OpenCDA

March 13, 2014

Bell About to Ring – Twice

Filed under: Probable Cause — Tags: — Bill @ 7:14 am

bell-cityhallFormer Kootenai County, Idaho,  Finance Director Angela Spaccia is scheduled to be sentenced on March 21 in Los Angeles County Superior Court for her corruption-related convictions resulting from her term as the Bell, California, assistant city administrator.   The Spaccia (then Sheffield) connection to Kootenai County was outlined in several OpenCdA posts.

As often happens when criminal conspirators are to be sentenced separately, they turn on each other to try and get reduced sentences.  Spaccia’s boss in Bell, former city administrator Robert Rizzo, had already pleaded no contest to 69 felony corruption charges last year rather than stand trial.

Rizzo had been scheduled to be sentenced before Spaccia, however he is likely to be subpoenaed to testify at Spaccia’s sentencing hearing.  The Court postponed Rizzo’s sentencing until April 16.  Obviously Rizzo’s attorney hopes that his testimony against his former assistant Spaccia will lighten his sentence.  Spaccia’s attorney probably hopes to reduce her sentence by shifting some of the blame back to Rizzo.

It is reasonably certain that both Rizzo and Spaccia will wind up in state or federal prison.  It seems likely that Spaccia will face federal tax charges as well.

OpenCdA will continue to follow the trials and travails of former Kootenai County Finance Director Angela Spaccia.  Who knows?  At some point she might even start cooperating with the feds to get a reduced federal sentence.  If she does, we wonder what she might say about the time she was Kootenai County’s Finance Director.

 

December 15, 2013

Bell’s Rizzo Agrees to Plead Guilty on Federal Charges

Filed under: Probable Cause — Tags: — Bill @ 7:01 am

rizzoIn a December 12 press release, André Birotte Jr., the US Attorney for the Central District of California, announced that former Bell, California, Chief Administrative Officer Robert A. Rizzo has agreed to plead guilty to two felony charges: conspiracy and filing a false federal income tax return with the Internal Revenue Service. In the plea agreement, Rizzo admitted that he created a corporation to fraudulently claim losses on his income tax return, which served to illegally reduce his tax liability on the significant income he was receiving from the City of Bell.

According to the press release, Rizzo and co-conspirators (including his tax preparer Robert J. Melcher) formed an S Corporation to claim bogus losses in relation to a purported rental property in Auburn, Washington. He also used an S-Corp account to pay for more than $80,000 in personal expenses in 2009 and $120,000 in construction work on his residence in Huntington Beach in 2010, then falsely claim that these expenses were related to rental property.

As the last sentence in the press release states, the federal investigation is not over.  According to reporter Jeff Gottlieb’s article in the Los Angeles Times, Rizzo’s charging documents refer to “A.S.” and her company, Sheffield Management Corp.  That is almost certainly a reference to Angela Spaccia, whose married name was “Sheffield” when she was in Coeur d’Alene and Kootenai County, Idaho, working for the YWCA and serving for two years as Kootenai County’s Finance Director.   OpenCdA hopes the federal investigation will reveal who the tax preparer, accountant, or attorney was who helped Angela set up Sheffield Management Corp.

December 14, 2013

Bell: Where Did the Money Come From?

Filed under: Probable Cause — Bill @ 9:10 am

bell-cityhallOur previous OpenCdA posts about the corruption in Bell, California, have contained links explaining how Bell City Administrator Robert Rizzo, Assistant City Administrator Angela Spaccia (Sheffield), former Mayor Oscar Hernandez and onetime City Council members Teresa Jacobo, George Mirabal, George Cole and Victor Bello were convicted of misappropriating public funds.  They were the direct recipients of the misappropriated public money.

As noted in the various California State Controller’s Office audits, some recipients of questionable City contracts were likely the indirect recipients.

That raises two fairly big questions:  Where did all the revenue come from that allowed the crooks to enrich themselves?  How could Bell’s Mayor and City Council have stood by while the City’s treasury was being looted? (more…)

November 19, 2013

Bell Corruption: Tightening the Coeur d’Alene Connection

Filed under: Probable Cause — Tags: — Bill @ 1:12 pm

pile-of-cash[

Last Saturday’s OpenCdA post titled Coeur d’Alene’s Connection to the Corruption in Bell asked why Angela Spaccia was interested in buying some very expensive property in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.  More specifically, we wanted to know what Spaccia’s connection was and is to Coeur d’Alene.

