How Fontana and San Bernardino County built a machine that stole from taxpayers for five decades, and why no one was ever held accountable. It began with a casino credit line. It ends, if it ever ends, with an assistant city manager involved in the processing his brother’s real estate applications and a planning commissioner whose brother is a member of the county board of supervisors and a principal in the city’s preeminent real estate company who oversees and holds tremendous sway over the municipality’s official land use decisions.
In between, the residents of Fontana and San Bernardino County have paid hundreds of millions of dollars to fund a corruption machine so durable and so patient it simply waited out every reform, replaced every actor who left or got caught, and kept running.
This is the story of that machine, how it was built, who built it, what laws were broken, and why, across five decades, four mayors, three county supervisors and a bribery prosecution, no one, at least from Fontana, has paid the price for their depredations.
By Carlos Avalos
Era One: The Ratelle Years (1973–1987)
The Man Who Built the Template
Jack Ratelle was Fontana’s city manager for fourteen years, and during that time, he turned a struggling Inland Empire city into his personal enrichment machine. The mechanism was not subtle. Developers who wanted entitlements, approvals, or public infrastructure money paid Ratelle through a credit line at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. Ratelle made weekly or bimonthly trips to collect, then returned to City Hall with stories about winning or losing at the dice tables. It was both his cover story and his collection mechanism.
For council members, the bribes were tailored to circumstance: a city contract steered to one councilman’s welding business; a no-show job created for another’s unemployed son-in-law; direct cash distributions to Mayor Nat Simon and others. The arrangement was institutional, not incidental. Everyone who mattered knew or chose not to know.
Law Broken: Bribery of Public Officials — California Penal Code §68 / §85 / §86 — Ratelle’s acceptance of payments through the MGM Hotel credit line in exchange for development approvals constitutes bribery of a public official. Any council member who received payments in exchange for votes similarly violated PC §85 (offering a bribe to a legislator) and §86 (legislator accepting a bribe). No charges were ever filed.
The Southridge Deal: A $374 Million Gift to a Developer
The defining transaction of the Ratelle era was the Southridge development. Ten Ninety Corporation was building a 9,100-unit residential project in the early 1980s. Under normal California redevelopment law, a developer seeking public entitlements contributes to the cost of the infrastructure their project requires, such as streets, sewers, sidewalks, and storm drains. Under Ratelle, the opposite happened.
Ratelle arranged for the City of Fontana’s Redevelopment Agency to pay the entire $120 million infrastructure cost in 1982 dollars, on Ten Ninety’s behalf. The financing came from $55 million in loans from the Glaziers Union and $65 million in certificates of participation: bond debt approved by a council vote, never put to the citizens of Fontana. The quarterly bond payments are $3.12 million every three months, or $12.48 million per year, running for thirty years, until 2013. Total taxpayer cost: $374.4 million.
The quid pro quo, documented in the investigative record: Ten Ninety funded Ratelle’s MGM Hotel credit line. Ratelle delivered $120 million in public infrastructure to Ten Ninety’s project. Fontana’s residents paid the debt for three decades.
Law Broken: Misappropriation of Public Funds, California Government Code §424 — Directing public redevelopment funds to pay infrastructure costs that should have been borne by the developer, in exchange for personal payments, constitutes misappropriation of public funds. The deliberate structuring of bond financing to avoid a public vote may also implicate Government Code §53511 and related provisions governing public debt authorization.
Law Broken: Conflict of Interest, California Government Code §87100 / §1090 — Any official who voted to approve the Southridge infrastructure financing while receiving personal payments from Ten Ninety Corporation had a financial interest in the contract prohibited by Government Code §87100 and §1090. Section 1090 is a felony. No charges were ever filed against anyone.
