More than two months after the FBI’s July 28 serving of search warrants at the home and office of Alan Wapner and at least eight homes and/or offices of others politically linked to him directly or indirectly resulted in him withdrawing from the 2026 race for Ontario mayor, a substantial portion of his support network has moved to back Councilwoman Daisy Macias in her effort to unseat incumbent Mayor Paul Leon.
Anticipated and unexpected as well as consistent and contradictory alliances are emerging as the election season advances toward the November 3 election day. Among the noteworthy developments in the race are the fluctuating dynamics of Macias’s personal and professional life, tempered by her increasingly apparent personal ambition, which has involved acquiring and discarding political allies at a prodigious rate.
The City of Ontario, with its current population of 189,505, which makes it San Bernardino County’s third-most-populous city, asserted itself a generation ago as the Inland Empire’s most dynamic city financially, surpassing both Riverside and San Bernardino. With more than $1.225 billion running through all of its municipal funds annually, Ontario has a budget that is more than the combined spending schedules of two of the next-three-most financially successful cities in San Bernardino County: Rancho Cucamonga, Fontana and Victorville. Geographically advantaged by being positioned at or near the confluence of three freeways – the I-10, the I-15 and SR 60 – as well as having State Route 83, known as Euclid Avenue, running directly through it, Ontario has the further advantage of being, since 1996, host to Ontario Mills, the largest single-level shopping mall in Western North America and California’s largest outlet and value-retail destination, ranking number one in the state for shopping centers of that type. The Mills, as it is referred to locally, is not the city’s major source of revenue.
A concerted effort was made by Former City Manager Greg Devereaux, who occupied that post from 1997 until 2010, to convince a number of highly successful corporations operating throughout California to set up their corporate headquarters in Ontario. Consequently, Ontario was considered the point of sale for the goods sold by those companies throughout the state, entitling Ontario for a share of the sales tax levied on that retail activity.
Ontario is further distinguished as a result of Ontario International Airport lying within its boundaries.
In 1967 the City of Ontario and the City of Los Angeles entered into a joint powers agreement in which the political leadership in Ontario agreed to entrust to the larger city management and operation of Ontario Airport, which at that time hosted roughly 200,000 passengers per year flying on planes operated by a handful of airlines that occasionally docked there. Los Angeles, through its Department of Airports and airport-operating corporate division, Los Angeles World Airports, made investments in the facility, paving its sand flea-infested gravel parking lot, removing the existing northeast-to-southwest runway and replacing it with an east-to-west runway that was the longest of any civilian airport in Southern California.
Los Angeles and Los Angeles World Airports further modernized, restructured and gentrified the aerodrome’s basic facilities, such as its concourse, passenger walkway and tower, and then constructed two state-of-the art terminals. As early as 1969, flights out of Ontario dramatically increased and would continue to do so as the number of airlines willing to establish routes to and from Ontario increased. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s and 1990s, Los Angeles World Airports assiduously promoted Ontario International.
A major advantage that accrued to Ontario Airport as a consequence of the joint powers arrangement with the City of Los Angeles was that the Los Angeles Department of Airports and Los Angeles World Airports oversaw operations at Los Angeles International Airport and Van Nuys Airport, and were able to use the relationship they had with airlines and control over gate positions at Los Angeles International to induce airlines to establish routes into Ontario Airport. Moreover, Lost Angeles and Los Angeles World Airports were able to use their combined gravitas, bonding capability and expertise to finance a range of improvements at Ontario Airport that the City of Ontario would not have been able to accomplish on its own.
In 1985, after Los Angeles had met all the performance criteria laid out in the 1967 joint powers agreement, the Ontario City Council as it was then composed, over the objection of then-Mayor Robert Ellingwood, surrendered ownership of the airport, deeding it to the City of Los Angeles for no consideration, pursuant to what was considered a public benefit transfer that most local officials, with a few notable exceptions such as Ellingwood, believed would improve the airport and contribute to its further expansion.
For the next 22 years, ridership at the airport steadily increased, in 2007 reaching 7.2 million passengers, a 3,600 percent increase over what the use of the airport had been before Los Angeles took over management in 1967. Thereafter, the “Great Recession” and the long-running downturn in the national state and local economy heavily impacted the airline industry as much or even more than most other sectors of the economy.
Councilman Alan Wapner, seizing on the drop-off of the number of passengers making their way through the gates at the airport from the record 7,207,150 in 2007 to 4,812,578 in 2010, launched a vituperative attack on Los Angeles officials, most prominently Los Angeles World Airports Executive Director Gina Marie Lindsey, claiming, spuriously, that they were responsible for the decline in ridership at Ontario Airport, as part of a campaign aimed at prying control and ownership of Ontario International Airport away from Los Angeles. Wapner’s council colleagues, including Mayor Paul Leon, deferred to Wapner, allowing him to quarterback the relentless pursuit of having Ontario Airport returned to the control of Ontario. He persuaded the remainder of the council to create the Ontario International Airport Authority, the entity that was slated to eventually oversee airport operations once Los Angeles was out of the picture. He was able to convince the mayor and council to install him as the president of the airport authority’s board of commissioners, whereupon he pushed for the city to take legal action, resulting in the city retaining the Washington, D.C.-based law firm of Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton, which in 2013 sued Los Angeles and Los Angeles World Airports on Ontario’s behalf, alleging Los Angeles had mismanaged the airport and engaged in neglect and negligence, breach of contract and misfeasance. In 2015, Los Angeles settled the suit short of going to trial, agreeing to relinquish title, ownership, control and management of the airport to Ontario and finalize the transfer as of November 1, 2016. In exchange Ontario agreed to pay Los Angeles $60 million out of its various operating funds and another $30 million taken out of its reserves, while committing to make payments of $50 million over five years and $70 million in the final five years of the ten-year ownership transition along with absorbing $60 million of the bond debt Los Angeles had taken on to finance improvements at the airport.
