John_Schwada's Blog

People now have a really good reason to hate California. That’s because the state with one in every eight U.S. residents, whose economy is the 5th or 6th largest in the world, was in large part the midwife who helped give birth to the economic mess we’re now in.

The go-go speculative housing market: it’s a California phenomenon. The whacko real estate lending practices: look no further than Countrywide and IndyMac to find the most rapacious practitioners of the cult of easy money. The political correctness that guided Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into the treacherous waters of okaying any loan to anyone, no matter how far-fetched: this moral myopia is an article of faith for many Californians.

California, in other words, is at the epicenter of our nation’s woes, according to veteran economic consultant John Hussing. If you want to know why you’ve lost your job, or your hours have been cut, or your 401 (k) has been decimated, just go to California and you can see the Petri dish where these ills were bred.

To quote Hussing directly about the Big Meltdown: “This to a large extent starts in California - this is the center of where it all comes from - because a lot of it comes from the mortgages written in this state by groups like IndyMac and Countrywide..." “The whole situation we’re facing on Wall Street and internationally comes about because of the housing markets in, in California, in Nevada, Arizona and Florida - those markets that got so boomed. And then you had the crazy financing come in where, uh, you had organizations [bond rating firms] like Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s [giving]u triple A ratings to investment vehicles that were based upon liar’s loans to people who couldn’t afford the housing that they were moving into....[Weren’t Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac enablers in all this?] Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – and partially that’s because they had pressure on them....political pressure to get more people in houses.”

And those crazy markets in Nevada and Arizona? Hussing says: “Las Vegas is Californians. Phoenix is just Californians who’ve moved over there.” Yes, these are California’s satellites, its ugly spawn.

Riverside and San Bernardino Counties is where the California real estate mess reached the height of its madness – even by California standards. The evidence is everywhere in these counties: tracts of look-a-like 3,500-square foot homes, with dirt bikes and dune buggies in the garages, SUV’s in the driveways, built check-to-jowl, walled off – all of them surrounded by orange groves, just waiting for their turn to be sacrificed on the alter of California’s brand of progress.

If you really want to go apocalyptic - who built these houses? In many cases, illegal immigrant carpenters, painters, drywallers, plumbers, electricians, now idled by the housing slump, trying to survive....and if you go to Palmdale, Lancaster and Moreno Valley you can find the cruel hoax of homeownership California-style – rows and rows of foreclosed properties, many once owned by minority families, who got sucked into the 100 percent loans, the no-interest loans....who now have very little to show for it all except wrecked credit and broken dreams.

It’s a tale worthy of the dark, crazy visions of Joan Didion, Ross McDonald and Hunter Thompson.

If the economy looks wobbly, what about our presidential candidates? Don't they remind you of drunken sailors on a ship in a hurricane?

John McCain is inveighing against a bailout of insurance giant AIG one day (Tuesday), and the next day, without looking too shame-faced (perhaps he was wearing his “keep-a-straight-face-express” mask), the GOP nominee is saying AIG’s too big, too important, to let it slide into chaos as he applauded the Bush administration takeover, seizure, bailout of AIG. This from the same guy who is simultaneously denying he’s George Bush’s secret twin.

Then, there’s Barack Obama. He seems equally at a loss about what to do.

I still haven’t heard exactly what the Democratic presidential nominee would’ve done about AIG, Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. His statement today (Thursday, 9/18/08) on AIG steers gracefully clear of standing for or against the action taken by the Bush administration. Call him a cipher. But that’s been part of Obama’s entire shtick: ethereal rhetoric over details.

But here are a few details that will make your hair stand on end about Obama’s judgment. While lambasting McCain for having seven lobbyists as senior advisers to his campaign, Obama has tactfully avoided (and who can blame him) that he, too, is up to his eyeballs in cozy relations with those who have been at the sleazy center of the nation’s housing crisis.

Franklin Raines. This is a name you should remember. In fact, Raines deserves a higher place in our rogue’s gallery of corporate buccaneers. The Washington Post in July, 2008 identified Raines as someone who has been advising Obama’s on mortgage finance and housing matters. In 2004, Raines left as CEO of Fannie Mae, the quasi-private mortgage bank that sucked up billions and billions of these crackpot, subprime mortgages. During his Fannie Mae tenure, Raines et al. gave an air of respectability to surreal real estate deals and lied steadfastly about Fannie Mae’s bottom-line. Again who could blame Raines for wanting to hide the facts….after all, as long as Fannie Mae appeared to be doing its job he was being paid millions as its CEO. How many times do the accountants, the investors, the regulators, the public, the taxpayers have to hear this kind of corporate gloss before we finally say: enough already (or basta ya! as they say in Spanish just before a coup d’etat).

More details about Raines. Remember this guy is advising Obama. From 1999 to Dec. 1, 2004, when he took “early retirement,” Raines was CEO of Fannie Mae. Raines stepped down while he and two other top executives at Fannie Mae were under investigation by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) after it was discovered Fannie Mae had overstated its profits by $6 billion or more. Is it too surprising that the same executive’s compensation was tied to Fannie Mae’s bottom-line - well sort of tied to it since corporate executives never seem to get dinged when they screw up. Anyway, here’s what the Washington Post, in a rather fawning feature story published in July, 2008, had to say about Raines’ fall from grace:

“Raines settled charges brought by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight by agreeing this spring to pay $2 million and forfeiting $22.7 million in stock and other benefits. And though none of it will come out of his pocket -- the payment was covered by insurance -- he has not emerged unscathed (my churlish emphasis). He and his wife of more than 25 years, Wendy, are separated. Their house, a 1910 colonial in Northwest Washington, is for sale. An old friend, former Time Warner chairman Richard Parsons, describes him as being "in strong recovery mode."

