加州如何成为新的政治腐败中心

【中美创新时报2024 年 8 月 30 日编译讯】（记者温友平编译）前洛杉矶政客何塞·胡萨尔（José Huizar）2015年因涉及房地产开发项目的贿赂丑闻面临 13 年监禁。José Huizar 在洛杉矶市政厅的垮台与他的成功一样令人震惊，这是一场政治悲剧，就像梦想之地的许多人一样，已经成为一个熟悉的悲剧。对此，《纽约时报》记者拉尔夫·瓦塔贝迪安（Ralph Vartabedian）作了下述详细报道。

José Huizar 出生于墨西哥农村的一个大家庭，在洛杉矶市中心高楼林立的高楼附近长大，家境贫困，他克服了巨大的困难，毕业于加州大学伯克利分校、普林斯顿大学和加州大学洛杉矶分校法学院。

他回到了东洛杉矶的老家，竞选学校董事会，并最终进入市议会，在那里他控制了一个有影响力的委员会，该委员会负责批准全市数百万美元的商业开发项目。

联邦调查局特工发现他收受了中国开发商价值 180 万美元的赌场筹码、豪华酒店住宿、装满现金的酒箱和妓女，联邦检察官将他的惊人倒台描绘成了好莱坞史诗。今年 1 月，他们说服法官以逃税和敲诈勒索罪判处他 13 年监禁。

“多年来，他一直是洛杉矶市政厅的金刚，”洛杉矶美国检察官办公室刑事部门负责人麦克·詹金斯 (Mack E. Jenkins) 告诉法庭。“他的倒台留下了很多灾难。”

本周，Huizar 计划入狱服刑，他将成为最近第三位因腐败指控而受审的洛杉矶市议会议员，他与被指控的人员相比，被指控的人员范围要大得多，包括工作人员助理、筹款人、政治顾问和房地产开发商，联邦当局称，最近加州出现了一波“非同寻常”的贿赂和权钱交易浪潮。

市议会的另外两名成员 Mitchell Englander 和 Mark Ridley-Thomas 早些时候因各种腐败指控被定罪，该市水电部前负责人也被判有罪。第四位市议会成员 Curren Price 面临贪污、伪证和利益冲突的指控。

根据司法部的报告，在过去 10 年里，加州有 576 名公职人员因联邦腐败指控被定罪，超过了以公共腐败闻名的纽约州、新泽西州和伊利诺伊州等州的案件数量。

加州的人口比上述两个州都多，但联邦检察官表示，最近一波案件的起因远不止这些。

政治分析人士表示，洛杉矶市政厅权力高度集中、当地新闻媒体影响力减弱、民众往往不关注当地政治、州政府中民主党占绝对多数的现象日益严重，这些都有助于保护公职人员免受损害。

在洛杉矶，惠萨尔的影响力甚至比大多数其他市议员更大：他的选区不仅包括洛杉矶市中心，数十亿美元的外国投资正在改变这里的天际线，他还控制着规划和土地使用管理委员会，该委员会负责批准重大开发项目。

“当你拥有这种权力时，付费游戏计划就会失控，”美国检察官马丁·埃斯特拉达 (Martin Estrada) 说，他的办公室领导了洛杉矶最近许多起诉案件。“这些人的所作所为不是普通的。这是非同寻常的。”

55 岁的 Huizar 承认犯有敲诈勒索罪，这是起诉有组织犯罪或街头帮派案件时经常使用的指控。他收受的 180 万美元贿赂是最近被定罪的新泽西州参议员 Bob Menendez 被指控收受贿赂金额的两倍。

3 月，陪审团以敲诈勒索罪判处前洛杉矶副市长 Raymond Chan 有罪，检察官称他是 Huizar 阴谋的“策划者”。自 2019 年以来，洛杉矶和旧金山共有 50 多名重要政治人物和高管被定罪。在指控浮出水面后，还有更多人接受调查或辞职。

多年来，洛杉矶发生的事情在洛杉矶县的小型工业城市中也曾以较小的规模上演，这些城市被称为“腐败走廊”：南门、贝尔、林伍德和弗农等，民间领袖因收受贿赂或挪用市政府资金而被起诉。