Wapner was hailed as a hero and great Ontario patriot for having bravely taken on the megalopolis to the west and prevailing. His reward consisted of being given virtual autonomy, as the chairman of the Ontario International Airport Authority, to dominate the airport commission and run the airport in any way he saw fit.
In 2014, Curt Hagman was elected to the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors, representing San Bernardino County’s Fourth Supervisorial District, which includes Ontario. He was installed as one of the commissioners on the Ontario International Airport Authority’s board of directors shortly afterward. In a bold move, in 2015, Hagman offered Wapner a position on his county staff as his policy advisor. Wapner accepted the paying position, which did not require his daily presence in Hagman’s office. Thus, Wapner, as the Ontario International Airport Authority Board president, was Hagman’s superior and Hagman, as Wapner’s employer, was Wapner’s boss. The conflict of interest that was manifest in this situation was obvious to all who knew of it, but the power and authority that Hagman, as a county supervisor, and Wapner, as a councilman/airport authority commission president, wielded prevented any effective challenge to the arrangement.
As the most prolific political fundraiser among local elected officials in San Bernardino County history – extending to having deposited more than $3.8 million into his personal electioneering war chest throughout his now-32 years as a member of the city council – Wapner took full advantage of his domination of the airport authority board by treating the airport as a cash cow. Shamelessly, he arranged votes by the airport authority board to confer lucrative contracts on service, equipment and supply vendors, the owners and principals of which made hefty contributions to his campaign fund. Simultaneously, he used his status as the head decision-maker at the airport to ensure that franchises at and around the airport – for rental car agencies, taxi service, towing service, terminal concessions and the like – were awarded to companies whose owners, principals and employees supported him with cash donations to his electoral efforts. That was not the full extent of it. Wapner had the airport or airport authority retain his associates and political supporters as consultants, providing them with remuneration that typically approached a quarter of a million dollars per year. The work or service provided by those consultants was not spelled out with any exactitude beforehand or in the $20,000 monthly invoices submitted by the consultants, who quickly established reputations for reliably making hefty contributions to Wapner’s electioneering fund.
Paradoxically, the money pouring into Wapner’s campaign coffers rendered him politically invulnerable, endowing him with an electioneering fund that warded off any competitors for the council office he held or giving him an advantage over those intrepid or foolish enough to challenge him. These quid pro quos laid the groundwork for the FBI’s focus on Wapner that is now threatening his prospect of remaining in elected office.

In the 2022 Ontario municipal election, Leon, who had originally been elected mayor in 2005, was reelected mayor for the fifth time and Wapner, who had originally been elected as a councilman in 1994, was reelected for the seventh time. For approaching two decades, Wapner had stewed over having to play second fiddle in Ontario to Leon, whom he considered to be his physical, substantive, intellectual, social, moral and political inferior. At that point, Wapner resolved that he would seize the mayoral gavel from Leon in the 2026 election.
Without conveying his intentions beyond a carefully confined circle of his supporters, Wapner in 2024 took a step that was widely interpreted as a gesture of accommodation toward Leon but which was actually a calculated move to outmaneuver him.
When she was a child, Daisy Macias had grown close to Leon, as he was the pastor of Hope Chapel, the church where her mother was a parishioner. When Macias was a teenager, Leon had employed Macias as a secretary and executive assistant at Hope Chapel. She was widely seen as Leon’s protégé, whom he was grooming to one day enter into the political fray and become a city council member. Leon’s efforts in that regard included appointing her to the Ontario Parks and Recreation Commission and then to the Ontario Library Board. Thus, when Wapner encouraged Macias to change her declared domicile from the city’s newly formed Second Council District to the equally new Fourth Council District and to vie for the city council in what was Ontario’s first by-district election in 2024, most people perceived that as a gesture of alliance between the mayor and Wapner. Macias took out and returned her application to seek the Fourth District post in July 2024. Shortly after her candidacy was certified by the city clerk and the county registrar of voters, Wapner transferred $40,000, later augmented by another $10,150.27, from his campaign account to Macias’s political fund. Wapner then put the arm on a whole host of those who had donated money to him in the past to provide her with an additional $93,000.
In the November 5, 2024 General Election, Macias, receiving 3,610 of 9,915 votes cast or 36.41 percent, was elected to the council in a five-candidate race
Wapner kept his mayoral ambition under wraps, more or less, throughout the first five months of 2025. Simultaneously, he was undertaking a prodigious fundraising effort to equip himself to overpower Leon at the polls the following year.
As of January 1, 2025, Wapner had $288,330.42 in his campaign fund, which was designated for his reelection as councilman. In the course of 2025, he continued to collect money for his anticipated council run, but also created a second account to finance his run for mayor. Throughout 2025, he deposited $172,250 in donations into his council campaign fund. In the same 12 months, he deposited $125,800 into his mayoral campaign fund. Between January 1 and June 30 of this year, he practically ceased receiving money into his council campaign fund, though $2,950 did drift in from some donors who apparently had not yet gotten word that their checks should be made out to Wapner’s mayoral campaign. In the same six month period, $323,199.08 in donations were made to his mayoral fund. Wapner was at liberty to move money in his council campaign fund into his mayoral campaign fund.
