Steve Cooley Is Not a Taco Truck

The D.A. man needs your help bringing to justice the “gangsters in suits,” as one prosecutor describes some of the people who run the corrupt cities southeast of downtown L.A.

Even if Steve Cooley were firing on all cylinders, he couldn’t do it alone. He’s tried. He’s in over his head. And, for good and for bad, he is coasting to his third four-year term in the largely ignored June 3 election. Big Bad Steve should pick up the phone today and ask the FBI to help him put together a sting operation to target elected officials he’s heard reams of complaints about over the years.

Wire a straw man in one of the cities – Cudahy, Maywood, Bell Gardens – and see what trouble you can document. Make it part of a joint county-fed task force.

If Big Bad Steve does it right, Angelenos, who get a bad rap for being apathetic about issues that really matter, could show as great an interest in public corruption as they do in a crackdown on taco trucks. Instead, the D.A.’s office announced an indictment last week that most of the 12 million people in the region probably didn’t even notice.

Bell Gardens Councilman Mario Beltran faces embezzlement charges after a yearlong investigation, several weeks of grand jury hearings and testimony from more than 54 witnesses.

If convicted on all 13 counts – seven felony theft counts, a felony perjury count and five misdemeanor counts for campaign disclosure violations – Beltran could go to prison, since he was already on probation for filing a false police report. Even if he’s acquitted, his career as an elected official, even in the sleazy netherworld of southeast L.A. County, is likely over. Beltran’s attorney, Jorge Gonzalez, said similar cases often warrant a “slap on the wrist. It’s clear to us that Mario isn’t being treated fairly.”

The indictment is remarkable mostly for what is not contained in its eight pages, considering what the public already knows about Beltran and his associates. It also shows the D.A.’s limitations in chasing down allegations of election fraud, criminal threats, and intimidation of those who politically oppose a cabal of Latino politicians who run Bell Gardens and its neighboring cities.

Beltran placed a bull’s-eye on his own chest in June 2006, when he passed out drunk in a skid row hooker hotel and lied to police about how he lost his wallet, city badge and cell phone. His conviction for filing a false police report, in March 2007, was his first, despite a 2004 arrest for attempting to evade police – an embarrassing incident that ended with him hiding in the bushes in Alhambra.

Even after his wild night on skid row, Beltran wound up on Cooley’s radar only after a complaint from a fellow councilman that Beltran set up a phone call with a convicted felon and accused drug trafficker named Shahram Shayesteh that led to alleged criminal threats. Shayesteh faces trial in the matter; Beltran will not likely be charged.

The incident raised alarming issues about the stability of Beltran, an enterprising immigrant from El Salvador who was raised in Mexico and became the protégé of state Senator Gil Cedillo, later working as a field deputy for state Senator Ron Calderon.

Cooley’s investigation began with revelations, exposed by CityBeat writer Jeffrey Anderson last year, that Beltran had met with Shayesteh before awarding him a lucrative tow truck contract, while also having a business relationship with one of the tow company’s owners of record, Bahran Madaen. According to Deputy District Attorney Max Huntsman, additional reports that Beltran had failed to file campaign disclosure documents in Sacramento led to a subpoena for bank records, which allegedly show that Beltran stole more than $11,000 in campaign funds to pay his legal bills in the sad hooker hotel case.

Yet the D.A. was not able to find evidence of provable criminal conduct in Beltran’s sleazy tow truck company dealings, or in his alleged facilitation of a criminal threat, despite efforts by LAPD Detective Marcella Winn, who looked deeper into the matter. Nor can the D.A. do much about more than $100,000 in campaign funds funneled to some of the state’s most prominent Latino officials – including Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa – by the tow truck company and a sister company in Maywood, which remains under federal investigation for alleged kickbacks, as Anderson wrote last fall.

