Archive: Southeast

Anthony Rendon becomes Speaker, Trump trouble in Silicon Valley, candidate trouble for the Democrats in Simi Valley and more.

Gov. Jerry Brown wants the state to spend $176 million on cleanup of lead contamination.

Galvez was a five-year veteran of the Downey Police Department from Whittier. Three suspects have been arrested.

The creator of the Batmobile and many other "kustom" cars for Hollywood was first a legend in the LA car culture.

USGS disputes the surprise claim that the La Habra area would endure a substantial quake in the next three years.

Roderick Wright says he'll leave the state Senate on Sept. 22. Two incumbent assemblymen announced they would run to fill his seat.

With students returning to school today, some residents are unhappy about the new policy that would put an AR-15 in the trunk on some on-duty campus police officers.

Former city of Bell administrator Robert Rizzo will plead guilty to federal felony charges and face a maximum of eight years in prison, prosecutors just announced.

Angela Spaccia, the former assistant city administrator in Bell, was found guilty today on 11 of 13 counts of felony corruption, including misappropriation of public funds. She was found not guilty on one charge; another ended in a hung jury.

When we last heard about journalist Michael Krikorian, he had written a colorful and revealing op-ed piece about the night he shot some guy in a brawl near Compton. His first crime novel features an LA Times crime reporter who is shot after leaving a bar two blocks from City Hall.

"I just couldn't resist," Garcetti posts on Facebook. Check it out.

Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy said she will sentence Rizzo to a minimum of 10 years and a maximum of 12 years in state prison.

In February of 2011 — yes, 2011 — the LA Times won $35,000 along with the Selden Ring Award at USC. When one of the reporters began asking where's the cash, he got the run around. As of today, the final plans for the prize money remain less than transparent.

After taking two weeks to arrive at a mixed bag of verdicts and undecided charges, one of the jurors has asked the judge if he or she can change their mind about Wednesday's guilty verdicts. (No, said Judge Kathleen Kennedy.) The judge ordered the jury to keep trying today to resolve dozens of pending charges, but it has not been going smoothly.

Five of the former Bell city officials on trial for misappropriating public funds were convicted on some charges, and a sixth — Luis Artiga — was acquitted of all charges. The convictions were mixed in with some not guilty findings and a report to the judge that the jury remains undecided on many charges after 18 days of deliberations.

Leon Leyson, who died Saturday in Whittier, was not quite ten years old when the Nazis invaded Poland and pushed his family into the Krakow ghetto. He taught at Huntington Park High School for nearly four decades without talking much about his Holocaust experiences.

Before the LA Times rediscovered the corruption in Bell, and in some cases before DA Steve Cooley got to town with his corruption prosecutions, investigative reporter Jeffrey Anderson was digging into the dirty dealings in the southeast cities for the LA Weekly. KCET interviewed Anderson about the challenges of reporting in places like Cudahy last decade.

DA investigators arrested embattled Assessor John Noguez this morning at his home in Huntington Park. Allegations include bribery and corruption. Two others were also arrested.

The headline of the piece is "Venus and Serena against the World." It's thrust is that the tennis stars have come a long way from Compton to dominate the sport, with a close look at mom and dad. May be some new stuff in there even for those familiar with the Williams' story.

Another former member of the Cudahy City Council, Osvaldo Conde, has agreed to plead guilty to federal extortion and bribery charges. He joins the former mayor, David Silva, and another official who formally agreed last week to plead guilty to federal charges.

The red-handed bribery in support of a marijuana store is bad enough. But it's the other corruption, including vote tampering, that's really chilling.

Eric T. Fresch, the city of Vernon's attorney and top administrator during many of the years that have been under investigation lately for financial improprieties, was found dead by rangers last night on the shoreline of Angel Island State Park in San Francisco Bay. He had been dodging a state subpoena to talk about the city's finances.

It's the southeast cities corruption story du jour, I guess. The feds say that Santa Fe Springs city councilman Joseph Serrano Sr., who is 62, agreed to plead guilty to a bribery count that was filed in U.S. District County in Los Angeles this morning. Fascinating reading, actually.

Fill-in county assessor Santos Kreimann took over this week and has reassigned two of the top deputies to John Noguez, who's on leave during a DA investigation into his office. Both had contributed to Noguez's political campaigns and were promoted after his 2010 election.

