Ontario City Manager Scott Ochoa last month submitted to a more than two-hour interrogation by the FBI, during which he confirmed or provided greater detail and/or hard specifics with regard to items already churned up by in the more than eight-year ongoing federal probe of violations of trust in San Bernardino County’s third-most populous city. In at least two instances, Ochoa provided investigators with information about actions they heretofore were previously unaware, the Sentinel is informed. Information which Ochoa has been sitting on in many cases for more than a half-decade cuts right to the heart of the wrongdoing that has now become the primary focus in the case being assembled for prosecution by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Some of the issues at the heart of the investigation have been known of, in limited circles within Ontario, consisting primarily of those who had approached the FBI originally with the information that triggered the initial inquiries, since 2017. By 2022, a wider but still relatively narrow collection of residents and city employees were aware that votes made by both the Ontario City Council and the Ontario International Airport Authority Board of commissioners as well as secretive actions taken by the city and authority without any official public discussion, votes or disclosure were being examined for their legality and possible criminal nature by federal authorities.
On July 28 of this year, that both Ontario City Councilman Alan Wapner and San Bernardino County Fourth District Supervisor Curt Hagman were the targets of a political corruption investigation broke into wider public view when their homes and offices as well as the offices and or homes of some of their associates and political supporters, including attorney Frank Lizerraga, businessman Andy Sehremelis and media mogul James Su, were raided by federal agents, subject to search warrants that had been issued. Wapner had been the chairman/president of the Ontario International Airport Board of Commissioners since that entity’s creation in 2012 and Hagman had been an airport authority commissioner since 2014. On July 28, as well, both Ontario City Hall and the headquarters of the airport authority were served with subpoenas for specific sets of documents.
Specifically, the FBI had interested itself in:
a) money that had been provided to Wapner and Hagman by a whole host of their political donors;
b) contracts and franchises that had been granted by the airport authority board of commissioners or the Ontario City Council to companies or entities owned by or associated with those donors;
c) approvals of projects proposed by companies or entities owned by or associated with those donors by the Ontario City Council;
d) those donors who had been hired as consultants by the airport authority;
e) determining if any of those donors were foreign nationals or were not American citizens;
f) the nature of the business Wapner and Hagman had engaged in while they were doing extensive traveling in the Far East;
g) influence-peddling by Wapner and Hagman;
h) efforts by those intent on delivering money to Wapner and Hagman engaging in political money laundering by donating money to political action committees or so-called independent expenditure committees which then donated the money to the duo;
i) reports of out-and-out bribe-taking on the part of Wapner and Hagman;
j) determining whether reports that Wapner and Hagman had set up bank accounts in the People’s Republic of China were accurate;

k) the degree to which Wapner and most particularly Hagman were involved in propaganda efforts by China Radio International, the state-owned international radio broadcasting network of the People’s Republic of China, which operates through Guoguang Century Media and its West Coast Arm, West Covina-based EDI Media, Inc., which runs G&E Studio Inc. and CiTi News, owned by James Su, who was himself a donor to Hagman’s campaign and employed others who were donating to Hagman’s campaign.
It is a violation of federal law for an American elected official at any level to accept political donations from a foreign citizen.
At the time the raids took place, more than a month and a half had elapsed since Hagman had scored a reelection victory in the June primary election by obtaining 54.84 percent of the vote, sidestepping the need to compete in a run-off election in the November 3 general election, and Wapner earlier that month had taken out and filed nomination papers to run for mayor and the city clerk and San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters Office had determined his candidacy was officially qualified. Wapner abruptly pulled out of the mayoral contest, persuaded one of his political allies, Curt Hagman’s son Jonathan, to drop out of the race for 3rd District Councilman, and himself took out nomination papers to run for the 3rd District council position just prior to the August 7 filing deadline. He then prevailed on another of his political allies, 4th District Councilwoman Daisy Macias, to enter the mayoral contest, challenging longtime Mayor Paul Leon.
FBI agents nosing around Ontario and at the Airport as well as at the homes and offices of some of their major political supporters, which included Frank Lizarraga, who had served as a lawyer for Wapner and his wife, Hagman and his wife, as well as Macias, and who had been a member of the Ontario Planning Commission for 13 years, created a degree of general chaos that was unprecedented during any previous election season in Ontario going back to its 1893 incorporation. The serving of the search warrants 98 days before the November 3 2026 Ontario municipal election rendered the situation more complicated still and left a series of issues unresolved in the community as a consequence of the unofficial policy of the U.S. Attorney’s Office and FBI to take not overt action within, variably, 90 days to 60 days of an election that might influence the election’s outcome. Wapner has been a member of the city council for over three decades and had been the dominant political power through much of that time, controlling two of the votes of his council colleagues during 18 of the last 21 years that Leon has been mayor. This made Wapner the head of a ruling coalition that politically outmuscled Leon for all but three of the years he has wielded the mayoral gavel.
