By Mark Gutglueck
The pending departure of San Bernardino County District Attorney Mike Ramos after sixteen years as the county’s top prosecutor has already triggered an initial round of gangland executions aimed at preventing what were formerly safe secrets relating to a protection racket run out of the prosecutor’s office from lurching into public view, information available to the Sentinel indicates.
While Ramos’s defeat in his fourth reelection effort has apparently emboldened the police department in the county seat to initiate action which prior to Ramos’s political demise would have been considered absolutely unthinkable, the Mexican Mafia, which lies at the center of the criminal enterprise against which the San Bernardino Police Department’s effort is aimed, is not without formidable resources of its own.
Accordingly, more than a dozen entities – including known and established criminals who are both in custody and at large together with law enforcement figures who have either been compromised through payoffs and bribes from the mob or who conversely have resisted such overtures and are doggedly seeking to bring those involved at the highest level of this criminal enterprise to justice – find themselves in mortal danger.
Among those over whom the sword of Damocles now hangs are Ramos himself, one of his most hard charging prosecutors and San Bernardino’s police chief, together with other members of that department’s command echelon.
Reportedly, since June 10, five days after Mike Ramos was displaced in a head-to-head contest with one of his former deputy prosecutors, Jason Anderson, in the 2018 race for district attorney, four members of the Mexican Mafia currently or formerly active in the Southern California region have perished in mob hits, ordered from on high in the organization. Among those said to have been “hit,” i.e., killed were two street level members, a higher ranking member at the level of a “lieutenant” or “soldier” and one at a higher level still. The Sentinel has been unable to identify who those alleged victims were or verify if those deaths occurred, with the single exception of that of Eric Moreno, who was killed on July 15.
Prior to Ramos’s defeat, there had been occasional flights of panic within the gang, headed by Salvador Orozco “Toro” Hernandez, Jr., which led to Hernandez consigning members to death at the hands of hit squads he controls.
For nearly a decade, Hernandez has run the Mexican Mafia criminal empire from a prison cell. Initially, Hernandez was calling those shots from within the California Penal System, where he had been serving a ten-year sentence for attempted murder. More recently, he has been running the Mexican Mafia from inside the walls of the high security federal prison in Wayne County, Pennsylvania.known as the U.S. Penitentiary at Canaan Township
The Mexican Mafia was originally set up by Luis “Huero Buff” Flores in the late 1950s as a prison gang intended to protect its members within the state’s penitentiaries as well as to control through violence, fear and intimidation the black market activities within, and the black market support network outside, prison walls. By the 1980s, the Mexican Mafia had morphed into one of the more dominant criminal organizations outside a prison setting in California and several other states and the de facto controlling organization over virtually all Hispanic gangs in Southern California, in and outside prisons and jails. The organization has a ritualized membership and induction code which deprecates and discourages acting as an informant or in any way cooperating with legal authorities, eschews betraying, victimizing, disrespecting or stealing from fellow gang members, vilifies engaging in homosexuality, and forbids intruding on another member’s business territory. Members of the Mexican Mafia are committed to remain members for life and are required to carry out, under penalty of death, orders handed down from the leadership of the organization, including ones to execute the organization’s enemies or other members who have left or betrayed the gang. Within the prison setting and sometimes outside of it, the Mexican Mafia is in a loose alliance with the Aryan Brotherhood, a white prison gang, as well as in a fierce and sometimes deadly rivalry with African-American gangs such as the Bloods, Crips and Black Guerrilla Family. Over the last several decades the Mexican Mafia has become a dominant element in the distribution of street drugs imported from or through Mexico, in particular heroin and cocaine and more recently methamphetamine as a consequence of the concerted U.S. policy which has effectively curtailed the availability of chemicals and lab equipment needed to produce the drug domestically. It has also formed loose affiliations with other gangs such as Sureño 13 and Familia Michoacana, as well as the Sinaloa Cartel. Thus, the Mexican Mafia is considered a major factor in the illicit drug trade in California and a significant factor in several other states.
As a young man in the 1980s and early 1990s, Hernandez maneuvered in and out of prison. In the mid-2000s, through a combination of luck, opportunism, the ruthless application of violence and with the loyalty and assistance of his brother, Alfred Hernandez, he muscled in on the syndicate, establishing himself at the pinnacle of power and authority, the very top of the chain of command.
While he was still free, Hernandez ruled the Mexican Mafia roost from Bloomington, the unincorporated San Bernardino County area near Fontana and Rialto. Hernandez used two arms of the Mexican Mafia that were locally based to enforce his hold over the Mexican Mafia’s burgeoning franchise. One of those was the Eastside Riva (ESR), a street gang that had been in existence since the mid-to-late 1980s, dominating territory on the east side of the City of Riverside, and which had grown to roughly 500 members by the time Hernandez had taken control of it. The second of those was another smaller and more insular street gang, the West Side Verdugos in San Bernardino, which had fewer members than Eastide Riva in Riverside, but which was even more prone to violence. Underneath the umbrella of the West Side Verdugo street gang were two smaller divisions: the 7th Street Locos and the Little Counts. Between 2000 and 2007, upon Hernandez’s orders members of the Westside Verdugos purged their ranks, i.e., killing no fewer than seven of their fellow gang members who had not demonstrated the requisite loyalty to Hernandez, either by withholding taxes (i.e., not kicking up a percentage of the proceeds from their drug dealing operations to Hernandez), cracking under police interrogation, or engaging in behavior that led Hernandez to suspect that they might be either cooperating with state or federal authorities or were working with rival gangs. By the same token, there is evidence to suggest that Hernandez, in a carefully calculated and precisely timed move, had himself provided to authorities information on some other high-ranking Mexican Mafia members that allowed him to take over and solidify his hold on the entire organization’s reins. By 2004, Toro Hernandez was the undisputed kingpin of the Mexican Mafia.
For an operation with as many tentacles as that of the Mexican Mafia exercising such omnidirectional reach, functioning in a legally safe environment was paramount to Hernandez. Paying off every policeman on the beat or the watch commanders overseeing them was out of the question. Nor was bribing all of the police chiefs in the San Bernardino region practical or possible. Two pathways for insulating himself did exist for Hernandez, however.
As luck would have it, a half dozen or so of the members of Hernandez’s criminal network turned out to be members of the San Manuel Indian Tribe, which had established an Indian Bingo Parlor on its reservation grounds in Highland in 1986 and then transitioned that enterprise over the next decade into an extremely lucrative casino. Some of those gang members just happened to hail from one of the most influential families in the tribe. Two of those were a brother and sister, Erik and Stacy Barajas. The tribal members were the beneficiaries of a substantial amount of income from the tribe’s gaming operation. And the reservation, under federal law, was considered sovereign territory, off limits to local and state authorities, including local and state law enforcement. Through his relationship with the tribe members, Hernandez was provided with access to the tribal land, where he could warehouse substantial quantities of contraband – mostly illicit drugs – with relative confidence that it would remain secure and beyond the reach of local police or regional narcotics task forces. And the tribal members, with their regular income from the casino, could deposit into their bank accounts large amounts of cash without raising suspicion, and then dole that money out as they – and Hernandez – saw fit, thereby laundering it.
The second pathway that lay open for Hernandez was the opportunity presented to him in the personage of San Bernardino County’s district attorney, Mike Ramos, and the possibility that the jurisdiction’s prosecutorial apparatus could be compromised. It would not much matter how diligent the region’s police officers proved in dogging his criminal enterprises, how many times he was detained and arrested, booked and fingerprinted, held in custody long enough for his bail to be posted, if ultimately the district attorney’s office concluded that there was insufficient evidence upon which to proceed with a prosecution, or that the arrest in some way or another had been marred by procedural error that made taking the matter to trial ill-advised. Money delivered to the DA in sufficient quantity could mean that Hernandez’s legal problems might simply go away.
At this point, much remains shrouded in mystery, including exactly to what extent Hernandez was able to merge the Mexican Mafia’s financial affairs with those of tribal members, including the Barajas siblings, and how much money the Mexican Mafia was able to pass through those accounts and then recover as completely laundered cash. What is known is that Hernandez was able to set up a system whereby the narcotics that were the commodity of his trade were given safe harbor on the reservation grounds under an arrangement that postdated his eventual incarceration and that a Mexican Mafia courier – a bagman in the parlance of the trade – succeeded in delivering a sack full of cash to District Attorney Mike Ramos.