In contrast, Leon, who started 2025 with $15,781 in his campaign account, collected $48,600 in campaign donations in all of 2025 and followed that up with $47,849 in donations received in the first six months of 2026.
Thus, in their respective campaigns for mayor through the middle of this year, Leon, the incumbent, had $112,230 with which to wage his reelection effort and Wapner had $912,529.08 with which to challenge him.
Leon had clearly been caught flatfooted when Wapner, in creating his mayoral campaign funding account at the midyear point 2025, went fully public with his intention to run for mayor. In American politics, incumbents normally enjoy a substantial advantage over challengers, with incumbent officeholders at the local level emerging victorious 89 percent of the time, which is slightly lower than the 94 percent win rate holders of national office register. Leon, however, in addition to his profound fundraising lag in comparison to Wapner, sustained a series of blows and setbacks that dimmed what would otherwise have seemed to be his excellent chance of being reelected mayor for the sixth straight time.
In rapid succession, the Ontario Police Association, representing the police department’s officers up to the rank of sergeant, the City of Ontario Police Management Group, representing the police department’s lieutenants and captains, the Ontario Firefighters Association, representing the city’s firemen, the Teamsters Union, which represents roughly 380 Ontario municipal employees such as library staff members, information center workers and others working in general or support roles in a multitude of city departments, and the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees Local 3061, which represents roughly 1,260 of the city’s employees in various general and operational job classifications throughout the city’s departments to include its custodians, equipment mechanics, facilities maintenance technicians, broadband technicians and a host of others, endorsed Wapner.
The Teamsters, American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees as well as the city’s three safety employee unions had all previously supported Leon in his previous runs for mayor, lending their names to multiple mailers and other electioneering materials he had sent out in 2022, 2018, 2014 and 2010, some of which were created to jointly support him along with Wapner and Councilman Jim Bowman, as all three ran in elections held in the years corresponding with California’s gubernatorial elections. Those unions in the past had made hefty monetary donations to Leon’s campaign fund as well. At that point however, union officials were expressing the belief that everyone – the citizens of Ontario, the Ontario business community, the employees at City Hall and at the City Yard, as well as the public safety employees working in the police and fire departments would fare far better under Wapner’s guidance than had been the case with Leon leading the city.
Further wounding Leon was Macias’s utter defection from his camp, which was heralded by her endorsement of Wapner and an accompanying breakaway from the mayor in terms of siding with Wapner on any issues of contention that manifested with regard to items that came before the city council. Indeed, detectable was Macias’s occasional show of hostility toward Leon during discussions with regard to selected matters where differences between the council’s members, which were previously mostly glossed over, surfaced.
As 2025 gave way to 2026, Wapner’s headlong pursuit of the Mayoralty continued. With each passing day the challenger continued to accumulate more than $7 in donations for every $1 collected by the incumbent, and Wapner’s political war chest opened up an $800,000 lead over that of Leon. Unmistakably, momentum was swinging behind Wapner and the ground beneath Leon’s feet was crumbling.
When the candidate filing period opened in July, Hagman’s son, Jonathan, filed to run in the city’s 3rd District. Another Wapner Ally, Stephanie Martinez, qualified her candidacy in the city’s 2nd District. A de facto slate had formed, pending merely the official exchange of mutual endorsements. The Wapner juggernaut appeared unstoppable, with his political machine’s ascendancy imminent. There was a growing prospect that when he was to be installed as mayor in December, Wapner would have the added bonus of unanimous support on the council, consisting of Macias, Hagman, Martinez and Councilwoman Debbie Dorst-Porada, who had been in office since 2008 and consistently over the years was aligned with Wapner.
On July 28, however, the pay-to-play ethos which predominated at Ontario City Hall from before and throughout the Leon Era and of and by which Wapner was the most industrious practitioner was overtaken events. On that day, the FBI together with other federal agencies, served search warrants at Wapner’s home; Curt Hagman’s home and county office; the home and office of Frank Lizerraga, Wapner’s attorney and a former member of the Ontario Planning Commission; the business office of Andy Sehrmelis, a major campaign contributor to Wapner, Hagman and Leon; the West Covina home and West Covina office of James Su, the chief executive of EDI Media Inc., a large Chinese-American multimedia company controlled by the government of the People’s Republic of China; and a mansion in the 600 block of North Canon Drive in Beverly Hills. The FBI simultaneously served subpoenas for the production of documents at Ontario City Hall and the executive officers of the airport authority, seeking specified documents.
Those within Wapner’s circle had the wind knocked out of them. Still, they considered Wapner their leader, and he instantaneously adjusted on the fly, taking advantage of the consideration that the FBI raids had taken place a full ten days before the August 7 filing deadline for the upcoming election. Stoically forsaking his vision of a new world order, Wapner withdrew as a mayoral candidate, simultaneously instructing Jonathan Hagman to rescind his candidacy for the 3rd District council post. Wapner then took out papers to run for Third District councilman. To fill the vacuum created by his exit from the mayoral contest, he instructed Macias to take out and file the full compliment of nomination papers in order to run for mayor. She obliged.
In an abbreviated span, the political landscape in Ontario had shifted by a good 120 degrees or more.
Wapner was no longer seeking to take absolute control of the city as he had taken absolute control of the airport. Instead, though he was not willing to tell even his closest allies, he found himself in a desperate bid to be reelected to the council seat he already held so that in negotiating a plea deal with federal prosecutors after his anticipated indictment, he will be able to trade resigning as an elected public official for a lighter sentence.