Today, we have a much better idea. (more…)

November 16, 2013

The Bell Corruption Scandal: Altered Official Documents

Filed under: Probable Cause — Tags: , — Bill @ 7:03 am

pile-of-cashThe corruption scandal involving the city of Bell, California, Chief Administrative Officer Robert Rizzo and his chief deputy, Angela Spaccia, gets dirtier and dirtier.

During Friday’s testimony, Deputy District Attorney Sean Hassett forced Spaccia to acknowledge that a 2006 resolution approved by the City Council had been illegally altered (switched) so the wording they signed was different from the wording of the resolution in their council packets.   What was in the Council packet and what the Council believed they were signing was, in fact, different from what they actually did sign.   Someone on the City staff, someone obviously trusted by the Council members, had altered the documents, public records.

The result was that the Council gave Rizzo more power and authority than had been intended.  It allowed Rizzo to approve lucrative contracts with City employees without Council approval.

Fortunately, nothing like that could ever happen in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.  Our Council diligently reads every document in its packet.  They compare word-for-word what their packet contains with what our City Clerk puts in front of them.  Our City Finance Director and City Attorney do the same.   Everyone’s paying attention, so we’re safe, right?  Two words:  Sheryl Carroll.

November 11, 2013

City of Bell’s Auditors Disciplined

Filed under: Probable Cause — Tags: — Bill @ 12:06 pm

pile-of-cashOpenCdA has written several posts about the alleged corruption of city officials in Bell, California.

Some of the nagging questions are, “Didn’t the State require independent audits of Bell’s books?  If so, why didn’t the auditors question such things as the  ‘secret formula the public could never find out’ ?  Since the public ultimately pays for the City’s audit, isn’t the public entitled to a diligent independent audit rather than one designed by the alleged crooks to conceal financial mismanagement?”

To get an answer, OpenCdA contacted Jeff Gottlieb, one of the Los Angeles Times’ two principal reporters covering the Bell scandal story.  Mr.  Gottlieb had, in fact, written an article that at least partly answered the nagging questions.  His article was published in the LA Times online on June 2, 2012, and headlined California disciplines accounting firm that missed Bell irregularities.

Apparently the California  Board of Accountancy takes is mission seriously.

ADDENDUM on 11-18/2013:  LA Times reporter Jeff Gottlieb’s article linked above was preceded by one headlined Audits of Bell were ‘rubber-stamp,’ state Controller says.  The earlier article was published by the LA Times online on December 22, 2010, and included these indictments of the City of Bell’s independent auditors, Mayer Hoffman McCann (MHM):

“The long-awaited report is being closely watched because Mayer Hoffman McCann audits the books of dozens of government agencies in California and has 30 offices nationwide.”

“The controller’s office found that MHM failed to comply with 13 of 17 “fieldwork auditing standards” when reviewing Bell’s books in the 2008-09 fiscal year. The firm focused mostly on comparing financial numbers year to year rather than looking at potential for inappropriate or illegal activities, the controller’s report said.”

 

 

October 23, 2013

Bell Update

Filed under: Probable Cause — Tags: , — Bill @ 2:48 pm

pile-of-cashRemember OpenCdA’s post on February 1, 2013, about the public corruption  scandal in Bell, California?

Well, earlier this month the former Bell City Administrator Robert Rizzo agreed to plead no contest to several of the charges against him in return for testifying against his former Assistant City Administrator, Angela Spaccia.  It’s reported in today’s LA Times article headlined Huge Bell salaries based on “secret formula”, prosecutor tells jury.

The article today was brief, and the most interesting part of it may have been in the last three paragraphs which reported emails exchanged between Spaccia and Bell’s former police chief Randy Adams.

As I was reading the numerous LA Times articles covering the Bell scandal, I couldn’t help wondering why the accounting firm that conducted the City of Bell’s annual audit didn’t question the obviously grossly inflated salaries and the “secret formula” used to calculate them.

I was also disgusted but totally unsurprised at the former Bell Police Chief’s emails.  One of my college professors at WSU told me 40 years ago:  “The only difference between cops and crooks is that cops have badges and the authority of law.”