For a relatively short time, Hernandez thrived in his vaunted position at the head of the Mexican Mafia. Ironically, it would be his association with the Barajas siblings that would play a pivotal role in bringing his days of freedom to an end.
In late 2004, just as Hernandez was outmaneuvering, eradicating or creatively sending up the river the last of his rivals for control of the Mexican Mafia, a joint San Bernardino Police/DEA investigation was focusing on drug distribution activity by members of the Mexican Mafia. In time, those investigators would identify Toro Hernandez, his brother Alfred Hernandez, Eric Barajas, his sister Stacy Cheyenne Barajas-Nunez, Erlino Honesto, Geahetta Amaya and Arturo Ortiz as being central characters involved in drug dealing and attendant crimes. Investigators had grounds to believe that the drug distribution activity was being coordinated out of the Brass Key, a Highland Bar not too distant from the San Manuel Reservation and Casino. The Brass Key was owned by Greg Duro, the son of one-time San Manuel Tribal Chairman Henry Duro. Greg Duro had hired Leonard Epps to serve as a bartender and manager of the Brass Key. A frequent patron at the bar was James Seay, Epps’ friend and the brother of former San Diego Chargers football player Mark Seay. James Seay, it seemed, came to recognize or in some way learned about the drug distribution activity taking place out of the Brass Key. James Seay was shot and wounded in front of The Brass Key on May 17, 2004. San Manuel tribal member Robert Vincent Martinez III, who was suspected of belonging to the Mexican Mafia, was charged in the case, but the charges were later dismissed. Seay in May 2005 sued Martinez over his injuries and lost wages. Though Martinez initially moved to contest the suit through his attorney, Trent Copeland, the case settled for in excess of $500,000. Just days later, Seay was fatally shot in front of his mother’s house in San Bernardino, an act bearing all the hallmarks of a Mexican Mafia hit. The killing remains unsolved.
At that point, members of the Mexican Mafia involved in the drug trafficking operation based out of the Brass Key, including Erik and his sister Stacy Barajas-Nunez, grew concerned that Epps represented a threat to their activity because he had been close to Seay and knew, on the basis of his role at the Brass Key, details relating to the drug distribution network. A botched attempt on Epps’ life was made, and after its failure, a contract that had been taken out on Epps remained in play. Federal drug agents learned of the murder plot against Epps in 2006 during their joint investigation with the San Bernardino Police Department into the Mexican Mafia’s drug distribution activity. The agents uncovered airtight evidence that Erik and Stacy Barajas were conspiring with Salvador Hernandez and his brother, Alfred Hernandez, to have Epps killed.
As a consequence of the utter depth of the criminal enterprises in which they were involved and the sheer magnitude of proof federal agents and the San Bernardino Police Department had accumulated against them, not to mention the widespread attention their activity generated among federal, state and local authorities and prosecutors, Salvador and Alfred Hernandez, for their involvement in the planned assassination of Epps along with dozens of other overt criminal acts, were imprisoned. More than a decade later, Hernandez remains as the head of the Mexican Mafia, though he is in custody. He is, at this point, no longer a guest of the State of California, but rather the federal government, based on drug distribution activity Hernandez was implicated in that more heavily involved the Eastside Riva gang in Riverside than the gangs he was affiliated with in San Bernardino.
The case against Barajas and Barajas-Nunez was handed off to the local prosecutor, San Bernardino County District Attorney Mike Ramos. Because the basis of the case against Stacy Barajas-Nunez and her brother had been laid by local investigators teamed with federal agents, Ramos did not have the option of dispensing with the matter without a prosecution, as the case involved layers of drug distribution activity and indisputable evidence of the murder-for-hire scheme. Proof that Barajas and Barajas-Nunez had arranged for the Hernandez brothers to set up the killing of Epps was obtained when federal officials served search warrants on several San Manuel Reservation homes, including those of Barajas and Barajas-Nunez. Ultimately, with federal officials closely monitoring the progression of the case in state court, Ramos accepted a plea agreement from both. Barajas-Nunez pleaded guilty to participating in the murder-for-hire scheme and to two drug charges. Her brother pleaded guilty to an assault with a deadly weapon charge in connection with the murder-for-hire scheme. The deal Ramos approved allowed them to avoid any jail time and remain on the reservation and be monitored electronically. Barajas-Nunez agreed to a 365-day home detention sentence and her brother agreed to 180 days of home sentencing.
The outcome of the case against Erik Barajas and his sister served as the first open indication that Mike Ramos might be militating on behalf of the Mexican Mafia, with multiple public and media notations of the lenient treatment the pair had received.
As a result of the attempt on his life and the injuries he sustained, Epps, represented by attorney Frank Peterson, filed a civil suit against Barajas-Nunez and Barajas. Epps and Peterson prevailed in that suit and a jury awarded Epps $6.577 million in compensatory and punitive damages. Epps is still a target for Mexican Mafia executioners and has had to assume a new identity and relocate himself and his family to a secure location.
In the course of litigating the matter, Peterson, a former sheriff’s detective turned attorney, developed a wealth of information relating to the Mexican Mafia’s penetration of San Bernardino County. Contained within that evidence file which Peterson intended to present at trial was the account of a witness who served as a courier between the Mexican Mafia and members of the San Manuel Indian Tribe in conjunction with payments and activity relating to the drug distribution network. That witness, known by the code name “Rico Doe,” said that Mike Ramos was handed, during a designated rendezvous at the Pechanga Casino in Temecula, a package containing a substantial amount of cash that originated from the Mexican Mafia’s involvement in narcotics distribution activity. According to Rico Doe, the money was provided to Ramos as part of an arrangement to insulate members of the Mexican Mafia and San Manuel tribal members from prosecution. The witness hinted at other occasions when money was provided to the district attorney.
Ultimately, that information was not presented in court, as the judge hearing the case, Michael A. Smith, deemed it irrelevant to Epps’ claims against the Barajas siblings. During the course of the trial, much of the evidence and information presented in court was not publicly available because of a gag order that had been imposed on Epps and Peterson at the request of the defense during the proceedings. Since the trial has concluded, information accrued by Peterson in preparation to put on Epps’ case exploring the degree to which the Mexican Mafia has wrapped its tentacles around public officials in San Bernardino County has surfaced.
In attempting to deflect early questions about why the Mexican Mafia had thrived within his jurisdiction under his watch and had been permitted to retreat to a safe haven on the San Manuel Indian Reservation from which it was operating with seeming impunity and immunity, Mike Ramos and his spokespeople simply asserted that the district attorney’s office did not have investigative or prosecutorial authority on the reservation, which, under federal law, is deemed sovereign Indian land beyond the reach of state or local authorities. That claim rang hollow, however, since the tribe waived that status in June 2010 by entering into an arrangement with the county approved by the board of supervisors under which the tribe agreed to pay the district attorney’s office $1,048,909 over the three years ending June 30, 2013, running to $349,636.33 per year, to prosecute criminal cases originating on the reservation and at the San Manuel Casino located on reservation grounds and operated by the tribe. That was intended to cover the provision of a single full time prosecutor and a single full time senior investigator, plus a vehicle to be available for their use and fuel enough for them to drive 2,000 miles per month. In 2013, the tribe and the county extended that contract for three years, with the tribe agreeing to pay the county $1,111,403 for the three years of prosecutorial service ending on June 30, 2016, running to $370,467.66 per year. In 2016, the tribe and the county again extended the arrangement, with the tribe providing the district attorney’s office $1,208,003 for continued prosecutorial and investigative services from July 1, 2016 through to June 30, 2019, which ran to an average of $402,667.66 per year. In April of this year, by mutual consent that contract was closed out and a new one put in place for 2018-19 in which the tribe agreed to up the annual amount to $420,278.
Over the last several years, it has become apparent that the federal Drug Enforcement Agency and several Southern California regional task forces devoted to narcotics enforcement and their constituent law enforcement agencies have come to recognize that advance information about the targets, times and places of enforcement operations cannot be safely vouchsafed to the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office.
For example, on January 12, 2017, the Fontana Police Department, the California Attorney General’s Bureau of Investigation, and the California Highway Patrol, in an effort involving more than 300 law enforcement officers, executed “Operation Bad Blood,” which had been in the planning stages for weeks and targeted two gangs in Fontana, the South Fontana Gang and the Mexican Mafia. In the days in advance of the massive set of raids, 32 suspected gang members had been quietly taken into custody. On January 12, another 35 people were arrested and several caches of firearms, ammunition, methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin and prescription medications were seized.