Virtually every one of the city’s 2,099 employees, who had been misled into believing by their union leadership that Wapner was a shoo-in for mayor and that collectively and individually they would be better off if they were to throw their support to the councilman challenging Leon, in the span of a few moments found themselves at odds with the highest ranking and most powerful decision-maker at City Hall, one who is in the uncomfortable position of overseeing a workforce that had shunned him.
The momentum had shifted from the presumption of Leon’s demise to the actual attenuation of Wapner’s hold on Ontario.
Wapner’s intent in substituting Macias’s mayoral candidacy for his own was to create an eventuality in which a) Leon would be displaced as a political force in Ontario and b) the mayor’s gavel would be wielded by a personage whose lack of political experience and sophistication would result in her being guided by his domineering lead, the second-best thing to Wapner himself being mayor.
Once Macias’s mayoral campaign was under way, however, it took on a life and direction of its own.
Completely unanticipated by Wapner was the role that would be assumed by an individual at odds with him and his ambition – James “Jimmy” Previti. Jimmy Previti is the son of James Previti, a third‑generation construction trade professional. Young Previti had obtained invaluable experience in the realm of residential development while working with his father’s company in the very late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. In 2002, at the age of 33, Jimmy struck out on his own, founding Frontier Homes, which in short order grew into one of the more active residential property development companies throughout the Inland Empire, particularly San Bernardino County. In 2004, the company was generating over $3 billion in home-building revenues through expansions into Arizona, Texas, and Georgia, with more than 8,000 homes delivered and found itself near the middle spot on the Builder 100. By the late 2010s, Frontier Homes had shifted its focus from single-family homes to industrial and multi-family developments, and in 2024 rebranded itself as The Previti Group, now specializing in multi-family, mixed-use, industrial, and commercial projects.
In 2010, or thereabouts, Previti first laid eyes on the then-19-year-old Macias, who was still working as an executive assistant to Leon. Instantaneously, Previti, who was 41 at the time, was smitten. On occasion after occasion, he sought to manipulate circumstances such that he would be at an event where she was present. Alternatively, he sought to find out what assignments she was engaged in on Leon’s behalf so that the he would find himself in her presence, giving him the opportunity to engage with her or otherwise have what would seem to be an organic interaction and exchange with her. Indeed, Previti’s efforts in this regard were so over-the-top, that those who could not help but see what he was attempting to do intervened, feeling it best that they inform him that she had a boyfriend to whom she was seriously committed and that his pursuit of a girl/woman two decades his junior was a tad unseemly. Macias eventually married that boyfriend. Previti himself married a woman somewhat younger than himself, and many of his friends and acquaintances who also knew or knew of Macias, remarked on the physical resemblance between the two women.
In the meantime, Macias’s standing and status evolved. After working for Leon at Hope Chapel, the church not too distant from Macias’s home where he is the pastor, she became an account executive with Old Republic Home Protection. Leon, who was intent on grooming her so she might eventually make her way onto the city council, appointed her to the Ontario Park and Recreation Commission and later to the Ontario Library Commission, on which panel she became the chairwoman. Subsequently, she left Old Republic to to move into an even better paying position as the community relations manager with National Community Renaissance and the Hope For Housing Foundation, two entities associated with developer Jeff Burum whose construction and development companies had associations with and sometimes partnered with Privetti’s Frontier Development and the Previti Group.
Over the years, Previti the younger demonstrated that he was not averse to utilizing his substantial wealth in support of charitable and humanitarian causes, and that he was as well willing to, as expected, make generous donations to the local and regional elected office-holders who compose the top echelon of the political establishment. As some of his developmental efforts entailed work in Ontario, which required dealing with the city council and planning commission – the entities overseeing land use decisions there – Previti’s largesse extended to Leon, whom Privetti supported in his run for the California Senate in a special election held in 2013, as well as Councilwoman Debbie Dorst Porada, City Clerk Sheila Mautz and Treasurer Jim Milhiser.
In addition Previti joined with others in supporting Wapner, donating a token $1,000 to his Wapner for City Council fund on February 27, 2019, something over three months after Wapner was reelected to the city council for the sixth time. A little more than two years later, on April 6, 2021, Previti provided the Wapner for City Council fund with $2,500 preparatory for Wapner’s 2022 reelection campaign. Something over ten months later, on February 24, 2022, Previti peeled off another $2,500 and gave it to the Wapner for City Council campaign to further ensure Wapner’s continuing incumbency.
Despite Previti’s participation in supporting the various politicians in Ontario, he found offensive, sources close to him report, Wapner’s aggressive fundraising efforts in which the councilman sought to leave the impression that showing adequate generosity to him and his electioneering efforts was de rigueur for those who wanted to see their projects within the city’s boundaries proceed. So resentful was Previti of the manner in which Wapner presumed that the support of everyone with a project pending approval at City Hall would be forthcoming that in the lead up to the 2024 and the 2026 election cycles, he had burnished his reputation as one of the few major figures in the development industry who was determined to not contribute to Wapner’s political war chest or those of others holding office in Ontario.
The Sentinel is informed that before he became distracted with other demands on his time, attention and intensity, Previti resolved to take some action – what was characterized as “striking a blow” – against the political status quo in Ontario. That status quo consisted of the automatic acceptance of Wapner’s sway over the governmental decision-making process and the requirement that those subject to that control had to pay homage to the councilman in the form of political contributions.
Preparatory toward that contemplated action to break Wapner’s corrupt hold on City Hall, Previti formed the Ontario Committee on Ethics and, on January 22, 2025, endowed it with a quarter of a million dollars transferred out of another entity Previti had created, IE Citizens for Government LLC.