Despite the assurance that Wapner and his associates were being provided with a grace period at least through November 3 during which they would not be arrested nor subjected to a so-called “perp walk” nor criminally charged, the specter of what will come after the current election season concludes has continued to hang over Ontario.
Over the last 20 years, during each of the five four-year election cycles in 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2022, Leon and Wapner, together with Councilman Jim Bowman, found themselves on the ballot together. Each time, Leon and Wapner had stayed in their respective mayoral and council position lanes, with Wapner never stepping up to challenge Leon. In those years, they had shared, to some degree, political donors, though Wapner had always proven himself to be the more aggressive fundraiser and managed to outraise Leon, touching those donors for more money, in most cases than the mayor. Over the last two to three years, as Leon at first surreptitiously and then openly began preparing for his mayoral run against Leon, the basic commonality of their electoral backers came to an end. Beginning about a year-and-a-half ago, Wapner, began telling those donors that they needed to make up their minds as to whether they were either with him or with Leon, and that he did not intend to lose. Intimidatingly, he intimated that if they put their money on Leon, when he was mayor and Leon was out of the picture, they would not be able to count on City Hall smiling upon them as it had done in the past, and that their applications for project approval or city contracts or franchises would no longer be automatically forthcoming as they had been in the past. Indeed, it was this unabashedly quid pro quo, pay-for-play ethos that Wapner was embodying that had put him on the FBI’s radar in the first place. The intensification of the unmistakable overtures he was making to his political supporters and would-be political supporters promising to sell his office, his votes and his influence for donations was in no small measure a causative factor in the FBI’s move to obtain the search warrants it served on July 28.
As there appeared to be no will on the part of the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office or the California Fair Political Practices Commission to hold Wapner in check, by the end of June, at which point Wapner over the previous 18 months had accumulated $912,529.08 in his political war chest while Leon had in the same timeframe collected $112,230. In political donations, what appeared to be the entirety of Ontario’s social, political, business and governmental establishment appeared to be abandoning Leon and lining up behind Wapner. Teamsters Local 1932 representing 380 Ontario city employees, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3061, representing 1,260 Ontario city employees, the Ontario Police Officers Association, representing the city’s police officer up to the rank of sergeant, the Ontario Police Management Group, representing Ontario’s police department’s lieutenant and captains, and the International Association of Fire Fighters Local 1430, representing the city’s firefighters all endorsed Wapner in the mayor’s race prior to the filing period for the election opening.
Wapner’s withdrawal from the mayor’s race in the aftermath of the negative publicity that attended the serving of the search warrants transformed the formerly cordial relationship the city’s employees and their union representative had with Leon into a rather awkward circumstance, one in which the city’s workers found themselves at odds with their current and presumably future top-ranking political master.
What naturally evolved from the circumstance was a move by Leon and his newly-formed alliance with two of the council’s members – Jim Bowman and Debra Dorst-Porada, who previously had aligned themselves with Wapner but now found that alliance to represent a threat to their legacy and continuing reputations – to relieve Wapner of his adjunct assignments as an elected official, those being his membership on and presidency of the airport authority board, his representation of the city on the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority, his position on/presidency of the Omnitrans Board of Directors and his representation of the city on the board of directors for the Southern California Association of Governments.
While the 60-day/90-day guideline the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI self-impose with regard to overt investigative or prosecutorial actions they might take that would come to the attention of the public and thereby impact an election, they do not curtail their work relating to figures involved in ongoing matters – be they investigative/prosecutorial targets, suspects, subjects, persons of interest, witnesses, victims or possible victims – if they can do so in a discreet manner or without drawing attention to their action. Such has been the case with those being investigated in relation to Ontario International Airport, the Ontario International Airport Authority, the City of Ontario and San Bernardino County. That investigation has continued, but investigators have attempted to maintain as low of a profile as possible in seeking to uncover more information.
Last month, three FBI agents – one woman and two men – approached City Manager Scott Ochoa in the parking lot at City Hall. Asking him if he would be willing to speak with them, they suggested that they go to a restaurant where they could have some privacy and not be subject to being seen or overheard by anyone at the city. Ochoa countered with an offer to take them back into City Hall, which by that point was empty, so they could converse in his office. The agents agreed, and Ochoa summoned City Attorney Ruben Duran to participate in the exchange, or at least be present as a witness.

While there is no publicly available record of precisely what questions were asked and what answers were given, the upshot of the exchange and its import can be extrapolated within certain parameters.
Given the limitations of Ochoa’s city administrative function and his general range of authority, the back-and-forth he engaged in with the agents dwelt primarily upon his observations of activity at City Hall and the dynamics of the interpersonal relationships of the city officials, extending to the operations at the airport only insofar as they involved city personnel and articulated with municipal activities.