The San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office was not involved in the preparation of the search and arrest warrants prepared for Operation Bad Blood. Nor was Mike Ramos or his office informed ahead of time that the action was to take place.
On November 9, 2017 a multi-agency task force led by the California Attorney General’s Office and its special operations unit carried out a series of raids targeting the Mexican Mafia and its related drug cartel, arresting 47 people, 44 of whom were in Southern California and two of whom were in San Bernardino County, as well as three others in Colorado and Missouri. In the course of those raids, 12 pounds of methamphetamine, three pounds of heroin, 120 pounds of marijuana and 60 pounds of cocaine were seized, along with a substantial number of firearms.
The arrest warrants around which these operations revolved were prepared by the California Attorney General’s Office, the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office and the Orange County District Attorney’s Office. The San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office was not given a heads up with regard to the raids before they were under way, as is routinely the case in such operations.
It is worth noting as well that the San Manuel Tribe has for the last eight years had contractual arrangements with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department for law enforcement service. The contract renewed in 2016 called for paying the county $3,081,143 per year for the sheriff’s department’s services, which were to include 11 deputies assigned full time to the reservation per week and one part time deputy assigned there for 16 hours per week, meaning primarily in and around the casino, with the part time supervision of a lieutenant about 15 hours per week, and the full time supervision of one sergeant per week and the supervision of a second part time sergeant at roughly 26 hours per week. The contract also called for paying for five marked units to be stationed at the reservation; a mechanic to service those vehicles up to ten hours per week; two full time office clerical staff personnel per week plus one part time clerical worker at 12 hours per week. By mutual consent the county and the tribe terminated that contract and entered into a new one effective for 2018-19 as of the July 1 for $3,463,748.
By unspoken arrangement, those deputies concern themselves almost exclusively with policing the casino operation. Over the last eight years, the sheriff’s department has never attempted to interrupt or interfere with the warehousing of narcotics known to take place at specified residences on the reservation. In addition, upon retirement from the department, deputies who have worked the San Manuel detail have been offered employment with the tribe at salaries rivaling their pay while employed with the sheriff’s department. This allows them to draw their pensions and receive compensation from the tribe, nearly doubling, in most cases, their annual remuneration when they were active peace officers.
The sheriff’s department is the contract law enforcement service provider for the City of Highland, which abuts the reservation property on the east.
Adjacent to the reservation to the west is the City of San Bernardino. It is in San Bernardino, which over the last three decades has seen an increasingly larger percentage of its population slip below the poverty line and where street gang activity is rampant, where many of the social ills that are an outgrowth of the Mexican Mafia’s criminal enterprises are most manifest. Accordingly, of all of the law enforcement agencies in San Bernardino County, it is the San Bernardino Police Department which has made the furthest inroads against the Mexican Mafia and its leadership. Indeed, it was the San Bernardino Police Department that followed up on the murder attempt on Epps, accumulated evidence and cobbled enough of the disparate underlying facts together which led to a strong enough case being made against Hernandez and his brother that they were convicted on the attempted murder charges. Unlike other law enforcement agencies and in pointed contrast to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, detectives with the San Bernardino Police Department, on occasion proved intrepid enough to obtain and serve, in conjunction with federal officials, search warrants at the reservation itself, the sanctuary from which elements of the Mexican Mafia have otherwise been able to operate with impunity. If the San Bernardino Police Department fell short of going into the Mexican Mafia’s nest and rooting out all of the soldiers Hernandez had at his command, that failure had come about not from the department shrinking from the task but rather as a function of the district attorney’s office’s unwillingness to capitalize on the investigative product the police department had churned up.
Late last year came an indication of the strategy by which Hernandez, behind bars but yet commanding a formidable criminal empire, hoped to limit the San Bernardino Police Department’s fervor for intruding into places on the reservation that remain critical to the Mexican Mafia’s ability to function. In October 2017 the San Manuel Tribe arranged to provide the San Bernardino Police Department with a $4.2 million grant, and then announced the gesture on November 1. Between that date and December 31, the tribe doled out $600,000 to the department to fund two daily overtime shifts in the northeastern quadrant of the city closest to the San Manuel reservation. The tribe’s largesse was also intended to cover the purchase of patrol vehicles, video surveillance equipment and ten license plate readers, along with the deployment of community service officers and parking control officers. Furthermore the department is receiving from the tribe another $1.2 million this year and is to receive $1.2 million twice more, in calendar 2019 and 2020 for the same purposes.
To Hernandez, money put in the right hands or vectored to the right causes could work wonders in keeping his criminal network from becoming entangled in pesky prosecutions.
A major game changer for him, however, came with the unanticipated political demise of Mike Ramos this year. The exodus next January of Ramos and his team, who have made a steady practice of looking the other way when it came to the activities involving Hernandez and his minions, and the ascendancy of Jason Anderson, who has no fealty to Ramos and the regime he built up over four terms in office, promises to be problematic for Hernandez and the multitude of crews serving him who are still at liberty throughout San Bernardino County. First off, potential cases involving local Mexican Mafia members that have been languishing while awaiting evaluation for prosecutorial potential or ones that have automatically been rejected under Ramos that will not have fallen beyond the statute of limitations when Anderson moves into office could be filed. Secondly, the advance information about law enforcement operations targeting the Mexican Mafia which has  been reaching Hernandez’s capos while Ramos has been in office could very well dry up once he is no longer district attorney and has lost access to inside information. Thirdly, in a function related to the first consideration above, that the district attorney’s office might undertake to prosecute the cases being brought to it might embolden local agencies, in particular the San Bernardino Police Department, which functions in the very heartland of the Mexican Mafia, to step up its operations against that organization. And fourth, there is no guarantee that once the prosecutorial scepter is no longer in his hands, Ramos, a former president of the California District Attorneys Association, and the immediate past president of the National District Attorneys Association, will not himself be the target of an investigation that will unlock the layers of deep secrets he has been keeping. In an effort to save himself from a sentence that could keep him in prison until he is well into his eighties, the now 60-year-old Ramos could very well turn state’s evidence against Hernandez and other members of his organization.
Hernandez has demonstrated a history of extinguishing those he senses have betrayed him, are about to betray him or are in any way disloyal to him or his organization.
An illustration of Hernandez’s vindictiveness in this regard is the case of Andrew Rodriguez, a Mexican Mafia gang member, and his wife, Carmen Gutierrez Rodriguez. Precisely what Andrew Rodriguez knew about the Mexican Mafia’s operation that would have been a dire threat to Hernandez and how much of that he shared with his wife can be speculated about but at this point cannot be precisely known. This much can be determined: Hernandez had some grounds to believe that the couple knew something and that there was at least a possibility they would let it slip. On Wednesday January 18, 2017 around 9:25 p.m., as Carmen Rodriguez was coming out of Gaby’s Cafe, located at 1641 North Mount Vernon Avenue on the west side of San Bernardino, she was gunned down. At that moment, her husband was some 650 miles north at California’s only supermaximum state prison at Pelican Bay. Three months later, one of Hernandez’s Mexican Mafia operatives inside Pelican Bay Prison was able to get to Andrew Rodriguez. It was a clean hit. Exactly who killed him is not known.
More than a year passed after the killings of Carmen and Andrew Rodriguez. The San Bernardino Police Department continued its investigation into the murder that had happened in its jurisdiction, that of Carmen Rodriguez in January 2017.
Earlier this month, with Mike Ramos a lame duck as district attorney, charges were filed against five individuals San Bernardino Police Department Investigators believe were involved, directly and indirectly, in the murder of Carmen Rodriguez, including those who carried out its planning, the provision of instructions for it, and its execution: 44-year-old Isaac Paul Aguirre, 43-year-old Robert Fernandez, Jr., 45-year-old Richard Troy Garcia, 35-year-old Matthew Ruben Manzano and 30-year-old Eric Moreno, Jr. Aguirre, Fernandez, Garcia and Moreno were all known members of the Westside Verdugos. Manzano is a Mexican Mafia associate from Redlands. According to investigators, Garcia, Manzano and Moreno were within the prison system when Carmen Rodriguez’s execution was being planned, and they were instrumental in the instructions being conveyed to Aguirre and Fernandez, who carried it out. At the time of the charges being filed, Garcia, Manzano and Moreno were yet in prison. Aguirre had been taken into custody by the San Bernardino Police Department on June 28, 2017 at 7 p.m. near the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and Texas Street. He was booked into West Valley Detention Center on charges of possession of narcotics for sale, participating in a street gang and being a felon in possession of a firearm. He remains locked up under a $5,850,000 bail restriction. Fernandez has been in custody at West Valley Detention Center since July 27, 2017, having been sent their pursuant to a transfer waiver following his arrest in Riverside County. He was charged with conspiracy, possession of a controlled substance for sale and being a felon in possession of a firearm. He remains in custody under a $2 million bail restriction.
