking it back into the cash-strapped California state General Fund.

I also know this subjectively. After a near-fatal criminal assault on me in 1997, the Victims Compensation Board forced me to spend $40,000 in legal fees, didn’t settle my case until three years after it had been approved and made me suffer another $40,000 in out-of-pocket losses that they refused to reimburse. And this after Executive Director John Gillis, of the Victims of Crime at the U.S. Justice Department, admitted in a letter to me that “the board mishandled your claim.”

Numerous victimized victims

It would be one thing if Siegel and this reporter were the lone critics of the program, woofing at CalVCP because attorneys’ fees were being reduced, or due to this reporter’s unfortunate set of circumstances under a different board at CalVCP. But we are not.

A number of crime victims interviewed by this reporter have cried foul regarding the program. So have former CalVCP staff members this reporter interviewed — in Sacramento, Sonoma and San Francisco counties. And if the program is as great as Bauman claims, then why have there been all the remedial legislation and Little Hoover hearings? As one Little Hoover commissioner involved in those hearings told this reporter, “That program is a scandal; all they seem to do is further victimize the victims.”

That Hoover Commission member’s criticism was echoed by former San Diego Superior Court Judge Larry Stirling at an Assembly Public Safety Committee hearing this reporter attended in the summer of 2003, when three clean-up bills related to the Victims of Crime Program were being heard.

“We had a lot of problems with that program in San Diego County,” said Stirling, also a former Assemblyman who retired from the court in 2003 and is now a counsel with the law firm of Hamilton & McInnis. “It was a crying shame the way some of these crime victims were treated.”

Quintin Mecke, the communications director for Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, who heads the Assembly Public Safety Committee, the legislative body in charge of CalVCP, said he intends to have his boss “look into the matter.” Mecke said he was unaware of anything controversial regarding the CalVCP’s ongoing record.

Executive Director Nauman, whose CalVCP salary pays her $116,606 annually, is attempting to right the ship at CalVCP. “We’re aware of the problems from the past,” said Myers, the CalVCP spokesman. “But Ms. Nauman is an aggressive advocate for victims’ rights and benefits and you’ll see more positive changes ahead at CalVCP.”

Perhaps this is so. Maybe the State Auditor’s report and all the remedial legislation and threats of litigation may have moved Nauman and CalVCP toward a program more responsive to the victims themselves. (Richard Fine, the renowned class-action attorney once considered bringing suit against CalVCP until he found himself in a major case involving judicial corruption in Los Angeles.) But it will be prudent to keep a watchful eye upon them.

Attempts to reach Gov. Jerry Brown for comments on the Victims of Crime Program proved fruitless.

A new piece of remedial legislation is now under way, with Siegel leading the charge. “But we haven’t been able to find a sponsor yet,” he said.

At the very least, a new law should seek to protect the victims’ funds from further looting by the Legislature. Both Myers and Siegel said they would support that.

By RICHARD TRAINOR

Since its inception in 1953, the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment  Agency has been driven by scandals, sweetheart deals for connected developers, cockeyed projects and ineptitude. In 1991, this reporter wrote the official history of the (SHRA) in a book titled, “Flood, Fire & Blight.”

The agency’s history since then has included such developer-concocted deals as:

Given all that, today the book might be re-titled, “Blood, Ire & Bloat.” Taxpayer blood is irate with supporting developers’ cash-bloated projects. In Sacramento, this blood-letting has been refined to a science

Redevelopment Failures