I hope you did not suffer as I did from Spontaneous Empathetic Trauma (SET) when I read of Raines pain. In fact, I immediately reached for the phone to donate money to the nearest soup kitchen where I was sure I could find Raines, dejected and haunted by guilt.

A Wikipedia article, sourced with Wall Street Journal articles, put it this way:

“Civil charges were filed against Raines and two other former executives by the OFHEO in which the OFHEO sought $110 million in penalties and $115 million in returned bonuses from the three accused.[5] On April 18, 2008, the government announced a settlement with Raines together with J. Timothy Howard, Fannie's former chief financial officer, and Leanne G. Spencer, Fannie's former controller. The three executives agreed to pay fines totaling about $3 million, which will be paid by Fannie's insurance policies. Raines also agreed to donate the proceeds from the sale of $1.8 million of his Fannie stock and to give up stock options. The stock options however have no value. Raines also gave up an estimated $5.3 million of "other benefits" said to be related to his pension and forgone bonuses.[6]”

There were, of course, congressional hearings into these allegations. Most of this congressional outrage, however, was buried in the lower reaches of the journalistic brain, stored away in great grey vaults of oblivion because the public could not understand it or be expected to be regaled by it.

As this mess unfolded, below the radar screen, the Bush administration stepped forward to propose that a new agency be established, to oversee Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Let’s hear it straight from the 9/11/2003 edition of the NY Times:

“The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios (my emphasis).

“The plan is an acknowledgment by the administration that oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- which together have issued more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt -- is broken (my emphasis). A report by outside investigators in July concluded that Freddie Mac manipulated its accounting to mislead investors, and critics have said Fannie Mae does not adequately hedge against rising interest rates.”

That proposal never got off the ground. In Sept. 2003, however, the congressional Democratic leadership on finance issues had this to say about increased regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (again this is from the 9/11/2003 NY Times):

‘''These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not (my emphasis) facing any kind of financial crisis,'' said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ''The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.''

And that, my dear readers, is the saga of Franklin Raines, one of Obama’s economic advisers (and please indulge me in a little more churlishness – as I point out that Obama set up a three-person vice-president search committee that included James A. Johnson, Raines’ predecessor as Fannie Mae’s CEO. Johnson stepped down after it was revealed that Johnson – like Raines – had received favorably priced personal loans from Countrywide Financial’s CEO Angelo Mozilo).

Is it any wonder that voters are not hugely confident in the economic leadership coming from their presidential nominees?

The latest Rasmussen poll says just 24% of those polled say it is “very likely” Obama will bring the kind of change that is needed to Wall Street. Another 29% say he is somewhat likely to accomplish that goal while 42% say he is not likely to do so.

McCain doesn’t do any better. Just 25% say he is very likely to bring about the needed Wall Street reforms. Another 25% say he is somewhat likely to do so while 44% say such accomplishments are not likely in a McCain administration.

We'll try this one more time...there's a piece that's now scheduled to air this coming Thursday, July 17, 10 pm (originally to have aired Tuesday - but was blown out by All-Star game) abt identity thieves, back East and here in LA, who were taking their daily marching orders from Armenian Power bigshot Akop "Efly" Kantrdzyan while he was in federal prison...AP is an LA street gang.

Hundreds of hours of phone calls between Kantrdzyan and his confederates on the outside - after being translated (from Armenian) and deciphered (the conversations were often coded) - revealed the 28-year-old Kantrdzyan was micro-managing at least two - possibly more - crews of identity thieves. One crew was operating in Rhode Island and Massachusetts (the four men in this crew were busted in 2007 and are now in federal prison), the other in LA county. The LA county crew was targeting supermarkets (Ralph's, Von's and Stater Bros.) that host Wells Fargo bank branches. When the banks were closed - but while the markets were open (there is no physical barrier between these areas) - the crew allegedly swapped Wells Fargo pinpads (those ubiquitous devices that we swipe our credit/ATM cards into) for identical-looking pinpads rigged up w/ PDA's (i.e., recording devices) that copied down customers' pin and acct #'s. This switcheroo was made easier by the fact that even after the banks had closed for the day, locked their doors, pulled down their shades - their pinpads were left outside the teller windows....where they could be easily accessed by anyone - including crooks posing as grocery shoppers!

And here's the kicker. It turns out three of the four alleged crooks (including Kantrdzyan) arrested in the LA county case are deportable aliens.

Kantrdzyan was ordered deported in 2001; Avetis Atalaryan in 1999; Tigran Gadyan, in January (that came at the end of a protracted bureaucratic process in which Gadyan's petition for asylum was denied by three sets of judges).

So how does a guy like Kantrdzyan stay in this country seven years after being deported and after being convicted as a felon illegally in possession of a gun, of identity theft (a separate case from the one he now faces) and a parole violation (for hanging out with his Armenia Power buddies)?

Turns out Armenia does NOT recognize these guys as their nationals. It claims they immigrated to the U.S. in the 1980's before Armenia was an independent country - when it was part of the old Soviet Union. So, Armenia claims Kantrdzyan et alia are not now Armenian citizens and never have been. Therefore, it refuses to take them back. For better or worse, U.S. immigration policy is NOT simply to take a planeload of deportable aliens to Armenia and shove them down the gangplank. No, our policy says Armenia must first issue travel documents for each deportee from the U.S. before we can ship them back. U.S. immigration says about 3,500 persons of Armenian origin who have been ordered deported are still in the U.S. because Armenia won't issue travel documents for them. U.S. immigration also says this impasse is a "dirty little secret" and that actually there are a number of other countries that also refuse to take back their nationals - even after they've been found living illegally in the U.S. and ordered deported.