The murder charges were filed against Aguirre, Fernandez, Garcia, Manzano and Moreno on Wednesday July 11, under case numbers FSB18002619, FSB18002620, FSB1800 2622, FSB18002623 and FSB18002621, respectively.
Within four days, Hernandez had moved to reduce his liabilities and silence those implicated in the Carmen Rodriguez murder whom he feared to be the weakest links – Eric Moreno, who had been incarcerated at the Level IV maximum security Kern Valley State Prison near Delano since 2015 as part of a ten year sentence, and Aguirre, yet housed within the population at West Valley Detention Center. A demonstration of the alacrity with which the Mexican Mafia can react to directives from on high ensued. Hernandez, in Pennsylvania, put out an order for Moreno’s and Aguirre’s deaths shortly after he learned of the charges being filed against Aguirre, Fernandez, Garcia, Manzano and Moreno. On Sunday, July 15, Moreno’s cellmate, 36-year-old Daniel Olguin, a Mexican Mafia affiliate, answered that call, killing Moreno within his cell. As of press time this week, no one had yet gotten to Aguirre.
Word on the mean streets of San Bernardino is that Hernandez, who had already resolved to carry out a purge of the Mexican Mafia’s ranks in the aftermath of Ramos’s loss of his reelection bid, has now sent that effort into overdrive. In addition to Moreno and the three members of the Mexican Mafia the Sentinel has been unable to identify who are said to have been killed since June 10, Hernandez allegedly is looking to silence Ramos in particular to preclude him from any future cooperation with law enforcement authorities relating to what he knows about the Mexican Mafia’s base of operation in San Bernardino County. Also identified as targets in Hernandez’s effort to clear his organization of opposition are Britt Imes, a prosecutor within Ramos’s office who has previously resisted or in some fashion overcome or eluded Ramos’s managerial restrictions that discouraged prosecuting members of the Mexican Mafia, and members of the command echelon at the San Bernardino Police Department, up to and including Police Chief Jarrod Burguan, in an effort to send an object message to investigators there that their pursuit of the Mexican Mafia carries with it an unacceptable price.
An inquiry with Chris Lee, who is the official spokesman for Ramos and his office, about what security enhancements the district attorney’s office has made and what precautions are being taken to protect Ramos and Imes, did not garner a response.
Lieutenant Mike Madden, the San Bernardino Police Department’s spokesman, told the Sentinel, “We are not aware of threats against any of our officers or command staff.”
The department is cognizant of Moreno’s killing, Madden said. “I do know there was a death of an inmate at Delano,” he said. He said that the department had not tracked the deaths of any other known Mexican Mafia members over the last six weeks.

Registrar of Voters Michael J. Scarpello, who has been San Bernardino County’s chief elections officer for more than seven years, was forced into resigning yesterday, less than four months before the November election and just as the employees he directed were gearing up to handle the November balloting.
“I can confirm that the registrar of voters tendered his resignation yesterday,” said county spokesman David Wert. “I cannot go beyond that, other than to say that Mr. Scarpello’s resignation was in no way related to any problems with the integrity of San Bernardino County’s election system. He has done a phenomenal job in coordinating our elections.”
That task has always been a challenging one in far-flung San Bernardino County, which at 20,105 square miles comprises more total land area than does a combination of four New England states combined. On election nights, ballots collected from the county’s disparate polling precinct locations are speedily collected and transported by sheriff’s deputies to the registrar’s office in San Bernardino where they are tallied. Transport from the most distant locales is effectuated by helicopter. With only a few notable exceptions, none of which occurred under Scarpello’s watch, the rapid early counts of voting results reported on election nights or in the early a.m. of the following day have been consistent with the final formal and more methodical counting done to derive the official results weeks later.
Scarpello came to San Bernardino County in April 2011, after serving as the director of elections for the City and County of Denver in Colorado. Prior to his tenure in Colorado, Scarpello had been elections manager in Douglas County, Nebraska, which includes the City of Omaha. He had been credited with improvements to the voting system there that were subsequently incorporated into the entirety of the voting process in Nebraska.
Word of Scarpello’s Thursday departure, which was rumored to be a sacking, spread quickly. Last night, at a meeting of the San Bernardino County Democratic Central Committee’s executive board, that panel took immediate action to draft a resolution to be presented to the full central committee calling for condemning the action against Scarpello.
The Sentinel has verified that Scarpello did resign; nevertheless, the Sentinel is informed, his leaving was not voluntary. Rather, it appears, Scarpello was confronted by Assistant County Executive Officer Leonard Hernandez and informed that if he did not resign, he would be terminated.
According to those with a close window on the Registrar of Voters Office’s operations, the county elections division’s high efficiency and productivity is in large measure a function of Scarpello’s dictatorial personality which resulted in what was described as a “tyrannical domination” of those working there.
That approach was evident from the start of Scarpello’s time as registrar and efforts to have him attenuate his harsh methods proved ineffective, as he asserted that the tight rein and taut ship strategy he used was undeniably effective in achieving the results which the county was demanding of him. On one occasion, the Sentinel is told, after an employee filed a grievance, Scarpello assembled the entirety of the office’s staff and decried such complaints up the county chain of command above him, saying such dissent was destructive to an organization in which members had to be team players.
During his first six years in office, the county’s senior administrators were willing to overlook Scarpello’s sometimes abrasive relations with his underlings and his insistence on being a stern taskmaster. After Leonard Hernandez’s ascendancy last year to the post variously described as assistant county executive officer or county chief operating officer, which is the county governmental structure’s second-in-command, Scarpello’s unwillingness to conform to a more accommodationist approach in managing his staff grew more critical. It was this week, in the relative respite from tension during the ebb preceding the hectic November election and following the heavy flow of the office’s activity during the June Primary election that a decision was made to move Scarpello out. In his place, the county has substituted Bob Page, who holds the title of transformational governmental administrator with the county’s human resources department. Page will serve as the interim registrar of voters while the county conducts a nationwide search for Scarpello’s replacement.
The county has not had, particularly, outstanding luck with its registrars of voters.
In the odd-year election held in November 2001, a programming error with the computer used to scan and record the votes on the punch card ballots then in use resulted in the county initially declaring as winners 13 candidates who were ultimately later determined to have lost in that year’s election. An election office worker was initially being blamed for that faux-pas, but ultimately, the then-registrar, Ingrid Gonzales, was let go by the board of supervisors, amid calls for ending the county’s use of paper ballots. The board eventually settled on hiring as her replacement Scott Konopasek, who had held an election office post in Washington State. Konopasek recommended that the county purchase, at what ultimately turned out to be a cost of $14 million, a touch screen voting system manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems. The county had committed to using that system in the 2004 Primary, which was held that year in California in March. Prior to that election, however, California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley withdrew his certification of electronic voting machines throughout the state because, he said, they could be vulnerable to tampering. Konopasek confidently went ahead with using the newly purchased machines in that year’s elections, asserting they had been previously certified. The county backed Konopasek, but less than two weeks after the November 2004 election, Konopasek and Steve Trout were relieved of their positions as the county’s registrar of voters and assistant registrar of voters, respectively.
Subsequently, Konopasek, who has now gone on to become the assistant registrar of voters in Contra Costa County, said that ballot stuffing was taking place in San Bernardino County.
Konopasek was replaced on a temporary basis by Donna Manning, a top tier assistant in the registrar’s office.
In 2007, Kari Verjil, who had been the registrar of voters in Riverside County, came to San Bernardino County to serve as registrar of voters. She was in place four years, leaving to return to Riverside County, which led to Scarpello’s selection to replace her in 2011.
The county’s investment in the Sequoia touch screen voting system did not pay off. Though the California Secretary of State eventually recertified the system conditional upon the incorporation of software patches intended to enhance Sequoia program security and protect it from cyber attacks and hacking, a decision was eventually made to cease using the Sequoia touch screen machines in San Bernardino County, with the exception of one at each polling place for use by handicapped individuals. Instead, the county for the last several years has used paper, i.e., oversized cardboard ballots, which voters mark with a black ink pen.