August 17, 2010

Bell Keeps Ringing

Filed under: Probable Cause — Tags: — Bill @ 7:27 am

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Remember the recent outcry in Bell, California, after the city’s residents learned how the mayor and council were abusing their authority and lining their own pockets with taxpayers’ money?    According to an article in today’s Los Angeles Times, the citizens of Bell now understand that they can retake control of their city government.   Sadly, many of the desirable attributes in Bell, in Los Angeles County, and the State of California are lacking in Coeur d’Alene, in Kootenai County, and the State of Idaho.

(more…)

May 16, 2020

Lessons Learned: What Our COVID-19 Response Has Taught the ChiComs

Filed under: Probable Cause — Tags: — Bill @ 12:50 pm

MSS-China“Would the present US Congress have the courage to propose, debate, and pass a declaration of war against the People’s Republic of China (PRC) pursuant to the US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 if the Wuhan corona virus release is proven to have been accidental but maliciously and fortuitously exploited rather than explicitly created as a biowarfare weapon?”

I’ve led several OpenCdA posts recently with that same question.   The absence of any news/skews stories even hinting that it may have been discussed in Congress suggests it has not and probably will not.  Now I’ve begun to wonder what the body count of dead United States citizens must be before one of our esteemed members of Congress timidly grovels at the feet of San Fran Gran Octogenarian Nan for permission to ask it.  My question has a historical basis.

The Japanese attack on Naval Station Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, killed 2,403 US military and civilians.  One day later, on December 8, 1941, as the US Pacific fleet lay in ruins at Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt asked the House of Representatives for a formal declaration of war on Japan.    Roosevelt’s 10-minute “Day which will live in infamy” speech was greeted in the House by thunderous applause and stamping of feet. Within one hour, the president had his declaration of war with only one dissenting vote from Montana Representative Jeannette Rankin,  a pacifist. President Roosevelt signed the declaration of war at 4:10 p.m. in December 8, wearing a black armband to symbolize mourning for those 2,403 American lives lost at Pearl Harbor.

Fast forward now to late December 2019.

PRC health officials informed the World Health Organization (WHO) that there was an outbreak of a mysterious new pneumonia in the vicinity of the Hunan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, PRC.  Then on January 7, 2020, PRC authorities identified a new variation of corona virus called novel coronavirus or nCoV.   On February 11, 2020, WHO officially identified it as COVID-19.  The Chinese Communist government of the PRC (ChiCom) assures the world that the release of COVID-19 was purely accidental.

Recent information indicates that COVID-19 made its first appearance in the United States in Santa Clara, California, 2-3 weeks before early February.  The first death on US soil from COVID-19 was reported on February 29, 2020.  As this post is being prepared on May 15, 2020 at 16:03 PDT, the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is showing 85,990 deaths in the US attributed to COVID-19.  Worldwide, approximately 304,000 deaths have been attributed to COVID-19.

Readers should remember, however, that there are very credible allegations that the US COVID-19 death figures have been inflated because of variations in the states’ death declarations.  For example, in some states coroners list COVID-19 as a cause of death in instances where it was merely present but was not shown to have significant effect on the decedent’s death.  The reasons for the discrepancy may be more social or political than medical.

Nevertheless, contrast our national emotional and subsequent political reaction to the Japanese bombing of the US fleet at Pearl Harbor in 1941 with our emotional and subsequent political reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.  In 1941 we rightly blamed the Japanese for attacking us, but in 2020 some Democrats and Trump-Haters (including the skews media) have sought to blame President Trump rather than the ChiComs for the medical and economic catastrophe they inflicted on the world.

When it finally notified the rest of the world of this COVID-19 release, the ChiComs assured everyone that the release was purely accidental.  Working with almost no meaningful scientific input from the ChiComs, the US Intelligence Community (IC) can only say it “…concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified. […] The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”  That is roughly the equivalent of the IC saying, We think COVID-19 occurred naturally rather than being manmade, but we cannot prove whether the ChiComs dispersed it intentionally or accidentally.

In other words, our IC seems to be doing everything it can to avoid considering the possibility the ChiCom intelligence service, the MSS, turned an accidental COVID-19 release into a clandestine worldwide human test experiment to determine if and how even more dangerous biowarfare agents could be delivered against the United States and other nations.   Given the panicked response of the US people, state and local governments, and news media to the release of the less lethal COVID-19, do the ChiComs even need to consider using the more dangerous and difficult to deploy biowarfare agents listed in the Army Technology document to achieve the ChiComs’ objectives?

