Burke won’t face charges

Los Angeles County prosecutors said Tuesday that they have decided against filing criminal charges against Supervisor Yvonne B. Burke after investigating allegations that she was living in a gated Brentwood home last year rather than in her predominantly South Los Angeles district.

Head Deputy Dist. Atty. Dave Demerjian said his office could not determine whether Burke intended to abandon the Mar Vista town house she owns in the 2nd Supervisorial District when she registered to vote there in 2006. A successful prosecution would have had to prove that Burke intended to move to Brentwood at the time she registered, he said.

“It’s not really about residency; it’s about whether or not they lied on any particular documents,” said Demerjian, who oversees the office’s public corruption division.

Burke, 76, declined to talk to district attorney’s investigators about the matter, according to a memo Demerjian wrote last month outlining his reasons against filing charges.

Neither Burke nor her attorney, Rickey Ivie, returned calls seeking comment Tuesday.

Prosecutors launched their probe in response to complaints following a July 2007 Times report that Burke had been staying overnight in her 4,000-square-foot residence on Mandeville Canyon Road, complete with swimming pool and tennis court. Burke told reporters at the time that she considered her Mar Vista town house, on the edge of her district, her principal residence but conceded that she had rarely slept there since purchasing the property a year earlier.

Demerjian said that Ivie provided prosecutors with photographs and receipts that showed Burke had remodeled parts of the town house on Centinela Avenue before moving into the property in 2006 and during a portion of 2007, making the home uninhabitable for some time. Ivie told the district attorney’s office that the three-week period during which reporters saw Burke staying overnight at her Brentwood home coincided with the remodeling work, Demerjian’s memo states.

“The fact that Ms. Burke retained the town house, and was remodeling it, indicates a lack of intent to abandon her district and establish her domicile in Brentwood,” Demerjian wrote.

Times reporters began watching Burke after she told the newspaper that she used her Brentwood home only on weekends and special occasions but otherwise lived at the Centinela property, which she purchased in June 2006.

When confronted three weeks later, Burke admitted that she had stayed at her Centinela home “maybe a month or two” despite owning the home for more than a year. She provided the newspaper with receipts of remodeling work at the home, but those showed the work was performed for only two months or so beginning in May 2007.

In recent years, the district attorney’s office has prosecuted several politicians for perjury and election fraud when they were caught living outside the district in which they claimed residency. But Demerjian said those cases involved sham homes that had either no connection to the politicians or were simply empty residences. That was not the case with Burke, he said.

“We can’t say that this was a sham,” he said.

The district attorney’s office also declined to pursue a civil action to remove Burke from office based on the allegations. Demerjian concluded that prosecutors probably would not receive the necessary permission from the state attorney general’s office because the supervisor’s term expires in December.

Burke is being replaced by state Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas, who beat City Councilman Bernard C. Parks in the Nov. 4 election.

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jack.leonard@latimes.com