Although these alleged crooks are behind bars (awaiting trial on dozens and dozens of id theft charges) is that really good enough? After all Kantrdzyan was adept at using his phone privileges in a federal prison to further his alleged criminal enterprises on the outside. Steve Whitmore, PR guy for Sheriff Lee Baca, says county jailers are well aware of Kantrdzyan's past activities and that his phone use is now "very much on our radar screen."

“They’ve got the best corn beef in LA,” a beaming Bill Bratton told a handful of reporters, moments after he stepped out of Langer’s Deli next to MacArthur Park and surveyed the peaceful progress of Thursday's May Day march.

Besides the corn beef lunch, LA’s chief of police had reason to be happy: after all, Thursday's May Day march was – by mid-afternoon - beginning to shape up as an event that would, in Bratton’s words, “correct the department’s image.”

A year ago, at the 2007 May Day event, some of the LAPD’s Metro Squad officers lost their heads and swept through MacArthur Park, roughing up a few radical troublemakers but also plenty of non-combatants. It was a black eye for the LAPD, and for Bratton who - while some of his finest were striking, shoving, tear-gassing, shooting (with rubber bullets) scores of marchers – was caught napping; the chief was at a fund-raising event when the mess began….

But this time around, the chastened LAPD brass were all over the march….cellphones to their ears, many fitted with hands-free devices, looking like air-traffic controllers and probably just as wired-in. The object was to identify any problem protestors quickly – and then surgically (that was the big word of the day) remove them so, in the words of Capt. Bob Green, the “peaceful marchers could enjoy their First Amendment rights.”

I met Green, a strapping cop in wrap-around sunglasses, as he talked amiably with civil rights attorney Carol Sobel, who was sporting a florescent green “National Lawyers Guild” cap. Sobel, who represents many of those who allege their rights were violated by the cops a year ago, was singing the praises of Green and Deputy Chief Michael Hillman, telling me she just wanted to “take their DNA and plant it in the rest of the department – these guys have got it right” about how to do crowd control.

I ran into Hillman an hour later. Like the chief, he was also beaming, a bullhorn, attached to his tactical belt, slapping at his side as he joined the procession. “Looking good,” he said.

Hillman - with about four decades of cop-work under his belt - is the guy who got the job of making sure the 2007 May Day mess was not repeated.

Hillman's fix meant flooding the area with senior LAPD leadership; this time around, decisions were not going to made by anyone who didn’t have a lot of brass on their shirt collars.

Coordination and communication were also at a premium. In the MacArthur leg of the march, the lead organizer had a captain assigned to him. Whenever organizer Victor Narro, of the UCLA Downtown Labor Center, slowed down, talked to anyone, “his” minder,
Capt. Rigoberto Romero, was at his side. Like a shadow. Nothing left to chance.

There were also a few new gadgets. Last year, the LAPD’s efforts to tell the protestors to disperse were, at best, garbled….and when people did not obey, the cops on the line used too much muscle to make it happen. This year, the cops had a handful of golf-carts-on-steroids, equipped with loudspeakers and “phrase-o-laters.” These communication systems were programmed with dozens of crowd-control commands, in four languages. Punch up a phrase in Spanish, and the automated system could bark out a very audible set of directions for the crowd to follow. No more guesswork.

By early evening, the march had petered out - only the stragglers, the kids who didn't want to go home. It looked like the LAPD and the city had good reason to be very satisfied.

So, eat another corn beef sandwich, chief. It's on us.

Pete Noyes today walked out of his last newsroom, at age 77, saying goodbye to several generations of colleagues and admirers, here at Fox 11 News.

It was a sad day, losing a living legend, a raconteur, a keeper of the flame, an encyclopedia of journalism lore. Pete won innumerable prizes and awards over his distinguished career; I won’t attempt to catalogue them. Suffice it to say, there are few – if any - in the TV-journalism business in Los Angeles these days who can match his achievements (below, a photo of Pete with his wife, Grace).

Despite his years, Pete’s love of journalism, energy in pursuit of a story, resourcefulness in digging up sources and documents, and enthusiasm for beating the competition was never dulled by age. Pete was a breath of fresh air in a business that too often has taken the easy route to getting a story, too often been content to follow the pack, too often exalted the pretty-face and the live-shot, and too often cared too little about underdogs, government corruption and official abuses.

I’d heard about Pete Noyes for years in Los Angeles. But our paths didn’t cross until a few years ago when his station, UPN/KCOP Channel 13, merged with Fox 11 News. It was a great pleasure to come to know him and a great honor to actually work with him on several stories, including a series about real estate fraud.

Pete was often heard before he was seen.

“Godddammnnnit! I’ve been in this business 46 years, and that’s a lot of nonsense!” Something like that would often rip through the newsroom just as I was trying to down my first cup of morning coffee. It was like sugar in my Java to hear Pete, on the phone or in the house, giving some stubborn bureaucrat or wet-behind-the-ears city desk assistant a piece of his mind.

Pete was the horror of the modern-day, corporate human resources department manager, who would rather have employees high on horse-tranquilizers, sedated and content, than hot on the trail of a good story, full of grit and indignation, breathing fire.

And there were the Pete stories. Hundreds of them.

Over a farewell lunch with him today, Pete told me about the time in the 1960’s
when he worked for the NY Daily News and got a call from his editor that Barbara Graham – a murderess who’d been executed at San Quentin – had cast a curse on all of her accusers, jailers and prosecutors and, as a result, they were dropping like flies. The sensational story of this wrathful curse was published in the Herald-Examiner, and Pete’s boss told him to go down and get that story – at any cost.

“So, I drove over to the Examiner, talked to the city editor, and he told me the reporter could be found in the 11/11 bar. Sure enough there was this guy – who wrote the story – slumped over the bar. I politely tapped him on the shoulder and told him I was following up on his story. ‘Was it true? The Graham curse?’ The guy was three sheets into the wind, sloppy drunk and looked at me through big, sleepy eyes and said – ‘Nahhh. I made the whole damned thing up!’”

