The Guss Report — Alive and well is the perception that Los Angeles Mayor Garcetti employs the same approach toward advancing his political aspirations that J. Wellington Wimpy did in the old Popeye cartoons:
“I will gladly quash corruption allegations and throw whistleblowers under the bus if you make a massive donation to my next campaign.”
For example, for nearly a year now, Mr. Garcetti, his chief-of-staff Ana Guerrero and LAFD Chief Ralph Terrazas sat on reports documenting the culture of corruption among some LAFD fire inspectors alluded to in my www.CityWatchla.com articles on Sept. 5 and Oct. 3.
Case in Point: The implausible overtime claims of Inspector Glenn Martinez.
On the morning of Dec. 23, 2015, department officials noticed that an odd proportion of the Q4 2015 overtime approved by Terrazas to help reduce the backlog of overdue inspections was claimed by Mr. Martinez. While his peers averaged roughly 40 hours that quarter, Mr. Martinez claimed 200 hours — about 40 percent of the total OT allotment.
When LAFD officials dug in to audit Mr. Martinez’s work plan for that day and saw that he already put in for a day’s worth of inspections, plus overtime, for time that had not yet occurred, they set out to locate him at the addresses where he claimed to be.
At Our Lady Help of Christians School, Mr. Martinez put in for 6½ hours of inspection time, without having been seen by any of the onsite personnel, including those he would have needed to access the places on the property he claimed to inspect.
Just eight days earlier, another inspector went through the property….in just two hours. It was a school building that had been closed for more than two years, which only required a walk-through. How Mr. Martinez spent 6½ hours there is a riddle that solves itself.
LAFD personnel looked for Mr. Martinez on and all around the Our Lady property at the time he said that he was there.
He was not seen by anyone.
Mr. Martinez’s time log claimed he was at the school from 11 a.m. until 5:30 after which he claimed to have spent four overtime hours at Occidental College, starting at – wait for it – 5:30pm, despite the campus being more than 6½ miles away.
(Mr. Martinez must have missed the chapter in the bunco playbook about taking into consideration L.A. drive time between one’s alleged victims du jour.)
Records reflect that at Occidental, Mr. Martinez claimed to have spent four hours inspecting two buildings.
Following a Pattern
That is his modus operandi: Take two hours to inspect a building regardless of its size and condition. The problem here is that the campus had, by that date, already been shut down for the winter break for 10 days. As was the case with the previous property, nobody (neither Occidental staffers nor LAFD personnel) saw Mr. Martinez or gave him access to where he needed and claimed to go.
This is what prompted LAFD officials to dig deeper into Mr. Martinez’s other claimed allocations for those 200 hours of quarterly overtime, including similarly implausible inspection claims at USC, where he put in for extensive OT during much of the weekend of the USC/UCLA football game. That also happened to be the Thanksgiving holiday when the places Mr. Martinez said he inspected were inaccessible on his own, and whose safety personnel – who always attentively accompany LAFD inspectors – did not encounter Mr. Martinez.
That brings us back to Mr. Garcetti.
To date, the only thing he appears to have done in response to these, and other fraud allegations leveled against some of Mr. Martinez’s colleagues, is re-assign Dep. Chief John Vidovich who was dutifully doing his job exposing it.
The mayor’s removal of Mr. Vidovich from that role coincided with the donation of $350,000 to his re-election campaign, and those of his City Council successors, by the firefighters’ union which had become agitated by the reduced overtime of its members as a result of Mr. Vidovich’s work.
At some point, Mr. Garcetti goes from being the enabler of the corruption to being an inextricable part of it.
It is time for L.A. Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey to set aside the perception that, for her, some in City Hall are fish too big to fry, or cross, and whether Mr. Garcetti and the Council members took what may amount to bribery and conspiracy. If she is unable or unwilling to do that, the feds should jump in.
And while Ms. Lacey decides where she stands on enforcing the law, the Los Angeles Times owes Mr. Vidovich a public apology for its Aug. 24 article in which it served as nothing more than a mouthpiece for the Mr. Garcetti machine, a mistake it has yet to correct.
Mr. Guss, MBA, is a contributor to www.CityWatchLA.com, Huffington Post and KFI AM-640. He blogs on humane issues at http://ericgarcetti.blogspot.com/. Follow him on Twitter @TheGussReport.