The Ratelle era did not simply end when Ratelle was fired in 1987. The financial wreckage persisted for decades. A 1992 Owner Participation Agreement related to Ten Ninety’s Southridge project continued to generate legal obligations. When California dissolved its redevelopment agencies in 2012, the state Department of Finance disallowed the Ten Ninety OPA, creating a $2 million per year loss to Fontana’s General Fund that the investigative record shows will continue until fiscal year 2032–33. Jack Ratelle left government in 1987. His deals are still costing Fontana money in 2026.
[Era Two: The Eshleman Years (1994–2002)
David Eshleman, who had first been elected to the city council in 1990 and would eventually become mayor, enjoyed several advantages that had essentially been handed to him. Having come onto the council after the departure of Ratelle, he never understood nor came to fully appreciate the depth of damage that Ratelle, in connivance with former Mayor Simon and with the acquiescence of some other city officials, had inflicted upon the city. Somewhat wrongheadedly, he championed removing John O’Sullivan, the reformist city manager who had replaced Ratelle, mainly because, under the influence of Simon, he believed that O’Sullivan was being too drastic and aggressive in his approach to righting the listing Fontana ship. In 1992, Simon’s successor as mayor, Bill Kragness was forced by a deterioration in his health to resign his office, at which point he was succeeded by Gary Boyles, a member of the city council in the 1980s and early 1990s who had for years, to no real avail, vociferously warned his council colleagues about Ratelle’s misadventures. In the more than five years following Ratelle’s departure, the city burned through three city managers – O’Sullivan, Jim Grissom and Jay Corey. In 1993, in what was perhaps Boyle’s most significant accomplishment as mayor, he promoted Greg Devereaux, who had been hired in 1992 as Fontana’s redevelopment and housing manager, to city manager.
Upon becoming mayor in December 1994, Eshleman inherited Devereaux as city manager. Though Eshleman never fully recognized how Ratelle had denuded the city of revenue by diverting into the pockets of developers money that should have been used to build infrastructure to accommodate the impact of the subdivisions those developers were constructing, he recognized the financial challenges the city faced. He essentially allowed Devereaux to work his economic development magic on the city, which was not really magic but rather an approach that called for a permissive policy toward development, a philosophy that the city could grow its way out of the problems enveloping it. While Devereaux was proved correct, accompanying that fix were all of the headaches that come with transforming what previously was an agricultural community that was hosting a steel mill into a 43-square mile urban landscape packed wall-to-wall with houses, factories and warehouses with little or no buffering in between.
Era Three: The Nuami Years (2002–2010)
Developer Money Obliterates What Little Reform The Shedding of Ratell Represented.
Mark Nuaimi’s 2002 defeat of David Eshleman was not a grassroots insurgency. It was funded by a consortium of developers who understood that Eshleman’s reform orientation had constrained their ability to capture public resources. Nuaimi ran on accusations of conflict of interest against Eshleman, whose wife had accepted a Planning Commission appointment (she resigned immediately when the issue was raised) and who had declined to annex property he personally owned (correctly noting that annexation would constitute a conflict).
What Nuaimi did not disclose during this campaign: his own employer, a traffic technology company called Iteris, held a multi-million dollar contract with the City of Fontana. Nuaimi was a sitting city councilan while his employer collected city money. He attacked Eshleman for conflicts he did not have while concealing a conflict he did. He won 47.4% to 41.6%, with a third candidate drawing 10.8%.
Law Broken: Conflict of Interest — Government Code §87100 / Failure to Recuse — Nuaimi’s employment by Iteris while Iteris held a city contract created a direct financial interest in city decisions under Government Code §87100.
Any vote on Iteris-related items without recusal constituted a criminal violation. Government Code §1090 makes participation in a contract in which an official has a financial interest in a felony. Nuaimi was never charged; the FPPC never acted.
The Double-Dipping Mayor
From March 2006 to December 2009, Mark Nuaimi simultaneously held two government positions: Mayor of Fontana and Deputy City Manager of Colton, an adjacent city whose planning and infrastructure decisions directly intersected with Fontana’s. He drew salaries from both. Any coordination between Fontana Redevelopment Agency decisions and Colton development interests during that period represented potential violations of both Section 87100 and Section 1090 of the Government Code.