“这里有大量的移民，大部分都是边缘化社区，他们没有资源密切关注政客，”父母从危地马拉移民而来的埃斯特拉达说。“我认为洛杉矶和大洛杉矶地区有着一系列非常独特的因素，这些因素使得这些事情得以发生。”

2011 年开始，来自中国的大规模投资加剧了风险。

在接下来的六年里，来自中国公司及其亿万富翁所有者的约 260 亿美元的直接投资来到了该州。

洛杉矶市中心经历了一场戏剧性的复兴。新的高层公寓和酒店拔地而起，废弃的仓库被改造成阁楼公寓和画廊，昂贵的餐厅也开业了。

拥有 40 年历史的大酒店是一个破旧的丑陋建筑，直到最近才被该市用作无家可归者的收容所，它成为了一位投资者宏伟计划的核心。

投资者黄伟是开发公司深圳新世界的亿万富翁，他于 2010 年买下了这家酒店，计划将其改建成一座 77 层高的塔楼，成为美国西部最高的建筑。

他需要的是帮助管理错综复杂的政治审批程序。联邦检察官说，他找到了 Huizar。

联邦检察官说，从 2013 年开始，Huizar 第一次和黄伟一起去拉斯维加斯，总共 20 次，费用全免，每次他都会得到价值约 1 万美元的赌场筹码。

2016 年，在一次前往拉斯维加斯大都会赌场的旅行中，赌场安全主管、前联邦调查局特工发现 Huizar 在牌桌上玩一堆价值 1.6 万美元的筹码。当他问 Huizar 身份时，他慌了，走开了，留下了筹码。

“谁会放弃 1.6 万美元的赌场筹码？”时任 FBI 洛杉矶公共腐败部门负责人的卡洛斯·纳罗接到了安全主管的电话，他说。

纳罗很快拿到了赌场牌桌现场的视频和飞行记录。有了这些，FBI 获得了法院批准，可以窃听和搜查 Huizar 的短信和电子邮件。

Huizar 将于周六自首，他在量刑听证会上公开道歉，称他一直致力于社区建设。“闪亮的东西摆在我面前，我无法抗拒诱惑，”他在写给法官的一封请求宽大处理的信中说道。“金钱、豪华晚餐、豪华航班。这些东西都在等着我，我无法拒绝。”

本文最初发表于《纽约时报》。

题图：前洛杉矶政客 José Huizar（2015 年）因涉及房地产开发项目的贿赂丑闻面临 13 年监禁。Ringo H.W. Chiu/美联社

附原英文报道：

How California became a new center of political corruption

By Ralph Vartabedian New York Times,Updated August 29, 2024 

LOS ANGELES — José Huizar’s downfall at Los Angeles City Hall was as stunning as his rise to success, a political tragedy that, like many in the land of dreams, has become a familiar one.

Born to a large family in rural Mexico and raised in poverty near the towering high-rises of downtown Los Angeles, he overcame enormous odds to graduate from the University of California Berkeley, Princeton University, and UCLA law school.

He returned to his old neighborhood in East Los Angeles to run for the school board and eventually the City Council, where he gained control of the influential committee that approves multimillion-dollar commercial development projects across the city.

His spectacular fall — after FBI agents caught him accepting $1.8 million worth of casino chips, luxury hotel stays, a liquor box full of cash, and prostitutes from Chinese developers — was cast by federal prosecutors as an epic Hollywood tale. They persuaded a judge in January to sentence him to 13 years in prison on charges of tax evasion and racketeering.

“He was the King Kong of LA City Hall for many, many years,” Mack E. Jenkins, chief of the criminal division at the US attorney’s office in Los Angeles, told the court. “And with his fall, a lot of devastation was left in his wake.”

This week, when Huizar is scheduled to report to prison, he will become the third recent Los Angeles City Council member to go down on charges of corruption, part of a much larger circle of staff aides, fund-raisers, political consultants, and real estate developers who have been charged in what federal authorities called an “extraordinary” recent wave of bribery and influence-peddling across California.