Over a good portion of the rest of 2025, Previti found himself abstracted into the effort to put a deal acceptable to the City of Rancho Cucamonga’s planning division, the Rancho Cucamonga Planning Commission and ultimately the Rancho Cucamonga City Council for the development of 1,253 acres of “surplus” flood control property in northeastern Rancho Cucamonga that he had purchased from the County of San Bernardino County for $93 million in November 2024. Ultimately, Previti was given clearance to construct 2,900 single family detached and attached units on 790 of those acres and another 100 single family detached units on homes in two confined “rural zones” of the remaining acreage, for a total of 3,000 units within a larger 4,085-acre area of former unincorporated county land that had been annexed into Rancho Cucamonga under guidelines codified into what is known as the Etiwanda Heights Neighborhood and Conservation Plan.
Only Previti himself knows the degree to which Macias had ceased to be a fixation within his consciousness over the decade to a dozen years before she re-emerged as a significant public figure in San Bernardino County during her successful 2024 run for the Ontario City Council or how much or how little time he devoted to thinking of her during the year and a half after she was installed a council member in December 2024.
What is known is that when Wapner slipped from his pony this summer after he reached for the brass ring while riding the Ontario political merry-go-round and Macias mounted the mayoral challenger’s steed, she had come to loom large once again in Previti’s perspective on the world.
The Sentinel is told that Previti had all but forgotten about the $250,000 in the Ontario Committee on Ethics account just waiting to be brought to bear in some political race or races. With Macias’s entrance into the mayoral contest, opening before him was an opportunity to gallantly swoop in and play a dynamic and crucial role in promoting her candidacy, building her up into a formidable contender, while simultaneously tearing Leon down, completing the task which Wapner has now shrunk from. With that came the added bonus of actuating the foundation of a relationship he had been persuaded from pursuing some fourteen years ago.
There were yet practical considerations Previti had to deal with. One of those was that taking on the role of a major, or the major, influencer in the 2026 Ontario municipal race could have some undesirable consequences on Previti’s future activity and business prospects in the City of Ontario if the candidate or candidate’s he backed failed to gain victory on election day.
Previti had throughout his career as a major developmental force, with a handful of notable exceptions, managed to maintain a relatively cordial or positive relationship with the elected decision-makers in the various jurisdictions where his father’s company and then his own carried out business. Generally speaking, where he had developed differences with a few office-holders, his efforts in backing a political insurrection against them had succeeded, blasting them out of office, which resulted in no difficulties for him down road and perhaps even advanced him, as the newcomers who had replaced the politicians he had been at odds with were grateful for the assistance he had provided them.
Nevertheless, taking on Leon, who had first joined the city council in 1998 and who has now been mayor for more than two decades, is something else, again. Moreover, Previti’s distaste for Wapner has not abated. In fact, leaving whatever feeling he has toward Macias out of the equation, his personal antipathy toward Wapner was far greater than any feeling he had toward Leon, one way or the other. If he was going to throw himself into the very center of the political fray in Ontario, Previti was not in favor of doing so in any sort of half-measured way. He was going to challenge the two-headed Ontario political establishment, which included both Leon, who has held office for 28 consecutive years, and Wapner, who has been on the council just shy of 32 years. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dictum that “If you strike the king, you must kill the king” seemed entirely applicable to the situation.
Since his election in 1994, Wapner has logged seven straight re-electoral victories, Despite his recent legal challenges, he yet has more than half of a million dollars to apply into his election effort in the 3rd District, way beyond what any of the three candidates competing against him have available to them. Leon has vied successfully for election five times since his original election as mayor. Even assuming Macias can match or outmatch him dollar-for-dollar in the fundraising department, she will need to overcome the power of his incumbency, name recognition and the knowledge both he and his electioneering team have accumulated over the 28 years he has been in office with regard to how to wage a political campaign.
If both Leon and Wapner are vanquished in November, by having led the charge, Previti stands to become the most influential icon of the Ontario business community. He had to seriously consider, though, what will come about if he were to get involved in a major way and at the conclusion of the election just one of the two incumbents running this year remain in office. In such a case, Previti recognized, complications could well ensue. Worse yet, if he shoots high and misses both targets, leaving Leon in place as mayor and Wapner on the council as the 3rd District councilman, he would face potentially dire consequences. Politics being what it is in America as a whole, in California and particularly in San Bernardino County, the price Previti would need to pay for having thrown the dice and having them come up snake eyes could, given the extent of his holdings and investments, run into the range of millions or even tens of millions of dollars, based on project approvals that are denied or delayed as well as the imposition of more burdensome infrastructure requirements or higher development impact fees.
