LA Councilmember Curren Price to stand trial on corruption charges

LOS ANGELES (CN) — A Superior Court judge on Wednesday found there to be enough evidence for corruption charges brought against LA City Councilmember Curren Price to go to trial following a six-day preliminary hearing.

After the ruling, Price’s attorney, Michael Schafler, said he was disappointed but thought the hearing showed the case against his client “has a lot of gaps, a lot of holes. It’s based largely on cynical speculation.”

“We believe that once we get to present our case,” Schafler added, “Mr. Price will be vindicated and exonerated.”

Price, who represents a large chunk of South LA, is charged with 12 counts of embezzlement, perjury and conflict of interest. Prosecutors say Price repeatedly took part in City Council votes that he was legally required to recuse himself from because they involved contracts with financial entities that used his wife’s consulting firm as a subcontractor. He voted on some of these agenda items; on others, he was absent but didn’t publicly announce his recusal, as required by law.

Prosecutors also say Price’s wife, Del Richardson, received medical benefits for five years before they were legally married, when Price was still married to another woman. They also say he lied on financial disclosure forms, perjuring himself. Lastly, he is accused of voting to award more than $2 million in federal Covid-19 grants to a nonprofit, Home at Last, that leased office space from another nonprofit, Urban Healthcare Project, for which Price served as CEO.

Schafler argued, during his summation, that the counts were mere oversights on the part of Price and his staff and that prosecutors had failed to demonstrate Price knowingly broke the law.

“The people established that many mistakes were made,” Schafler said. “Still, there was no evidence presented that Mr. Price acted with any willful intent. Not any email, no recording. There’s nothing.” He added: “I’ve never seen a public corruption case like that.”

The votes that his client cast without recusing himself, Schafler said, were not controversial and, in many cases, passed unanimously.

“He had nothing to gain,” Schafler argued. “If he recused himself, the projects would still pass.”

In his own summation, Deputy District Attorney Casey Higgins sought to reframe the case. Though it might pale in comparison to other cases against local politicians — such as those made against former City Councilmembers Jose Huizar, Mitch Englander and Mark Ridley-Thomas, all of whom were sentenced to prison on federal charges — the charges leveled at Price were still significant.

“This case is not going to be this kind of public corruption case where there’s strippers and cocaine and bags of cash in Las Vegas,” Higgins said in his summation. “It’s a long, secret corruption.”

He said that while each individual count might seem minor, the case was about a pattern and practice of corruption.

“Either Curren Price is completely oblivious to what he does in his position, or it’s a pattern,” Higgins said, adding that Price’s intent was “to nickel and dime the city every step of the way.”

The preliminary hearing featured testimony from two of Price’s staff members — one current and one former — whose job it was to help Price prepare for council meetings by highlighting certain agenda items he might be interested in, as well as those he had a conflict of interest in and had to recuse himself from. Price’s current deputy chief of staff, Marisa Alcaraz, said that out of thousands of votes during Price’s 12-and-a-half years on the council, Price would have recused himself from hundreds. She admitted that, a handful of times, Price did vote on items that he shouldn’t have, but insisted the oversight was hers — not Price’s.

“He never voted on a matter that I told him there was a conflict on,” Alcaraz testified.

Former staffer Delphert Smith admitted he used a thumb drive to keep a record of Richardson’s colleagues in order to avoid using email, so as to avoid the list being turned over to public records act requests.

Higgins said the two ex-staffers were “tripping over themselves to jump in front of the bus” for Price, who was “trying to create this wall around himself, this wall of deniability.”

Superior Court Judge Shelly Torrealba said she agreed the witnesses, called by Higgins, were not credible.

“It appears that a level of bias in favor of the defendant was displayed by the witnesses, in terms of their working relationship, their perspective of these counts and allegations and their personal beliefs and feelings toward the defendant,” Torrealba said. “That came through very clearly.”

If convicted of all charges, Price faces a maximum sentence of nine years in state prison and two years in county jail — but it’s not clear if prosecutors would even seek jail time for the 75-year-old politician, who has held public office nearly continuously for more than 30 years and has never been charged with a crime. It’s also unlikely the case would go to trial before the end of the year, when his final term in City Council is over.

Price is scheduled to be arranged on March 13, when he will enter a plea.

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