What came across as being unmistakable is that the FBI’s presence in Ontario has not concluded and will involve multiple rounds of scrupulous examination. It appears that Wapner will go down by the time the first round concludes and that the outstanding question is how many others in the city or at the airport or those affiliated with the city or airport directly through him he will take with him in the succeeding phases of the investigation and prosecution. The exchanges between Ochoa and the three investigators established, the Sentinel is told, that Ochoa observed anomalies in how Wapner operated consistent with illegal or improper activity already charted in the investigation, but that, as city manager, he was too abstracted in running a municipal operation to make an exacting examination of the questionable or outright improper activity that was ongoing and he chose, essentially as it was termed to the Sentinel, to “see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil.”
Among the points of commonality between the city and the airport authority were Wapner, as a city councilman and the chairman/president of the airport authority board; Bowman, as a city councilman and an airport authority board member; Claudia Isbell, the assistant city clerk who served as the airport authority board clerk and executive secretary; and Greg Devereaux, who had been the Ontario city manager fro, 1997 until 2010 and has been, since 2017 until the present, a consultant to both the city and to the airport authority.
Bowman, in his elected capacity as a city councilman, received, just as Wapner and Hagman had, political contributions from individuals and entities who were engaged in business with city and at the airport, a technical violation of California Government Code § 84308, also known as the Levine Act, which prohibits a government official from participating in decisions impacting a donor – i.e., voting to approve a contract with – a donor of $500 or more to his or her campaign. Wapner had received donations from owners and principals in businesses which had contracts with airport authority, in virtually every instance involving contributions of far greater monetary amounts than what had been provided to Bowman or Hagman.
Isbell, as the lead clerical staff member with the city and airport authority responsible for recording proceedings and keeping records relating to city council and airport board actions and administrative activity, served as the primary contact with the public for the provision of documents, records and information relating to city and airport authority operations. Over an extended period of time, as city residents and other members of the public were pressing for the release of information relating to aspects of airport authority operations and decisions by its board members and administrators, Isbell in compliance with Wapner’s instructions and the assistance of Kevin P. Sullivan, a lawyer with the law firm of Gatzke Dillon & Ballance, which serves as general counsel to airport authority, consistently blocked or limited provision of that information.
Devereaux, who has been receiving a $20,000 per month retainer or $240,000 per year for his work as a city consultant and a $20,000 per month retainer or $240,000 per year for his work as a city consultant since 2017, was provided with those $480,000 per year sinecures based upon Wapner’s insistence. Early on, some elements within the city referred to the consulting contract for managerial assistance with Devereaux and his company, Worthington Partners, for managerial assistance as “training wheels” for Ochoa, who began with the City of Ontario as city manager in November 2017. Ochoa, upon being hired, accepted the consulting arrangement as a temporary condition, though he considered the city’s consulting contract with Devereaux and his company an assignation that was purposelessly redundant.
In two relatively minor respects, Devereaux’s presence was of use to the city and therefore, to a certain extent, was tolerated or even welcomed by Ochoa.
Devereaux functioned as what was called “the great massager,” for his utility in calming the alcoholic Bowman when he grew temperamental. While Bowman for the most part was under the thumb of the manipulative Wapner, he occasionally chaffed at being taken for granted and would tie one on, in which case Devereaux would swoop in and put him back on the wagon.
On occasion, Devereaux, who was also dubbed, the “land guru,” would broker deals with developers where real estate transactions involving the city were at play. There were inconsistent accounts as to whether this was beneficial to the city in certain circumstances, with claims that the city had realized savings of money in some cases because of Devereaux’s intercession.
Ochoa came to resent the unnecessary parallel to his function that Devereaux represented, but lived with it to avoid a run in with, and to appease, Wapner, who on one occasion.
Devereaux, who like Wapner had a juris doctor degree but had never passed the California bar exam to actually become a lawyer in the Golden State, was valued for his ability to assist government officials, in particular elected ones, around the pitfalls of the law. Among some government officials in San Bernardino County and especially in Ontario, he is referred to as “the Wizard.” The FBI agents working the case pertaining to Ontario and Ontario International Airport, and reportedly some of those in the U.S. Attorney’s Office to whom the case had been assigned, took to referring to Devereaux as the ‘Consigliere,” an indication that he, rather than Wapner or Hagman, is considered the brains of the operations that were turning a profit on the exploitations of the public trust that were occurring at the airport, in Ontario and the within a good portion of San Bernardino County’s Fourth Supervisorial District.
