By Mark Gutglueck
The homes and offices of Ontario Councilman and mayoral candidate Alan Wapner and Fourth District San Bernardino County Supervisor Curt Hagman were the targets of raids by the FBI, the Sentinel has learned.
Both politicians have long been the focus of investigations into pay-to-play politics within the Inland Empire community where they serve as elected officials, as well as their efforts on behalf of foreign governments, corporations and business interests, including the secreting of what was alleged to be bribe money into the country.
The raids relating to Wapner and Hagman took place inside and outside San Bernardino County, where the duo are both career politicians based in the Fourth Supervisorial District, the most geographically compact and densely populated of the county’s five subjurisdictions. San Bernardino County’s Fourth District includes the entirety of the cities of Chino Hills, Chino, Montclair and Ontario, the southern portion of Upland and the unincorporated communities of as well as the Carbon Canyon, Velano, Yorba, West End, Prado, Narod, Ballou, Racimo and Guasti. Hagman’s career as a politician began with his election to the city council and later ascension to mayor, followed by his election the California Assembly, his acceding to the position of chairman of the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee, and his election as Fourth District San Bernardino County Supervisor and reelection to that post three time. Wapner, who was employed as a police officer, detective and later a sergeant with the Ontario Police Department, began his political career as a member of the Ontario-Montclair School District Board and was first elected to the Ontario City Council in 1994, having been reelected to that post seven times. He is currently vying for Ontario mayor.
In carrying out the raids, FBI agents were seeking evidence and documentation pertaining to quid pro quos – bribes or kickbacks – provided to Wapner and Hagman by individuals, business entities, business owners and principals in businesses which had applications for project approval with the city or the county, which were competing for contracts with the city or county or which were seeking franchises granted by the city or county that ultimately were subject to approval by the Ontario City Council or the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors.
In addition, federal agents were seeking instruments or documents relating to Wapner’s and Hagman’s overseas banking activity, most particularly involving financial institutions in the People’s Republic of China, and their ability to access those accounts or transfer money, as well as account codes, or platform access and management tools for cryptocurrency exchanges.
Wapner and Hagman have been on the FBI’s radar for over a decade, as dozens of their constituents have noted irregularities and improprieties in their operations, and reports of one or the other purchasing the silence of other officials have abounded for years and those who have gone to both state and federal authorities with information or complaints have expressed dismay and frustration at the glacial pace of law enforcement’s and political regulatory agencies’ investigations into that alleged wrongdoing.
Relatively early on, federal investigators took note of how Hagman moved, shortly after he assumed the position of county supervisor, to hire Wapner as a member of his staff. This reflected a similar pattern evinced by Wapner in which he has used the authority vested in him as an elected official to hire individuals known or believed to be in possession of information that is potentially damaging to Wapner on either a personal, legal or political level, as part of what appears to be an effort to keep Wapner in power.
Over the years, federal investigators accumulated what well-placed sources have told the Sentinel was sufficient information to justify arresting and charging both Wapner and Hagman with criminal acts relating to the misuse of their official governmental positions. The U.S. Attorney’s Office held off on that action, it was said, as investigators were attempting to widen the investigative net and cinch up information relating to a number of others involved with them in the activity under investigation. According to those sources, because the activity Wapner and Hagman were engaged in was ongoing, delaying the filing of charges against either of them had no statute of limitations implication.
There are a number of parallels in the political careers of Alan Wapner and Curt Hagman. Hagman, a UCLA graduate, is nine years Wapner’s junior. Wapner, a USC alumnus, was first elected to the Ontario City Council in 1994. Ten years later, in 2004, Hagman was first elected to the Chino Hills City Council. In 2008, Hagman was elevated by his council colleagues to the appointed position of mayor. It was in the capacity of Chino Hills mayor that Hagman campaigned for and won a position in the California Assembly. He was subsequently reelected to the Assembly in 2010 and 2012.
In 2011, Wapner embarked on an effort to wrest Ontario Airport from the grip of the City of Los Angeles.
In 1967, when the annual number of passengers passing through the airport’s gates stood at 200,000, the cities of Ontario and Los Angeles had entered into a joint powers agreement, whereby the larger metropolis was to use the expertise and personnel at its command by virtue of its ownership and operation of Los Angeles International Airport to run Ontario Airport, in so doing using its relationship with scores of national and international airlines to improve the smaller airport and induce more than just the handful of airlines then willing to fly into and out of Ontario to establish operations there. In 1985, after Los Angeles had succeeded in meeting all of the criteria laid out in the joint powers agreement, Ontario deeded the airport to Los Angeles, which continued with defraying operational costs at the airport and financed or arranged financing on continued modernization of the facility, including constructing what was the largest civilian runway in California, a state-of-the-art concourse and two ultra-modern terminals.
Ridership at Ontario Airport had peaked in 2007 at 7.2 million, but declined steeply as a consequence of the economic downturn precipitated by the subprime mortgage crisis that hit the nation, state and local region, resulting in what was referred to as “the Great Recession.” Utilizing the drop-off in the number of passengers experienced by the airline industry in general as a pretext while arguing that Los Angeles officials were purposely mismanaging Ontario Airport to increase ridership at Los Angeles International, Wapner aggressively demanded that Los Angeles return Ontario Airport to Ontario. His tactics including a highly personal attack on Gina Marie Lindsey, the executive director at Los Angeles World Airports, the corporate entity that Los Angeles used to oversee Los Angeles International Airport, Ontario Airport and Van Nuys Airport. While accusing Lindsey of running Ontario Airport into the ground, Wapner in 2012 convinced Ontario Mayor Paul Leon and his other council colleagues to create the Ontario International Airport Authority, which was intended to step into the role of operating and managing the airport once Los Angeles and Los Angeles World Airports were out of the picture.
Wapner succeeded in being designated as the president/chairman of the board of directors for the Ontario international Airport Authority, which had as two of its five other board members Wapner’s council colleague and political ally, James Bowman, as well as the county’s then-Fourth District supervisor, Gary Ovitt, who had previously been Ontario mayor. Wapner pushed the city toward filing suit against Los Angeles in an effort to recover the airport, and the city retained the law firm of Sheppard, Richter, Mullen, and Hampton to do so.
In pursuing that end, Wapner took a scorched-earth approach in which there appeared to be no regard for the impact the hostile tactics he was employing would have in the long run, nor what bridges were being burned with elected and other officials in Los Angeles, at least some of whom would move into powerful positions in state and federal government. Moreover, Wapner did not take into consideration that Los Angeles, which had control over gate position at Los Angeles International Airport and had strong ties and influence with the more than 90 airlines that fly into and out of that facility, was in a position to, on the positive side, offer airline executives with airlines who had no presence in Ontario inducements or incentives to schedule landings into or flights from there or, from a negative perspective, influence airlines already established in Ontario to discontinue their operations there. A consensus was growing among local, county and regional officials that Wapner was being too aggressive and gratuitously offensive, such that his bull in a China shop approach was wreaking more harm than the city or nearby communities stood to gain by returning the airport to local control. Wapner’s determination to have Ontario, which simply lacked the gravitas and leverage of the megalopolis 37 miles to the west, intimidate Los Angeles into capitulation would not only not work, most thought, but create an institutional enmity where none had existed before and which would have no salutary outcome.
To Hagman, as the highest-ranking local elected state official with ties to the Inland Empire’s business community and financial institutions, fell the assignment of attempting to serve as a moderating influence on Wapner, He was designated to approach the councilman and seek to convince him that at the very least he should tone down his vituperative rhetoric with regard to Los Angeles officials and dispense with the strategy of outright seizing the airport in favor of more amicable tack that would be less likely to antagonize some or all of those who yet had say not only in how the airport was being run but were in a position to determine how spiritedly Los Angeles should fight in maintaining its hold on Ontario Airport and the terms by which it was to be relinquished to the municipal jurisdiction in which it is located.
A small circle of those involved in government knew that Paul Leon, Ontario’s mayor, had, as a child, lived in the same East Los Angeles neighborhood as then-Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Those people openly mused, among themselves, as to whether Leon would be able to work out a better deal by applying honey with his childhood chum than Wapner was trying achieve by dousing the situation with vinegar.
At least some federal investigators have come to recognize that it was the contact Hagman was making with Wapner in the 2012 and 2013 timeframe with the intent of getting the councilman to cool his jets and dispense with his solipsistic, indeed delusional, stance as David seeking to slay Goliath in favor of a more reasonable avenue of negotiation and compromise with Los Angeles that gave rise to the collusion between Wapner and Hagman that is at the heart of the matter now being investigated and which is the focus of the search warrants served today.