“If I could, would I do it in a minute? Sure,” Huntsman told Anderson last week, of his desire to probe deeper into the pay-to-play politics in Bell Gardens and its neighboring cities that bring street elements into city government. “But then we can’t predict what the future might bring, either.”

Neither Cedillo nor Calderon will talk about Beltran or their longtime support of him. Last year, in CityBeat, Cedillo all but dared Cooley – and the FBI – to go after Beltran. Cedillo even came to Bell Gardens pushing an initiative on behalf of unlicensed immigrant drivers, and stood by Beltran’s side to lend the young councilman an air of credibility.

In the coming weeks, it will be interesting to see who, besides his lawyers, will stand beside Beltran and claim he is a good public servant worth saving.

To do that could require one to ignore the following associations, also likely beyond Cooley’s reach:

Besides Shayesteh, Beltran has ties to other questionable figures. On the night he passed out in downtown L.A., he was imbibing at the 740 Club, whose owner, Ralph Verdugo, was run out of Whittier in 2004 for running a nuisance nightclub called Ibiza, where Beltran was an employee. The 740, which opened on South Broadway in late 2005, soon became a magnet for gangs and crime, according to police reports and interviews with law enforcement.

L.A. Councilman José Huizar is no stranger to the place: He called for an abatement action last year after the club’s questionable reputation surfaced, though he held fundraisers there.

Lawyer-lobbyist Francisco Leal, who has served as city attorney in a number of cities, including Huntington Park and Maywood – which always seem to be attracting attention from federal law enforcers – also sponsored political events at the 740 with Beltran, who moonlighted at the club while working for a former state assemblywoman.

Most troubling is that the club’s building permit expediter, Steve Carmona, a former L.A. planning and public works commissioner, has been indicted for taking a bribe from accused racketeer and grocery store magnate George Torres, one of L.A.’s most notorious figures.

Steve Cooley knows all of this. So does the FBI, according to sources close to ongoing federal investigations in Cudahy, Maywood and Bell Gardens.

The question is, how much of life in that part of the county is a reflection of the struggles of working class communities with inexperienced leaders? And, how much is attributable to a cancer growing out of the barrios and into the little city halls known for corruption and the occasional criminal probe by Steve Cooley?

In Contempt of Traffic

It feels like the 1970s all over again. Just as one of the best solutions to L.A. gridlock – the carpool lanes on the Santa Monica Freeway – got creamed then by a judge who hated the project because it lacked an EIR, now we have a judge interfering with Mayor V’s plans to address Westside gridlock on Pico and Olympic boulevards.

Superior Court Judge John Torribio may know his law books, but he’s too bogged down with measuring traffic on side streets and weighing the effect of removing parking along the east-west P&O thoroughfares to see the big picture.

The more serious environmental effects the judge should worry about are the killer fumes belching from the additional tens of thousands of cars stuck in traffic on those roads today compared, say, to the 1960s. Why not order up an EIR on the respiratory illnesses caused by the rush-hour crawl? Maybe the judge should close the streets because they are operating over capacity?

Mayor V should fight back and appeal the ruling and, to make up for time lost in court, jump to the final phase of the project and make the two boulevards mostly one-way as soon as possible. It’s not right to use environmental law against the environment.

Somewhere, the traffic gods must be laughing through the smog. Mayor V would not find himself in this spot had he not stolen the idea – without credit – from his nemesis, county Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky. And Westside traffic would not be quite so bad today had Zev, as a naive member of the L.A. City Council in 1976, not joined the short-sighted lawsuit that halted the Diamond lanes on the Santa Monica Freeway seemingly forever.

Mayor V and Zev, whose role in L.A.’s transportation history is more complex than any politician’s, should call a news conference to commiserate over three decades of broken dreams and ever-lengthening commutes. And perhaps they should announce that red lights on P&O will incrementally grow longer until they stay red forever.

Wanna see an EIR about anarchy in the street, your honor?

With reporting by Jeffrey Anderson. Send insults and ammo to BigAl@lasniper.com.