LA Councilman Curren Price pleads not guilty to new corruption charges

LOS ANGELES (CN) — City Councilman Curren Price appeared in a downtown LA courtroom on Thursday and pleaded not guilty to new corruption charges filed against him.

Price was first charged, in 2023, with 10 counts of embezzlement, perjury and conflict of interest. Prosecutors accused Price of voting on city contracts that benefitted a consulting business run by his wife, Del Richardson, without disclosing the relationship and receiving medical benefits for Richardson before they were married, when he was still married to another woman.

The two new conflict of interest counts accuse Price of voting to steer more than $800,000 in payments from the city’s housing authority and the county’s public transit authority to his wife’s business. Prosecutors now say in their amended complaint that Price also voted to send more than $2 million in taxpayer funds to a nonprofit, Home at Last, which was leasing properties from a different nonprofit, The Urban Healthcare Project, of which Price was the CEO.

“Embezzling public funds and awarding contracts for your own financial gain is the antithesis of public service,” District Attorney Nathan Hochman said in a Tuesday statement after the new charges were filed. “Self-dealing and pay-to-play politics will not be tolerated in Los Angeles County.”

Price’s attorney, Cohen Williams partner Michael Schafler, called the new complaint “nothing more than an attempt to pile on to a weak case.”

“They have gone back as far as 6 years, combing through thousands and thousands of votes, to find a couple more allegedly conflicted votes,” Schafler said in a written statement. “The evidence will show that Councilmember Price had no knowledge of any alleged conflicts at the time he cast those votes. The fact is that every one of those votes was passed unanimously.”

On Thursday, Price filed a demurrer, a motion to have the complaint dismissed or trimmed down, noting the amended complaint “was filed following grand jury proceedings initiated earlier this year — that did not result in any indictment — and which appear to impermissibly have been for the primary purpose of discovery and preparing for the preliminary hearing and trial in this action, which had already been pending since June 2023.”

Price previously filed a demurrer to the original complaint last year. Among other things, his lawyer argued the councilman’s failure to disclose conflicts of interest or recuse himself on certain votes amounted to simple oversights. He also said the embezzlement counts, which related to his wife’s health insurance, weren’t actually embezzlement but grand theft, a charge that would have fallen outside the four-year statute of limitations.

Superior Court Judge Craig Richman denied the motion, finding that there was enough evidence for the case to move forward.

Price’s indictment made him only the latest in a long line of councilmen to be charged with public corruption, following Mitch Englander, who pleaded guilty to obstructing a federal probe; José Huizar, who was sentenced to six years for bribery; and Mark Ridley-Thomas, who was sentenced to 3 1/2 years for bribery.

But unlike those politicians, who were charged by federal prosecutors, Price was charged by local district attorneys — first by George Gascón and now again by Hochman, Gascón’s successor.

Some, including Price’s City Council colleague Marqueece Harris-Dawson, have suggested the accusations leveled against him are ethics violations dressed up as criminal charges. Prosecutors have been quick to push back against that argument, saying the 75-year-old, who’s held several elected offices for the last three decades, has long engaged in a pattern of corruption and self-dealing, pointing out that he had been told about the conflicts time and again, by his staff and the Fair Political Practices Commission.

If convicted of all charges, Price faces a maximum sentence of nine years in state prison and two years in county jail.

The district attorney’s public integrity unit first began investigating Price in 1997 following a complaint by independent journalist Daniel Guss that Price had committed bigamy — that the divorce for his first marriage had never been finalized. Price claimed it was an oversight.

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