Indeed, if it was Hagman’s intention to reason with Wapner and convince him that he was being overzealous in his demands that Los Angeles surrender control of the airport to Ontario and San Bernardino County, the outcome was virtually the opposite. Rather than Hagman convincing Wapner that he should alter his course, it was Wapner who persuaded Hagman to deviate from the path he was on and join him, and that Ontario seizing control of the airport was in their mutual benefit.
Under the term limits then in place for members of the California Legislature, Hagman was required to leave the Assembly at the end of his third term, which was to come to a close in December of 2014, a month after the November 2014 election. Logic dictated that Hagman, by that point a committed career politician, next move to the California State Senate. That was complicated by the consideration that Senate District 29, which encompassed Chino Hills where Hagman then resided, was at that point represented by Bob Huff, like Hagman a Republican. Huff had first been elected to the California State Senate in 2008, the same year Hagmna had been elected to the Assembly. California state senators are elected to four-year terms, and under the term limit rules then in effect, state senators were restricted to two terms. Thus, Huff, who was reelected in 2012, was set to remain as the senator representing District 29 until December 2016. This meant that Hagman, as the heir apparent to Huff, would need to wait for two years after leaving the Assembly before stepping back into political office, this time as the state senator representing Chino Hills along with Diamond Bar, Walnut, Yorba Linda, Brea, La Habra, Placencia, Fullerton, Anaheim and Cypress. Hagman was ready to so, as the district was a safe one for a Republican, his experience in the Assembly prepared him to make a transition into California’s upper legislative house, he had represented a large swath of the 29th Senate District as the assemblyman representing Assembly District 55 and he was positioned as an incumbent assemblyman in the 2012-to-2014 timeframe to raise a substantial amount of money for his future political endeavors, not to mention he could likely count on Huff’s endorsement.
After meeting with Wapner several times, however, ostensibly as part of the effort to broker a reasonable resolution to the dispute between Ontario and Los Angeles over Ontario Airport, Hagman came away with the idea that Ontario should charge forward with obtaining the airport, the sooner the better, and that he should himself get in on the action. Rather than progress up the political evolutionary chain to state senator in 2016, Hagman concluded, he should take a step backward to county supervisor in 2014.
Such a move was to take some maneuvering and gyrating. A major factor was that the incumbent Fourth District supervisor was Gary Ovitt, the former Ontario mayor. Ovitt was not only a Republican, but was eligible, under the county’s term limit rule which had been enacted in 2006 and was applicable thereafter, to seek reelection in 2014 and again in 2018 before being termed out at the end of 2022. To run in 2014, Hagman would have to displace a member of his own party, a move not readily accepted within Republican circles.
A decade previously, the county’s Republican leadership, which was later discredited and removed from all vestiges of political authority, had consented to the party siding with one Republican over another or set of Republicans over another set of Republicans during primaries. That practice had come to a halt, however, when Robert Rego had been chosen as the chairman of the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee in 2008. Rego’s first priority was promoting the Republican Party as a whole rather than catering to the whims and personal ambition of individual politicians, which meant electing Republicans and keeping them in office was his priority. Not only had Rego, a certified public accountant who was extremely conscious of the importance of funding and fundraising in a political context, emphasized the importance of the local party building up a substantial amount of money to carry out campaigns promoting Republican candidates and initiatives embraced by the GOP, he had insisted on discontinuing the immediate past practice of allowing county Republican Central Committee money being used against Republican candidates in primary elections by other Republican candidates.
Generally speaking, the strategy under Rego was that incumbent Republicans, who had by definition demonstrated their electability, were to be supported by the party apparatus. In primary elections where there was no Republican incumbent involved, the party was to steer clear of taking sides. The San Bernardino County Republican Party’s official policy while Rego was at the helm was that in the primary elections held in March in presidential election years and June in gubernatorial election years, Republican candidates would vie against one another without the party becoming involved with endorsements or monetary contributions of any sort, such that, hopefully at least, the best Republican candidate would rise on his or her own merits to the top. The basic understanding was that where an incumbent with a demonstrated track record of winning was seeking reelection, loyal Republicans would stand down, not challenge the incumbent and for the good of the party jump in to help the incumbent perpetuate his or her incumbency. At that point, after the primary was concluded, going forward toward the November general election, the party’s money and endorsements would be brought to bear in favor of the Republican candidate vying for whatever position was at stake, be it for the school district board, water district board, city council, mayor, county supervisor, Assembly member or California state senator.
For Hagman, his path forward was clear. The first order of business was that Rego would need to be deposed. Rego would not countenance a non-incumbent Republican running against a proven incumbent Republican. That meant, Hagman knew, the party would not get behind him challenging Ovitt.
In 2013, while he was yet in the Assembly and functioning largely from Sacramento, Hagman, assisted by his chief of staff, Mike Spence, targeted Rego for removal as the chairman of the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee. Hagman and Spence acted ruthlessly in dethroning Rego, who had done a masterful job during his tenure as chairman of transforming the central committee into an efficient fundraising machine that was dedicated to the GOP cause. Hagman and Spence used a carrot-and-stick approach. The stick consisted of threats to Rego himself and his supporters that they would be transformed into party irrelevancies if they attempted to keep Rego in the chairman’s post, intimating that Hagman’s ascendancy to the county chairmanship was supported by the state Republican Party and therefore inevitable. When that eventuality occurred, they said, Hagman would purge the county central committee’s executive committee of Rego loyalists. This was matched with carrots, consisting of promises that if the committee members went along, those committee members who were part of the Rego Administration’s executive committee would keep their vaunted positions under Hagman. Rego himself was offered the position of treasurer if he gracefully acceded to being replaced as chairman by Hagman.
Ultimately, Rego deferred to Hagman and before 2013 was concluded, Hagman was central committee chairman.
Heading into 2014, Ovitt could feel the ground shifting below his feet. Gloria Negrete McLeod of Chino, a lifelong Democrat, had initiated her political career as a member of the Chaffey College Board of Trustees before she successfully vied for the California Assembly in 2000, then ran, again successfully, for California State Senate in 2006 when she was termed out of the Assembly, before managing to be re-elected state senator in 2010. Two years later, Negrete McLeod leapt into the U.S. House of Representatives when then-New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, then a Republican, endowed her, even though she was a Democrat, with more than $5 million to challenge and defeat incumbent “Blue Dog” Democrat Congressman Joe Baca in 2012. After a single term in Washington, D.C., Negrete McLeod opted to leave Congress and, like Hagman was attempting to do, step backwards down the political evolutionary chain by running for Fourth District county supervisor.
While Ovitt confidently asserted he would be able to hold off Negrete McLeod’s challenge, he simultaneously found himself undercut by the reality that Hagman had commandeered control of the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee. As central committee chairman, Hagman was in a position to cut off a significant portion of the funding that would have otherwise been available to Ovitt and to deny the incumbent the endorsement of the Republican Party as well, while claiming that for himself. Running for reelection as supervisor was suddenly a way more dicey situation than it had been six months previously, Ovitt realized. He pulled out of the race.
Despite the Democrats enjoying a significant voter registration advantage over Republicans in San Bernardino County’s Fourth Supervisorial District, Hagman ultimately defeated Negrete McLeod in the November 2014 election.
Meanwhile, during the 2014 electoral season that ended with Hagman’s assumption of the role of Fourth District county supervisor, elsewhere within the Fourth District an electoral drama played out during the Ontario municipal races. Seeking reelection that year were Mayor Leon and councilmen Wapner and Bowman. Vying against Leon were Councilman Paul Avila and Rudy Favilla. Challenging Wapner and Bowman were Ruben Valencia, Yolanda Garcia and Reyna Machado.
As the campaign was heating up, a video was posted on the internet which carried with it the potential of derailing Wapner’s reelection campaign and eradicating any prospect of the continuation of his career as an elected public official. That video was captured by a private residence security camera in place at a home within Wapner’s neighborhood in the area of East Hazeltine and South Pleasant Avenue. It showed Wapner beating his then-15-year-old daughter after she had left their home in the midst of a heated argument.
Recognizing at once the impact the video would have, Wapner diverted attention from the video’s contents to accusations about who was responsible for posting it. He accused Valencia, who had vied unsuccessfully for a position on the city council in 2012, and J. Steve Garcia, a member of the Ontario-Montclair School District Board who was running at that time for a board position with Chaffey Joint Union High School District, and the owners of the home with the security system that had captured the video as the culprits.
