Orange County News Blog

​Here's government-sponsored motivation for you to make it safely to Thanksgiving. The Orange County Sheriff's Department announced this morning that its "DUI Task Force" will conduct "roving patrols" in Stanton and Villa Park on Friday, November 20. Deputies will target areas that attract drunks and collisions.

What has Dick been doing?

​The County of Orange's lawyer is calling on the California Attorney General to investigate potential illegal deals that could give private control of the $100 million-plus Orange County Fairgrounds property in Costa Mesa to well-connected political insiders.

In an Oct. 30, 2009, letter to Gary Schons--the state AG's top-ranking official in Southern California--County Counsel Nicholas S. Chrisos writes, "it appears" that the public board of the state-owned fairgrounds began violating open meeting and conflict-of-interest laws in July by secretly forming a private foundation to bid on the property, secretly naming themselves to the foundation's private board and hiring--without a bid process--former State Senator Dick Ackerman's law firm as the private entity's consultant.

The fair board was so concerned about secrecy it asked Ackerman's Nossaman, Guthner, Knox and Eliot to create the foundation in July--"eight days before the [law firm's] consulting contract was approved" in public, according to Chrisos.

What is the definition of organized crime?

​"$90 million."

--The amount local labor unions hoped to fleece from public contracts to build the "Great Park" in Irvine, according to Irvine Democrat Chris Mears on the current episode of KOCE's "Real Orange."

Larry the Liar nailed by fellow Liberal

​"We have the great balloon not the Great Park."

--Acclaimed UC Irvine professor Mark Petrecca on the current episode of KOCE's "Real Orange" discussing the failure of Irvine city councilman Larry Agran, a fellow liberal and the ethics-less godfather of the city's politics, to deliver on his nine-year-old promises to convert a military airport into a "world class" public park. In the absence of building a park, Agran has shamelessly celebrated giving massive, taxpayer subsidized balloon rides over the proposed park area.

Aitken: OC's Proud Lefty

​Earlier this week, nationally prominent Santa Ana trial lawyer Wylie Aitken stepped down after 17 years as the leader of the Orange County Democratic Foundation and the group voted Dan Jacobson its new chairman. The ultra well-connected Aitken, who considers assassinated U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy his political hero, played a major role in shaping OC history by orchestrating the startling upset election of Loretta Sanchez over longtime Republican Congressman Robert K. Dornan in 1996. But under Aitken's direction the foundation was never able to recruit a serious candidate to challenge the temperamental goof ball of OC's congressional delegation: Dana Rohrabacher, our self-styled "surfin' congressman," though credible evidence of his ability to ride a wave on a surfboard appears to be nonexistent. Fifty-year-old Jacobson lives in Tustin, works as a lawyer and teaches at Pacific West College. One of his first missions might be to break the GOP stranglehold over all five county Board of Supervisor seats.

--R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly

Gurel is stuck in prison

​Wickedly cruel Irvine rapist Metin Reza Gurel may have thought he'd found a way to overturn his 2008 convictions when officials conceded after his trial that the prosecutor and the lead Irvine police detective on the case had shielded their sexual affair from defense lawyers.

That salacious news originated in September 2008 from Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas, who said he was "regretful" to learn that Deputy DA Suzy M. Snyder violated office ethics by secretly engaging "in a sexual relationship with a testifying police witness."

Because the government has a duty to disclose to the defense exculpatory evidence--including information that might impeach a witness, Rackauckas immediately notified Gurel's defense team, James Crawford and Leonard Klaif.

Not lost on the defense was the fact that they'd suspected that the police detective had encouraged the embellishment of the victim's testimony in order to secure convictions. A flurry of legal moves followed. Synder never returned to her office at Harbor Court in Newport Beach. Gruel, 44-year-old Turkish citizen, may have thought he'd soon see freedom again.

Billy Joe Johnson says drugs blocked his dreams

​On the day he didn't bother to spike his Mohawk (with jailhouse soap) or tuck in his white button down shirt, Costa Mesa serial killer Billy Joe Johnson received the death penalty recommendation from a somber jury of eight men and four women. Johnson accepted the outcome of the hearing, which took less than six minutes, with the same aplomb he's exhibited during the month-long proceedings. The white supremacist gang member of Public Enemy Number One Death Squad (PEN1) smiled at the verdict, which he lobbied for during a sensational witness stand appearance earlier this week.