At this point, Pete began cackling over the beauty, the craziness of the whole goddamnnned story.

And then came Pete's second punch-line: “I called up the Daily News editor up and told her it was hoax. She didn’t want to believe it! Said I wasn’t being a team-player! Fired me on the spot!” More peals of laughter from Pete – who then revealed that the same editor re-hired him six months later.

Of course Pete was rehired - because he was indispensable….because he was the rare producer/reporter/investigative impressario who could – and did – break the story that Charles Manson had been arrested for the Sharon Tate murder, who dug up the dirt on Mayor Sam Yorty helping Occidental Petroleum founder Armand Hammer position himself to get a lucrative oil drilling lease in the Pacific Palisades, who won a prestigious Peabody Award, in 1975, for an investigative story about a notorious confidence scheme (“The Dale Car: A Dream or a Nightmare?”) that resulted in a 39-count indictment against the perpetrator. The list of his accomplishments, the stories Pete broke, could fill dozens of pages. But I’m on deadline and have stories of my own to do – I'm sure Pete will understand.

One last thing. One of Pete’s trademark expressions came from World War II when Navy Admiral Charles Lockwood messaged one of his youthful submarine commanders, then engaged in a deadly struggle with a Japanese warship: “Good luck. God bless you. Your picture is on my piano.”

In good humor, with a week’s worth of solid journalism under his belt, Pete would frequently swing through the newsroom on a Friday, telling his colleagues: “Okay
kid. Good work this week. We kicked some ass. Your picture is on my piano."

Well Pete, goodbye and good luck.....and you can be sure your picture will always be on our piano.

LA County Sheriff Lee Baca, on April 4th, told a largely African-American audience in Compton that when Latino gangs are at war with black gangs over drugs and turf they are sometimes satisfied to kill any young black living in their rival’s territory in order to flex their criminal muscle. In other words, Baca asserted innocents are being targeted for death by gangs just because of their race. Sounds like a hate-crime to most of us.

Fox 11 News obtained a videotape of the remarks Baca made to the National Association for Equal Justice in America; those remarks, taped by Lonzo Williams, a cable TV talk-show host, were included in a Fox 11 story that aired Friday (April 10) as part of our continuing coverage of the murder of Jamiel Shaw, a promising LA High School football player, allegedly killed by an 18th Street gang member on March 2.

Shaw lived in a neighborhood identified as the turf of the Black P-Stones (BPS), an African-American gang that has had a long, deadly feud with the predominantly Latino 18th Street gang. But Shaw was not a member of BPS, and the evening he was murdered Shaw was not wearing attire that might have caused him to be mistakenly identified as a gang member. Immigration and police officials say Shaw's accused murderer, Pedro Espinoza, 19, is an illegal alien who has been an 18th Street gang member since he was 12 years old.

Here is exactly what Baca told the African-American audience in Compton: “I don’t say it’s all but there is a percent of these Latino kids killing blacks because of a race-related motivation. That is my opinion.”

Pretty explosive stuff. And then Baca went a step further, claiming his deputies had overheard jailed Latino gang bosses (so-called “shot-callers”) telling their followers on the outside that, in a feud with a black gang, it was okay to kill any blacks to make their point. “We’ve heard when the person out there can’t find African-American gang member to shoot, the shot-caller says: ‘Then shoot any African-American you see.’” (Jamiel Shaw's father was in the audience that day and Baca looked him straight in the eye when he made these remarks; but the sheriff did NOT specifically say if he believed Shaw’s murder was racially-motivated).

Baca’s observations put him at odds with LAPD chief Bill Bratton.

In recent days Bratton has taken a lot of heat from African-Americans over the Shaw murder. They say he has buried his head in the sand and refused to acknowledge  hate-crimes against them committed by Latino gang members. Wave newspaper editor Betty Pleasant recently blasted the chief on this issue at a community meeting; afterward the chief sounded a little contrite, acknowledging he needed to be more sensitive to the perceptions of the black community – while apparently still refusing to acknowledge that there was much evidence to support their claims.

In February 2007, Fox 11 News did a story about a series of black-on-Latino, Latino-on-black murders along Central Avenue in the LAPD’s Newton Division. The killings had to do with a war between an African-American gang, the Rollin’ 30’s (and their Rollin' 20's allies), and the East Side Treces, a Latino gang. Some of those killed were recognized gang members but others were innocents – NOT killed by stray bullets but essentially executed. The brutal murder of three young Latinos, including a 10-year-old, on 49rd Street on June 30, 2006 was a landmark event in this savagery. (Almost a year later several Rollin’ 30’s members were arrested for these murders).

What was the point of blacks murdering these young Latinos? Had the interracial gang warfare reached such a debased point of tribalism that killing anyone of the rival race was okay? That was the question we asked….

Bratton’s reply to Fox 11’s questions started out at one end of the spectrum and, over time, moved toward the other end. On Feb. 7, 2007, Bratton told me the following about the Central Avenue killings: “There are several incidents that we feel in that area were the direct result of targeting because of race (my emphasis). There’s been speculation about other incidents – and that has not been the case, proven to be the case.”

In December, 2007, Cheryl Green, a 14-year-old black teenager, was killed in the Harbor Gateway area, allegedly by members of the Latino 204th Street gang. It was almost immediately decried as a racially-motivated crime by LA city officials who noted that blacks in the area had been harassed by 204th Street for years; the LAPD flooded the area with cops. Before this, few people had ever heard of the 204th Street gang, which operated in a very limited part of the city.

Then, on March 17, 2007, 16-year-old Nelly Rodriguez and a Latino male companion – neither affiliated with gangs - were executed in front of her house, in the Central Avenue corridor, by a young man on a bike. A Rollin’ 30’s member is now charged with those murders.