Indignantly, Wapner suggested that what had occurred was a private family matter and his method of dealing with his recalcitrant daughter was no one’s business but his own. If the video was not removed from the internet along with all references to it, he threatened legal action, including suing for defamation, against all of the responsible parties.
Simultaneously, Wapner went on the attack against Valencia, asserting, spuriously it would turn out, that Valencia, who was then employed as a deputy with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department at the department’s City of Industry substation, was being assisted by the County of Los Angeles and its taxpayers in his campaign for the city council in Ontario. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and various personnel at the City of Industry substation, Wapner alleged, were using the substation premises and its equipment in assisting Valencia in electioneering effort across the county line. What was more, Wapner said, Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department higher-ups were allowing Valencia to campaign while in uniform.
Los Angeles County officials and commanders in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, having at first been rocked back on their heels by Wapner’s allegation, looked into the matter. Having satisfied themselves that no misuse of Los Angeles County equipment or facilities in support of Valencia’s campaign had taken place, the county and the sheriff’s department made a declaration to that effect. Valencia, sensing that Wapner was seeking to orchestrate events and use his position of power along with sheer intimidation to inhibit his ability to campaign for city council, thereafter sought and obtained a restraining order against Wapner.
At the September 2, 2014 Ontario City Council meeting, the council adjourned into a closed session, during which the panel’s first order of business was to discuss how the city was going to respond to the restraining order that had been filed by Valencia, concerns that the city might be sued by the County of Los Angeles over his false accusations and overcome the adverse publicity the city was beginning to suffer because of the tie-in between Wapner’s beating of his daughter and his diversionary campaign tactics which had brought a law enforcement agency into the matter while the Ontario Police Department was, essentially, ignoring the criminal implication of Wapner’s assault on his daughter.
During the September 2, 2014 closed session, the city council agreed to retain Jason Anderson, who from 2004 until 2008 had been a member of the Ontario City Council and who had just gone into private practice as an attorney after having served as a prosecutor with the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office from 1998 until earlier in 2014. Curiously, the council sought to disguise the retaining of Anderson by disbursing the funds out of the city’s housing authority account. Anderson agreed to go to bat for the city and represent Wapner with regard to the restraining order filed against him, smooth out the contretemps with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and keeping the damning video of Wapner under wraps.
As it would turn out, the political status quo in Ontario remained intact as a result of the November 2014 election, in which Leon was reelected as mayor and both Wapner and Bowman were retained as councilmen.
In December 2014, the month after the 2014 General Election, Hagman supplanted Ovitt as the representative of the Fourth District’s 419,669 residents in San Bernardino, simultaneously moving into the position of airport commissioner at Ontario International Airport. Alpha type personalities both, it took some time for Wapner and Hagman to adjust to coexisting in the same public forum. Ostensibly, Wapner, who was widely perceived as one of, if not, the most aggressive political figures in the county, occupied a less impressive, prestigious and powerful position as councilman than the supervisor’s position Hagman had acceded to. Hagman, too, was known for his assertive, combative style. Yet in the context of the forum they were now dealing with on a monthly basis, the Ontario International Airport Authority Board of Commissioners meetings, Wapner, s the board chairman, was the presiding officer. Hagman, as a board member, remained in his lane, and the two over the next several months established a working relationship in which neither threatened or overrode the other in a heavy-handed way.
In August 2015, a settlement was reached between the cities of Ontario and Los Angeles regarding Ontario International Airport. After Ontario dropped Wapner’s demand that Los Angeles deed the aerodrome back for no consideration and agreed a $150 million purchase of the airport property, paying another $60 million to take possession of the aviation-related assets technically belonging to Los Angeles World Airports that were in place at the airport and which were indispensable to its operations as well as agreeing to take on the responsibility of servicing some $60 million in bonded indebtedness Los Angeles had assumed over the years to finance airport improvements in Ontario, Los Angeles agreed to return ownership of the facility in its entirety and let Ontario take over management of the facility effective November 1, 2016.
That milestone having been achieved, the following month, without any fanfare, Hagman arranged to take on Wapner as a member of his supervisorial staff. In an effort to minimize attention and scrutiny of the arrangement, Wapner’s appointment as the 4th District’s policy advisor was not put on the board of supervisors’ September 15, 2015 agenda ahead of time but presented as a late “walk-on” item to the board’s consent calendar. Wapner began work in the assignment, which had no set schedule nor requirement that he be present in the office daily or any specified time, and paid him an annual salary of $48,326 plus benefits of $1,859.
Once Wapner was installed as Hagman’s policy advisor, the two embarked on an effort to court businesses and convince them to locate in the 4th District, as well as inviting investment in the area. Neither Wapner nor Hagman was restrictive in terms of where those infusions of capital were to come from, involving either domestic or foreign speculators and investors. Early in Wapner’s tenure as 4th District policy advisor, the two traveled on multiple occasions outside the country together, in particular to the Far East, including both Taiwan and China, ostensibly to interest investors there in activity around the airport or regarding airport operations. A report at the time was that both established bank accounts in the People’s Republic of China.
Simultaneously, with the pending exodus of the City of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Department of Airports, Los Angeles World Airports and Lindsey from Ontario, inquiries from entities testing whether the restrictions relating to the use and eventual sale of Ontario Airport property that had been in effect while Los Angeles had ownership and control of the facility would remain in place once Ontario was in the driver’s seat began flooding in. Those interested in obtaining property on the airport grounds that Ontario might designate as “surplus” included development companies, logistics companies, real estate companies and speculators. The lion’s share of those were domestic entities, with a few foreign companies or partnerships expressing interest. Of note, a few of the ostensibly American-based companies in actuality were funded virtually entirely by foreign capital. A handful of those, consisting primarily of Chinese investors, had headquarters in California, primarily Los Angeles and Orange counties. A codeword for those – “Orange County interests” – came into vogue at Ontario City Hall, the airport authority’s executive offices on the airport grounds and in Hagman’s offices at the county. Understood was that Orange County interests were very interested in obtaining property at or near Ontario Airport, were willing to pay top dollar for it and outspend any competition if a bidding war for the property materialized, and that the Orange County interests were ready to show appreciation to anyone involved in the process, including airport authority staff and decision-makers or governmental officials, who facilitated them in achieving their goals.
Upon reaching the agreement with Los Angeles to reassume eventual ownership and management of the airport, the Ontario International Airport Authority Board of Commissioners initiated what turned out to be a five-month global search to find an airport management professional to oversee the airport. In January 2016, the board of commissioners approved the hiring of Kelly J. Fredericks to serve as Ontario International Airport’s chief executive officer. Fredericks was at that time the president and chief executive officer of the Rhode Island Airport Corporation, which controlled and operated Rhode Island T. F. Green International Airport near Providence. Fredericks arrived in Ontario in March of 2016, and spent the next six months shadowing the Los Angeles World Airports staff in their daily operations running Ontario International in preparation of the November 1, 2016 ownership transition.
Almost immediately upon that transition, Wapner began pressuring Fredericks to compile a list of what portions of the 1,741-acre airport property could be deemed “surplus,” meaning not currently crucial to airport operations. The idea, Wapner made clear, was to prepare and then execute upon his intention, which he insisted was supported by the other members of the airport board of commissioners, to sell the property to entities that would make use of it and thereby boost the local economy. He had, Wapner said, undertaken to return Ontario Airport to Ontario’s control because the airport was most useful as an “economic engine” for the region, which he said Los Angeles officials had failed to take stock of. Ontario had already squandered the economic development potential at the airport during the 30 years Los Angeles had control over it, Wapner said, and he asserted it was imperative that the transfer of non-essential land there be freed up for sale at once.
Fredericks, who was uncertain of what Wapner’s true intention was, nonetheless had doubts about the legitimacy of his motivation. While there were pockets of land around the 1,741 acres that were indeed, at that moment, lying fallow and not being put to aeronautical use, aviation use, support use or any use whatsoever, the possibility existed that a time would come when the property might prove critical to airport operations. Selling the property in a rushed sale, Fredericks knew, would potentially preclude, at a later date, expansion of the airport and it operations. Undertaking to reacquire the property at some future point after it was in the hands of another entity utilizing it for some other purpose, would prove expensive, and more likely than not prohibitively expensive, Fredericks said. He pushed back, or attempted to push back. Fredericks did not understand, or came to understand too late, that Wapner does not gladly indulge those who defy him. He told Fredericks in no uncertain terms at that point that he needed to quit shilly-shallying around and carry out a survey of what airport land could be sold off. It wasn’t a request, Wapner said. It was an order, he made clear, given by the president of the airport authority who had the backing of all four other members of the board.
