The Bad Sheriff

Who’s the biggest fraud sitting in public office right now in Los Angeles County? Tough call, but if you leave out the Board of Supervisors, the dishonor probably goes to either D.A. Steve Cooley or Sheriff Lee Baca. Both men are overseeing dead-end investigations and both are world-class pansies when it comes to finding the courage to stand up and take the heat for their dumb-ass errors in judgment.

In the D.A. man’s case, he never intends to touch wayward pedophile protector Cardinal Roger Mahony, but don’t expect him to tell the public he’s closing the books after spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars paging through the diaries and papers of the Jackass in the Red Robe, who’d be hell-bound if one existed.

And the loony sheriff, who’s snowed some of the top human-rights watchers in this city with his often empty New Agey rhetoric during his too-long three terms in office, refuses to stop looking for the person who leaked the Mel Gibson arrest report way back during the summer of 2006. Hey Lee, ask your favorite mystic before you take my word on this, but some words in that wallet-sized code of ethics you make your deputies carry should keep you from dragging your feet on this.

One of the few people in Los Angeles who still remember that an investigation remains open in the Case of Mel’s Bad Night Out is Michael Gennaco, chief attorney for the Office of Independent Review. In a report last December on “Celebrity Justice and the Sheriff’s Department,” he dinged a unit commander for giving preferential treatment to Gibson on July 28, 2006 – the night of his sloppy arrest. Now, 19 months later, we’re still waiting for the leak investigation to come to a close.

“I’m a little discouraged that it’s taken as long as it has,” Gennaco said Monday. In his December report, Gennaco hinted that he would get in the last word once that witch-hunt is over. Wrote Gennaco: “After the conclusion of the ‘leak’ investigation, there may be additional findings of policy violations and/or preferential treatment surrounding this aspect of the case.”

It’s hard to know why anybody would be trying to protect Mel the Asshole. A belligerent drunk, he unleashed an anti-Semitic tirade against Deputy James Mee and threatened to get the deputy fired during his DUI arrest in Malibu. Talk about preferential treatment. If you had been Gibson, all of your outrageous conduct would have been described in unremitting detail in your arrest report. Gibson’s sanitized arrest report, however, could have been describing the arrest of a choirboy who had imbibed too much altar wine. The arrest was described as having gone down “without incident.”

The juicy details (Sugartits!) got excised by higher-ups, an outlandish move that won them top-to-bottom scolding in Gennaco’s report last December. The full details were placed in a supplemental report that was supposed to remain secret, an illegal practice banned by the state public records laws. Within 24 hours of Gibson’s arrest, the full, unadulterated report was leaked to gossip/celebrity/entertainment website TMZ.com.

Days later, sheriff’s officials raided Mee’s house in pursuit of evidence that the deputy spilled the story. The disastrous handling of the matter by Baca and his troops shook up the career of the deputy, who was transferred and harassed for doing his job … namely, saving the world from yet another sozzled driver.

When Gennaco finally critiques the illegal hounding of Deputy Mee, expect a huge showdown between the public’s right-to-know crowd and the sheriff’s inner-sanctum starfuckers.

Said Gennaco: “I would favor more disclosure.”

And, we’ll toss in a medal of honor for whoever leaked the report.

Heel, critics of Chuck Philips

If you need evidence that humans are not the highest form of life on this planet, consider the unrelenting attacks from all quarters on L.A. Times Pulitzer-winning entertainment investigative writer Chuck Philips. Bruised and bloodied, Philips was skewered for believing that documents filed as part of a Florida court case were actually authentic FBI reports that linked two men to setting up the 1994 attack on rapper Tupac Shakur. Not to minimize the error, but how many of Philips’ critics have ever sought confirmation that a court document was valid? How many of his critics have even stepped foot in the file room of any courthouse in America? The report on Thesmokinggun.com turned them all into experts on detecting fabricated reports, even those by the clever con man involved in the Florida case.

It’s not like Chuck and his editors ducked the incoming barrage. Within hours of learning of his mistake, Philips owned up to it and apologized. The next day, his paper ran a front-page correction. Philips and Times Editor Russ Stanton deserve a standing ovation, not to be pissed on by the legions of misinformed pundits.

Ladies and gentlemen, Chuck Philips made a mistake. A human error, no matter how serious or public, is, in the end, just a human error. The mistakes that matter more are the institutional ones. Look how long it took The New York Times to face the fiction spewed by Judith Miller and her paper about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction: the Times’ mea culpa ran on May 26, 2004 -- three years or more after its propaganda began misleading a nation.

Or consider the case of Wen Ho Lee, the Chinese-American scientist suspected of stealing nuclear secrets from Los Alamos. The N.Y. Times destroyed his career with a story that ran on March 6, 1999. Eighteen months later, on September 26, 2000, the paper finally ran a bloated, charitable analysis of its poor handling of the story and said it “should have pushed harder to uncover weaknesses in the FBI case against Dr. Lee.”

One more thing about the Philips’ fallout. In addition to the dumb comments from pundits and critics, it would be nice to shut up blowhard attorney Jeffrey Lichtman, who was quoted in the Times as saying the paper should come to him with their checkbooks open. Let’s not get too technical here, but the document in question, as part of a court file, can be reported on without any repercussions, regardless of whether it’s fake or not. It’s called the “fair report privilege” and is recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court. Lichtman should turn off his mouth – and meter – and go hide in a law library.

The moral of this story: Hug your dog, and wish she ruled the world -- or that she could, at least, teach the sub-dogs among us to heel.

Wait 41 hours before you kill somebody

Was that an April Fool’s Day joke or the L.A. City Council voting Tuesday?

Indeed, the council was serious when it considered calling for a 40-hour moratorium on killing in the City of Angels. It would start at 6:01 p.m. Friday and is the idea of Earl Ofari Hutchinson, the president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable.

No offense to Earl, who couldn’t get the City Council to go along with his plan, but maybe we should go for a slightly longer ban, seeing how we’d all like to be around longer than what boils down to another workweek – if you’re union. Maybe a 40-year ban, with an option to renew! And, as long as we’re doing away with murder, can we put a lid on lesser (yet annoying!) crimes -- like littering? And maybe issue an advisory to discourage the perfectly legal practice of some subway riders who chew gum loudly on the train?

As for murder, let’s kill the politics and resurrect a lively debate on taming L.A.’s gangs.

Yagman’s New Digs

Stephen Yagman, L.A.’s top police brutality lawyer, got a bum rap on tax-fraud charges, and will be exonerated once his appellate attorney, and UC Irvine law school head, Erwin Chemerinsky (it’s true!) gets his day in court. Just a little prediction you heard hear first. This is not to say that Yagman is not one of the two or three most obnoxious people ever to practice law or anything else in California (true too), but, fortunately for a lot of us, that’s not yet a felony. In the meantime, Yagman won’t be seen walking on the beach near his Venice home anytime soon. On Monday, he started serving his three-year sentence at a low-security prison near Raleigh, N.C. His new address: Stephen Yagman, FCI Butner Low, Federal Correctional Institution, P.O. Box 999, Butner, NC 27509. Now, don’t be rude and send him checks from some made-up overseas account with his name on it.

Send insults and ammo to BigAl@lasniper.com