A month after Nelly’s murder, on April 4, 2007, Bratton and Mayor Villaraigosa held a news conference to proudly trumpet a 12 percent city-wide decline in gang-related crime.

But when I reminded the pair gang crime was up 20.5 percent in Newton Division (the precinct that includes the Central Avenue area beleaguered by the Rollin’ 30’s-East Side Treces feud), their mood turned sour. Bratton acknowledged that “certain areas of the city are struggling. Newton is one of those.” However, he snapped: “Are we engaged in a race war down there? Certainly not.” (In fact, this statement badly misrepresented our story – which simply suggested some of the victims might have been killed not because of their gang affiliation but because of their race).

And there was more rancor when I pressed the chief about why city officials and the LAPD were wringing their hands, labeling as racially motivated, the reign of terror of the 204th Street gang when a much uglier and more lethal situation was exploding along Central Avenue? Why was one situation labeled a hate-crime, the other was not? What was the difference between the murder of Cheryl Green and Nelly Rodriquez?

The chief smirked and turned to the audience of cops and reporters and smugly informed them that I was just trying to promote my stories about the Central Avenue murders (the murders had hit about a dozen by then) and thus, he suggested, my questions should really be dismissed as so much grandstanding nonsense.

Now Sheriff Baca is adding fuel to this debate.

The murder of Jamiel Shaw, the LA High School football phenom, on March 2 was a huge tragedy.

And the story took on more tragic overtones Friday when Fox 11 News learned that the alleged shooter, Pedro Espinoza, 19, was in this country illegally; that Espinoza, an 18th Street gangmember since he was 12-years-old,  has spent almost all of the last four years in either LA county jail or in the custody of the California Youth Authority; and, finally, that it was only in the last week that authorities discovered that Espinoza - with his pretty extensive record of violent behavior - is an illegal alien who has been sitting in various lockups, under the very noses of the authorities for years.

A lot of "what if's" in this case. The most explosive one: Shaw might still be alive today if immigration authorities had a more air-tight system of detecting illegal aliens in the jails.

The chronology goes like this: On Nov. 18, 2007, Espinoza and two of his buddies from the notorious 18th Street gang (the largest criminal street gang in the U.S. if not the world) were - according to one witness - striding through the Syd Kronenthal Park in Culver City, throwing up gang signs; the park is only about ten blocks away from Alsace Street, homefield for the so-called Alsace clique of 18th Street to which Espinoza belonged.

The trio from  18th Street were trying to intimidate park visitors, a typical way for gangbangers to start trying to mark off their turf.

But before the trio could get too obnoxious the police arrived. The gangbangers scattered and Espinoza dumped a .380 Browning semi-automatic into some nearby bushes. Espinoza was arrested and charged with two felonies and one misdemeanor: carrying a loaded firearm; obstructing a police officer (at the police station, Espinoza got into an altercation with the cops) and exhibiting a gun in an angry, threatening manner (Espinoza pulled out a pistol during a brief confrontation with a jogger in the park).

Espinoza did not make bail and was convicted in January on two of the counts and sentenced to 180 days in LA County jail.

On March 1,  Espinoza was released. On March 2, less than 28 hours after being released, he allegedly gunned down Shaw, only steps away from the football star's own house.

Only days after being jailed for Shaw's murder, Immigration and Customs Enforcement  (ICE) put a "hold" on Espinoza after determining he was illegally in the U.S.  This meant that if Espinoza ever beat the Shaw rap, ICE would immediately take him into custody and deport him.

To repeat: if ICE had been at the jailhouse door on March 1 when Espinoza finished serving his time for his Kornenthal Park antics, Jamiel Shaw might be alive today.

What happened? ICE has a "criminal alien program" meant to scoop up deportable aliens when they're being released from jail and promptly ship back to their homelands. When I asked an ICE spokeswoman how this program could have missed Espinoza, she said: "I don't know. The system is not 100 percent."

The failure to spot Espinoza was particularly troubling because of his extensive history of criminal activity. In May 2004 he was arrested for burglary and given a three-year term in a CYA facility. While in CYA, Espinoza was convicted twice of attacking CYA staff and a third time of assaulting a fellow inmate at the Eastlake Juvenile Center. Authorities also heard testimony late last year, in the Kronenthal Park matter, that Espinoza had been an 18th Street gangmember since he was 12.

A copy of the story I did on this angle to the Jamiel Shaw tragedy can be seen on this same website; it aired Friday night, 3/21/08.

The phrase “dance of the lemons” got some air-time this week. It was used by an attorney for the 13-year-old girl, allegedly raped by Steve Rooney, 39, the assistant principal at Markham Middle School in Watts where the girl attended school.

The phrase refers to the alleged tendency of LA school district brass to rotate (“dance”) their most questionable human resources into the district’s toughest schools.

Not to toot my horn too much but it was Fox 11 News (producer Dan Leighton View Blogand myself) that broke the story that Rooney was also investigated in 2007 in connection with allegations he had sexual relations with another underage girl – this one a student Foshay Learning Center. Rooney met this girl at Foshay where he taught health and life skills classes. Their alleged affair did not begin – Fox 11 News was told – until later, when was promoted to an assistant principal job at Fremont High School.

When his alleged affair with the Foshay student was discovered and investigated by the LAPD, Rooney’s employer, the LA Unified School District, placed him on administrative leave. But when the girl ultimately refused to cooperate with police (who were investigating Rooney for statutory rape) and no charges were filed against him, Rooney was put back to work and transferred from Fremont to Markham.

It was at Markham that Rooney met the 2nd girl – a recent immigrant from El Salvador; during a court hearing this week, on the rape charges, I reported that the charges included allegations Rooney sexually fondled the same 13-year-old girl in his office, at school, during school hours just days before the incident where he allegedly raped her.