Fredericks continued to drag his feet. Two months later, when Wapner recognized that Fredericks was not going to acquiesce to the sale, on July 5, 2017, he forced Fredericks to resign through a combination of threats and inducements. One of those inducements was agreeing to pay Fredericks the remaining $1,494,375 of the $1,992,500 in his five-year $398,500 annual contract to have him leave.
Despite Wapner and the city having pursued the campaign to liberate the airport from the clutches of Los Angeles by claiming Los Angeles World Airports had been mismanaging the
airport, when the Ontario, San Bernardino County and the Ontario International Airport Authority assumed ownership of the facility, it poached numerous Los Angeles World Airports staff members, hiring them into key management posts at Ontario Airport. Having effectively sacked Fredericks, Wapner found himself in the position of having to turn to one of those, Mark Thorpe, who had been the director of air service development & marketing with Los Angeles World Airports from June 2003 to December 2011, worked as the assistant vice president of air service development at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport from 2012 to 2015 and was then selected by Fredericks to come to Ontario International Airport in August 2016 into the position of Ontario International Airport Authority’s first chief development officer, in which capacity he spent his first ten weeks on the job working side-by-side with some of his former colleagues at Los Angeles World Airports while the clock wound down to Ontario’s November 1 takeover of the airport. Following Fredericks’ departure, Thorpe moved into the position of the airport’s interim executive director. Three months later, In October 2017, the board of directors dropped the qualifier “interim” from his title, designating him as the airport’s chief executive officer.
Just as he had with Fredericks, Wapner began to relentlessly bang on on Thorpe to get him to identify and then prepare for sale a roster of surplus properties contained within the airport’s 2.72-square mile grounds. By that point, Wapner’s actual objective in the pressing for having certain parts of the airport cataloged as surplus had become known.
Two entities, the Sares-Regis Group and Lee and Associates, had become interested in what was considered to be a prime piece of ground at the airport, a 198-acre property, referred to as “the boot” because of the unique shape and outline of its combined boundaries. Situated on ground immediately east of the airport’s runway just across Haven Avenue, south of Airport Drive and north of Jurupa Avenue, the property was perceived as ideal for industrial logistics and commercial warehousing projects.
In 2015, Lee & Associates represented Sares Regis Group it the purchase of 150 acres of land extending nearly a mile along the north side of Interstate 10, between Archibald and Vineyard avenues in Ontario. Sares purchased the land with the intention of transforming it and adjacent property into the Meredith International Centre, a 243-acre campus with a 3-million-square-foot mega-warehouse and industrial distribution facility. Sares Regis and Lee & Associates had even more energetic designs on the boot. Together, Lee & Associates and Sares Regis approached Wapner, offering to pay the airport authority $101 for the 198 acres.
Wapner did not feel he was in in a position to turn Sares Regis and Lee & Associates down. From April of 1998 through 2021, state campaign reporting documents show, Sares-Regis, including principals John Hagestad and Peter Rooney as well as its employees Larry Lukanish, Kenneth Coatsworth, Patrick Russell, Vincent Ciavarella and William Thormahlen, provided Wapner with at least $123,444 in political donations. Similarly, between December of 1999 and December of 2021, Joe McKay, Mike Wolfe and Carol Plowman of Lee & Associates supplied Wapner with $95,596.07 in campaign funding.
Throughout the closing months of 2017 and into the late winter and early spring of 2018, Wapner expressed confidence in Thorpe, who had succeed, shortly after moving into the airport executive officer position, in scoring two impressive coups – landing two new carriers, Frontier Airlines and China Airlines. “Mark is committed to transforming ONT [Ontario International Airport] into a magnet for economic development in the Inland Empire,” Wapner said.
Yet, as he closely examined the course Wapner, Hagman and the rest of the board wanted the airport to take, Thorpe had come to the same conclusion that Fredericks before him ad reached: Selling off the airport property would be a mistake. Once the land was developed and in the hands of private owners and companies, it would be virtually impossible to reclaim for airport use, based upon its value and the building that would take place on it.
For a time, Thorpe played along, toying with the prospect of having the authority sell off some of the acreage most distant from the airport grounds, well away from actual aeronautical activity was ongoing or likely to ever take place. But those parcels were not what Lee & Associates and Sares Regis were expecting Wapner to make available to them. Before 2018 was halfway through, Wapner found himself repeating to Thorpe what he had been over time and again with Fredericks a year prior to that, telling him to quit stalling and get on with it.
In the summer of 2017, in the immediate aftermath of Fredericks’ sacking, Wapner arranged for the Ontario International Airport Authority to hire three consultants. The first of these was Greg Devereaux, who had been Ontario’s city manager from 1997 until 2010, when he had left to become the chief executive officer of San Bernardino County, a post he held until 2017. The second was Chris Hughes, who had been Ontario’s fire chief while Devereaux was city manager and who had been elevated to city manager following Devereaux’s departure, a position he remained in until his retirement in 2013. The third was Steve Lambert, the one-time publisher and editor of the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, the most widely circulating daily newspaper in Ontario and the west end of San Bernardino County who had gone on to found the 20/20 Network, a strategic communications firm specializing in what is described as public relations, media outreach and tailored advocacy. Devereaux, Hughes and Lambert were paid $10,000 less than a quarter of a million dollars per year for the services they were recruited to provide: $20,000 per month. Less than six months later, Paul Haney, who had previously worked for American Airlines and the Lockheed Corporation and had been one of the deputy executive directors with Los Angeles World Airports from 2001 to 2008 while that entity had been overseeing Ontario Airport, was also enlisted by the Ontario International Airport Authority as a consultant on a $20,000 monthly retainer, upon Wapner’s recommendation.
While consultants are traditionally utilized to provide expertise and advice with regard to technology, operations, business and marketing strategy, and utilize technical know-how in specific areas or under specialized circumstances to achieve goals or outcomes, Wapner had not retained Devereaux, Hughes, Lambert and Haney for them to offer him guidance with regard to how the airport should be run or assistance to the airport and airport authority staff with regard to operations but rather to assist him in bring staff into compliance with his directions and objectives. What his go-round with Fredericks had demonstrated to him was that when his instructions to staff, from the executive director down, deviated with standard procedure or conventional rules, staff defaulted to doing things by the book and the way they are traditionally done. Fredericks’ refusal to sell of the idle pieces of ground that real estate speculators and developers were interested in buying was a manifestation of that. What Wapner needed to be able to please his network of political backers and supporters were airport administrators and managers who would do his bidding at his command and without regard to the way things had been done historically. He had staked his political career on Ontario taking control of Ontario Airport and had emerged victorious. He was now laying claim to the spoils that were his as a consequence of that victory, and it was not the place of Fredericks or Thorpe or anyone else to interfere with the exercise of his will. His intent was to utilize Devereaux, Hughes and Haney to ensure that the well-remunerated employees at the airport authority clearly understood what his objectives were and then executed the strategy that had been formulated to achieve those objectives. It was Lambert’s assignment to put the best face possible on that strategy and convince the public at large that not only was the airport in the competent hands of dedicated public servants who had the best interest of the community at heart, but the best policies for efficient and beneficial operation of the airport were being implemented and were succeeding.
Despite the forces that were arrayed against him in 2018, Thorpe remained true to his belief that selling the 198 acres that Wapner was bound and determined that Lee & Associates/Sares Regis purchase would be an epic mistake that contrary to the interest of the airport, its future, the City of Ontario and the whole of San Bernardino County and the Inland Empire.
In an effort to stymie Wapner, Hagman, Bowman, Devereaux, Hughes and Haney, all of whom were after him to move forward with the sale of the 198 acres to Lee & Associates/Sares Regis, Thorpe cited a provision contained in the airline use agreements the airport had with its carriers requiring that non-aeronautical revenues to be split between airport and airlines. This would result in the airport having to surrender half the proceeds, or profit, from those land sales to the airlines, Thorpe asserted. This bought him some time, during which he began looking at the prospect of not selling the property, but rather leasing it. A 25-year lease would encumber the property and render it unusable for aviation purposes for a quarter century. That might preclude expansion of the airport, though not indefinitely. If such a lease could be effectuated and timed correctly, the airport and airport authority might have the best of both worlds, generating income off of the airport’s dormant property, yet preserving the possibility of utilizing the property for airport expansion at some designated point decades hence. Furthermore, revenue derived from a lease arrangement would not be subject to the revenue sharing protocol contained in the airport’s airline use agreements.
