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Ex-Official Gets Lenient Sentence

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Times Staff Writer

Responding to an extraordinary plea for leniency from a prosecutor, a federal judge sentenced a former Carson city councilwoman Monday to four months of home detention for conspiring with other elected officials to extort $600,000 from a bidder on a waste-hauling contract.

U.S. District Judge Percy Anderson also placed Raunda Frank, a former Los Angeles County public defender, on five years’ probation and ordered her to pay $10,000 restitution to the city. The 40-year-old single mother of two could have received a 30- to 37-month prison term under federal sentencing guidelines.

At the outset, Anderson indicated he was disinclined to let Frank off with a light sentence, notwithstanding her guilty plea and cooperation with authorities. “There has to be some accountability, some consequences,” Anderson said, returning to that point several times during the proceedings as he questioned lawyers on both sides and the defendant herself.

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As a public defender, he said, Frank was intimately familiar with the criminal justice system and what happens to people who break the law.

“The thing that troubles me more than anything else,” Anderson told her, “is that at a time when people in the community are feeling disenfranchised, your actions make them feel that there’s no hope.”

But Assistant U.S. Atty. John Hueston said Frank was “one of those rare defendants who deserves a substantial downward departure” from guidelines for sentencing in federal courts.

When confronted, he said, Frank immediately admitted her guilt and went on to provide crucial assistance that not only strengthened the prosecution’s case against other defendants, but enabled investigators to expand their probe into other areas. He did not elaborate.

The federal investigation into official corruption in Carson has resulted in guilty pleas by all 10 defendants, including two former mayors and two former council members. The biggest instance of extortion involved a scheme directed by Mayor Daryl W. Sweeney to solicit a $600,000 kickback from Browning-Ferris Industries in return for awarding the company an exclusive 10-year garbage contract worth an estimated $60 million.

Sweeney, Frank and Councilman Manuel Ontal, constituting a council majority, voted in February 2002, to award the contract to Browning-Ferris, the highest bidder. Frank received $5,000 before her vote and another $5,000 afterward. Ontal, having admitted his role in another municipal bribery scheme, was working at that time as an FBI informant.

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Building on evidence developed in the Carson probe, federal agents last year arrested the president and a board member of the West Basin Municipal Water District on charges of extorting kickbacks from contractors.

In court Monday, Hueston told the judge that prosecutors did not promise Frank they would recommend probation in exchange for her cooperation.

“She, unlike other folks, came in and fell on the sword,” Hueston said. “She said, ‘Yes, this is what happened, and let me tell you what else went on.’ ”

Hueston described her assistance as “extraordinary” and said the recommendation for a probationary sentence had the full backing of superiors in the U.S. attorney’s office.

While the prosecutor offered no details about Frank’s cooperation, her defense lawyer, Thomas Bienert, said his client did so at considerable risk to herself and her family. But he, too, did not elaborate.

Frank apologized to the court for “this horrible error in judgment.” She said she regretted having “hurt so many people who put their faith in me.”

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Frank, the third defendant sentenced in the case, resigned from the public defender’s office and the state bar after her indictment. Her lawyer said Monday that she is unemployed. The judge said Frank could leave her home during the four-month detention period for job interviews and to begin working again.

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