 Now Markham is a struggling school, in the heart of Watts, where rival gangs like the Grape St. Crips and Bounty Hunters fester in local public housing projects. City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo a year ago took the unusual step of assigning prosecutors to work at the Markham campus with parents and school officials to break the cycle of gang violence and the recruitment of 12- and 13-year-old kids into the local gangs.

The “lemons” issue is this: critics claim LAUSD puts its most damaged resources – teachers, administrators, etc. – in its toughest schools where they won't upset the "good" kids and families. Another way of looking at it, the district puts the employees it can’t fire  into the toughest schools in order to get them to quit.

If this is what's happening,  the real losers are the kids.

By the way, don't try to get LA Unified to explain what's going on. It steadfastly blocks questions about its handling of Rooney over the past year, citing confidentiality rules.

When I started looking into this story I went to school district headquarters, signed in at the security desk (with my cameraman, with his large camera) and went to the 24th floor to meet – unannounced – with the district’s spokesperson. When we found the right office, the receptionist was irritated as heck that we’d managed to get by security. In fact, in our presence she called security at the front desk to reprimand them for letting us into the building without an appointment. I think we made it clear we’d make a stink if she tried to throw us out so we stayed until a PR person finally arrived to tell us – no comment.

LA Unified is a public agency, using billions of tax dollars, its bosses elected by the public, its affairs governed by the Brown Act (open meeting act), its records subject to the state Public Records Act. But it doesn’t always act like it.

The Herald-Examiner was to me what the Great Depression and WWII were to my parents (sorry, Mom and Dad, that’s probably a stretch, maybe even sacreligious). In other words, working for that newspaper produced great horrors, adventures and joys…

A lot of these memories bubbled to the surface this week when the survivors of the Herald-Examiner gathered for an “almost 20th reunion” in Hollywood. The paper’s last edition appeared on Nov. 1, 1989; a few days later I had a job at the Los Angeles Times. Now, almost 20 years later…..

As I start writing this and thinking what memories to share I’m ambivalent. I don’t want to leave any of my old comrades-in-arms out because so many of those Herald-Examiner folks played a big role in my work-life. It would be a shame not to give them all credit. But that, my friends (to quote John McCain), would bore you to tears.

So, I’m not going there. I’ll stick to more reflection, less gossip.

Let me say, without fear of contradiction, that for ten years the Herald-Examiner was an experiment in anti-journalism. It was the creation of eccentrics who loved the news and were guided by a desire to get scoops and upset the city’s sacred cows; it told stories while others pontificated; its reporters ducked under the police tape at crime scenes to find out what really happened while other papers waited for the official version. In the 1980’s the newspaper business was sitting pretty: it made a lot of money, and those who managed these businesses, from top to bottom, had an MBA-don’t-rock-the-boat, protect the advertisers, don’t shock the readers mentality – in fact, their watchword was don’t do anything daring and weird, just keep counting profits.

But the Herald-Examiner was different. It was an extension of people like Editor Jim Bellows (who used various grunts and body English to express himself, as translated by managing editor/editor Mary Ann Dolan), and City Editor Larry “Mountain Man/Izzy Top” Burroughs. As such the paper was scrappy, feisty and schizophrenic.

Imagine a paper with distinguished columnists book-ending wildly worded, and sometimes erratically edited, exposes…a paper that had a blue-collar Sports Page (replete with sex ads and horse racing touts) and a style section written by fashionistas, gossips and culture mavens. At various times, the reporters consisted of youthful lushes, Harvard University graduates, the scions of various blue-blood families as well as kids from the boondocks – all trying to make it in the big-city news business.

Herald-Examiner reporters/editors/copykids, etc. cursed each other, threw typewriters, burned memos, threatened to dangle editors out the windows by their heels and generally behaved in ways that were then – and still are – considered tacky, dangerous, incorrect and demonic. If you wanted to find an editor, there were days when they could be found just as frequently at the bar across the street as in the newsroom. If the Herald-Examiner had had a Human Resources and legal department, like the baleful ones that dominate newsrooms today, its minions of correctness and legality would have had their hands full putting out fires, keeping stories out of the paper.

All of these volatile ingredients produced journalism that was often inspired, sometimes wondrous and frequently uneven. And while its colleague-papers turned grayer and richer, the Herald-Examiner kept its exuberance and lost its shirt.

It was a hugely sad day when the Herald-Examiner folded – for its sons and daughters, its graduates, its lovers, its readers and for the city of Los Angeles. An institution that was unafraid to challenge our conventional wisdom, to push the envelope, graced our city for too little time. It was like a teenager with promise, killed in a drive-by shooting. The city has been poorer because of its absence. More, not less, voices are needed to keep a city both together and fun, to clear out the cobwebs, smash the china. People tell me that all the time. Unfortunately, they didn’t buy the paper.

True we have blogs now, and websites and Wikipedia. More voices. The number of news outlets is expanding I keep telling myself....

So maybe the spirit of places like the Herald-Examiner didn’t die, it just hibernated for a while. I hope for all of our sakes that’s true.

Is the anti-illegal immigration movement's most respected voice really a hate group?

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, John Tanton, a founder of FAIR (the Federation of Americans for Immigration Reform),  is a fear-mongering anti-Latino, anti-Catholic racist, and, for that reason, and others, SPLC's  just-released 2008 "Intelligence Report" has added FAIR to its list of "hate groups."

FAIR now joins groups like the Aryan Nations Youth Action Corps, Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Jewish Defense League and the Golden State Skinheads identified as "hate groups" by the SPLC.

SPLC went on to claim that the "number of hate groups operating in America rose to 888 last year, up 5% from 844 groups in 2006. That capped an increase of 48% since 2000 — a hike from 602 groups attributable to the exploitation by hate groups of the continuing debate about immigration. And it comes on top of some 300 other anti-immigration groups."