Ultimately, Thorpe was able to confound Wapner, Hagman and Bowman when he was able to make a demonstrable showing that Wapner was seeking to shoehorn the airport, the airport authority and the City of Ontario into a disadvantageous financial deal through the acceptance of the offer on the table by Lee & Associates and Sares Regis without considering any other alternatives.
One of those alternatives was so starkly superior, from the standpoint of the city, the airport authority and the airport, that Wapner’s and Hagman’s insistence that Thorpe close the deal with Lee & Associates and Sares Regis was no longer operative. San Antonio, Texas-based USAA Real Estate Company and McDonald Property Group of Newport Beach, having formed a joint venture, began a dialogue with Thorpe in late 2020 regarding property at the airport non-essential to aviation purposes. Over the next several months, those discussions began to center on the Boot, after which the concept of USAA Real Estate/McDonald Property gaining access to the property pursuant to a lease rather than an outright purchase was broached. The numbers being batted about in those discussions dwarfed the $101 million Wapner had been insisting the airport authority had to accept for the 198 acres. Ultimately, when the deal fully shaped up, the airport authority found itself in position to derive more than six times the revenue that was being offered by Sares Regis through Lee & Associates. Under the development and entitlement agreement that was worked out, USAA Real Estate Company and McDonald Property Group, functioning under the corporate guise of CanAm Ontario LLC, the 198 acres were to be leased for 55 years at an overall cost of $625 million. The agreement specified that CanAm Ontario was to make a non-refundable $10 million deposit with the airport authority, after which USAA Real Estate Company/McDonald Property Group, functioning jointly, were given time to obtain local jurisdictional entitlement and environmental approvals to construct buildings and improvements on the property. In the first five years, CanAm Ontario agreed to pay the airport authority $25 million per year and in the second five years, $30 million per year, such that at the end of the first ten years, the airport authority will have received $275 million. Over the remaining 35 years of the lease, CanAm was to pay the authority an average of $10 million per year.
Outmaneuvered, Wapner had no choice but to accept what Thorpe had structured. On December 23, 2021, Wapner joined with Hagman and Bowman and the other two members of the Ontario International Airport Authority Commission, former Riverside Mayor Ron Hagman and former East West Bank president and CEO Julia Gouw in a unanimous vote to authorize the development and entitlement agreement with CanAm Ontario LLC.
Meanwhile, from the outset of Ontario’s reassumption of control over the airport, members of the Ontario community, including residents, a minority of Ontario city and airport authority/airport employees and business owners and operators in Ontario were confronted with elements or manifestations of the airport operation that appeared improper. Immediately apparent was the favoritism in the granting of franchises and concessions at and around the airport and the approval of contracts for the provision of goods and services to the airport itself.
Generally, governmental entities utilize competitive bid processes for the awarding of governmental contracts. Under most, though not necessarily all, circumstances, the contract is awarded to the lowest responsive and responsible bidder. A responsive bid is one which the vendor follows all of the specifications in the submission and provides assurance the work or goods sought will be delivered. A responsible bidder is a contractor or vendor who has the proven financial resources and technical capacity to fully perform a public contract and previous experience in doing so. The decision-making body with a governmental entity or agency can make a determination that a bid was not responsive and reject it on that basis. The decision-makers can also reject a bid on the basis that the bidder does not have the resources, equipment or technical capability to perform the tasks at hand. The decision-making body can also bypass a lower bid in favor of a higher bid on the basis that the quality of work to be performed or quality of goods to be provided by the contractor or vendor with the higher bid would be superior to that offered by the lower bidder[s], and this qualitative difference justifies the higher expenditure. Competitive bid processes provide for an open and transparent examination of the governmental decision-making process.
In a substantial number of cases regarding contracts for goods and services at the airport paid for by the Ontario International Airport Authority there was no competitive bid process. The overwhelming number of contractors and service providers and consultants involved in those no-bid contracts were donors of substantial amounts of money to Alan Wapner’s campaign fund.
In addition, there were recurrent reports, backed by evidence and other indicators, that formalized kickback arrangements were in place in which the Ontario mayor and members of the city council were designated to be the recipients of graft/bribes to be provided by service providers at the airport. In this way, taxicab companies servicing the airport, tow companies servicing the airport, heating-ventilation-and-air-conditioning service providers maintaining the ventilation systems at the airport’s terminals, the custodial crews cleaning the terminals, airport offices and their facilities, the groundskeeping contractors maintaining the landscape around the airport, the restaurant and shop owners with concession-operation permits within the terminals were obliged to make payments to a specific member of the council or the mayor, as designated by, presumably, Wapner, as the president of the airport authority board. Those payments, if cash, were supposed to be made silently and secretly or to take the form of an innocent-appearing transaction or in-kind provision of service.
Scattered and relatively infrequent reports regarding what appeared to be amiss at the airport drifted in the first few years of Ontario’s resumption of the aerodrome’s ownership, and were generally made to what were deemed to be the most logical points of authority. When Mayor Paul Leon was approached about such matters, he would beg off, stating the airport was Wapner’s bailiwick. To many, Leon’s response struck them as insincere, as if he actually knew how bad the situation was and the degree to which he and the rest of Ontario officialdom was implicated in it and either did not want to open any cans of worms or simply lacked the fortitude and character face Wapner down. When confronted with issues relating to or questions about the airport, City Manager Scott Ochoa would defer to Thorpe or either of the two of his predecessors as city manager, Hughes and Devereaux, who were, he said, more directly involved with its management. The police department, under Police Chief Tom Hill, Chief Derek Williams and then Chief Michael Lorenz, was no more accommodating of those who expressed concern with regard to issues at the airport. Citizens who approached the department with regard to the airport referenced or utilized such terms as “black hole” and “useless” and “unresponsive” in describing the attitude the police department took toward their complaints or allegations. Some expressed the view that members of the department had no stomach to take on Wapner.
Similarly, the district attorney’s office was reluctant to engage in any critical examination of Wapner or his associates.
In 2016, 2017 and 2018, Mike Ramos was district attorney. Members of the department’s public integrity unit would accept written complaints or listen politely to citizens’ reports of what they had witnessed or observed, but made no realistic follow-up. In June 2018, Jason Anderson, who had been a member of the city council while he was a deputy district attorney from 2004 until 2008 and had taken on the representation of Wapner in the aftermath of his assault on his teenage daughter at the expense of Ontario’s taxpayers as one of his first major cases when he went into private practice in 2014, was elected San Bernardino County District Attorney, and assumed the post in early January 2019. Anderson, who had moved to Upland subsequent to his time on the city council, nevertheless remained a member of the Ontario social and political establishment. An examination of campaign reporting documents that all elected officials in the state are required to complete twice yearly in non-election years and a minimum of six times during election years, known as California Form 460s, show a degree of commonality among the donors to Wapner and Anderson’s respective political war chests. Accordingly, Anderson was reluctant to initiate an investigation, let alone action, against anyone in whose political career an investment had been made by someone who had likewise invested in advancing him as a key public official.
While suspicion regarding Wapner existed and occasional accusations regarding him surfaced over the course of the first five years that Ontario Airport had been returned to Ontario and while he was the president of the airport authority, the public revelations relating to his efforts to force the sale of the 198 acres of prime airport property to his major campaign donors Sares Regis and Lee & Associates at a fraction of its actual value proved to be a watershed event that caught the attention of anyone tuned into governance in the Inland Empire. Thrown into stark relief was the pay-to-play ethos that gripped the leadership of the airport and that embodied Wapner’s status as a public official. Exposed as well was the manner in which Hagman, Bowman, Loveridge and Gouw had gone along with him in their oversight of the airport and the airport authority. Only slightly less blameworthy, in the public perception, were Wapner’s council colleagues and the mayor, who had stood by idly while he used the power they had conferred upon him by elevating him into the position of the only president/board chairman there had ever been of the airport authority to militate on behalf of his cronies, campaign donors and political supporters to the detriment of the city, its current residents and taxpayers and those who would live in Ontario in the future. Those residents were equally dismayed with the indolence of the city’s top-ranking administrators and department heads, together with its police force, who were the highest paid municipal employees in the entire county, who were unwilling to rock the boat, lest Wapner, his council colleagues and the mayor use their authority to separate them from the city and their lucrative positions.