A hidden factor in Previti’s evolution into Ontario’s current political prime mover consists of City Manager Scott Ochoa’s determination to utilize to his own advantage the dismantling of the political order that was precipitated by the FBI raids at Wapner’s home and office and those of his attorney and a handful of his associates and supporters, which had followed Wapner’s exposure of how shallow, shaky and easily attenuated Leon’s hold on the city is. Ochoa has been Ontario’s city manager since 2017, and was the city manager of Glendale for five years prior to that and the Monrovia city manager from 2004 to 2012. For the 22 years Ochoa has been a top municipal administrator, he has abided by the rules, living into, or at least trying to live into, the classic role of a city manager, allowing each of the city councils for which he worked to set policy while staying within his lane as a senior governmental staffer, running the three cities by riding herd over the department heads in each of the jurisdictions as the combination chief executive officer/chief operating officer. In Ontario, with the strong-willed Wapner’s presence on the council and the often politically-outmuscled Leon in the role of mayor, Ochoa found the model of municipal governance compromised somewhat, as Wapner had succeeded in getting several individuals who were so-called “members of his team” or his political supporters installed into influential consultancies with the city. This allowed Wapner to unilaterally, without agendizing for public discussions and votes of the city council the effectuation of policies and actions that achieved his personal goals, which often entailed benefiting any of a number of his political supporters and associates. From the outset of Ochoa’s tenure as city manager, Leon – for a variety of reasons ranging from not having the requisite number of votes to hold Wapner in check to not having having the stomach for confrontation to not having the fortitude to engage in a battle royale between his forces and Wapner’s forces when the outcome was uncertain to fearing that an exposure of Wapner’s misdeeds and the circumstances in which they were occurring would reflect poorly on the city, himself and his administration – was unwilling to prevent Wapner from having his way. This put Ochoa in the position of overseeing a municipal operation in which highly inappropriate, improper and even illegal activity was ongoing, the exposure of which could damage his reputation and destroy his legacy. Moreover, the city’s and airport authority’s employment of so many consultants, some of whom were engaging in what were represented as “management roles,” over which he, as city manager, had no input, control or say whatsoever, was personally insulting.
The FBI investigation of Wapner and the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s preparation of a criminal case against the councilman offered Ochoa an uncommon, indeed a virtually once-in-a-lifetime, opportunity to nudge the domineering city councilman over the precipice. The situation surrounding Leon in which the city’s employee unions had turned on him in favor of Wapner, leaving the mayor disconnected from what were arguably the most important elements of the coalition of interests that had kept him in the city’s top political post for two decades and in public office for heading toward three decades, left Leon vulnerable as well, Ochoa perceived. The chance to get out from underneath a mayor and city council more interested in their own political perpetuation was one that was for Ochoa intensely inviting.
At the age of 53, his time remaining as city manager is limited. At most, he and others calculate, he will remain in place in Ontario for another seven years, retiring and cashing out with an exceedingly comfortable annual pension, one no less than the $392,667 in yearly salary he is currently provided with and more likely in the neighborhood of $425,000. The time is at hand, he understood at once when the FBI began carrying out its raids on July 26, to secure his legacy as having been part of the internal movement at Ontario City Hall to shake off the corrupt and/or indolent political leadership the city has been cursed with for three decades. Doing so was to involve breaking a cardinal rule that applies to those in the municipal management profession: becoming personally involved in the politics that go into the citizenry choosing its elected leadership.
Somewhat ironically, just as Leon had originally and Wapner had more recently, Ochoa saw political potential in Macias. For each of the three men, of course, the potential was to be utilized for different purposes. Leon had seen Macias for perhaps becoming a part of his ruling coalition to ace out Wapner. Wapner had commandeered Macias from Leon to become part of the coalition that would allow him to rule the city without challenge. To Ochoa, what Macias represented was an already elected public officeholder who could advance to the mayoralty, one whose naïveté, lack of political sophistication, relative inexperience with regard to the function and operation of government, and history of dependence on men who have assumed the role of her mentor while she fulfilled the role of a willing protégé would leave her dependent on him for guidance once she advanced to the post of mayor, the city manager calculated. In this way, Ochoa might be able to undo at least some of the depredations the City of Ontario has been subject to and which he as city manager had either been, essentially, forced to carry out or tolerate while others perpetrated them during his more than eight years as city manager.
With caution, discretion, stealth, secrecy, subtlety and confidentiality as the watchwords, Ochoa began sending backchannel messages relating to Macias’s candidacy to places where they might have what was for him the desired results.
To Previti, the signal that the Ontario city manager was favorably disposed toward Macias’s political ascendancy was interpreted to mean that he could support her without having to risk having to sustain a governmental grudge against him that would transform the properties in the city he has invested in into undevelopable liabilities.
There are inherent problems with Macias’s candidacy. One of those was that, unlike the vast majority of successful electoral efforts, it sprang into life at the last minute, without being planned months in advance. Another issue is that Macias is proceeding without a campaign manager and/or campaign consultants. In her maiden run for the city council two years ago, Macias similarly did not have a campaign manager. Nor did she hire paid consultants. Nevertheless, Wapner, who at that point had conducted eight successful council campaigns of his own, a successful campaign for the school board before that and had advised multiple other candidates in their runs for office, was in her corner. Additionally, none of her opponents in 2024 were incumbents or experienced fundraisers or campaigners. Wapner had taken up the slack for her in providing her with money from his own political war chest and reaching out to others with deep pockets to come across with money to support her.
Wapner having done much or perhaps even all of the heavy lifting in 2024 taken together with her convincing victory that year appears to have left Macias without a true understanding of what a political campaign actually entails or appreciation of its complexity. At the same time, she appears to have come away with an impression of her inevitable electability. Her appointments to both the parks and recreation commission and the library board had required no campaigning on her part, but were rather a function of Leon’s designs for her to grow into a future council ally. Wapner’s promotion of her in 2024 did not afford her the opportunity of learning the nuts and bolts of campaigning or how to assemble a political machine, let alone maintain one and hold it together. In July of this year, her decision to run for mayor was made on the fly, based upon the opening that came about when Wapner withdrew from the race and amid assurances that, as in 2024, the financing would be taken care of for her.
The stark reality is that in Ontario a campaign for mayor is four times as demanding as a campaign for city council. The suggestion in early August as Wapner was shifting gears from his aborted mayoral run to simply remaining on the city council and simultaneously encouraging Macias to take his place in challenging Leon was that he would be willing to devote a sizable amount of the money available in his political war chest to backing Macias in her effort to advance up the political hierarchy.
