Hahn cloud not like Shaw

Joe Scott, who worked in the Bradley and Riordan campaigns for mayor and has covered races—and who is researching 1930s Los Angeles for a book—takes issue with the meme repeated by Jim Hahn's rivals that the mayor "leads the most investigated administration in Los Angeles since Frank Shaw." It's actually worse than the Shaw years, which were far more corrupt, but without the investigations like those going on today, Scott writes on his blog:

I have researched Shaw’s 1938 recall for a novel and find the comparison without merit. There was no criminal investigation then, or since, to compare with the scope of the current joint federal-county probe of alleged City Hall corruption.

Institutional memory is useful. FDR’s Atty. General Frank Murphy said before Shaw fell that Los Angeles was “the most corrupt, graft ridden city in the nation.” F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover received memos from his L.A. field office. But, during his frequent trips to the coast, the G-man was more interested in going to the races at Del Mar and Santa Anita than ferreting out corruption. Unlike today, everything was transparent: the L.A. County D.A. averted his eyes; the LAPD chief was in cahoots with both Shaw and the mob; and the four metro dailies (The Times was the most rabid) endorsed the mayor’s 1937 reelection.

Given this good-ole-boy climate, organized crime and vice flourished. It took assassination attempts on the cafeteria owner and civic reformer Clifford Clinton and his private investigator, ex-cop Harry Raymond, to sober up the establishment and trigger public outrage. Shaw’s fixer brother and the captain of LAPD’s notorious Intelligence Squad, based in the mayor’s office, were convicted and sent to San Quentin.

Scott is the chief spokesman for DA Steve Cooley, whose office is investigating the Hahn administration, but he writes the blog on his own time and does not suggest that he speaks for his boss or the office.

Also: Steve Lopez has lunch with Bernie Parks, they talk mostly about the Devin Brown shooting...Hahn TV ads begin to air...783 words in the Daily News on Bob Hertzberg. The profiles, by the way, are all by editorial writer and columnist Mariel Garza.