The revelation of what Wapner had done prompted some of the minute number of people who had already sought to push the authorities into taking action but who had come up short in that doing so to redouble their efforts. A slightly larger subset of the local population, ones who had also been disturbed by what they had seen but had not been moved to action previously, were motivated to speak out and register their disapproval and outrage. As before, neither the police nor the mayor nor the city council nor city officials were willing to challenge Wapner or hold him to account. Wapner’s attempt to advance the fortunes of a set of his donors who had given him $218,000 – the corporate officers of Lee & Associates and Sares Regis – and in essence provide them with a gift of public funds valued in excess of $300 million had roused dozens of Ontario residents to take a deeper and harder look at Wapner and the way in which he had conducted himself as an elected public official over the course of his quarter of a century in office. Few were pleased with what they discovered. That examination demonstrating that Wapner’s first loyalty was not to the voters who had put him into office but rather to those with business and economic interests that were highly dependent upon action by the city council and who were willing to outright pay money to Wapner to get into or remain in his good grace. Those who had business with the city, from those who were seeking franchises to those who were competing to get municipal contracts for the provision of goods or services to those who were seeking permits doled out at City Hall to landowners, speculators and developers seeking entitlements to build or to obtain approval of projects, were obliged to make donations to his campaign fund. Whereas with the lion’s share of local politicians in San Bernardino County, donations generally top out at a thousand dollars and run-of-the mill donors average a show of generosity toward the candidates they support of $500 or less, among the legion of Wapner’s donors, an offering of $1,000 is barely chump change. He routinely collects donations $2,000, $5,000, $10,000 and on occasion $20,000 and was once provided with $30,000 from a single donor in one go.
In the 32 years since he first ran for city council in 1994, Wapner has taken in at least $3,875,936 in campaign donations, not counting money he raised for his unsuccessful 2004 run for the California Assembly, making him the most prolific fundraiser among elected municipal officeholders in San Bernardino County history. In achieving that distinction, Wapner has continuously skirted the law, which prohibits an officeholder for promising any specific action in exchange for the donation being provided. Wapner decades ago perfected asking for money in support of his candidacy without making any explicit commitment, yet doing so in a way that suggested to the individual being approached that it would be best for the potential donor and his business interest[s] if the request were not turned down. That Ontario had descended into an undeniable pay-to-play environment was evinced by a comparison of those entities which have Ontario city contracts, hold franchises granted by the City of Ontario by a vote of the city council and those developers, builders or contractors on projects built in the city going back three decades to the roster of donors to Wapner’s political campaigns in the same timeframe, which demonstrates that there is virtually no one concluding business successfully at Ontario City Hall who does not pay literal financial tribute to Wapner.
A law school graduate, Wapner’s approach in this regard pivoted on his interpretation of a critical element of the California Political Reform Act of 1974, embodied in California Government Code § 84308. As originally written, Government Code § 84308 prohibited appointed officials in California from accepting $250 or more from a donor and then voting on any matter impacting that donor financially or otherwise. While California Government Code § 84308 was applicable to votes or decisions made by any appointed officials, such as members of a planning commission or civilian appointees to a governmental committee/subcommittee who had run for political office and received money from campaign donors and to elected officials when they were voting as a member of a joint powers authority board of directors or a member of an adjunct committee or commission to which they were appointed, it did not apply to votes made by elected officials when they were acting in their elected capacity, such as a member of the city council or county board of supervisors. In 2022, pursuant to Senate Bill 1429, the California Legislature altered the form of California Government Code § 84308, making it applicable to both appointed and elected officials while upping the donation threshold from $250 to $500 for one year prior to, and one year after, receiving the money from an entity impacted by the vote. From the time of his election in 1994 until Senate Bill 1429 went into effect on January 1, 2023, Wapner, as all elected municipal, county and local agency officials in the state, functioned under the original language of Government Code § 84308, which Wapner interpreted along with most other politicians and officials in the state as allowing him to take money from donors and vote with regard to project proposals or contract applications they had with the city. As the vast majority of votes that Wapner made during that timeframe, at least for the first 18 years following his 1994 election to the city council were ones made in his capacity as an elected city council member, these did not represent any legal issue.
What was more problematic for Wapner was his function in those posts that had been conferred upon him as a secondary consequence of his being a member of the city council. Mayors and council members with nearly all of California’s 482 cities and incorporated towns as well as members of the state’s 58 boards of supervisors participate in adjunct governmental capacities as representatives of their town, city or county on panels or boards that oversee joint powers authorities in which multiple cities and agencies and the counties in which they are located take on issues of mutual concern or regional boards that oversee the management of operations that span multiple cities or even companies. In San Bernardino County and Southern California, such adjunct governmental roles that Wapner participated in included the Southern California Association of Governments, a regional planning agency that involved the cities of Imperial, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Ventura counties; San Bernardino County’s transportation agency involving all 22 of the county’s cities, its two incorporated towns and the county itself, which was originally referred to as San Bernardino Associated Governments or the acronym SANBAG and then was rechristened the San Bernardino County Transportation Agency or SBCTA; Omnitrans, the agency devoted to overseeing the San Bernardino Valley’s public transportation system; the Southern California Regional Rail Authority; the San Bernardino County Council of Governments and the Metro Foothill Gold Line Extension Construction Authority. All of those entities predated the creation of the Ontario International Airport Authority. Several of them involved contractors or service providers or vendors or development companies which at one time or another had made political contributions to Wapner. Despite that, there was little in the way of scrutiny with regard to the specific issue involved in California Government Code § 84308 – i.e, a board member of an adjunct governmental entity voting on a matter involving a donor – and all such matters flew under the applicable regulatory and prosecutorial radar.
The way in which such regulations were ignored with regard to these regional governmental entities provided a larger context within which there would be an avoidance of scrutiny within Wapner’s primary jurisdiction of operation – Ontario. The pay-to-play ethos that was so engrained in him and those around him, that it was not accurate to say officials were ignoring it. In actuality, it was such an intrinsic element of how Wapner and those around him functioned, it was as if they did not even know it was there.
There were a few exceptions that proved the rule. One of those exceptions would have an extraordinary, even paradoxical, indeed absurd conclusion, one that illustrates how thoroughly the pay-to-play principle had come to inhabit the Ontario International Airport Authority. In 2018, the firm that served as the general counsel to the airport authority – stated in a memo that members of the airport board who received donations from any entity of $250 or more should not, pursuant to Government Code § 84308, vote on any matter impacting that donor. The memo was further memorialized in an informational item that was put on the agenda for airport commission’s then-upcoming meeting, one that might simply be accepted or subject to a brief discussion. Wapner, however, in reviewing the meeting agenda after it had been tentatively finalized and just before it was posted, took stock of the memo. He instructed the airport authority staff to remove the item from the agenda and that the memo not be distributed to the board. This illustrates that Wapner, at least as early as 2018, if not prior to that, recognized that he was in violation of the law when he voted, as a member of the airport commission, to approve contracts or other arrangements with companies that had donated money to his campaign fund or the owners of and principals in those companies that had backed him with money to run his campaigns. A footnote to this is that on March 1, 2022, Gatzke Dillon & Balance donated $5,000 to Wapner’s reelection campaign. This was a testament that Wapner ruled the roost, and that what was taking place at Ontario International Airport was a game that was being played by his rules, rather than society’s. The law firm that was in place to make sure that Wapner and the others on the board played by society’s rules dispensed with those rules and social convention as soon as it was understood by all involved that if it abided those rules, it would very soon no longer be the law firm employed to advise and represent the airport authority.
Though city officials, county officials, prosecutorial authorities and regulatory authorities were not focused upon whether the rules were being adhered to or enforcing the rules once it was recognized they were being disobeyed, as is often the case, it was outsiders who took the lead in trying to redress the situation. It was soon recognized that no one at the city, neither Leon and the remainder of the council nor Ochoa nor the police chief was going to stand up to Wapner, Hagman, Bowman, Loveridge and Gouw. The next move was to go to the district attorney’s office. It was soon recognized that Anderson had not handed out get-out-of-jail-free cards to the airport authority board members but rather never-get-arrested-or-prosecuted cards.