The ChiComs have learned several important lessons from observing our official, media, and public responses to COVID-19.

  • The United States government apparently doesn’t intend to aggressively enforce the Biological Weapon Convention and its amendments or international law forbidding nations to make and deploy biological weapons and requiring nations (including the PRC) to timely disclose and provide all assistance required to identify, contain, and mitigate the effects of any release of biological agents.
  • It is not necessary to bribe US government officials directly.  US corporate boards of directors and executives are more than willing to exert pro-ChiCom financial and political pressure on US politicians in return for their companies being financially enriched for putting critical US manufacturing plants in the PRC and for encouraging US colleges, universities, and companies to share sensitive research with the ChiComs.  The ChiComs have made the entire United States industrial and educational institutions the PRC’s R&D arm and have either bought or stolen information critical to our national security. 
  • On January 3, 2020, the ChiComs’ ordered the destruction of all their laboratory samples of the virus material, the destruction of the scientists notes and experiments, and the silencing of the scientists.  This  was likely a move to destroy any and all evidence that if analyzed in US laboratories might have revealed the ChiComs’ true motives for having the viral samples in the first place.
  • “Buying off” the World Health Organization was a wise investment for the ChiComs.
  • In 2017 the US learned that during the Obama presidency from 2010 to 2013, US intelligence assets in the PRC were mysteriously identified and neutralized by the ChiComs.  It is entirely likely that their removal by ChiCom counterintelligence helped the ChiComs blind their American adversaries to the work being done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
  • The “free press” in the United States is willing to accept and distribute ChiCom propaganda as if it is news and with little or no critical analysis.  (See CPB, NPR, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, ad nauseum.)  The US news media (I prefer “skews media”) are gullible, very easily distracted from the essence of important news stories, and easily manipulated.  The media reporters often lack sufficient subject matter knowledge to frame informative questions and recognize newsworthy answers.  Colleges and universities are now teaching advocacy journalism rather than the traditional fact verification and complete reporting journalism.
  •  Many US citizens almost seem to like being manipulated and deceived by uninformed politicians elected to national, state, county, and local offices.  The manipulation and deception as well as political party affiliation are frequently used as excuses to avoid critical, independent thinking and thoughtful decision-making.
  • It takes relatively little effort to induce panic and despair in many US citizens, particularly in densely populated urban areas.  Why use a sledge hammer when a puff of wind will do?
  • In spite of historical reverence for the American revolutionaries who were willing to fight to the death for independence from the British Crown, too few supposedly conservative citizens today are willing to remind public officials that when tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes necessary.
  • Many American state, county, and local officials are afraid or unable to adapt policy decisions they made earlier in an emergency to contemporary circumstances.   Intransigence is easier than adaptation.
  • Many policies and practices of the US federal and state governments tend to encourage more heavy dependence on the government while at the same time discouraging independent problem solving without government involvement.
  • In the 2016 presidential election, the US voters demonstrated with the election of Donald J. Trump that the will of the voters still prevails in the US.  The ChiComs will do everything in their power to undermine the public’s confidence in the integrity of elections and willingness to participate in them.

We must hope that the US government and especially the US military is cataloguing the lessons they must learn about the ChiCom involvement in the pandemic.  If all the victim nations, not just the US, do not retaliate meaningfully and painfully against the ChiCom government of the PRC, the ChiComs will do this again.

September 17, 2018

Derogatory? Yes. Credible? Not So Fast …

Filed under: Probable Cause — Tags: , , — Bill @ 8:58 pm

Lies-TruthWho among you did not expect the Democrats to produce at the very last second “someone” who would testify that Federal District Judge Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee for the US Supreme Court, committed some unspeakable act upon her innocent body?

The Democrat’s “someone” this time is Christine Blasey Ford, a professor from Palo Alto University in California.  Ford alleges that about 35 years ago in 1982 when Kavanaugh was a junior in high school and she was a sophomore, they were at a party together at a private residence in Maryland.  She alleges Kavanaugh was drunk, held her down on a bed, tried to remove her clothing, and rubbed her through her clothing.

Ford’s information was provided in a letter to California US Representative Anna Eshoo and then on to Senator Dianne Feinstein as an allegation.   The content of the information, an allegation of wrongdoing,  qualifies it as “derogatory.”   The question is whether Ford and her information are both “credible.”   (more…)

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