LOS ANGELES (CN) — The former general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power will spend six years in federal prison for agreeing to accept bribes to help a lawyer who befriended him secure a $30-million, no-bid contract from the utility.
David Wright, 62, was also ordered to pay a $75,000 fine at his sentencing Monday in Los Angeles.
U.S. District Judge Stanley Blumenfeld said the case was truly a tragedy because of the contrast between the egregious crime and Wright's otherwise outstanding character, based on the many letters his family and friends submitted to the court. Wright was at zenith of his career and wasn't in financial dire straits, but nonetheless engaged in an elaborate and sophisticated scheme that required substantial effort to pull off, Blumenfeld said.
"I believe it was an aberration, in part," the judge said. "It appears the motive was pure greed and the pursuit of excess riches."
Wright agreed to plead guilty this past December to one count of bribery. He's the highest ranking executive at the LADWP, the largest municipal utility in the U.S., to be caught up in a sprawling corruption scandal that also has infected the LA city attorney's office. The government had sought an eight-year prison term.
Wright admitted he helped Paul Paradis, a New York lawyer who was representing the LADWP in litigation against PricewaterhouseCoopers over the deeply flawed billing software it had sold the utility, get a $30 million contract for the lawyer's newly created business Aventador Utility Solutions LLC that was to help fix the billing problems. In exchange, Wright was to become Aventador's chief executive when he retired from LADWP and receive $1 million a year in pay.
"Mr. Paradis played him like a fiddle," Wright's attorney, Anthony Pacheco, told the judge. "It just got away from him."
According to Pacheco, Wright was in over his head at the utility and was panicking over the billing mess he had inherited. Pacheco had asked for a sentence of no more than 24 months because, in part, Wright never received any money from the scheme.
Wright expressed remorse at the hearing and said he was "sad to his very core."
Throughout the spring of 2017, Wright lobbied LADWP's board to award the contract to Aventador over the objections of the utility's senior staff to give a huge no-bid contract to a company that was just set up, had never been vetted, had no relevant experience, and was charging sky-high consulting rates.
Shortly after he had persuaded the board of the critical urgency to award the contract to Aventador, Wright told Paradis that the company should do “the minimal possible” with respect to the billing upgrade so that he wouldn't need to spend time and energy on that project during his remaining time at LADWP, according to the government.
Wright made clear, the government said, "in both words and actions, that his primary interest was in serving Aventador and his own financial gain — not the public utility that he led, the city that had entrusted him with that important responsibility, or the taxpayers that underwrote his substantial salary package."
Paradis is the central figure in the corruption scandal that has engulfed the LADWP since the disastrous rollout of the PwC billing software that overbilled tens of thousands of customers while not billing others at all. The city hired Paradis in 2014 to pursue a lawsuit against PwC, but the lawyer was also secretly representing the lead plaintiff in a class action against the city in a blatant conflict of interest. Paradis has pleaded guilty to accepting a $2.2 million kickback from an Ohio lawyer to whom he steered the ratepayers' case, which settled for $67 million.
By 2019, when allegations began swirl around his double-dealing, Paradis began cooperating with the FBI. Shortly thereafter, he met with Wright, who was scared their relationship would become public.
According to Wright's plea agreement, he told Paradis, “OK, so I’m going to say something that you get to read between the lines. But if all, if any of that stuff” — meaning their text messages — “somehow wasn’t there, I wouldn’t be unhappy.”
Paradis agreed to delete Wright’s text messages and emails and to wipe clean a laptop that Wright had used. Wright said he already destroyed a “shitload” of physical evidence.
The LADWP scandal is part of a number of corruption investigations that have ensnared various members of the upper echelon of LA’s political leadership, including two former City Council members — Mitch Englander and Jose Huizar — as well as sitting City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, who has been suspended from the council. Former Deputy Mayor Raymond Chan was also charged in a federal corruption probe.
Englander last year was sentenced to 14 months in prison after he pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators who were looking into whether he had accepted cash, female escort services, hotel rooms and expensive meals from a businessman during trips to Las Vegas and Palm Springs. He wasn't convicted of bribery.
Huizar is scheduled to go on trial next year over allegations that he ran a massive pay-to-play that solicited money from real-estate developers to facilitate approval of their projects in downtown LA.
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