Anderson’s stance was baffling. There were approaching two dozen examples of Wapner having violated Government Code § 84308 alone. In the cases of Hagman and Bowman, they had not violated Government Code § 84308 as frequently as Wapner, but had violated it nonetheless, unequivocally, and those violations had been documented with the provision of documents originating with the treasurers to their respective political campaigns which had been filed and validated, in the case of Wapner and Bowman, by the Ontario City Clerk’s Office and in Hagman’s case, the San Bernardino County Registrar of Voter’s Office. The documentation, which illustrated an open-and-shut case against all three, softened no soap with the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office, which refused to budge. Without an explanation or providing a reason, the prosecutor’s office took no action against Wapner, Hagman or Bowman.
After that avenue was exhausted by several Ontario residents and at least one city employee/former city employee, most working independently of one another, several persisted, going to what some, at least, calculated was their next best option, that being federal authorities.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI, truly, did not know what to make of the handful of reports floating in. Agents consulted the files relating to the airport and the airport authority going back to the mid-2010s, which offered only a single matter of substance, relating to an environmental issue relating to the migration of TCE, trichloroethylene, a solvent used in aviation contexts, which had permeated through the airports tarmac and seeped into the water table beneath it had had manifested in a toxic plume migrating into the Chino Water Basin. That matter had been handed off to the Environmental Protection Agency for some order of resolution. There had been some civil liability potential on the part of the manufacturer of the TCE, the aviation maintenance companies that used it and the airport itself, but unless some evidence of willful or indifferent negligence emerges there was no realistic criminal case, and for that reason the EPA was handling the matter. A standard otherwise would have led to the nation’s prisons being full to bursting with the leadership and management of every public and private airport in the country. There was indication, as well, that Wapner and Hagman had made at some points frequent but overall irregular flights to the Far East, which was not unheard of, particularly given their status, in Wapner’s case, as a city councilman and the leader of the airport authority, and, in Hagman’s, the chairman of the county board of supervisors and a board member of the airport authority. The airport authority at that point was courting airlines from around the globe, which made travel on the part of the airport authority’s two highest-ranking officials both logical and justifiable. The complaints that had been lodged had also made reference to their prodigious political fundraising on their own behalfs, which was certainly accurate. Still, politicians are raising money for their campaigns constantly, and given the success both Wapner and Hagman had experienced over an extended period, their fundraising efforts were in keeping with their station as public officials. In the context of city and county politicians, the amount of money deposited into their campaign accounts surpassed that of their rivals by multiple factors. In comparison to politicians involved in federal politics, such as Congress members, the money collected by Wapner and Hagman was not out of the ordinary. In comparison to the other matters being considered by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Central District of California and the local FBI, the ill-defined issues at the basis of the complaints centering on the circumstance at Ontario International Airport were assigned a relatively low priority, with FBI agents devoting little more time to the matter than reading over the incoming complaints.
For months on end, and then for well over a year, the initial FBI investigation, touched off by no more than a half dozen citizen complaints, gained no traction.
It was, in retrospect and in terms of monetary scale, a seemingly insignificant event that triggered the more intensive scrutiny of Wapner and Hagman by the FBI that now looms so large in the public’s attention.
In the midst of the 2022 election season, on August 1 of that year, Alan Wong, the station manager with China Airlines at Ontario International Airport, made a $500 donation to Wapner’s reelection campaign. The money Wong tossed in appears to have been offered up during a fundraising event held that day, as simultaneously on that same date, Wapner received $500 each from six other donors, $250 each from 11 donors, $200 from a single donor, $1,000 each from six donors, $2,500 each from four donors, $5,000 each from three donors and $10,000 from a single donor. In the week, i.e., seven days, before August 1, 2022, Wapner had received two donations, one of $2,500 and another of $15,000. In the week after August 1, 2022, Wapner received one donation of $500, two donations of $1,000 each, one donation of $2,500, two donations of $3,000 each and three donations of $5,000 each. Thus, on balance, at least from the common man’s perspective, the $500 from Wong was not terribly impressive or significant and didn’t stand out. More than any of the others, however, it caught the attention, the full attention, of the FBI.
Under federal law, an American politician cannot legally accept campaign contributions from a foreign national — anyone who is not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident — in connection with any federal, state, or local election.
The Federal Election Campaign Act and related regulations prohibit candidates, political committees, and parties from soliciting, accepting, or receiving contributions from foreign individuals or entities for any U.S. election.
The FBI agents assigned to looking into the goings-on at Ontario International Airport did not immediately discover Wong’s donation to Wapner. But when they did, several months after the fact, it had a resounding impact. It appeared that Wapner, who had been accepting money hand over fist to propel his political career for a generation without any detriment, and indeed benefit, had at long last outsmarted himself by breaking the law, not state law which a friendly district attorney who had once been his lawyer was not going to enforce against him but federal law, a felony, in fact. It was as if, for a microsecond, the universe had stopped.
After that microsecond pause, all of existence picked up again. Things had changed. From that point forward, the FBI agents assigned to the case were no longer just going through the motions. They were no longer half-listening or one third-listening or one quarter-listening to what the residents of Ontario had been telling them. They were from then on considering the full implication of what they were being told. They went back to canvass once more the ground they had already covered, but this time considering what lay before them as embodying something, or maybe some things, which they had previously missed.
They kept their eyes peeled. It wasn’t any great challenge to move to what was for many the most logical jumping off place: the episode involving Lee & Associates’ and Sares Regis’s designs on the 198 acres due east from the airport runway. All the elements of graft were there.
Hagestad, Peter Rooney, Lukanish, Coatsworth, Russell, Ciavarella, Thormahlen, McKay, Wolfe and Plowman provided Wapner with $219,040.07 for his political war chest and Wapner, with the support of Hagman, Bowman, Loveridge and Gouw, were on a trajectory to sell property worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $450 million to $475 million to Lee & Associates and Sares Regis for $101 million. It was a classic quid pro, a bribe to a public official to compromise his duty to those he represented as part of the democratic process to the detriment of the public at large to benefit those who are paying him off. That is what would have occurred, had Thorpe not resolved to resist Wapner and if the USAA Real Estate Company and McDonald Property Group had not coalesced into the CanAm Ontario partnership to lease the 198 acres over the course of 55 years for $625 million. An examination of what Wapner had tried to pull off with Lee & Associates and Sares Regis allowed the FBI to draw back the curtain to expose the actual pageant ongoing in Ontario: Wapner masquerading as the savior of Ontario so he could liberate the airport from the foul clutches of Los Angeles when in actuality his intention all along had been to loot the place seven ways from Sunday, doing so in the guise of of a pillar of the community, one whom the other pillars held in high esteem as an honorable and dedicated public official, someone who was too respectable to be distrusted, whose word was given automatic credence and whose critics were systematically disregarded.
All that was fading away like the mirage it was.
Everything about the operation at Ontario International Airprort was subject to scrutiny.
A giveaway that something was amiss was that Thorpe was not recognized for what he had accomplished with the CanAm Ontario lease but, like Fredericks before him, forced out, replaced with the Atif Elkadi. That promotion did not stand up to scrutiny. Elkadi had been hired in 2017, as the senior director of marketing largely at the direction of Wapner. Elkadi’s qualifications for the post, those questioned said, consisted primarily of Elkadi being, like Wapner, a USC graduate who was fiercely loyal to Wapner. The following year, Elkadi was promoted to the position of the airport’s chief commercial officer/deputy executive director to manage strategic communications, public relations, and branding at a salary of $275,307 with benefits and perquisites of $97,614 for a total annual compensation of $373,921. Elkadi had originally been brought in as director of marketing despite the airport authority having simultaneously retained Steve Lambert as a consultant being paid $240,000 yearly to “oversee public affairs, strategic communications, creative marketing services, media relations, branding, crisis management and policy advocacy.” In March of 2022, Elkadi was put in charge of the airport without having any substantive experience relating to the aviation-related elements of running an airport.
The FBI’s examination extended to the airport board’s tendency toward expensive redundancy in the airport’s secondary and tertiary areas of function such as public affairs, media relations, marketing and branding, while important posts relating to critical elements of the airport’s operations were staffed with inexperienced individuals whose primary value to the board was their willingness to execute the strategies that were being dictated to them by Wapner and, to a lesser extent, Hagman. A recurrent pattern was noted in which contracts, primarily no-bid contracts, were prepared by airport staff for ratification in a straight up-or-down vote of the airport commission, and the remarkable degree to which the providers of those contracted-for goods or services were donors, and usually substantial donors, to Wapner’s campaign fund.