Macias took Wapner at his word and he was indeed ready to do what he could. In 2025, Wapner had outhustled Leon by securing a place on a multitude of slate mailers intended to appeal to Democratic, Republican and independent voters that were to be sent out to the city’s voters during the current election season, ensuring that on those materials the recommendation would be that the voters receiving them vote for him rather than Leon. With his having dropped out of the mayor’s race, however, he approached the various companies publishing and mailing those materials and arranged for them to switch the recommendation in the mayor’s race to Macias and to include a recommendation that in Ontario’s 3rd District, where he is now the candidate, that he be featured as the candidate the voters should support and that on the same mailers the recommended candidate in the 2nd District be Stephanie Martinez, another of his allies.
In the case of Macias, this entailed Wapner, on the mailers sent by a single company to Ontario’s high-propensity Democrat, Republican and independent voters, spending $37,265.32 to have her name included. In the case of Martinez, Wapner shelled out $13,757.04 to cover the cost of including her name on the slate mailer sent to Ontario’s voters most likely to vote.
Wapner was in the course of arranging to have Long Beach-based Creative Print Consulting, Laguna Niguel-based Landslide Communications and Rancho Cucamonga-based The Arely Group carry out work on Macias’s campaign. He was ready to reimburse the Sacramento-based organization that produces the COPS Voter Guide, which purports to identify the candidates endorsed by police officers throughout the state in its slate mailers, for including Macias among the candidates recommended to voters on that piece of political literature. The Sentinel has learned that Wapner was ready to peel off $55,000 as an initial cash contribution to the Macias campaign, potentially to be followed by more money before the November 3 balloting.
In early September, Macias held a fundraiser at which Wapner and his wife, Judy, were in attendance. Previti arrived after the event had begun. Previti, who at that point was on the brink of making a major funding commitment to the Macias campaign, was perturbed by Wapner’s presence and his prominence as one of the most important and noteworthy of those participating. At the earliest opportunity, the developer informed Macias that he did not look favorably upon Wapner’s involvement in her campaign. Without attempting to prevent Wapner from overhearing what he was conveying to Macias, Previti told her that if she wanted his support, she would need to separate herself from the councilman. At that point, according to someone who was in attendance, “Alan went ballistic. He just lost it.”
Wapner told Macias that he had already purchased for her, in the form of a $37,000-plus in-kind contribution, a place on three slate mailers that were to be sent to Democrats, Republicans and independents endorsing her in the mayoral contest and that it was too late to rescind that commitment. Macias, recognizing that Previti stood prepared to come through with three to four to five times the support in monetary terms that Wapner was offering, expressed her thanks for the assistance her council colleague had provided up to that point but informed him she intended to take control of her campaign going forward. At that point, an entirely unexpected schism between Wapner and Macias opened.
On October 6, Macias told the Sentinel with regard to the $37,265.32 in-kind donation Wapner had made to her in the form of purchasing space for her in the slate mailers being sent to Democratic, Republican and independent voters that she “…never authorized it …never coordinated it …never approved it.” Macias said she and her campaign “.didn’t even know Alan was doing it. Alan acted on his own.”
After Macias spurned Wapner and was no longer taking his calls or meeting with him in compliance with Previti’s request, Macias told the Sentinel, she and her campaign stiff-armed Wapner.
“Alan has repeatedly been told,” Macias stated in an email to the Sentinel, that both she and her campaign “do not want his involvement, do not want his assistance and want him to stop attempting to make contact.”
At one point, Macias said, Wapner showed up at her private residence attempting to contact her.
She did not say so explicitly, but implied that when he showed up at her door she had ducked out without meeting him.
Having opted to accept the support Previti was offering her through the Ontario Committee on Ethics and IE Citizens for Government LLC, Macias, on one level at least, improved her chances in the mayoral contest. Of note, however, is that Previti, functioning through his various entities, including the Ontario Committee on Ethics and IE Citizens for Government LLC, has confined himself to supporting various candidates, including Macias, through an independent expenditure committee or political action committee. Under California law, in particular the California Election Code, independent expenditure committees must provide support to a candidate or cause without coordinating with and acting independently of the campaigns of the candidates or the measures they are assisting. Thus, Previti/the Ontario Committee on Ethics/IE Citizens for Government LLC can send mailers or electioneering materials to Ontario’s voters that support Macias or, in the alternative, attack Leon or the other candidate in the mayor’s race, Kevin Kizzee, but cannot communicate with Macias or her campaign before and while doing so or assist the Macias campaign in any way, including providing funding to it directly. As a consequence, Macias’s campaign is left to its own devices in carrying out the traditional direct promotion of her candidacy.
The campaign reporting documents, known as California Form 460s, filed by the Macias campaign so far this year, like the campaign documents filed in conjunction with her 2024 city council run, do not reflect that she has hired or is in any way employing a campaign consultant or consultants. In 2024, Wapner, in what was essentially a voluntary capacity, provided her with guidance on how to conduct her campaign, which proved sufficient to get her elected. Without being credited as such, Wapner was Macias’s campaign manager two years ago. In the immediate aftermath of her taking nomination papers out in July of this year, completing them and filing them in early August, it appeared that Wapner, with respect to Macias’s now-ongoing mayoral campaign, was going to replicate the role he played in her successful 2024 council campaign. Previti’s insistence, however, that she cut herself off from Wapner has left Macias’s mayoral electoral effort, at best, in disarray.