"Billy Joe genuinely doesn't care," defense lawyer Michael Molfetta told reporters as his client was being shipped back to Theo Lacy Jail to await formal sentencing on November 20. "A lot of people say they don't care. It's truly genuine with him . . . Billy Joe's fine. He's at peace with it . . . He was the one telling me not to get misty."

Probolsky: Let's blame OC Weekly!

​Desiree Mouzoon, the Orange County Republican fundraiser salaciously tied to disgraced ex-state assemblyman Mike Duvall in a Wednesday KCBS-KCAL report, has finally spoken.

Well, not exactly.

Mouzoon apparently has hired Jones Day--the law firm that unsuccessfully defended dirty ex-Sheriff Mike Carona for his crimes in office--to threaten local news outlets which mention the report that the woman had been caught in a "compromising position" with Duvall.

In a letter to Art Pedroza, editor of Orange Juice blog, lawyer Thomas R. Malcolm asserted that the KCBS report is "absolutely false and [has] caused irreparable harm" to Mouzoon. Malcolm, a heavyweight in local political/legal circles, demanded that Pedroza "immediately" remove his blog post from the Internet or he would be "aggressively" attacked in future litigation.

Pedroza--a feisty blogger who attempts to keep officials with both major political parties honest--told me tonight that he removed his original blog entry and then wrote a new posting about Malcolm's threat.

A joint September KCBS/OC Weekly probe caught Duvall, the powerful vice chairman of a state utilities committee graphically bragging about having sex with a Sempra Energy lobbyist. An outraged Assembly Speaker Karen Bass immediately removed him from his committee assignments. Shortly thereafter, Duvall--a self-described Christian conservative who had strenuously claimed gay marriage would wreck family values--resigned his seat.

In an October 21 follow-up investigation that had nothing to do with the Weekly, KCBS reporter Dave Lopez, a hard-charging, award-winning veteran of 37 years, reported that he'd discovered that Duvall's indiscretions may have extended to Mouzoon. At a Tuesday political fundraiser in Fullerton, Lopez confronted her with the allegation because she is now working for Linda Ackerman, a candidate seeking to replace Duvall. (Ackerman has made sexual ethics an issue in the campaign.) Mouzoon refused to answer any questions.  

Despite the blatantly obvious source of the report, Mouzoon's allies--which include boyfriend and local Republican Party pollster Adam Probolsky, a longtime Carona apologist--spent today attacking me and the Weekly in an shamelessly deceitful and misguided effort to discredit Lopez's story.

--R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly

Mike Duvall spread more than the word of God

​Until recently, Irvine-based Republican fundraiser Desiree Mouzoon prominently listed a testimonial on her business website from Mike Duvall. Why not? Until recently, Duvall had been an Orange County state assemblyman who served as vice chairman of a powerful legislative utilities committee and worked in the California GOP's leadership. 

​In a remarkable opinion issued today with potential Orange County implications, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit blasted the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) for committing "highly objectionable," "tainted," "reckless," "misleading" and "illegal" conduct in a 2005 attempt to seize more than $186,400 from a legally compliant Southern California medical marijuana distributorship.

Rawitz (L) saved Sheriff Carona's sorry ass

​Sadly, Jeffrey M. Rawitz--one of Jones Day's feisty defense lawyers who represented ex-Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona in his federal corruption trial earlier this year--is hospitalized in Los Angeles at Cedars Sinai Medical Center.

During Carona's three-month trial in Santa Ana, Rawitz participated in almost all hearings despite significant spinal cord pain following a pre-trial accident. He often limped in and out of U.S. District Judge Andrew Guilford's courtroom, but always fought strenuously on Carona's behalf. Indeed, Rawitz was singlehandedly the life of the defense--an opinion numerous jurors shared with me after a lucky Carona won acquittal on five of six charges.

The injury has now caused Rawitz to resign not just from Carona's defense team (which is appealing the conviction for sabotaging a federal grand jury investigating corruption at the Orange County Sheriff's Department) but also from Jones Day.

"I am in a lot of pain," Rawitz, 46, told me last night in a phone interview from his hospital bed. "I am really hurting."

And, true to form, he continued to lobby me, perhaps Carona's biggest media critic.

