California can’t shed a history of persistent government corruption

Susan Shelley, a columnist at the Orange County Register, recently reminded her readers — and the whole state — that California has a corruption problem.

She focused mainly on a string of corruption cases involving Southern California politicians, particularly members of the Los Angeles City Council.

However, she touched on others outside of Southland, including a recent scandal involving Gov. Gavin Newsom’s former chief of staff accused in an alleged scheme to raid political campaign funds for personal gain and the indictment of Oakland’s mayor for bribery.

California was notoriously corrupt after it became a state in 1850. The freewheeling Gold Rush era’s rampant lawlessness morphed into an equally unseemly political ethos. The Southern Pacific Railroad notoriously controlled the state Legislature, using its clout to gain control of vast tracts of land and squeeze farmers into paying usurious freight rates.

In the early 20^th century, a political reform movement bloomed, led by Hiram Johnson, the era’s dominant political figure. The creation of agencies to regulate the railroad and other entrenched interests; the adoption of initiative, referendum and recall powers to bypass a corrupt Legislature, and the shift to non-partisan local governments all seemed to curb institutional corruption.

However, it didn’t go away. Throughout the 20^th century, California saw periodic outbreaks, usually when the law caught up with miscreants. The most famous case was that of Artie Samish, a lobbyist for liquor and other interests who openly boasted, during the 1930s and 1940s, of his control over the Legislature.

Samish finally went to prison, a few new laws passed and Californians once again were told their governments were clean. However, the illusion was punctured in the 1980s when the FBI conducted a sting operation in the state Capitol.

Agents posed as businessmen seeking special legislation for a shrimp-processing project. They videotaped legislators, staffers and lobbyists offering help for bribes. Quite a few caught up in what was dubbed “Shrimpgate” wound up behind bars.

Meanwhile, something was happening among the small cities that ringed the City of Los Angeles. Many were captured, in effect, by crooked politicians who sold favors, such as franchises and contracts, to the highest bidders and voted themselves lavish salaries and pensions.

The syndrome was first revealed in a 2010 series of Los Angeles Times articles about the tiny city of Bell, revealing how the city manager and other officials had essentially looted the city.

Since then, similar scandals involving other small Los Angeles County cities and at least one in Anaheim, a city in Orange County, have emerged. When Anthony Rendon was speaker of the state Assembly, he once called the San Gabriel Valley region he represented a “corridor of corruption.”

More recently, as Susan Shelley’s column points out, the Los Angeles City Council has seen a string of corruption prosecutions alleging its members sold favors or steered city contracts into entities that benefited them financially.

Currently, Councilman Curren Price is being charged with corruption for a variety of schemes prosecutors say put money into his pocket.

Meanwhile Newsom’s former chief of staff, Dana Williamson, faces federal charges, including bank fraud, for allegedly falsifying documents to obtain a pandemic era federal business loan and an alleged scheme to drain hundreds of thousands of dollars from a campaign account that Xavier Becerra, a former Biden cabinet member and attorney general, maintained.

A former Becerra staffer, Sean McCluskie, and Sacramento lobbyist Greg Campbell have pleaded guilty, while Williamson awaits trial.

Even though political figures wind up behind bars when their schemes are revealed, it doesn’t seem to deter others from lining their pockets, so one must wonder how much corruption goes undiscovered.