Jose Huizar former Los Angeles city councilman seeks to gut corruption case, says alleged $1.5 million in gifts were not bribes.  They were just little gifts of appreciation says his lawyer.

Former Los Angeles City Councilman Mitchell Englander was sentenced in January 2021 to 14 months in prison for lying to federal authorities about his dealings with a businessman who provided him $15,000 in secret cash payments and a debauched night in Las Vegas.

Marilyn Louise Flynn, 83, was dean of USC’s School of Social Work when she allegedly paid off Mark Ridley-Thomas, now an L.A. city councilman, when he was on the county Board of Supervisors.

Englander, Huizar and now Ridley-Thomas.  The council is a cesspool of corruption.  The battle over which district includes USC and the surrounding area has something to do with prestige and probably some kind of kick back in an area ripe for development.  After all it is the city council that finally approves every new development.  Since there is little development in the mid San Fernando Valley no one even wants to represent that area since there is little likelihood of new development.

As Pat Morrison wrote in her October 26, 2021 Los Angeles Times column “In 2015, as civic guru Rick Cole was departing his post as deputy mayor in L.A., he explained to me that “a lot of checks and balances are built into the system to avoid corruption and half-baked ideas, but … ironically, most were designed by reformers [who] were petrified of abuse of power. The charter was designed to prevent corruption, not to enable effectiveness. They took effective government for granted. So when you ask questions like, “Who’s responsible for the miserable state of L.A. streets?” you can blame anyone, because almost anybody has a piece of the problem and almost no one has the power to fix it. To avoid one problem, we so diffused power and hamstrung accountability, it’s no wonder we have the results we all complain about.”