The mayor of Cudahy, David Silva, and two other officials in the small southeast LA county municipality were indicted by the feds on charges of soliciting and accepting $17,000 in bribes for help to open a medical marijuana shop, the LA Times reports.

At least one journalist tried to warn Los Angeles County voters people before they elected Noguez in 2010. That was Jeffrey Anderson, who was reporting on corruption in the unwatched southeast cities long before the LA Times rediscovered Bell and went on to win a Pulitzer.

Remember all those teachers who were summarily moved out of Miramonte Elementary School after two teachers were accused of sexually attacking children at the school? Fox 11's Phil Shuman found out what they are doing. It isn't teaching.

That's a respectable crowd on the sidewalk — reminded some residents of when the Olympic torch came through in 1984.

Robert Hoskins, the violently psychotic former prison inmate who served time for stalking Madonna, was arrested today near the Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk. He had left the hospital last...

Doesn't look good. The woman has a history of mental issues and assaults on police, says Sheriff Lee Baca, but she wasn't arrested in this incident.

The note is from Marcia Parker, West Coast Editorial Director for AOL's Patch websites.

Major turnover tonight in the tiny, anachronistic city of Vernon, population 112.

Marcia Parker, Patch.com's West Coast editorial director, sent this note out to the other local Patchies about staffing for the mixed Spanish-English news sites.

ruce Malkenhorst Sr., at one time California's highest-paid public official — while employed by one of the state's least populated cities — pleaded guilty today to a charge of misappropriating public funds.

The Kings' best player, center Anze Kopitar, broke his ankle during this afternoon's win at Staples Center — and just like that the team's chances of going deep in the NHL playoffs suffered a big blow.

Instant classic Steve Lopez column in tomorrow's L.A. Times. A tipster dropped me a line the other day to say she'd spotted an infamous former public official in Huntington Beach,...

This brings Robert Rizzo, the former city administrative officer in Bell, to 55 felony charges, mostly of misappropriation of public funds.

According to his lawyer, former Bell official Robert Rizzo is due payments from the city of Bell in a negotiated deal that led to his resignation this summer. He also wants the city to pay his legal bills.

KFI News tweeted shortly after midnight that former Bell city administrative officer Robert Rizzo had posted bail and been released from jail.

NPR media reporter David Folkenflik devoted six minutes to the Los Angeles Times reporting on Bell and the related media coverage issues in a piece for Weekend Edition.

The body of Rigoberto Ruelas, a 5th grade teacher at Miramonte Elementary in South Gate, was found near his car in the Angeles National Forest.

That's down from the $3.2 million originally set for ex-Bell city manager Robert Rizzo.

The L.A. Times has rightfully been receiving a lot of credit for its disclosures of the corruption in the city of Bell (and probably too little criticism for enabling the...

How Bell's city hall and the police department tried to quash dissent by residents who wondered where all the money went.

It turns out that the property tax add-ons levied by the City of Bell have its residents paying a higher rate than in any local city but Industry.

District Weekly writer Steve Lowery grew up in Downey and revisits the home turf for a piece pegged to the city apparently beating out much-bigger Long Beach for the new Tesla electric car plant. Or is Downey toxic central?

Our post this week on the lament of the ant fighters brought some interesting suggestions — lots and lots of cloves, for instance — and a reminder from the county agricultural commissioner that red imported fire ants are here and causing trouble.

The weekly's offices will be closed for about two weeks but publication will continue uninterrupted, says editor Allison Jean Eaton. The cause remains unclear. She writes about getting an unexpected...

Tesla Motors will build its Model S, four-door, all-electric sedan in the city of Downey, the mayor there told the District Weekly....

Good column in today's L.A. Daily Journal (by former editor Martin Berg) about a storefront law office on East Compton Boulevard run by Luz Herrera. She's just your typical Tijuana-born,...

Former LA Weekly writer Matthew Fleischer, now a senior editor at CityBeat, debuts in the paper with a piece on the city of Maywood and its controversial mayor, Felipe Aguirre,...

Members of Mariachi Véritas de Harvard believe they are "the first and only 100% undergraduate student Mariachi in the East Coast." Here they are (bigger) with Mexican president Felipe Calderón....