Law Broken: Dual Public Employment Conflicts — Government Code §87100 / §1090 — Holding executive positions in two adjacent cities whose jurisdictions interact raises conflict-of-interest liability under California Government Code §87100 and §1090. This arrangement drew public criticism for potential conflicts of interest at the time. No formal investigation was ever conducted.
The Redevelopment Agency: A Weapon of Financial Extraction
With Ken Hunt as his city manager and Executive Director of the Fontana Redevelopment Agency, Nuaimi chaired an agency that controlled five project areas and deployed hundreds of millions of dollars in tax increment financing. The agency’s record across those eight years is a catalog of financial harm to Fontana’s public institutions:
The Ventana Project Nuaimi championed this mixed-use development as, in his words, ‘an entirely new type of development’ for the city. The RDA acquired the Ventana property at $43.4 million, a figure added to the city’s capital assets in 2014. The city eventually sold it at a $31.8 million loss. ‘This has got to be a mistake,’ said Finance Director Rachel Brown when she discovered the loss. It was not a mistake. No one was ever held accountable.
The Housing Fund Shortfall
California redevelopment law required agencies to deposit 20% of tax increment into a Low and Moderate Income Housing Fund. A lawsuit filed before 2012 alleged that the Fontana RDA owed $27 million to its own housing fund money that should have been reserved for affordable housing and was not deposited. The shortfall accumulated primarily during Nuaimi’s tenure.
The School District. A separate lawsuit filed around 2011–2012 alleged the RDA had failed to make legally required pass-through payments to the Fontana Unified School District. California Health and Safety Code Sections 33607 and 33607.5 require agencies to share tax increment growth with schools. The money was apparently kept by the agency.
The Illegal Transfers
The California State Controller’s 2014 review found $7.1 million in illegal cash transfers from the RDA to the city in 2011: $1 million from the Downtown project area, $2.28 million from the Sierra Corridor, $3.84 million from the Ventana project area, all traced to Nuaimi-era operations. All were ordered returned. None were returned.
Law Broken: Misappropriation of Public Funds — Government Code §424 / Health & Safety Code §33607- The failure to deposit required tax increment funds into the Low and Moderate Income Housing Fund violates California Health and Safety Code §34176 and related provisions. Illegal transfers from RDA project accounts to the city’s general fund violate Government Code §424 (misappropriation by public officer) and the specific dissolution requirements of California’s Community Redevelopment Law. The State Controller found violations and ordered restitution. Fontana never complied.
The Southwest Industrial Park Expansion: A Parting Gift to Warehouse Developers
In the final weeks of his mayoralty, Nuaimi pushed through Amendment No. 9 to the Southwest Industrial Park Redevelopment Plan, expanding its tax increment capture zone by 1,101 acres over community opposition. The expansion was approved in 2010 and took effect as Warren assumed the mayoralty. It benefited warehouse developers who needed public infrastructure funding. The same Southwest Industrial Park project area had been established in 1977, during the Ratelle era. It was now, under Nuaimi’s final act of governance, the instrument of benefit for the next generation of developers.
The CityLink Revolving Door
In 2009, Nuaimi co-founded a nonprofit called CityLink with then-Councilwoman Acquanetta Warren and Pastor Dan Carroll of Water of Life Community Church. He then resigned the mayor’s office six months before his term expired, citing a new full-time position. That position was Senior Director of Strategic Projects at Water of Life Community Church, the same institution he had just set up to receive public money through CityLink.
Warren became mayor in 2010. Federal ESG (Emergency Solutions Grants) funding began flowing to CityLink shortly after. Nuaimi now designs the grant applications that Water Of Life/CityLink submits to city and county officials, the same officials whose careers he helped build. He left government to take a private position at the institution he created to receive public money. The revolving door, in its most complete form.