"Someday, I'm going to convince you," he said, "that the government's case against Carona was weak."

I don't know about that assertion given that federal prosecutors Brett Sagel and Ken Julian proved beyond a doubt that Carona was a sheriff-hoodlum with egomaniac tendencies, but I do pray that Rawitz heals quickly.

--R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly

Will Billy Joe's Suck Up to Prison Gang Work?

​In what may have been acclaimed homicide prosecutor Ebrahim Baytieh's easiest conviction, a jury this afternoon found Billy Joe Johnson--the notorious, wide-eyed and lisping Costa Mesa white supremacist--guilty in the 2002 conspiracy to execute a fellow pro-Hitler gangster who committed an apparently unforgivable sin: talking to Fox News.

Today's relatively rapid decision likely was not a surprise to Johnson, who previously took sole credit for killing Scott Miller in Anaheim in a ridiculously obvious effort to score points with two other Public Enemy Number One (PEN1) thugs, Jacob Rump and Michael Lamb, who faced trial for Miller's killing. Johnson's taxpayer-funded defense lawyer, the ever-sweating Michael Molfetta, had no choice but to concede his client's guilt.

Baytieh--who in the past gained courthouse respect for his tireless pursuit of Vietnamese hoodlums--now has convicted Rump, Lamb and Johnson in Miller's brutal ambush murder. Rump, a dim-witted drug addict with a fondness for Nazi symbols, is serving a life in prison sentence. Lamb, once a promising baseball player from Dana Point and the man who pulled the trigger on Miller, lives on California's death row in San Quentin State Prison.

According to Baytieh, Johnson--already in prison for the next half century because of a gory Huntington Beach hammer murder--confessed to solely killing Miller in hopes of winning PEN1 prison protection from the Aryan Brotherhood (AB), who allegedly authorized his execution years ago for not following AB instructions in prison.

The current jury--which is heavily dominated by middle-aged white men--will next decide if Johnson, a 46-year-old former Nazi Low Rider, should join Lamb in the traffic-jam lineup for state-sponsored execution.

Count on Johnson, who openly drools at female jurors when they enter the courtroom, to continue to assist in his own demise.

--R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly

Linda Ackerman uses Dick to rub Norby

​It's potentially the most lethal weapon in Linda Ackerman's campaign to defeat Republican county Supervisor Chris Norby for Mike Duvall's open state Assembly seat: sexual misconduct innuendo.

The reason is simple. Duvall resigned in September after the Weekly and KCAL revealed that the self-styled Christian conservative and vice chairman of the Assembly utilities committee had bragged about having sloppy sex with two Sacramento-based lobbyists--one of whom worked for utility giant Sempra. Voters in the 72nd district surely don't want to be embarrassed again, right?

But some grassroots activists in Fullerton, the heart of the district, are outraged not just at Ackerman's tactics but at Orange County Register columnist Frank Mickadeit for, in their view, regurgitating a smear campaign in advance of the Jan. 12 special election.

​Congratulations to Orange County web pioneer Len Kranser. Fourteen years ago this month, Kranser created one of the nation's first well-respected blogs, www.eltoroairport.org. Though the  battle over converting the old military air base at El Toro (Irvine) into a commercial airport is long over, this award-winning site continues to be a sometimes controversial, always must-read for folks interested in local airport issues--thanks to Kranser's meticulous efforts.

Who created Billy Joe Johnson?

​There was something comical about defense attorney Michael Molfetta's opening performance today in the trial of legendary Costa Mesa serial killer/white supremacist Billy Joe Johnson. Molfetta, a former prosecutor with legendary oratory skills, represents Johnson--a vicious, lisping specimen for California crime annals. If convicted, the Public Enemy Number One Death Squad (PEN1) and former Nazi Low Rider (NLR) killer faces a one-way trip to San Quentin State Prison's inhospitable death row.

Sure, Molfetta did something I can't recall seeing a defense lawyer do in court. He acknowledged that his client "did everything" veteran homicide prosecutor Ebrahim Baytieh accuses him of doing. That means--without an iota of sensationalism on my part--that Johnson is a Nazi-loving monster without a pang of conscience or--so much for protecting the white race from decline--the ability to form a proper sentence.