The SPLC report also found it disturbing that "FBI statistics suggested that there was a 35% rise in hate crimes against Latinos between 2003 and 2006. Experts believe that such crimes are typically carried out by people who think they are attacking immigrants."

In other words, the SPLC report indicated that "hate groups" like FAIR are somehow responsible for such hate crimes against immigrants.

FAIR has claimed the SPLC report has distorted the hate crimes data and that there is no significant increase in anti-immigrant hate crimes. FAIR has also called SPLC's claims that it is a racist organization

If the SPLC and its allies succeed in their campaign to marginalize FAIR by portraying it as racist, they will have won a tremendous victory because FAIR is perhaps the most listened-to voice on the conservative side of the immigration debate. As SPLC pointed out FAIR's spokespeople are regularly quoted in mainstream newspapers and media as representing a respectable, but conservative, point of view on the immigration issue. The group, as SPLC notes, has clout and access to lawmakers on Capitol Hill and about 400,000 members.

If you want to send your heart-rate racing into the danger zone, watch the truly ghoulish-looking Angelo R. Mozilo, chairman of Countrywide Financial Corp., testify this morning before the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee.

Mozilo is being grilled about why he should be walking away with a half-billion dollars in compensation after presiding over the collapse of Countrywide's stock (now trading for about $5/share versus the $45/share of some two years ago) and after selling tens of thousands of subprime mortgages to people seeking a piece of the American dream...

Equally interesting is the defense offered by U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, Orange County Republican. To Issa,  Mozilo is the victim of a witchhunt. "I'm looking for a villain but I don't see it," Issa said.

For an antidote to Issa's apology of Mozilo, there was U.S. Rep.  Elijah Cummings, D-Maryland, who said: "something doesn't smell right....On the one hand, we've got the golden parachute drifting over the golf course ,and on the other hand I see people losing their homes....where the little guys get squeezed."

The appearance that Mozilo abused his company and its shareholders, contributing to a giant train wreck, is based on two issues.

1) Mozilo and other CEO's have been advised to set up plans to sell/purchase stock in their own companies that would be in place for several years. Such plans were designed to give the public and shareholders confidence the CEO's would not be gaming the stock value or using insider information to make tens of millions illegally. That being said, what really happened? Mozilo did file that recommended stock sale/purchase plan that called for him to sell 350,000 shares/month. of Countrywide stock. But then - just about the same time signs began to emerge Countrywide might be on shaky ground - Mozilo changed his plan to significantly increase the amount of stock he could sellto 585,000 shares.

* Mozilo also moved his board into the business of buying back Countrywide stock (i.e.,.  using Countrywide's own assets to bolster, if not lift, the stock price) while at the same time significantly increasing the number of shares he was selling....all this happening at a time when the house of cards of subprime loans Countrywide had built was on the brink of collapsing....

I wrote a blog two months ago about being an airplane seatmate of a former Countrywide trader who used the same ethical gymnastics that drug-dealers use to justify their business: we only supply the subprime loans/heroin; if people are stupid enough to buy it, that's not our fault.

I kicked myself this morning. Hard. After reading about the latest publishing hoax.

This one perpetrated by Margaret B. Jones, who represented herself as the author of a memoir about growing up as a foster-child with gangbangers in South Los Angeles. Jones' gripping account of running drugs for the Bloods, getting a gun on her 14th birthday, buying a burial plot as a teenager, all traced in her book Love and Consequences, was praised in separate book reviews in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times (an “humane and deeply affecting memoir”).

But it was all a fraud - unmasked when Jones' photo turned up alongside one of the articles. The author's real-sister saw it and blew the whistle. That's not Margaret B. Jones, the sister said, that's Peggy Selzer who grew up in Sherman Oaks, not Sherm Alley, who attended a pricey Episcopal day school in Studio City, not a chalkboard jungle in Watts.

What did Ralph Waldo Emerson say? 'If you don't trust your own instincts you'll get up every day looking at the works of originality of others and kick yourself, saying - I knew that, or I could have done that, etc. (Emerson was pretty big on etceteras).' Anyway, that’s a fair paraphrase….

Okay, I'm kicking myself because I also saw the photo in the New York Times of Margaret B. Jones - and an Emersonian light-bulb moment hit me….there was something that just didn't compute. My instinct told me: this woman isn’t any half-Caucasian, half-Native American wild-child of the inner-city (as she portrayed herself). Also, how does this girl get placed in a foster home in South LA with a black family? Not that it doesn't happen but…

And the odor of possible inauthenticity resonated with me too because when I saw that photo of Jones-Selzer I had just finished a news story about Barack Obama's two years as an undergrad at local Occidental College. The bible for tracing Obama's life at Occidental is the presidential candidate's 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father.

Now don’t get me wrong: I am not suggesting Obama’s autobiography is comparable to Jones-Selzer’s work of outright fiction.

But as I looked at that photo of Jones-Selzer, just last week, I wondered if there might be some parallels to the Illinois senator’s autobiography - which also seemed to be possibly tainted with hoakum.

Hoakum? Yeah. Read the fine-print on Obama’s autobiography: that many of the names of the people mentioned in his book have been changed to protect their privacy, that some of Obama’s characters consist of composites of multiple real-life people. Hmmm. (I wrote about my attempts to track down Obama's classmates in a blog entitled "Looking for Obama").

How can a reporter or a reader tell fact from fiction when the supposed witnesses to Obama’s life at Occidental – the Regina’s, the Marcus’ – aren’t given last names, and the author further acknowledges Marcus and Regina might not, after all, be real flesh-and-blood people anyway? How trustworthy is Obama's account of his life?