Reportedly, a secondary issue that pushed county administration toward moving Scarpello out of the registrar of voters position was efforts he had been making over the last few years to have the county move to a fully digitized voting system. Given the county’s experience with the Sequoia system and the anticipated expense of adopting the program Scarpello was advocating, former County Chief Executive Officer Greg Devereaux and his interim successor, Dena Smith, followed by current county CEO Gary McBride as well as County Chief Operating Officer Hernandez were unwilling to accommodate Scarpello on that score, increasing the general level of friction with him.
-Mark Gutglueck

The 2017–2018 San Bernardino County Civil Grand Jury in its final report last month recommended that the county solicit bids for the provision of emergency ambulance support in a wide range of so-called “exclusive service areas” for the first time in 37 years.
Throughout the better part of the last four decades, the current service provider and its corporate predecessor have had an impregnable hold over the region. There have been charges over the years that the county has conferred a monopoly upon that service provider, American Medical Response, by establishing it as the sole provider of ambulance service within a cross section of the county’s exclusive operating zones. This arrangement, some believe, is contrary to the best interest of some county residents, as the resultant lack of competition has allowed American Medical Response to escalate the prices it charges for the service it renders to its customers.
American Medical Response’s primacy in San Bernardino County is the legacy of the fashion in which its predecessor, Mercy Ambulance, utilized a formula of hefty donations to elected county decision makers to enhance its profitability to the detriment of its competitors.
Mercy had formed in the late 1970s, when Terry Russ, Homer Aerts, Steve Dickmeyer and Don Reed, all of whom operated ambulance companies on the west and central portion of San Bernardino’s Inland Valley and had been competing against one another for years, smoked a peace pipe and resolved to merge their operations into one, consolidating and streamlining their dispatch service, and better coordinating it with local fire and police departments. Through efficiencies and the sharing of resources, they were able to overwhelm the other ambulance operators they were in competition with, lower their prices, and induce most of those competitors to either go out of business, move elsewhere, merge with them or sell out to them. After pooling their money and initiating a program of making substantial political contributions to local politicians at both the city and county level, Russ, Aerts, Dickmeyer and Reed then used this newfound political clout and influence to have both the county board of supervisors and various city councils “regulate” the ambulance industry, which included essentially adopting as the minimum requisites for an ambulance operation within their jurisdictions the vehicle, equipment and employee training standards Mercy had in place. The politicians were able to do so by asserting that this enhanced public safety.
Thus, Mercy Ambulance established a political hammerlock on the region. Keeping up its pace of donations to the county’s top local elected officials, the consortium gobbled up ever more key franchises, making its operation yet more lucrative. In turn, the company would use a percentage of the profits it was generating to increase the scope of its political contributions. In return, the grateful politicians ensured that Mercy retained its competitive advantage over its rivals, giving Mercy plum franchises in the county’s most heavily populated areas. While what Mercy established fell slightly short of being an outright monopoly, it was at that point capable of controlling the local ambulance market at will. It then began raising its prices, making up for the rate cuts it had instituted to obtain market dominance and then raising its service rates to a point where customers were openly complaining about being gouged.
Those complaints had little effect, however. As Mercy solidified and expanded its domination of the local ambulance industry and it grew to become preeminent among the county’s campaign donors, the county and many of its cities moved to create franchises in which a single ambulance company was allowed to operate and from which any other companies were prohibited from operating. Not surprisingly, in San Bernardino County Mercy was granted the lion’s share of these exclusive franchises, not to mention the most lucrative ones.
As Mercy grew, so did the scope of its operations and its power. The company added helicopters to its line of service and extended its reach all over 20,105-square mile San Bernardino County – a land area the size of four New England states. But as Russ, Aerts, Dickmeyer and Reed aged and grew wealthier, they began, slowly at first, to disengage from and then inevitably pulled out of the stressful emergency response business entirely. A first step in that direction was selling off – at considerable profit – the Mercy Air wing. Thereafter, they sold or let their heirs take on the ground ambulance fiefdom that Mercy represented, and they withdrew into a retirement of luxury and comfort.
It was at that point that American Medical Response came into San Bernardino County as the new kid on the block. As Mercy withdrew, American Medical Response filled the vacuum, simultaneously taking a leaf out of Mercy Ambulance’s playbook, and it too made hefty political contributions. Over time, favored status would be conferred upon American Medical Response in San Bernardino County that would rival that of Mercy Ambulance a generation before. American Medical Response ultimately bought out Mercy Ambulance, thereby inheriting Mercy’s ambulance service kingdom.
A major player in these issues is ICEMA, which is an acronym for the Inland Counties Emergency Medical Agency. ICEMA oversees emergency service provision issues in San Bernardino, Mono and Inyo counties. With the permission of the boards of supervisors in Mono and Inyo counties, the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors acts as the governing body of the Inland Counties Emergency Medical Agency. ICEMA is charted “to ensure an effective system of quality patient care and coordinated emergency medical response by planning, implementing and evaluating an effective emergency medical services system including pre-hospital providers, specialty care centers and acute care hospitals.”
According to the grand jury report, “In 1981 San Bernardino County contracted with the primary ambulance service provider and other smaller ambulance providers to conduct a pilot project. As a result of this pilot project, in 1984 the Inland Counties Emergency Medical Agency (ICEMA) established an emergency medical services (EMS) plan that included establishing exclusive operating areas (EOAs) as allowed under California Health and Safety Codes Sections. The plan resulted in contracts being established, without going out to bid with the current providers within the pilot project. On April 20, 2004, twenty years later [and] without going out to bid, ICEMA approved a performance based contract with the primary provider that included setting up six EOAs. The contract was written to expire on April 30, 2012, and included six automatic extensions. In 2010, ICEMA entered into discussion with the emergency medical services providers to negotiate contract extensions with the understanding that a bid process would be needed in the near future.”
The grand jury reviewed the county’s purchasing policies and procedures, pilot project documentation, the emergency medical services contracts, amendments specific to American Medical Response, various statistical reports and business plans.
According to the grand jury report, “The primary ambulance service provider has continued to be a contracted provider to the county for 34 years. During this time frame, the contract has never gone out for a bid. Based upon interviews, the time frame needed to prepare a request for proposal [i.e., a solicitation of bids] for a contract is 18 – 24 months. The grand jury’s interviews and review of documentation validates that there are no set policies which prohibit the extension of contracts. The ambulance services contract is extremely complicated due to the required levels of safety. These levels of safety include but are not limited to adequately trained emergency medical technicians, paramedics and advanced life support (ALS) equipped ambulances. The standard county contract’s life is five years. The board of supervisors has the authority to extend any contract. The contract between the primary ambulance services provider and the county has never gone out for bid since 1984. The current contract has performance monitoring requirements and penalties to which current ambulance service providers must adhere. ICEMA receives a fee for the monitoring of the performance of all contracted providers.”
Obliquely and politely, indeed without directly referencing the degree to which hefty campaign contributions from AMR have bought influence on the board of supervisors, the grand jury report raises the issue of the favoritism shown toward AMR over the years and the way in which the company has been allowed to adhere to older and lower standards that were in place when it obtained the ambulance service franchise while the county is insisting that the companies that would compete with AMR hew to higher and more expensive standards. This phenomenon in which the government shows such favoritism to a preexisting entity that is not shown to a newer entity is referred to as “grandfathering.”
“The primary ambulance service provider has been serving San Bernardino County since 1981,” the grand jury report states. “In the early 1990s, the primary provider formed a corporation with regulations written as ‘successor clauses.’ The successor clauses address the transition from one service provider to another. These regulations allow the provider ‘grandfather rights’ for successive contracts and extensions, addressed in section 1797.201 of the Health and Safety Code. The eleven exclusive operating areas that the primary provider covers have never gone out to bid. The primary provider has ‘grandfathering rights,’ covered in the State of California Health and Safety Code, sections 1797.201, 1797.224 and 1797.226. Additionally, the Inland Counties Emergency Medical Agency cannot put one exclusive operating area out for bid; only the entire contract must be in the bidding process. Ambulance service is considered a critical service as are the police and fire departments in the bidding process, which could take 18 to 24 months. In the grand jury’s interviewing process, it became apparent that county leadership thought it would be difficult to provide the necessary level of critical service in a changeover process.”