Two other members of the City Council, Mitchell Englander and Mark Ridley-Thomas, were convicted earlier on various corruption charges, as was the former head of the city’s Department of Water and Power. A fourth City Council member, Curren Price, is facing charges of embezzlement, perjury, and conflict of interest.

Over the last 10 years, 576 public officials in California have been convicted on federal corruption charges, according to Justice Department reports, exceeding the number of cases in states better known for public corruption, including New York, New Jersey, and Illinois.

California has a larger population than those states, but the recent wave of cases is attributable to much more than that, federal prosecutors say.

A heavy concentration of power at Los Angeles City Hall, the receding presence of local news media, a population that often tunes out local politics, and a growing Democratic supermajority in state government have all helped insulate officeholders from damage, political analysts said.

In Los Angeles, Huizar’s influence was even greater than that of most other council members: Not only did his district include downtown Los Angeles, where billions of dollars of foreign investment was transforming the skyline, but he also controlled the Planning and Land Use Management Committee, which approves major developments.

“When you have that kind of power, pay-to play schemes run amok,” said US Attorney Martin Estrada, whose office has led many of the recent prosecutions in Los Angeles. “I wouldn’t call it ordinary what these folks did. It is extraordinary.”

Huizar, 55, pleaded guilty to racketeering, a charge often used in prosecuting organized crime or street gang cases. The $1.8 million in bribes he received was twice the amount that recently convicted Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey was charged with accepting.

In March, a jury convicted Raymond Chan, a former Los Angeles deputy mayor whom prosecutors called the “architect” of the Huizar conspiracy, also on racketeering charges. In all, more than 50 key political figures and executives in Los Angeles and San Francisco have been convicted since 2019. Many more were investigated or resigned after allegations surfaced.

What happened in Los Angeles had been playing out on a smaller scale for years in the small industrial cities of Los Angeles County that have been described as a “corridor of corruption”: South Gate, Bell, Lynwood, and Vernon, among others, where civic leaders were prosecuted for taking bribes or tapping into city funds.

“You have large immigrant populations, largely marginalized communities that do not have the resources to watch their politicians closely,” said Estrada, whose parents emigrated from Guatemala. “I think you have a pretty unique cauldron of factors in Los Angeles and the Greater Los Angeles area that allow for these things to happen.”

The arrival of large-scale investments from China starting in 2011 heightened the risks.

Over the next half-dozen years, about $26 billion of direct investment from Chinese firms and their billionaire owners arrived in the state.

Downtown Los Angeles underwent a dramatic revival. New high-rise condos and hotels went up, abandoned warehouses were converted into loft apartments and galleries, and expensive restaurants opened.

The 40-year-old Grand Hotel, a rundown eyesore used until recently by the city as a homeless shelter, was at the center of one investor’s grandiose plan.

The investor, Wei Huang, a billionaire owner of the development company Shen Zhen New World, bought the hotel in 2010 with plans to convert it into a 77-story tower, the highest in the western United States.

What he needed was help managing the byzantine political approval process. He found it, federal prosecutors said, with Huizar.

Starting in 2013, federal prosecutors said, Huizar took the first of 20 all-expenses-paid trips to Las Vegas with Huang, during which he was supplied with about $10,000 worth of casino chips each time.

During one trip to the Cosmopolitan casino in Las Vegas in 2016, its security chief, a former FBI agent, spotted Huizar playing a $16,000 pile of chips at a card table. When he asked for his identity, he became flustered and walked away, leaving the chips.

“Who walks away from $16,000 of casino chips?” said Carlos Narro, who was then the chief of the FBI’s public corruption section in Los Angeles, who got a call from the security chief.

In short order, Narro had the casino’s video of the scene at the card table and flight records. With those, the FBI got court approval for wiretaps and searches of Huizar’s text messages and emails.

Now scheduled to surrender to prison by Saturday, Huizar made a public apology at his sentencing hearing, saying he had long been dedicated to his community. “Shiny things were dangled in front of me, and I could not resist the temptation,” he said in a letter to the judge asking for leniency. “The money, the fancy dinners, luxury flights. It was there for the taking, and I could not say no.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.