So, I told myself, looking at that photo of Margaret B. Jones in the New York Times and feeling my antennae twitter: l ought to look into this Jones thing - something doesn't smell right about this story, a local story at that.

But instead I wake up and read that other reporters have exposed the Jones-Selzer hoax. So I kicked myself. Jealousy. Envy. Remorse. Other cardinal sins. Including cursing. I should have followed my instincts. The story was there.

My sons, read Emerson, take the old fogey’s advice.

The latest blog/radio talk-show fever is about John McCain's eligibility to run for president. This epidemic has quickly replaced the one caused earlier this week by the photo of Barack Obama wearing traditional garb of Somalia...

In all these cases, the victims are easy to identify.

They run up to you in the hallway, their eyes rolling around in their heads. Foaming at the mouth, they breathlessly exclaim: "Obama's a Muslim - he's a Manchurian candidate!" or "Omygod! McCain can't run!!" It's the hysterical (and forgiveable) ramblings of those afflicted with blog-talk show fever. Treatment requires bed-rest and strict avoidance, for at least 48 hours, of radios, televisions and computers.

I was talking to a doctor friend of mine who has treated dozens of cases like this. In fact, it's not widely known that 468 senior citizens were hit with the Obama-photo fever in Sun Lakes, Arizona Wednesday. "Radio talk show overdose," the doctor sagely told me, shaking his head; he had just returned from Sun Lakes after pulling two 24-hour shifts working with the Centers for Disease Control to diagnose and treat this epidemic. Fortunately, early diagnosis prevented any fatalities. However, a 76-year-old retired accountant and the widow of a Midwest bank executive had to be hospitalized for the remainder of the week. Both are doing fine now.

This morning I personally treated a young member of our Fox 11 News team who has the unhealthy habit of starting his day with 30 minutes of political blog-scanning. As his eyebrows twitched uncontrollably, he happily blurted out: "McCain is history! The Republicans are screwed!"

His mind was agitated - inflamed might be the better word - by blog reports that McCain was not eligible to run for president because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone, where his father, a U.S. Navy officer, was stationed (with McCain's mother); the U.S. Constitution says a president must be a "natural-born citizen" - and some in the blog-zone were cheerily citing our nation's most revered document to argue that McCain was technically not born on U.S. soil - and therefore disqualified from running for our nation's highest office.

As a Democrat, my young friend was among those chattering feverishly in the blogosphere about this windfall discovery. I recognized the symptoms and immediately began applying cooling compresses to the young man's forehead. Per the instructions in the "Blog/Talk Show First-Aid Kit," I also spoke calmly to him, assuring him it would be nonsensical for McCain to be disqualified because his parents happened to be, at the moment of his birth, attending to the nation's business in foreign territory.

"How could it make sense to deny McCain's right to run," I soothingly reasoned with this young man, "when we recognize the citizenship of children born in the U.S. to parents who are in the U.S. illegally?" He looked at me and, the pernicious fever still gripping his mind, screamed: "Passion, not logic!"  - and immediately fell into a relapse.

It's not every day you get to rub shoulders with a "Master of the Universe." That's what I call those extraordinarily arrogant, self-assured guys (increasingly gals too) who glide easily through the world, making money, breaking things all around them and yet emerging from the mess they create ever wealthier and ever more arrogant.

Anyway, there I am aboard a flight from Chicago to LAX and this guy plops into the seat next to me....as it turns out, he's a former trader at Countrywide Financial, the huge mortgage lender. From what I could gather this guy (who shall remain nameless) made a big money reselling the most dicey of Countrywide's loans to investors...

He was totally unapologetic for Countrywide's mode of operation, and little did he or I know, suspended in the air for four hours, that on terra firma Bank of America was offering $4 billion to buy out Countrywide's mortgage lending business (read story here).

As I talked to this man, I felt like I might as well be talking to a big-time drug dealer, who didn't use crack, meth, heroin himself, and who held in contempt those who used his deadly products. In the eyes of the dealer, his addict-customers were really just weak-willed, pathetic sub-humans.

Likewise, Mr. Countrywide washed his hands of any guilt for the housing mess. Countrywide, he said, was just supplying greedy little homeowners with the means to keep feeding their stupid, irresponsible buying/consumer habits.

"Orange County," he told me, "is built on our loans."

But was it right to make loans to people who couldn't afford them? I asked.

"Don't tell me those little blonde Newport Beach divorcees were innocent babes in the woods," he said. "When they came to us, time after time, for loans to tap into the growing equity in their houses, they knew what they were doing. And how do you think they paid for their Mercedes, their trips to Europe, their country club memberships, their face-lifts? It wasn't by working for a living."

There is truth to what Mr. Countrywide said. There have been a lot of irresponsible borrowers. But also a lot of reckless lenders.

Anyway, as I was sitting there rubbing shoulders and elbows in coach class with this creature, I wondered if he was married, had children. I could imagine his kid's hatching out of reptilian eggs....

No kids, he told me. I'm divorced.

Then, as the plane landed, Mr. Countrywide told me how he'd been at a Countrywide party, with his wife, when one of his female work-colleagues came up to him and - in front of his wife - invited him to her place for the weekend (these Countrywide folks are anything but shy about their appetites!). Mr. Countrywide told me he was dumb-founded by his colleague's brazen offer.

But then he said: "You know, what I didn't realize until a few weeks later, was that she (his co-worker) had sized up my marriage correctly, in just a matter of minutes. She saw that my wife had checked out of our marriage. I guess my wife's body language gave it a way. Anyway, it was only a few weeks later that my wife filed for divorce. I didn't see it coming but that other woman did. Amazing."

I might have been sympathetic. But because of his reptilian ethics, I felt only a quiet glee that Mr. Countrywide - Mr. Master of the Universe - had been blind-sided. Now he was the one holding a worthless property.