Law Broken: Federal Grant Fraud / False Claims Act 31 U.S.C. §3729- If grant applications submitted by Water Of Life/CityLink contain false statements about eligibility, program activities, or fund usage, each application constitutes a false claim against the federal government under the False Claims Act, carrying civil penalties of up to three times the amount of each false claim. The coordination between an official who co-founded the entity (Nuaimi), the official who controls the grant process (Warren), and the entity receiving the grants creates a textbook self-dealing structure subject to federal scrutiny.
The County Level: Paul Biane and The Colonies Chapter
The $102 Million Vote
While Nuaimi was running Fontana’s corruption machine at the city level, Paul Biane, as the county’s Second District supervisor overseeing the western half of Fontana, entangled himself in a political corruption scandal that took him more than 11 years to extricate himself from, and then only by the application of millions and millions of dollars and at the cost of the utter destruction of his political career.
On November 28, 2006, Biane voted yes on a $102 million settlement with Colonies Partners LP, a developer that had filed a lawsuit against San Bernardino County over a flood control easement dispute. The vote was 3-to-2. Without Biane, the settlement would have failed.
In 2011, the California Attorney General and San Bernardino County District Attorney jointly announced the issuance of a superseding indictment to an ongoing criminal case in which Biane was charged with misappropriation of public funds, filing a fraudulent tax return, perjury, filing a false instrument, and two counts of bribery. Three other defendants in the case which also extended to accusations of conspiracy and extortion – one-time Sheriff’s Deputy Union President Jim Erwin; San Bernardino county Fourth District Chief of Staff Mark Kirk and developer and principal in the Colonies Partners, Jeff Burum – surrendered the morning after charges were filed, and were dealt with relatively quietly.
Biane, who had been voted out of office in 2010 as unfavorable publicity about the 2006 vote mounted, was out of the state when the indictment was handed down. His image was seen everywhere, it seemed, on wanted posters issued by the district attorney’s office in which he was described as a fugitive from justice. As he arrived at Ontario Airport to turn himself in after he learned of the indictment, he was subjected to the indignity of being photographed as law enforcement officers converged on him to place him in handcuffs.
The case hung in limbo for more than five years as pretrial sparring between the prosecution and defense attorney proceeded. The case went to trial in 2017 in the same courtroom before two juries, one for Biane, Burum and Kirk and another for Erwin, dragging on for eight months. Biane, Burum and Kirk were acquitted after a reported $17.5 million was spent on their legal defense. Erwin’s jury hung, failing to reach a unanimous verdict on any of the charges against him.
Bill Postmus, a county supervisor who had joined with Burum in the 2006 vote to approve the $102 million payout to the Colonies Partners, was with Erwin one of the two original criminal defendants in the case before the superseding indictment of Biane, Burum, Kirk and Erwin in 2011.
Just prior to the superseding indictment was handed down in 2011, Postmus pleaded guilty to 14 felonies and confirmed in statements to investigators and prosecutors that he had received money from Burum’s company, the Colonies Partners in exchange for his November 2006 vote. That guilty plea remains in the public record.
Note on Postmus’s current activities: Postmus operates Mountain States Consulting as a political consulting vehicle, with documented financial relationships connecting Alliance Building Solutions’ kickback payments to Warren, current Fourth District San Bernardino County Supervisor Curt Hagman, current First District San Bernardino County Supervisor Paul Cook and current Third District San Bernardino County Supervisor Dawn Rowe. Postmus is a minority owner of Eagle Real Estate Group alongside Dino DeFazio, who was charged with perjury in a criminal case associated with the prosecution of Postmus, Biane, Burum, Kirk and Erwin. Charges against DeFazio were later dropped by the prosecution.