A grand picture of graft at the airport was emerging. Within that mosaic of pay-to-play politics whereby the likes of Wapner and Hagman and even Bowman were shaking down those making money at the airport for campaign contributions, on that same huge canvas were smaller scenes of simultaneously ongoing grifts in which, from time-to-time, Wapner or Hagman were themselves being shaken down, or so it seemed, by those who were in a position to force their advantage.
In the summer of 2017, Devereaux, Hughes and Lambert were given $240,000-per year consultancies. A little less than five months later, Haney was given a consultancy on exactly the same terms. Like clockwork ever since, each month the airport authority commissioners/board of directors approves $20,000 payments to each of those four on an automatic basis. Those payments, twelve times a year, have continued every year – throughout 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and the first seven months of 2026, right up to the present. None of the consultants has ever been required to provide a description/inventory of the services rendered in exchange for those payments. Inquiries submitted to the airport authority in an effort to obtain such inventories submitted in conjunction with the invoices submitted by Devereaux, Hughes, Lambert and Haney were met by the airport authority’s response that no such documentation in response to that request were available in the agency’s files.
During his tenure as Ontario city manager and chief executive officer with San Bernardino County, Devereaux never tolerated a situation in which a consultant to either of those government agencies or any of their departments was paid without there being a strict accounting of what services were provided and the amount of time in hours and fractions thereof were devoted to the relevant tasks involved.
Under normal circumstances, consulting contracts run for a set period and are discontinued. Of note, there is no sunset built into the consulting contracts Devereaux and his company, Worthington Partners, LLC, Hughes and his company, Woodlawn Consulting, LLC, Lambert and his company, the 20/20 Network and Haney and his company, Paul A Haney & Associates LLC. Both Devereaux, who was Ontario city manager for approaching 13 years while Wapner was a member of the city council, and Hughes, who was Ontario city manager for three years while Wapner was on the city council in the immediate aftermath of Devereaux’s departure, in the words of Steve Rogers, who was formerly employed as a civil engineer in Ontario’s public works department, “know where Alan Wapner buried maybe not all but some of the bodies.” Lambert’s presence at the airport as a consultant over the years, given that strategic communications, public relations, and branding, as it were, were handled by Elkadi during the first four years of his consulting contract and by Elkadi’s successors as deputy executive director and deputy executive director in the years since, appears to be based on his ability, as the one-time status as the publisher and editor of the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, to keep information unflattering, embarrasing or downright damaging to the airport, the airport authority, the airport authority’s board of directors and both Wapner and Hagman in particular out of the press. The exact nature of Haney’s function as a consultant to the airport authority is equally baffling. While his previous experience as an executive with American Airlines and the Lockheed Corporation along with his function as one of the deputy executive directors with Los Angeles World Airports would appear to justify having him in place to provide the board and the airport administration with advice, that is not how Haney is being utilized at the airport, as he is has no ostensible whatsoever in those aspects of the airport’s operation about which he has the greatest expertise. Staff members at the airport, when pressed to do so in 2024, could not cite a single accomplishment that might have been attributed to him, despite his more than five-and-one-half year association with the facility. Though virtually everyone knew who he was, referring to him variously as Wapner’s “friend…” or “associate…” or “travel companion…,” no one seemed to know what he did and said he was present at the airport on only the rarest of occasions. It was Haney’s accompaniment of Wapner on his flights out of the country and the assistance he was rendering the airport commission president in his activity in those contexts that some suggested represented Haney’s true value to the collection of politicians, their backers and the select set of administrators that had been handpicked by Wapner to run the airport.
In this way, the FBI agents assigned to the matter at Ontario International Airport found themselves inexorably driven to the same conclusion that a handful of Ontario residents had reached: Devereaux, Hughes, Lambert and Haney were, in not so many words but still essentially, blackmailing Wapner. They had too much damning information about him and the way he had been conducting business, both at the airport and at the city, for him to terminate their consultancies with the airport authority.
Another aspect of the consulting contracts had relevance to the issues being explored by federal authorities. While Hughes had for the most part steered clear of participating as a donor to political campaigns, at least local one, altogether, that was not the case with Devereaux, Lambert and Haney.
In 2022, Devereaux donated $2,500 to Hagman’s supervisorial reelection campaign.
In 2023, Lambert donated $1,000 to Wapner’s political war chest.
Over the years, Haney had demonstrated himself to be the most generous of the four consultants in his support of the reelection efforts by the members of the airport authority’s board members.
The firm of Englander Knabe & Allen has had Haney as an associate since he left Los Angeles World Airports in 2008. Englander, Knabe & Allen did consulting work for the City of Ontario and subsequently the Ontario International Airport Authority as part of Ontario’s effort to reassume ownership of Ontario Airport from Los Angeles. Englander, Knabe & Allen contributed $1,000 to Wapner’s electioneering fund on February 23, 2012; another $1,000 on April 1, 2013; another S1,000 on June 12, 2014; and another S1,000 on February 24, 2015. In addition, Englander Knabe & Allen contributed S1,000 to Jim Bowman’s campaign fund on November 28, 2013. Paul Harvey contributed $1,000 to Wapner on June 18, 2014; another S1,000 on February 15, 2016; another S1,000 on February 15, 2016; another S1,000 on January 27, 2017; another S1,000 on March 5, 2018; another $1,000 on February 7, 2020; another $1,000 on January 25, 2021; another $1,000 on March 1, 2022; and $2,000 on December 19, 2022. Susan Haney, Paul Haney’s wife, gave Wapner $1,000 on July 18, 2022. Paul Haney also provided $1,000 to Bowman on March 30, 2018.
Among these were $1,000 each from Yin Tai Designs LLC, Zhiming Zou, James Xu, Wei Tao Sheng, Jerry Qui Tangshan, Weiyan Hu, Haiping Chen, Yaping Wang and Zhen Zhong Cao. In addition, Zhi Ping Wen of Heng Tong Investments provided Hagman with $2,000. Investigators’ attention was seized, as well, by three donations made to Hagman on the same day, March 8, 2022, by Tangshan Qui for $3,000, Yin Qian for $2,550 and Li Wang for $4,900. Less than a month later, Hagman on a single day, March 31, 2022, received three donations totaling more money than that from questionable sources. One of those was for $4,900 and came from Chen Feng, the CEO of Sun Yin USA Inc. That was accompanied by $4,500 from Li Ming Dai, another Sun Yin USA employee. The same day, March 31, 2022, Feng Xu endowed Hagman’s campaign with $4,900.
Investigators would further note that on April 11, 2022, Hagman received $1,000 from Bun Chan, who was described in the California 460 document reporting the donation as a “media worker” with the “EDI Group.” More than three years and two months later, on July 30, 2025, Sammi Su, identified as an “events manager” with “EDI Media, Inc.”provided Hagman with $1,000. Earlier this year, on March 19, 2026, James Su, characterized in the Form 460 filed by Hagman’s campaign treasurer Lysa Ray on April 23, 2026 as the “owner” of EDI Media, gave Hagman $2,500.
James Su, born in Shanghai in 1970, has lived in the United States for more than 30 years, but has maintained ties to the People’s Republic of China. He is the California-based manager of the West Coast arm of Guoguang Century Media, which consists of 34 radio stations in 14 countries. Guoguang Century Media is backed and funded by China Radio International, the state-owned international radio broadcasting network of the People’s Republic of China. Guoguang Century Media is dedicated to producing content aligned with Beijing’s interests, both domestically and internationally. In 1993, using funding provided to him by the Chinese government through Guoguang Century Media, Su founded EDI Media, Inc., which is now affiliated with G&E Studio Inc. and CiTi News, a company of which Su is the president that includes multiple TV stations, radio stations, magazines, and newspapers. In 2005, Su founded the Chinese America Film Festival as chairman, which is intended to enhance cultural exchange between U.S. and China. In 2011, during the Beijing Film Festival, the Chines Cultural Ministry conferred on him the title of Outstanding Oversea Promotion Executor of Chinese Film.
Utilizing money provided to him by the Chinese government, Su, who resides in
West Covina where the EDI Media offices are located, has become a prolific donor to humanitarian and philanthropic causes in Southern California, as well as to local, state and federal politicians.
In November 2015, the Federal Communications Commission began an investigation into EDI Media, G&E Studio Inc. and CiTi News, based on indications that EDI Media and CiTi News programming, which consisted of content produced at G&E Studio as well as material originating with China Radio International, were being financed and controlled by the Chinese government.