According to the grand jury, “The changeover process (successor clause) is covered in section 1797.226 of the State of California Health and Safety Code. The changeover process is addressed as a successor; the successor replaces previous providers. The bidding process has been discussed for five years by the governing bodies. The primary ambulance service provider has all the most populated exclusive operating areas of which eleven of the total twenty-seven were grandfathered. The eleven exclusive operating areas are in the following cities: Rancho Cucamonga, San Bernardino, Redlands, and Victorville. The other ambulance service providers are the San Bernardino County Fire Department, city fire departments, and four other private ambulance service providers.”
Continuing, the grand jury report points out that there are different perspectives as to whether AMR’s potential competitors can perform at the same level it does. “A number of factors are involved in selecting an ambulance service provider,” the grand jury report states. “The primary provider must maintain a 90 percent response time of 9:59 minutes. Based upon our interviews, it was stated that San Bernardino County Fire Department could not provide a more cost efficient level of ambulance services. The fire department stated that it could provide better service, make a profit and cover the entire county. Currently, the department is not monitored for its response time like the primary provider.”
The grand jury alluded to the degree to which AMR and its predecessor, Mercy, had pressed the advantages conferred upon them by the county and then subsumed their competitors, foreclosing any realistic opportunity for competition.
“All decisions regarding the primary ambulance service contract including the extensions are made by the board,” the grand jury stated. “The current ambulance service providers started servicing San Bernardino County in 1981. Eight ambulance service providers that were servicing the county were acquired by the primary ambulance service provider. The acquisition also included the grandfathered exclusive operating areas which the State of California Health and Safety Code 1797.224 allowed. As Health and Safety Code 1797 dictates, if an ambulance provider were providing services in a specific area within a county exclusive operating area, they retain it [or were] grandfathered. The county could lose grandfathering protection and some control could revert over to the state if the contract were put out for bid under the Health and Safety Codes.”
In its findings, the grand jury stated, “The county issues five year contracts and can extend at its discretion. Three of the six extensions were limited to six months or shorter, not allowing the time needed for a request for proposal (18-24 months). Modifying boundaries of existing contracted exclusive operating areas would warrant for the complete bidding process of the contract. Health and Safety Code 1797.224 states if the exclusive operating areas are amended, the entire contract must go out for bid. The primary service provider currently services eleven exclusive operating areas of the twenty-seven exclusive operating areas within the county. This represents nine percent of the geographic area and 80 percent of the total population.”
Ultimately, the grand jury recommended that the county “Create one exclusive operating area that covers the entire county. This would allow one provider to cover the county and require the provider to service populated and rural areas. If one exclusive operating area were created to encompass the remaining sixteen exclusive operating areas, the current provider could retain grandfathering protection.”
Thus, the grand jury said the county should “Create a request for proposal for a new service provider contract.”
-Mark Gutglueck

Less than a month after its June 26 rejection of resident Linda Repp’s appeal of the planning commissions May 16 approval of Verizon’s proposal to erect a cell tower at Mendel Park, the Apple Valley Town Council on a 5-0 vote last week approved a lease agreement with Verizon for that facility. In exchange for $20,400 annually and Verizon’s assurance it will construct the tower in the likeness of a Eucalyptus tree, the council gave go-ahead to the project.
Repp presented data to indicate that cellular towers present a health risk to those who live or spend a significant amount of time near one, including elevating in children rates of autism and cancer, particularly cancer of the blood such as leukemia. She cited the Los Angeles Unified School District’s banning of cell towers at its schools in making her appeal. The use of the park property for the cell tower location was also opposed by Karen Mendel, whose parents donated the Mendel Park property to the town, though Mendel was unable to launch an official appeal of the planning commission approval because she did not meet the town’s requirement that the appeal be filed within 10 calendar days of the commission’s vote.
In rejecting Repp’s objections to the placement of the tower near the park and its playgrounds as well as adjoining Mariana Academy, which serves preschool through eighth-grade students, the council members downplayed those concerns. Councilwoman Barb Stanton, noting that the fire department has cell towers at its fire stations, said, “If it’s good enough for our firemen who live in those stations day and night, then it’s good enough for our park.” Councilman Curt Emick cited the consideration that Verizon provides the communication link to the in-car computers used by the sheriff’s department to assert that the cell tower will improve general public safety.
Councilman Larry Cusack, who is the owner of Apple Valley Communications and deals in electronic devices using wireless technology such as cell phones, said the proliferation of cell phones among Apple Valley resident was overwhelming the ability of existing facilities to facilitate calls and data exchanges, asserting, “[With] the service in Apple Valley there is not very good coverage. The more and more devices and the more and more equipment that goes on these services, the less service we get unless we add services. North Apple Valley is having all kinds of trouble, and I know down by Apple Valley Road and that area there’s a bunch of dead areas.” He said the electromagnetic emanations from such towers are safe. “Being a radio person, I know the frequencies that go on and stuff, and these are actually lower frequencies, not microwave frequencies that are or can be harmful. When I was working on towers, you had to be away from it, but these are the lower frequencies, which are not as [dangerous]. And it’s low power, too. These are not high power, high wattage facilities.”
At any rate, according to Town Attorney Thomas Rice, the town, like all local jurisdictions, is not permitted to consider the safety or health risks associated with such facilities because the U.S. Congress and the Federal Communications Commission have set the criteria by which such towers are to be located. Both the planning commission and the city council were prohibited by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 from utilizing radio-frequency emissions as factor in determining the placement of the cell-tower, Rice said.
-Mark Gutglueck

The second third of what has been a political institution in Victorville for 50 years gave indication this week he will retire from the position he holds within the public forum later this year.
Councilman Jim Kennedy will not seek what would have been his third term on the Victorville City Council come November.
In more ways than one, Kennedy is the embodiment, or at least represents a continuation, of the Caldwell/Cox dynasty that has proven out as the major shaper of what Victorville is today and has been over the last forty years.
When Victorville was founded in 1962, one of the prime movers toward cityhood had been Joseph Campbell, the scion of what was one of the community of Victorville’s elite families. Campbell’s father was Kemper Campbell, Sr. and his mother, Litta Belle Campbell, both of whom were attorneys. Joseph Campbell. was the younger brother of Kemper Campbell, Jr., an Army Air Corps flyer who lost his life in an aviation training mission early in World War II. Joseph Campbell was a charter member of the Victorville City Council, and remained on that panel for nearly a decade, serving during that time stints as mayor.
In 1967, when the city was five years along in its existence as an incorporated municipality and was being managed by Fred Baxter, it hired a young man not too long out of San Diego State University, Jim Cox, into an apprenticeship as an administrative assistant. By 1968, Cox had acceded to the position of treasurer and then finance director. In 1969, the council took a risk on promoting him to city manager.
In 1972, then-California Governor Ronald Reagan appointed Campbell, who was mayor, to the Superior Court. Because of state statutes pertaining to the incompatibility of public offices, Campbell was required to resign his elected municipal position to go on the bench. With Campbell’s assonance, the city council on March 7, 1972 appointed Terry Caldwell, who was then a member of the Victorville Planning Commission, to fill out the slightly more than two years left on Campbell’s unexpired term. Caldwell spent the next 38 years and nine months on the Victorville City Council, the longest tenure of any Victorville elected official before or since. Along the way, he formed a close alliance and friendship with Jim Cox. Over the years, a number of personages found their way onto the council, becoming members of what was essentially the Caldwell/Cox team that dominated the city and the Victor Valley for more than three decades. In the battle for what was termed “the Golden Triangle,” the property beginning at the tip of the nexus between the 15 Freeway and Highway 395 at the southern end and then between those two major arteries all the way to its northern boundary at Bear Valley Road, Caldwell and Cox outmaneuvered their political and administrative counterparts in Hesperia to put that property, with its rich sales tax-producing frontages, first within Victorville’s sphere of influence and then within its city limits. A few years later, after the Department of Defense in 1992 shuttered George Air Force Base, Victorville entered into a protracted competition with the City of Adelanto over which municipal entity would annex the base property and be allowed to guide its civilian use reconversion. Despite having cut Hesperia off at the pass in the battle for the Golden Triangle, Caldwell and Cox were somehow able to allay city officials there and get them to work cooperatively with them, the Town of Apple Valley and the County of San Bernardino, under the joint powers association of a cooperative entity, dubbed the Victor Valley Economic Development Authority, to put forth an annexation and land use proposal for George Air Force Base that ultimately overcame a competing proposal from Adelanto. Eventually, the Victor Valley Economic Development Authority was granted title to the base property. Thereafter, in a series of maneuvers, Victorville essentially sloughed off the mantle of the Victor Valley Economic Development Authority, taking de facto control of the base, which by that point had been rechristened as Southern California Logistics Airport.