"Everything [Baytieh] said [in his opening statement] is true," said Molfetta. "I'm not going to sugarcoat it."

For Molfetta, it wasn't so much sugarcoating as accepting a terrible set of facts and attempting to score points for honesty with jurors. Johnson has already admitted on numerous occasions that he's a killer. Indeed, he has described himself as proud of his crimes. In case anyone could forget his beliefs, he has even charmed a previous courtroom with a salute to Hitler.  

So here's what started to make me chuckle to myself today in Superior Court Judge Frank F. Fasel's (Triple F) ninth-floor Santa Ana courtroom: Molfetta's opening lines.

"Take a look at him," Molfetta said to the button down, middle-class-loaded jury as he pointed at Johnson. "Who is he? What makes him tick?"

Oppression didn't end in 1945

​Folks are always complaining that Congress and state legislatures should not be allowed to meet except for a couple of weeks a year. It's an idea to help curtail the nanny-state notions of politicians of both major political parties. Good enough. But what about city councils?

Caucasian students fear competition?

England wants freedom but hasn't admitted his sick sex crimes

​A convicted California serial pedophile who despises Jews, cops and African Americans and who forced a kindergarten-age girl he purchased in Vietnam to become a sex slave to not only himself but also his German shepherd and basset hound, both males, becomes eligible for parole in December.

George Joseph England--a self-proclaimed Christian who remains unrepentant, according to law enforcement sources--is scheduled to make his pitch for freedom to the parole board after lunch on Monday inside Salinas Valley State Prison, where the 65-year-old Quebec, Canada native and U.S. Army veteran is housed.

Not surprisingly, the thought of England's return to society alarms Orange County district attorney Tony Rackauckas.

"The only way to stop England is to keep him in prison away from young girls," Rackauckas said today. "My district attorney's office will do everything in our legal arsenal to make sure he never again has access to little girls."

Though his office is cutting back on parole hearing attendance thanks to budget shortfalls, Rackauckas is dispatching Rebecca Olivieri, one of his veteran deputies, to England's hearing in Soledad. Olivieri will ask the parole board to keep the child molester in custody to the maximum allowable date: December 2013.

Yes, that's right--just four years from now. 

A headache for liberals soon arrives in Sacramento

​Earlier today, Art Pedroza at OrangeJuiceBlog reported that Steven Greenhut, the longtime senior editorial writer and columnist at The Orange County Register, has accepted a job in Sacramento. Though he didn't have the details, Pedroza was right. Greenhut told me tonight that he is opening a news bureau and investigative journalism program in the state capital for the Pacific Research Institute, the free-market, individual liberty organization that is based in San Francisco.

"My column will still run fairly regularly in the Register, but with a Sacto focus," said Greenhut. "I'm leaving on great terms. It's just time for a new challenge and state government desperately needs some additional attention."

During his career as a regular columnist at the Reg, Greenhut--a solid libertarian voice--has angered police, liberals, Democrats, bureaucrats, union leaders and Republicans with stances that at the core deride increasing government power and, in his view, the shameless looting of public treasuries by special interest groups.

Did I say police officers, who now get to retire at the spry age of 50 and collect their salaries for the rest of their lives, despise him for strenuously opposing the massive cost to taxpayers?

He also once famously pissed off Bill O'Reilly of Fox News by challenging the necessity of George W. Bush's Iraq War.

Last year, he mocked Republican obsession with blocking gay marriage. 

Greenhut said he will launch his project on October 5.

--R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly

Two Top OC Cops Turn Convicted Felons

​He once dreamed of becoming California's first Latino governor. He finagled an improbable transition from Garden Grove police sergeant to the powerful No. 2 post at the Orange County Sheriff's Department (OCSD). He even managed to create a fan club within the George W. Bush White House. But late Monday afternoon, ex-Assistant Sheriff George Jaramillo discovered there are consequences to unbridled ambition: a 27-month federal prison sentence and the forfeiture of at least $233,000.

"I am here to say that I am profoundly sorry for what I have done," a weepy Jaramillo (pictured on the left with Sheriff Mike Carona) told U.S. District Judge Andrew J. Guilford before punishment was announced in the bribery case against him. "My cavalier, irresponsible, lackadaisical mode of operation while sitting in a position of public trust was criminal. I need to apologize publicly. I was not raised to violate the law. . . . I blame no one for the circumstances I am in."