The Sentinel is reliably informed by professionals specializing in managing and directing political campaigns that while it falls within the realm of possibility that a relative political newcomer such as Macias could conceivably prevail over an established long-term incumbent with substantial name recognition such as Leon, doing so in a city such as Ontario, with a population of roughly 190,000 would require that the challenger, or forces in support of the challenger, spend, and spend judiciously, in the neighborhood of $600,000.
There are other considerations at play. One of those is the political operative Previti is working with, Jim Erwin. Erwin’s introduction and orientation to elective politics came during his time as the president of the Safety Officers Benefit Association, the union representing, primarily, the deputies with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. As such, Erwin cut his political teeth supporting candidates that were more or less establishment figures falling within the mainstream who were predominantly incumbents. In the time since he left the sheriff’s deputies’ union, Erwin has become even more heavily involved in political campaign management or augmentation than he was previously and has, for the most part, remained involved in the campaigns of well-financed establishment figures who are incumbents, with exceptions such as the 2018 election when he worked on behalf of then-District Attorney Mike Ramos’s challenger, Jason Anderson, proving the rule. Erwin’s specialty consists of attack ads, so-called hit pieces, which dwell on negative aspects or negative characterizations, of the opponents of the politicians he is working on behalf, or in independent support, of. While Erwin has a decent track record, with the candidates he has been in favor of winning more than they lose, they have in virtually every case had substantial fundraising advantages over their opponents and could, far more than not, claim having a competent core of managers and consultants. Already, Leon has been hit with three negative mailers. Those have not been followed up with an adequate number of conventional ads to drive the voters to Macias, rather than Kizzee, as the alternative.
In this way, Macias, managing her own campaign, finds herself in over her head.
Multiple questions are raised by the crossovers taking place.
Former Councilman Ruben Valencia, who was in office for two terms from 2016 until 2024, was gerrymandered out of office in 2024 after Leon, Wapner, Bowman and Councilwoman Debbie Dorst-Porada, working together, in 2021 drew up a city council district map in anticipation of what was then the future changeover from at-large city council elections to district elections, and scheduled the elections for those districts in a way that left Valencia with no place to run when his second term ended. Valencia crossed swords with Wapner during the 2014 election and the two grew into implacable rivals. In 2022, Valencia challenged Leon for mayor, losing in spectacular fashion. This year, Valencia is seeking election to the city council in the newly-formed 2nd District. He is being supported by Leon, as well as by Dorst-Porada and Bowman, both of whom were once staunch Wapner allies. Valencia is supporting Leon.
Bowman is set to leave the council in December. He along with Dorst-Porada are supporting Leon in the mayor’s race against Macias, and were supporting Leon against Wapner, despite having previously sided with Wapner for over a dozen years virtually every time an issue of substance divided Wapner and Leon on in the past.
After the FBI raids, when Leon, Dorst-Porada and Bowman closed ranks to remove Wapner from his committee and adjunct governmental body and panel posts such as member/president of the Ontario International Airport Authority Board of Commissioners, board member on the San Bernardino County Transportation Commission and board member president of the Omnitrans Board of Directors, all of which were done over Wapner’s and Macias’s dissenting votes, Ochoa recognized the power vacuum that was being created and its larger implication. It is the perception of a good number of those in positions to observe the goings-on at City Hall that Ochoa moved to encourage Macias to take Wapner up on his suggestion that she run for mayor. Some order of backroom deal was entered into at that point, those in the inner sanctum say, one which was aimed at removing both Wapner and Leon.
“Scott obviously believes he has a better shot at controlling the entire situation at City Hall with Daisy in charge of the city council than with either Alan or Paul,” one of those insiders told the Sentinel.
Thereafter, those in position to be oriented to what is going on at City Hall could recognize that Ochoa was seeking to put his thumb on the scale, creating circumstances in which Macias would be able to prevail in November. They have also said they believe Ochoa is realistic enough to understand that Wapner will prevail in the 3rd District council race but that the situation will resolve itself after the election when the U.S. Attorney’s Office at last moves forward with regard to the matter that led to the July 26 FBI raids.
For some, the personal situation involving Macias and Previti is equally or more interesting – and may be indistinguishable from – the political implication of the contact between them that went dormant for more than a dozen years.
What everyone missed, including Leon and Wapner, it is now being whispered, is the political ambition that Macias embodies. In 2012 or thereabouts, those concerned about Macias pushed Previti to abandon whatever designs he had on her so she could live out the life she chose, and fulfill her relationship with the man she would eventually marry. Now, however, after Macias stepped over Leon to form what was for her a more beneficial relationship with Wapner and after she threw Wapner over to form what she yet has hopes will be a more advantageous relationship with Previti, the speculation is over what will come next. Some have projected that both Macias and Previti are headed toward getting what they want. For Macias, that would be a billionaire husband who can bankroll her political advancement to the next level, then the level after that and then the level beyond that, with no clear limit in mind – county supervisor, California Assembly member or State Senator, congresswoman or even governor. For Previti, that would consist of being married to Macias.
That would mean that Macias and her husband are headed, eventually, to divorce court and that they will be followed there by Previti and his wife.
That is not the case, a party heavily involved in Ontario politics told the Sentinel.
“He [Previti] found her [Macias] attractive, sure,” he said. “but that was the infatuation of a younger man. She’s lost her looks. His wife is way more attractive than she is at this point. He’s putting some money into this election of hers, but that is just because he can, maybe for old time’s sake or to show off. A quarter of million dollars is like sofa change to him. He’s supported candidates before and in two years, he’ll be backing someone else.”