In 1999, Cox retired as Victorville city manager. In December 2007, after more than seven years of comfortable retirement, oftentimes golfing with Caldwell at the Green Tree Golf Course that was proximate to their homes, Cox was sought out by the town of Apple Valley to serve as town manager there. He stayed in that role for ten months, before retiring for the second time as a municipal manager. And then in 2009, Victorville, staggering under the weight of the mismanagement of its electrical utility division as well as the downturn in the national and state economy, asked Cox to again come out of retirement and oversee city staff once more. Cox did so, staying in that assignment for two years.
Over the years, Caldwell would find himself closely affiliated with Jim Kennedy, the husband of his law partner. When Caldwell chose not to seek reelection in 2010, he and his longtime supporters threw their support behind Kennedy, who was elected. Kennedy was, and still is, perceived as a continuation of Caldwell’s guidance of the City of Victorville. In 2011, Cox retired for the second time as Victorville’s city manager. The next year, he successfully vied for the Victorville City Council.
Both Cox and Kennedy not only replicated, but embodied, much of Caldwell’s philosophy and approach.
Of note is that Caldwell, Cox and Kennedy are residents of what is considered by some to be Victorville’s premier neighborhood, that area surrounding the Green Tree Golf Course and Country Club, which was developed as Victorville’s first planned community beginning in 1963, just a year after the city’s founding. The golf course is now a city-owned entity, and as such it has been bundled with a number of other city assets such as City Hall, its city yard, fire stations and other real properties and structures as collateral used to secure bonds. The city, which formerly contracted with Billy Casper Golf to operate the golf course and the country club, has since contracted with Sierra Golf Management to run the links and clubhouse.
Because of the consideration that they each live within 500 feet of the golf course, neither Cox nor Kennedy is permitted to vote on any issues related to the golf course, including the contract with Sierra Golf Management, as this would violate the conflict of interest provisions of the Political Reform Act.
Last month, the city council took up the issue of the 2018-19 budget, including that element of the budget outlining a proposed $532,243 payment to Sierra Golf Management in the form of a taxpayer subsidy necessary to allow the golf course to attain its $1.1 million operating allotment and remain open to the public. That item was separated from the approval of the entire budget so that Cox and Kennedy would not vote upon it.
Under law, however, neither the entire budget nor any part thereof can be passed without the assent of a majority of the entire council, that is, three votes.
Previously, there had been discussion of creating a special taxpayer district within the immediate environs of the golf course that was inclusive of the Green Tree neighborhood. The assessment to be imposed on the district’s homeowners and property owners would defray the costs of operating the golf course, a major proportion of which consists of irrigating the course’s greens and landscaping the course and country club grounds, all of which are considered to be enhancements to the neighboring properties. Those discussions had not proceeded to the point of actuating the formation of that district, though the 2018-19 budget did earmark $25,000 to fund a study about initiating the tax district.
While Mayor Gloria Garcia and Councilman Eric Negrete were willing to support voting to utilize $532,243 in taxpayer money to subsidize the golf course operations, Councilwoman Blanca Gomez was not. This inability to get three votes to support the golf course subsidization raised the prospect of Sierra Golf Management shutting the course down and launching legal action against the city over a breach of contract, as well as potentially creating a default with regard to the credit arrangement on the city’s bonds.
Ultimately, Kennedy has come to the conclusion that his continued council incumbency will prevent the golf course operation contract issue from being resolved. As such, he is electing to leave the council as of December, and will not seek reelection in November.
His departure will have the outcome he seeks, however, only if he is not replaced by a candidate living in the Green Tree neighborhood and Negrete, who is also up for reelection this year, is able to regain election, such that three members of the newly composed council will be on board for offering the city subsidization to the golf course operations and maintenance.
-Mark Gutglueck

San Bernardino County yesterday joined with more than 200 cities and counties throughout the country and filed what is essentially a cloned lawsuit suing 24 pharmaceutical companies and ten retail drug distributors and pharmacies, citing “aggressive and fraudulent marketing of prescription opioid painkillers and distribution practices.”
The county is represented in the lawsuit by the New York City-based law firm of Simmons Hanly Conroy, along with Wisconsin-based Crueger Dickinson LLC.
The suit maintains that the pharmaceutical companies, physicians prescribing opioids indiscriminately and retailers including pharmacies, drug stores and general merchandisers failed to maintain effective controls over the distribution of prescription opioids and actively sought to evade reasonable controls on the prescribing and dispensing of the drugs.
Lodged in federal court, the suit seeks relief associated with costs the county is bearing in fighting the opioid crisis. The problems besetting the county have been brought on by “the drug companies’ deceptive marketing campaign that misrepresents the safety and efficacy of long-term opioid use,” according to the suit, which maintains that 35 fatalities from opioid use occurred in San Bernardino County last year. Moreover, according to county officials, in 2017, at least 259 people visited emergency rooms in the county with non-heroin opioid overdoses and another 179 were hospitalized for opioid overdoses. Nearly 1.5 million prescriptions were written last year for opioid medications. County officials say those have contributed to addiction and have increased drug-related or drug-induced crimes or public health issues like Hepatitis C and neonatal abstinence syndrome.
With other offices in San Francsisco, Chicago, St. Louis, El Segundo as well as Alton, Illinois, Simmons Hanly Conroy has with Crueger Dickinson filed what are nearly indistinguishable lawsuits against the same defendants on behalf of New York City; the State of New York’s Dutchess, Broome, Erie, Orange, Oswego, Schenectady, Seneca, Sullivan and Ulster counties; San Juan County, New Mexico; Santa Fe, New Mexico; DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry and Will counties in Illinois; Adams, Columbia, Door, Douglas, Eau Claire, Florence, Fond du Lac, Grant, Green, Iowa, Jackson, Jefferson, Langlade, Lincoln, Marathon, Oconto, Oneida, Pierce, Price, Rock, Rusk, Sauk, Shawano, Sheboygan, Washburn, Washington, Waupaca Brown, Crawford, Iron, Juneau, Kewaunee, Outagamie, Ozaukee, Pepin, Portage, Racine, Richland Winnebago and Wood counties in Wisconsin; Washington, Calcasieu, Ouachita, Sabine and Vernon parishes in Louisiana; Adair, Adams, Audubon, Benton, Bremer, Buchanan, Buena Vista, Calhoun, Carroll, Cedar, Clay, Clayton, Clinton, Dallas, Delaware, Fayette, Hamilton, Hardin, Humboldt, Johnson, Lee, Mahaska, Marion, Mitchell, Monroe, Montgomery, O’Brien, Plymouth, Polk, Pottawattamie, Sac, Scott, Shelby, Sioux, Taylor and Winneshiek counties in Iowa; the municipalities of Bridgeport, Naugatuck, Southbury, Fairfield, Beacon Falls, Milford, Oxford, West Haven, Noth Haven, Thomaston, Torrington, Bristol, East Hartford, Southington, Newtown, Shelton and Tolland in Connecticut; Dauphin County in Pennsylvania and Riverside County in California, among others.
“The county and our residents are being severely affected by the opioid crisis,” said San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors Chairman Robert Lovingood, who added that through the filing of the lawsuit, “our county joins hundreds of counties across the United States in an important effort to hold these companies responsible for their role in creating the opioid epidemic.”
“Together, with Simmons Hanly Conroy, we will work to hold the defendants responsible and to secure help for the residents of San Bernardino County recovering from opioid addiction,” Erin Dickerson, a lawyer with Crueger Dickinson LLC, said.
The defendants in the lawsuit include Purdue Pharma, L.P.; Purdue Pharma, Inc.; The Purdue Frederick Company, Inc.; Endo Health Solutions Inc.; Endo Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Janssen Pharmaceutica, Inc. n/k/a Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Noramco, Inc.; Ortho-McNeil-Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc. n/k/a Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Johnson & Johnson; Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd.; Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc.; Cephalon, Inc.; Allergan PLC f/k/a Actavis PLC; Allergan Finance LLC, f/k/a Actavis, Inc., f/k/a Watson Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Watson Laboratories, Inc.; Actavis, LLC; Actavis Pharma, Inc. f/k/a Watson Pharma Inc.; Insys Therapeutics, Inc.; Mallinckrodt PLC; Mallinckrodt LLC; Cardinal Health Inc.; McKesson Corporation; AmerisourceBergen Corporation; CVS Health Corporation; The Kroger Co.; Rite Aid of Maryland, Inc. D/B/A RiteAid Mid-Atlantic Customer Support Center, Inc.; Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc. A/K/A Walgreen Co.; Wal-Mart Inc. F/K/A Walmart Stores, Inc.; H.D. Smith, LLC d/b/a HD Smith, f/k/a H.D. Smith Wholesale Drug Co., H.D. Smith Holdings, LLC, H.D. Smith Holding Company; and Miami-Luken, Inc.