But if Jaramillo, who considers himself an expert strategist, thought his words would seal a sweetheart deal that would keep him out of prison in exchange for home confinement, he was terribly misguided. Indeed, the hearing wowed those in attendance (including six reporters) by how quickly Jaramillo and his legal team, headed by Brent Romney, seemed to argue themselves out of the relatively good graces of federal prosecutor Brett Sagel. The Jaramillo strategy combined two parts arrogance and one part contrition, a doomed recipe to anyone awake.

Prior to the hearing, it was Sagel who generously recommended that Jaramillo get a whopping six-point downward departure in the sentencing guidelines based on his willingness to accept responsibility for his crimes and his cooperation for helping to bring down the degenerate former sheriff. Incredibly, though, the defense attacked Sagel in its sentencing brief, calling him a liar and adopting a disrespectful tone that preposterously implied Jaramillo was ethically superior to the assistant United States attorney. At the end of the defense presentations, Sagel stood up, shook his head and said, "I no longer believe he's entitled to a downward departure of all six levels. . . . He still thinks the law applies to everyone but him."

Jaramillo's eyes widened, and he rapidly rubbed his lips and chin with the fingers on his right hand. Sagel compared the ex-assistant sheriff to a child who kills his parents, and then seeks sympathy because he's an orphan. The analogy stiffened Jaramillo's body. Sagel paused. The prosecutor then announced, "We ask for a period of incarceration." Jaramillo slowly shook his head in recognition that his plight now would include a stop in a federal penitentiary.

Sacramento is the place to be!

​A creative OC Weekly reader crafted an Ode to Mike Duvall today. It's set the theme of Green Acres, which--in case you've forgotten--can be heard HERE.

These are the suggested new lyrics:

Sacramento is the place to be
Dirty livin' is the life for me
Gals spreadin' out so far and wide
Keep Manhattan, just give me that girl's backside!

Sacto is where I'd rather be
I've no allergy smelling Heidi
I just adore a Capitol view
Dar-Ling, I love you but give me beaver too

The whores!
The bores!
Fresh girls!
The pearls!

You are my vice
Good bye city life
Sac-ra-men-to we are there!

-- R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly

Assemblyman Mike Duvall apparently heeded a powerful call for his resignation.

​Several media outlets are reporting that Assemblyman Michael D. Duvall (R-Yorba Linda) has resigned amid the scandal uncovered last night by OC Weekly and KCBS/KCAL about his inadvertent admissions of adultery with a utility lobbyist.

Duvall--vice chairman of the powerful Committee on Utilities & Commerce--trotted onto the state Assembly floor this morning with his game face on. It was the look of a man trying to hide the obvious puffiness under his eyes. When he reached his desk near the front of the room, he plopped his body down hard in the chair, sighed and stole a glance at the press section to his right. It must have been unsettling to see both myself and KCBS reporter Dave Lopez standing there for a second day. I could imagine he was wondering: what's next?

Duvall ran from reporters today in the capitol

​SACRAMENTO--Freshmen legislators arriving in Sacramento receive advice from veteran
 politicians about the intricacies of working in California's capital. One of those tips is to remember that microphones broadcasting legislative debates can also capture embarrassing, career-ending personal admissions if a politician isn't careful. Michael D. Duvall, Orange County's 72nd Assembly
District representative, must have forgotten the warning.

In July--two days after Assembly Speaker Karen Bass and Republican leader Sam Blakeslee put Duvall on the Rules Committee that oversees member ethics--the second-term, conservative, Republican assemblyman sat in a public hearing and vividly described lewd details about his trysts with a female lobbyist whose clients had business before another committee on which
 Duvall sits.


Duvall, speaking to a relatively mum Republican colleague seated to his left, apparently had no idea his dais microphone became live beginning about a minute before the start of a cable-televised committee hearing. He was captured in the middle of recounting portions of an affair.


"She wears little eye-patch underwear," said Duvall, who is married with two children. "So, the other day she came here with her underwear, Thursday. And
 so, we had made love Wednesday--a lot! And so she'll, she's all, 'I am going 
up and down the stairs, and you're dripping out of me!' So messy!"

That line may quickly become part of colorful Sacramento political lore. In the meantime, it leads me to a question: Can someone please buy the assemblyman a box of condoms?