Postmus served as a lobbyist for Alliance Building Solutions and that company’s owner, Brad Chapman. The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors approved providing Alliance Building Solutions a no-bid $5.5 million project to upgrade county properties, which included a waiver of the requirement that the company comply with the State of California’s prevailing wage requirement on that project.
Postmus from 2004 until 2006 served on the board of supervisors with Josie Gonzales, who prior to that was a councilwoman in Fontana. He served as her campaign advisor in the 2024 special election for San Bernardino County assessor/recorder/county clerk, which Gonzales won. He again advised her in her electoral effort to keep that post in this year’s election. No opponents to Gonzales emerged. Gonzales, as the assessor-recorder-county clerk is the elected official whose office now controls all property records and assessments for a county where Postmus’s clients hold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of property interests.
Law Broken: Bribery – California Penal Code §68 (Public Official Accepting Bribe) Postmus’s sworn guilty plea under Penal Code §68, accepting a bribe as a public official in exchange for the Colonies vote, is the permanent evidentiary record of what the three yes votes represented. Misappropriation of Public Funds — Government Code §424 / Penal Code §424- A vote to pay $102 million to a developer in exchange for bribe payments constitutes misappropriation of public funds under California Government Code and Penal Code §424.
Ken Hunt: 29 Years, Three Masters and $1.1 Million For Silence
The Man Who Knew Everything And Said Nothing
Ken Hunt joined the Fontana city government in January 1990. He worked under Devereaux, saw what recovery from the misapplication of municipal authority looked like, and understood in precise detail how completely the city’s direction had changed when Nuaimi defeated Eshleman. He served as city manager for twenty years under Eshleman, under Nuaimi, briefly under Frank Scialdone, and then for nine years under Acquanetta Warren. He was simultaneously the mechanism through which Fontana’s corruption operated and the man who discovered one of its most recent iterations.
In spring 2019, Ken Hunt reached a conclusion: Acquanetta Warren was on the take. The evidence was a pattern he had observed in how Warren helped Alliance Building Solutions, a contractor, obtain a no-bid contract in Fontana. It was not the only pattern he had seen. But it was the one that crystallized his judgment.
In July 2019, the city council issued a press release announcing Hunt’s sudden departure. His contract ran through the end of 2021. He left immediately.
The Payment
In 2020, Ken Hunt received $312,865 in ‘settlement pay’ —an extra payment not required by any provision of his contract; $476,772 in leave payoff; and $64,137 in a ‘longevity’ payment. Total: $1,127,378.45. He became the highest-paid city employee in California for 2020 without working a single day. Under Hunt’s contract, a voluntary resignation triggered zero severance. A termination without cause triggered twelve months of base pay. The city paid nearly three years of Hunt’s salary. Robert Fellner of Transparent California stated plainly: the fact that Fontana paid more than required by Hunt’s contract could be construed as hush money. If Hunt had resigned willingly, Fontana wouldn’t have owed him anything. Warren initially said Hunt wished to retire. When pressed about the contract requiring him to remain until 2021, she adjusted her account to say he resigned. Neither explanation accounts for the above-contractual payment. The California State Auditor examined the circumstances of Hunt’s departure with, in the investigative record’s words, sophisticated, exacting, and intense focus.
Laws Broken: Obstruction / Hush Money — Potential Federal 18 U.S.C. §1503 / §1512 — A payment structured to prevent a witness from disclosing knowledge of criminal activity to law enforcement may constitute obstruction of justice under 18 U.S.C. §1503 (obstruction of judicial proceedings) or §1512 (witness tampering/intimidation). The above-contractual nature of the payment — paying significantly more than any contract provision required — is the documented signature of a payment made to secure silence rather than satisfy a legal obligation.
Misuse of Public Funds— Government Code §424 — Paying public funds to a departing employee above and beyond any contractual or legal obligation, for the purpose of purchasing silence about criminal activity, constitutes misappropriation of public funds under California Government Code §424. The city council members who approved the settlement payment may bear personal criminal liability.