The suit also alleges that physicians Russell Portenoy, Perry Fine, Scott Fishman and Lynn Webster have been instrumental in promoting opioids for sale and distribution nationally.

The legal team representing former Adelanto City Councilman Jermaine Wright, who is accused by the U.S. Attorney’s Office of arranging to receive a bribe while in office and fixing to have his restaurant destroyed in an arson fire so he could collect on a $300,000 insurance policy he had on the structure that housed it, has been granted a six-month continuance to prepare for their client’s trial.
Wright had been scheduled to go before a jury beginning on August 14, some nine months and seven days after his November 7, 2017 arrest by the FBI. That arrest came roughly three weeks after Wright had been confronted by an FBI agent with evidence that agency had accumulated against him and the councilman agreed to cooperate with a continuation of the investigation into graft, bribery and fraud at Adelanto City Hall, including using a surreptitious recording device to capture statements from other city officials the FBI agents thought might implicate them in activity similar to that in which Wright was involved. Wright, however, violated the terms of that commitment by disclosing to one of his confidants, whom he did not know to be an FBI informant, that the probe was under way. In his exchange with the informant, Wright went so far as to solicit a mob-type “hit” on an undercover FBI agent who had posed as an arsonist in previous dialogue with Wright during which the councilman had given the agent a tour of his restaurant, Fat Boyz Grill, assisted in the planning of the arson by providing a ladder for the undercover agent, discussed various tactics with regard to maximizing the damage and paid the undercover agent $1,500 to carry out the assignment.
Wright has asserted his innocence through his federal public defenders, Jeffrey Aaron and Angela Viramontes, during the legal process and, when he has surfaced publicly since his conditional release on bond in May, in his own statements. The evidence against him, however, is overwhelming. In addition to the material assembled by the undercover FBI agent who had taken on the persona of an arsonist, several encounters Wright had with another FBI agent who had convincingly represented himself as an applicant seeking to obtain a city permit to operate a marijuana transportation business were electronically monitored. In one of those, Wright told the FBI agent that he was willing to take money in exchange for helping to secure an “exemption” that would allow the transportation business to get up and running. At a later meeting, on October 6, 2017, the FBI agent provided Wright with two separate stacks of 100 $50 bills. When the exchange was made, Wright and the agent observed the nicety of suggesting that the money might be used by a non-profit charity Wright indicated he controlled. In reality, that non-profit entity did not exist.
Wright’s lawyers, despite the consideration that they have been working on his behalf since November, are completely unprepared to go to trial. Whatever leverage to make a favorable deal Wright may have once possessed in the form of his ability to assist federal authorities in their investigation evaporated when he angled to have one of the FBI agents knocked off prior to his being arrested and while he was still in a position to approach both Adelanto officials and those suspected of bribing them to see what evidence he might gather.
Hearing no objection from the U.S. Attorney’s office, U.S. District Judge Jesus G. Bernal on July 9 consented to continuing the trial until February 26. Between now and then, it is anticipated that Aaron and Viramontes, together with their investigators and research staff, will be attempting to find some procedural or evidentiary fault in the way in which the FBI and then the U.S. Attorney’s Office proceeded against their client in an effort to have some or all of the evidence against him thrown out.
–Mark Gutglueck

In a July 16 email to the Sentinel, San Bernardino County’s official spokesman, David Wert, took issue with several elements in the article, “Board’s Emerging Political Divide Overwhelming County’s Top Administrator,” which ran as the lead story in the Sentinel’s July 13 edition.
Wrote Wert, “Just read your article and there were a few factual errors that should be addressed:
“–’Devereaux was not hired into the post of county administrative officer – the title historically conferred upon San Bernardino County’s top employee – but rather the enhanced position of county chief executive officer.’ – Greg [Devereaux] was hired as county administrative officer. The board did not create the position of chief executive officer until Nov. 2, 2010, about nine months after Greg joined the county as CAO.
“–’Devereaux was given absolute autonomy with regard to overseeing the county’s operations as well as the hiring and firing of county department heads that went beyond the authority of any previous county administrative officer.’ – Greg’s authority to oversee the county’s operations and hire and fire department heads was no different than it was for previous CAOs and is for the present CEO. There are a handful of positions –Behavioral Health director, Child Support Services director and public defender, to name a few – that by state law are board of supervisors appointments. Most department head positions have always been and still are CAO/CEO appointments for which there is no legal mechanism for board appointment or termination.
“–’the board did not confer upon McBride the title of chief county executive officer. Rather, the previous title of county administrative officer was reinstated as the county’s top staff position with his promotion.’ – Gary [McBride] was hired as and serves as “chief executive officer.” He has never held the title of “county administrative officer,” which has not existed since November 2010.
“–’the practice of restricting the county’s department heads from having direct substantial contact with the board of supervisors.’ – There has never been a ‘practice of restricting the county’s department heads from having direct substantial contact with the board of supervisors.’ When Greg was hired, he and the board agreed that individual board members and their staff members would refrain from giving orders to county departments behind the scenes, and county departments who received orders from individual board members and their staff members would refer the matter to the CAO (later the CEO). Direction from the board can only come from the board taking action as a body in an agendized meeting. That agreement was memorialized in an ordinance passed on Nov. 2, 2010. However, it was made clear from day one of Greg’s tenure (I know, because I was there when Greg communicated this to county department heads) and it continues to be the rule today that department heads and other county staff are to respond promptly to questions and requests for information from individual board members and board staff, and keep board members and board staff informed of significant situations and events. The CEO needs to be kept in the loop on those communications for obvious reasons. Therefore, there is no and never was any restriction on contact between department heads and the Board of Supervisors, or on the board as a body providing direction to county agencies, just a restriction on individual board members and board staff from giving direction to county staff behind the scenes.
“This is not to say that I’m confirming the other elements in your story. As I mentioned, what you say you’re hearing and what I’m seeing and hearing do not match.
“Thanks, and take care,

“David”

This morning, at 9:16 a.m. deputies and medical aid responded to a residence in the 2700 block of Duffy Street in Muscoy, following a report of a shooting. Deputies arrived and found a two-year-old victim suffering from a gunshot wound. She was transported to a local hospital and pronounced deceased at 10:02 a.m.
Sheriff’s specialized investigators responded to conduct a probe of the incident. They determined a four-year-old boy, the victim’s cousin, was in possession of a handgun and accidentally shot the two-year-old.
Investigators interviewed several people who were at the home at the time of the shooting, and as a result they determined that Cesar Lopez, the victim’s grandfather, left the gun in an area that was accessible to the children. Lopez, 53, was arrested and will be booked for child endangerment and being a felon in possession of a firearm.

The Montclair City Council this week appointed Virginia Eaton to serve out the remainder of her husband’s term as mayor. Paul Eaton stepped down as mayor on July 5, as health considerations had prevented him from physically attending city council meetings since March.
Councilwoman Carolyn Raft nominated Eaton, who often goes by “Ginger.” No other suggestions were made or nominations entertained. The council then voted unanimously to approve her selection.
Virginia Eaton was sworn into the office on the spot by City Clerk Andrea Phillips.
Virginia Eaton’s political ascendancy very likely preserves what should be an open mayoral election in November, when the term Paul Eaton was elected to in 2014 expires. It is anticipated that Virginia Eaton will not vie in that contest.
Appointments to elected office vacancies carry with them political implication, as incumbency statistically endows office holders with an eight-to-11 percentage point advantage against challengers. There has been speculation that any of the four current council members – Raft, who has been in office since 1992; John Dutrey, who has been in office since 1996; Bill Ruh, who has been in office since 1998; and Trisha Martinez, who has been in office since 2014 – would be interested in moving into the mayor’s post.
Virginia Eaton has lived in Montclair 53 years, since moving there with Paul and their young family in 1965. Her husband, to whom she has been married for 60 years, came into office the same way in which she did. He was appointed to the city council in 1988. Seven years later, with the departure of then-Mayor Larry Rhinehart, Paul Eaton was appointed mayor.