Ex-Union Chief Pleads Not Guilty to Embezzlement Charges

The former president of a union representing Los Angeles school workers pleaded not guilty Monday to federal charges alleging she embezzled $36,000 to secretly help the 2003 City Council campaign of Martin Ludlow and improperly spent thousands more on travel for relatives and a friend.

If convicted, Janett Humphries faces a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison for each of 18 counts, according to Assistant U.S. Atty. Craig H. Missakian.

“When you’ve got an election, it’s important to have a level playing field for all the candidates,” Missakian said outside the courtroom. “Mr. Ludlow and Ms. Humphries took an unfair advantage in that election.”

Appearing with Humphries in federal court in downtown Los Angeles, Nick Pacheco, her attorney, said federal prosecutors are going after the wrong person and that other union officials were in charge of helping the Ludlow campaign.

“We firmly believe that the prosecution here has misread the facts, and Janett Humphries should not be a target,” said Pacheco, a former city councilman.

Ludlow has entered a bargain in which he has agreed to plead guilty Monday to participating in the embezzlement conspiracy with Humphries, and he is expected to testify against her. Ludlow, who left the council last summer to serve as executive secretary-treasurer of the L.A. County Federation of Labor, faces paying $36,000 in restitution and a possible 13-year ban from holding a union position.

The Humphries indictment includes one count of conspiracy to embezzle union funds and 17 charges of embezzling funds to pay six workers on Ludlow’s campaign, cellphone service for Ludlow and travel for Humphries’ daughters and a friend. At the time, Humphries was president of Service Employees International Union Local 99.

The indictment alleges that Humphries directed a bookkeeper to put Ludlow’s workers on the union payroll but also instructed her that the union files related to them be “cleaned up.” The indictment also alleges that at Ludlow’s direction, workers backdated some reports.

It further alleges that Humphries illegally used $894 in union funds for a daughter’s travel to Hawaii, $769 for the same daughter’s travel to the Virgin Islands, and $1,364 for the daughter to travel to Australia.

Humphries was also charged with illegally using union funds totaling $1,568 for her other daughter and a friend to travel to St. Thomas. The three traveled to St. Thomas in July 2002.

Humphries has said she reimbursed the union for travel mistakenly booked by an assistant. Added Pacheco on Monday: “The prosecution is misreading the facts about how the union handles its internal reimbursement and travel.”

Missakian, who works for the U.S. attorney’s Public Corruption and Civil Rights Section, said the U.S. Department of Labor played a role in investigating the allegations against Ludlow and Humphries.

“It’s important because the funds they took belonged to members of that union,” Missakian said. “Those members work very hard for that money, and Mr. Ludlow and Ms. Humphries have no right to use that money as if it was their own.”