FBI agents in examining the California Form 460s – the campaign reporting documents – filed by the politicians under scrutiny in this case discovered, as had local residents monitoring their elected leaders, that remarkably, Devereaux, whose bread and butter as the owner of Worthington Partners in large measure consisted of being able to influence top governmental decision-makers, did not, with only a few exceptions, show up as a major donor to political campaigns. This was, it appears, because Wapner understood the letter and the import of the Levine Act – California Government Code § 84308 – by which a politician is breaking the law if he or she takes $500 or more from someone and then takes action as a governmental official to benefit that donor. In this way, Devereaux was protecting not so much himself but the politicians he was working with or working for or working in conjunction with as a consultant or assistant or agent or lobbyist, whatever role he and Worthington Partners in that instance had taken on.
Recently, however, as FBI agents have continued to peel the onion layer by layer, they have come across elements of the scandal that had been buried or obscured so deeply that previously there was little prospect they would be discovered. One of these pertains to the use of, variously, political action committees or independent expenditure committees in an effort to get around California Government Code § 84308. Through the use of a committee, which is able to pool political donations from one, two, three or thousands of donors or any number in between, money can be delivered to a candidate or officeholder without the source of the money being readily recognized. In most cases the California Fair Political Practices Commission, the California Fair Political Practices Commission and county district attorney’s offices, which have the authority to look into, investigate, evaluate and potentially prosecute violations of California Government Code § 84308 are stymied by the political money laundering that takes place when a political donation is provided to a third party before it is passed along to the intended recipient. The vast majority of state prosecutors would not pursue a California Government Code § 84308 theory in such a case. Those prosecutors that perhaps would do so, could be thwarted by a criminal defense that would assert that the money taken from the pool and provided to the politician in question did not necessarily originate from the donor who was benefited by the politician-in-question’s vote. A jury in a state court might find that reasoning persuasive and vote to acquit the politician.
Under federal law, however, which has prohibitions very much like California Government Code § 84308 against a politician taking money from a donor and then voting to benefit that donor, there is a precedent case which establishes that taking money from a donor and then acting in an official capacity to benefit the donor meets is tantamount to bribe-taking.
Moreover, federal law with regard to efforts to conceal the source of funds delivered in the commission of bribery is far stronger than state law, such that such action, under a federal statue constitutes conspiracy, enhancing the seriousness of the offense and the punishment.
Earlier this year, on May 4, 2026, Devereaux provided $10,000 to the Grand Terrace-based California Parents Association Political Action Committee. That donation came in 11 days after the California Parents Association Political Action Committee donated $1,000 to Hagman’s campaign and the California Parents Association Political Action Committee in the same time frame made a $1,000 in-kind contribution to Hagman’s campaign in the form of campaign literature in support of his election. The California Parents Association Political Action Committee made an $8,500 contribution to Wapner’s mayoral campaign on July 30, 2026.
On December 23, 2025, the California Parents Association Political Action Committee made a $30,000 to Wapner for Mayor on December 23, 2025
On November 13, 2025, the California Parents Association Political Action Committee made a $1,000 donation to the Hagman for Supervisor campaign. On June 30, 2025, the California Parents Association Political Action Committee made a $9,000 donation to the Wapner for Council campaign.
Previously, Wapner had prepared his California Form 460 campaign finance documents himself, but had his wife, Judi, as his campaign treasurer, sign them. Wapner at that time was functioning under the impression that having his wife serve as his campaign treasurer would give him a layer of protection, since as his wife, she could not be forced to testify against him. More recently, however, he was informed that their husband/wife status would afford him no shield, since she had signed the California Form 460 documents under the penalty of perjury.
Those documents are problematic for Wapner.
An examination of his Form 460s shows that between January 2021 and December 2025, Wapner utilized $89,287.54 to pay for airfare for his wife to travel with him on 61 trips, 51 within the United States and ten international, entailing 302 days of travel on her part. Another $11,579.65 of his electioneering money was spent on hotel rooms for his wife. Another $1,309.20 from his campaign fund was spent on meals and incidentals for his wife. In this way, Wapner’s political war chest was used to defray $102,120.95 on his wife’s travel expenses. The California Political Reform Act, adopted by Proposition 9 in 1974, established clear limits regarding the use of campaign funds by candidates and politicians for travel expenditures. Under the California Political Reform Act, there is no general allowance for a politician’s spouse to use a candidate’s campaign funds for personal travel, including “defraying travel costs,” unless that travel is directly for a lawful, political purpose and complies with the act’s travel rules. In this way, Wapner’s use of money to cover his wife’s travel costs was illegal.
On some of the trips, the Wapners were accompanied by the Devereauxs, that being Greg Devereaux and his wife, Bertha Chavoya. Based upon information provided to the FBI by others who were also present during those excursions, Bertha on occasion made purchases, at costs exceeding thousands of dollars, of designer clothes, handbags and other accessories for Judi Wapner.
Federal investigators have undertaken efforts, sources close to Ontario City Hall have told the Sentinel, to examine records relating to Greg Devereaux’s banking records to see if they provide indications of cash withdrawals matching reports of kickbacks made by Devereaux to Wapner.