“The fact that Fontana paid more than required by Hunt’s contract could be construed as hush money. If Hunt had resigned willingly, Fontana wouldn’t have owed him any severance.” — Robert Fellner, Executive Director, Transparent California, 2021
The Federal Theory: RICO And The 50-Year Pattern
The legal significance of documenting five decades of corruption is not, primarily, historical. It is structural. The federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute 18 U.S.C. §1961–1968 was designed precisely for situations like this: not isolated corrupt acts, but a continuing enterprise in which corruption is the operating principle, actors rotate in and out, and the institution persists.
RICO requires proof of an enterprise affecting interstate commerce, with which defendants are associated, through a pattern of racketeering activity, meaning at least two predicate acts within ten years. The predicate acts documented in this investigation include: the Alliance Building Solutions kickback scheme (approximately 2017–2019); the illegal RDA asset transfers found by the State Controller (2011); the WOL/CityLink sole-source funding pipeline (2009 to present); and the ongoing affordable housing financial irregularities (2020 to present).
The historical documentation —the Ratelle casino credit lines, the Southridge infrastructure giveaway, the Nuaimi-era RDA misappropriations, and the Colonies bribery establishes the pattern. RICO does not require convicting Ratelle or Nuaimi for the predicate acts they committed. It requires demonstrating that the current actors are operating within a continuing criminal enterprise with a demonstrable historical pattern. That pattern is now fully documented.
Laws Broken: RICO -18 U.S.C. §1962(c) and (d)
Section 1962(c) prohibits conducting the affairs of an enterprise affecting interstate commerce through a pattern of racketeering activity. Section 1962(d) prohibits conspiring to violate §1962(c). Predicate acts may include mail fraud (18 U.S.C. §1341), wire fraud (§1343), bribery of public officials (§666 where federal funds are involved), money laundering (§1956), and obstruction of justice (§1503/§1512). The ten-year window for the pattern is satisfied within the Warren era alone.
Federal Program Bribery — 18 U.S.C. §666
Section 666 extends federal bribery and theft statutes to any state or local government that receives more than $10,000 in federal funding in one year, a threshold Fontana and San Bernardino County far exceed. Kickbacks paid to local officials in connection with contracts or grants at a federally funded agency constitute federal crimes, regardless of whether the specific contract involved federal dollars.
The Circle Completes: Fontana In 2026
In 2021, Phil Burum, brother of Jeff Burum, the developer charged and ultimately acquitted in the Colonies bribery prosecution, was installed as Fontana’s assistant city manager. In 2022, Jesse Armendarez — Acquanetta Warren’s political protégé, a member of Water of Life Community Church, and holds a stake in Sierra Realty, one of Fotnana’s premier real estate companies, which generates for him income of over $100,000 per year — was elected to the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors’ 2nd District seat: the same seat previously held by Paul Biane.
In 2025–2026, Diversified Pacific, Jeff Burum’s company, filed a 393-unit development application with the City of Fontana. Joe Armendarez, Jesse’s brother, chairs the Fontana Planning Commission. Phil Burum processes his brother’s company’s entitlement application. Joe Armendarez chairs the commission that approves it. Jesse Armendarez controls the county funding that surrounds it. The machine is fully operational.
From Jack Ratelle’s MGM Hotel credit line in 1973 to Phil Burum’s management of his brother’s development applications in 2026: fifty-three years of continuous institutional corruption. Three distinct eras, multiple mechanisms, one consistent principle: public money flows to those who pay the officials who control it. The machine works because it is patient. Because it replaces its actors while preserving its structure. Because the local oversight bodies have been captured at every level. Because the people who discovered the corruption were paid to stay silent. Because the prosecutions that reached court were defeated on evidentiary technicalities.
The only path to accountability that remains open runs through federal agencies: the FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Inspector General, and the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights and Public Integrity Section.