Duvall--who was twice a president of the Yorba Linda Chamber of Commerce, served two terms as mayor of Yorba Linda before entering the assembly in
 2006, and is the owner of an insurance agency--continues his tale: "So, I am getting into spanking her. Yeah, I like it. I like spanking her. She goes, 'I know you like spanking me.' I said, 'Yeah! Because you're such a bad girl!'"

He then laughed.


The assemblyman representing Anaheim, Fullerton, Placentia, Orange, Brea, La
 Habra and Yorba Linda then offered clues to the identity of his sex partner.


"And so her birthday was Monday," he said at the Wednesday, July 8 committee hearing. "I was 54 on June 14, so for a month, she was 19 years younger than 
me. I said, 'Now, you're getting old. I am going to have to trade you in.' And she goes, '[I'm] 36.' She is 18 years younger than me. And so I keep
 teasing her, and she goes, 'I know you French men. You divide your age by 
two and add seven, and if you're older than that, you dump us.'" 

According to voter-registration records reviewed by the Weekly, veteran Sacramento-based lobbyist Heidi DeJong Barsuglia turned 36 years old on Monday, July 6. 

Legislative sources say they have witnessed Duvall, who is vice chairman of 
the Assembly's powerful Committee on Utilities & Commerce, socializing after-hours with Barsuglia. Sources--who asked for anonymity because of 
Duvall's power in the capital--say Susan Duvall usually stays in Orange
 County during the week, when her husband flies to Sacramento. They also say 
they have seen Duvall with Barsuglia in restaurants, "arm-in-arm" at political fund-raising events and even shopping together for groceries just blocks from the capitol building.


"Their relationship is the worst-kept secret in Sacramento," a capitol staffer recently told me. "He's old and fat. She's hot, blonde and about 20
 years younger. He could have never gotten a woman like that before he got
 this job.'"

​For the second year in a row, OC Weekly has been honored with inclusion in Harper Collins' annual Best American Crime Reporting compilation, which just arrived on bookshelves this week. Moxley's "Hate and Death," a gripping, terrifying account of the brutal, broad-daylight murder of a young Vietnamese-American, Thien Minh Ly, by a drug-addled racist named Gunner Jay Lindbergh. The story, which you can read here, also won Best Feature Story at this year's Orange County Press Club.

Rounding out the book are stories from such publications as The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, Los Angeles, The Atlantic, Details, GQ and New York magazine.

OC Weekly previously made the Best American Crime Reporting list in 2008, with my story "Just a Random Female," which also deals with senseless murder. Anyone noticing a pattern here?

Anyways, our collective hats go off to Mr. Moxley. We who toil salute you!

​Their numbers have dwindled. Their pay has been cut. They're often strapped with bean-counter goals devoid of editorial meaning. For years, they were forced to work in the same building as Gordon Dillow, and they've constantly watched their corporate bosses invent new ways to lose bundles of precious cash on mind-numbingly stupid ideas.

Despite that mess, The Orange County Register still has reporters who are kicking ass. Consider Teri Sforza, for example. On Monday, I nearly choked on my morning coffee while reading Sfora's story about a new plan at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California to "increase employee pensions by 25 percent."

Yes, that's right. Never mind the shitty economy, layoffs, furloughs, foreclosures and that everyone else in government is trying to reduce spending: Bureaucrats at the Met want to spend an additional $70 million so that retiring employees receive 62.5 percent of their income every year for the rest of their lives. The move will increase the agency's unfunded employee liability to almost $500 million, according to Sforza.

Fiscal mismanagement in Southern California is as commonplace as a traffic jam on the San Diego Freeway. But Sforza deftly points out the other component of the Met's plan: hire public-relations experts to spin the spending as--I kid you not--a way to save money. Indeed, her article notes that the Met's spin doctors at Marathon Communications are arguing that spending $70 million actually saves, drum roll, $21 million.

Four minus six is now apparently 22.

Meanwhile, the Met and its PR guns refused to let Sforza see the agency documents outlining their proposed spending plan until after it has been formally approved. That action is, of course, illegal. California has a public-records law that requires open, honest government, and Sforza has found another warped bureaucracy that needs cleansing.

Read Sforza's story HERE.

