LA City Councilman Curren Price pleads not guilty after judge denies motion to dismiss charges

LOS ANGELES (CN) — Los Angeles City Councilman Curren Price pleaded not guilty to criminal charges of conflict of interest and embezzlement on Monday after a Superior Court judge denied his motion to dismiss those charges.

About 100 of Price’s supporters, many of them union activists, packed the hallway of the Clara Shortridge Foltz criminal courthouse in Downtown Los Angeles. After the hearing, Price told them, “We have done nothing wrong. And we’re gonna be fighting tooth and nail to prove our innocence, and to prove that we’re here to serve other people. That’s why your support your attendance is so very, very important.”

Price, a former state legislator and councilman representing part of South LA, was charged in June 2023 with five counts of grand theft by embezzlement, three counts of perjury and two counts of conflict of interest.

The charges stem from two broad patterns of behavior. Firstly, that he voted to approve affordable housing projects built by, as well as the sale of land to, a developer — Thomas Safran & Associates — who had paid his wife’s company, Del Richardson & Associates, as a consultant. By failing to report the conflict of interest on city ethics forms, according to prosecutors, he committed perjury.

Secondly, Price received more than $30,000 in medical premiums from the city between 2013 and 2017 by claiming his wife, Del Richardson, as a dependent. There was just one problem: Price was married to a different woman at the time, making Richardson very much not his wife. When news of the apparently accidental bigamy broke in 2017, Price chalked it up to an oversight.

Price is only the latest in a long line of LA city councilmen to face corruption charges, following in the wake of Mitch Englander (pleaded guilty to obstructing a federal probe), Jose Huizar (sentenced to six years for bribery) and Mark Ridley-Thomas (sentenced to the 3 1/2 years for bribery).

But the charges against Price appear different. He is being charged not by federal prosecutors, but by the local District Attorney, George Gascon. And some have suggested the charges appear more like ethics violations and not what you’d normally associate with felonies.

Price’s city council colleague Marqueece Harris-Dawson told the Los Angeles Times in October, “I’ve not seen a felony charge for this type of activity. I’ve seen ethics violations for this type of activity.” Price has been removed from committee assignments, but he has not been suspended, as Ridley-Thomas and Huizar had been.

After the hearing Monday, Deputy District Attorney Casey Higgins responded to that argument, telling reporters, “I know that various people out in the public and the city council have made those allegations. Quite frankly, if you look at the evidence, this is a long pattern. If you look at the dates 2013 to 2021 [and] 2022 — and I’ll just leave it at that.”

Price filed a demurrer — a motion to have the charges against Price dropped or at least revised — in October, before Price had entered a plea, saying that the first set of charges were based on “connections between Councilmember Price and the City’s purported contracts with developers Thomas Safran & Associates and GTM Holdings that are gossamer-thin,” noting that the resolutions to approve the developer’s contracts all passed unanimously without controversy. Price also denied “willfully and knowingly voted for contracts in which he had a financial interest.”

Through his attorneys of the firm Cohen Williams LLP, Price argued that the exclusion of evidence about Price’s state of mind meant he didn’t have proper notice about the prosecution’s case.

As to the embezzlement counts, pertaining to his wife’s health insurance premiums, Price in the demurrer argues that the charges “lack two hallmarks of embezzlement charges: (1) the control over and entrustment with the money of another, and (2) the use of such funds for a purpose different than that for which the funds were provided.”

Price says the only reason the DA is charging him with embezzlement, and not simply grand theft, is to “sidestep the four-year statute of limitations for grand theft.”

In their own briefs to the court, county prosecutors argued that the charges against Price stem not from mere oversights, but from a pattern of behavior that stretches all the way back to the 2000s, when Price serves as Inglewood city councilman. He obtained medical benefits for Richardson then, and in 2008, while he was serving for the state legislator — and still technically married to his first wife, Lynn Price.

As for the conflict of interest charges, prosecutors wrote, “It appears Curren Price was put on notice about his conflicts of interest by the Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) starting, at least, as early as June 21, 2019.”

Judge Craig Richman asked a pointed to question to Michael Schafler, Price’s attorney: “If we assume someone was claimed as a spouse and wasn’t, would you agree that that’s a crime?”

“It’s not embezzlement,” said Schafler.

“What crime do you think it would be?” the judge asked.

“Some sort of theft?” Schafler said. “It’s not embezzlement.”

“We agree that there’s a crime,” said Judge Richman, a bit later. “The question becomes what the crime is — if this is what took place. The people have chosen to allege embezzlement of public funds. I am not in a position to say it was not.”

The judge said the defense’s objections could likely be heard again later at some sort of evidentiary hearing. With that, he denied the demurrer, saying, “I do believe the defense is on sufficient notice of criminality.”

Seconds later, Price’s lawyer entered a “not guilty” plea for his client. The case will now proceed toward a preliminary hearing, and later, a trial.

“Naturally, we’re disappointed by the court’s decision not to sustain the demurrer,” Schafler said after the hearing, “Although it does not come as a large surprise.”

He added, “Having closely examined a substantial portion of the prosecution’s evidence, we are confident that they will be unable to meet their burden,” and urged Price’s constituents to “withhold judgment while the legal process unfolds.”

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