--R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly

Hanna Montessori's Killer Gets An Unpleasant Surprise

​Jonathan Phong Khanh Tran--dubbed by a homicide detective as "the nicest killer" he'd ever met--has waited 17 months in a California prison in hopes that a state court of appeal would overturn his rape, oral copulation and murder convictions in the famed killing of Hanna Montessori, a 15-year-old prostitute related to the founder of Montessori schools.

But late yesterday a three-judge panel based in Santa Ana delivered two rounds of bad news to Tran. They ruled his cries of an unfair trial were not legitimate and then they did something that may have the former happy-faced Little Saigon car salesman wishing he'd never asked for a review of his case. The justice, opining that Judge William R. Froeberg was too lenient at the 2008 sentencing hearing, increased Tran's prison sentence by a whopping two decades.

Tran's punishment is now listed as 83 years to life, meaning he'll be 108 years old before he's eligible to seek parole.

The Montessori case attracted international media attention largely because Hanna Montessori ran away from her Georgia home and became a Southern California street prostitute working for "Pepper," a vicious pimp tied to the Los Angeles Crips. In January 2004, Hanna stood in the parking lot of a fast food restaurant on a seedy section of Harbor Boulevard in Santa Ana and sought customers. Tran drove up, told a black prostitute, "I want the white girl." Hanna got into Tran's truck. As they drove to a nearby cul-de-sac Hanna leaped from the moving vehicle, suffered a massive skull fracture and died on the street.

Get this thru your thick skulls: This Ho ain't related to the other one

​One of the amusing aspects of covering Little Saigon politics is watching the world class mental gymnastics performed by the mostly elderly folks determined to spend their lives fighting the Vietnam War into perpetuity.

It's no exaggeration to note that they see Ho Chi Minh's spirit, dead 40 years, nefariously conspiring against them in present day news stories, art works, clothing articles and in music concerts. Last year, these people even organized daily protests against Nguoi Viet, the obviously pro-capitalism Vietnamese daily newspaper. They claimed with all the sincerity they could muster that the paper is a communist tool working on secret instructions from Hanoi.

But the most absurd attacks are usually saved for Vietnamese American singers. Though these performers have zero interest in politics or political theory or a lost war or Ho Chi Minh, the anti-communist crowd in Little Saigon selectively targets certain singers by labeling them "communist."

The thought process to arrive at that conclusion is often indecipherable, though it's apparently enough to fuel bizarrely vicious protests at music concerts around Orange County.

Our friend Hao Nhien-Vu over at Bolsavik.com now reports that the anti-commie crowd is targeting legendary Little Saigon singer Don Ho because--you can't make this stuff up--yellow stars appear on a poster announcing a Ho-lead concert at an Atlantic City casino.

Ah-hah!

​Ian Robert Tedeschi groomed himself as a Southern California bad boy with blond hair, blue eyes and a surgically placed silver ball in the shaft of his penis. The 5-foot-10, 200-pounder bragged that he loved "really big boobs" and belonged to the Orange County Skinheads gang. Before he was halfway through his twenties, he'd created an impressive police rap sheet that included stalking, trespassing, vandalism, possession of a deadly weapon (a nunchaku), felony graffiti, criminal threats and sex crimes. Once, he expressed his displeasure with a driver by slamming a baseball bat into a vehicle's window. At the age of 28, he was calling himself "Taildragger" on his MySpace account. He published an online "Booty Call Agreement" with lines such as "No falling asleep after sex. It's over, so get your ass up, get dressed and go the fuck home" and "Don't be offended if I don't ask if you enjoyed it. I don't care." Plus, "Doggie style is the preferred position--the reason: the less eye contact, the better." His cell-phone ring tone was a recording of his girlfriend moaning during intercourse--which may have been tacky but not entirely degenerative if the girl hadn't been a middle-school student.

A Seemingly Happy Westminster City Councilman Andy Quach on August 2

​Here's the police mug shot of Westminster City Councilman Andy Quach, who was arrested on August 2 for driving while wildly intoxicated (three times the level limit, according to police). His Mercedes-Benz S550 clipped another vehicle and then crashed into an electrical pole that sparked a 12-hour power outage for approximately 300 homes in Little Saigon. The Republican politician has apologized for his conduct, but still faces misdemeanor charges. 

--R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly