Our Scandalous Past : Some were rogues, some only unfortunates. But through the years Ventura County has had its share of public figures in hot water.

Never mind Tom Ely. Whether he’s an innocent Ventura Community College trustee (as he maintains) or the wanderlusty embezzler of some $15,000 in public funds (as the district attorney alleges), his case just doesn’t scandalize the way certain passages of local history do.

Over the years, elected officials and prominent citizens in Ventura County have been accused of taking bribes; drinking on the job; refusing to salute the flag; stealing from the post office; fixing family traffic tickets; making lewd gestures, while naked, to strangers, and shoplifting at Sears. Some of those allegations stuck, some didn’t. But they all seem to endure in memory.

A handful of old-timers, for instance, can still recall that evening in June, 1957, when an irate sheriff’s deputy faced down the Santa Paula police chief on the lawn of City Hall.

Copping an attitude: Santa Paula’s chief of police is accused of being ‘drunk half the time.’

The City Council had just finished meeting when sheriff’s Lt. Perry Barker, whose area included Santa Paula, went public with charges that Police Chief George H. Weiner was drinking heavily on the job and might throw the town open to vice and organized crime.

“He’s drunk half the time. And you can quote me on that,” yelled Barker, according to newspaper accounts at the time.

Weiner immediately threatened a lawsuit for slander, and a grand jury inquiry commenced soon thereafter. By the recollection of Santa Paula’s current police chief, Walt Adair, none of the accusations was ever tested in court.

But the deputy’s protest achieved its desired effect: Weiner resigned Sept. 1, 1957, three months after the accusations and just one year after his appointment to office.

On the take: A county supervisor pockets $3,000 from a rock products company.

But when talk turns to scandals, Howard F. (Robbie) Robinson is more often remembered.

Robinson won election to the Ventura County Board of Supervisors in 1964, then won reelection in 1968. In the intervening time, he took about $3,000 in unreported funds from officials of Consolidated Rock Products Co., and the district attorney’s office found out.

On Dec. 22, 1970, Robinson was convicted on six counts of bribery. Two months later Superior Court Judge Edwin F. Beach sentenced the 48-year-old ex-supervisor to one to 14 years in state prison. In remarks quoted by the Ventura Star-Free Press, Beach tried to emphasize Robinson’s contributions to the community.

“Almost all of his work,” Beach said, praising faintly, “has been done without thought of personal aggrandizement.”

Peter D. Kossoris, now the county’s senior deputy district attorney, prosecuted the case.

“People were saying it was the first time a public official had been convicted of bribery in the history of the county,” Kossoris recalled recently. “And we haven’t had a bribery case since.”

Odd man out: A free-spirited councilman questions the right to impose laws.

There was, however, the city councilman who wouldn’t salute the flag.

Dick Bozung was his name. A slow-growther who had just prevailed in a legal fight against expansion-minded Camarillo city officials, Bozung was elected to the Ventura City Council in 1974.

“He was an all-American boy--only about 30 years old, and clean-cut,” said veteran Ventura Councilman John McWherter, who took office the same year.

But while McWherter, now 75, was holding onto his seat, Bozung was testing Ventura County’s social mores.

“He let his hair grow Afro-style,” McWherter said. “I mean Afro--eight or 10 inches out from his head. And he let his beard grow unattended. It was just a mess. He wore a horizontal-striped T-shirt, overalls, and went barefooted. A number of times, I kept him from being kicked out of places the council was invited because they thought he was a bum.”

Bozung lived on a boat in Ventura Harbor for a while, and then moved the boat to Santa Barbara and commuted to Ventura council meetings. Sometimes he hitchhiked around town. Once he advertised in an alternative tabloid called the “Mother Earth News” for seaworthy female companionship. As McWherter recalls it, the ad mentioned that he was on the Ventura City Council.

But it was when Bozung stopped saying the Pledge of Allegiance at council meetings--because he had come to question any government’s right to impose laws on citizens--that the real trouble began. McWherter remembers hearing from the American Legion, among others.

The situation deepened when Bozung proposed an amendment to the city charter that would have essentially eliminated the regulatory power of Ventura’s municipal government. He said he had no plans to step down, unless of course the people felt he should.

But on Nov. 1, 1976, Bozung did resign, in a speech that the city clerk summarized this way:

“Councilman Bozung stated that since taking office he has had a change in philosophy of the functions of government. . . . He felt that he could not be true to himself to remain in office and felt that it was appropriate to resign.”

Modest mischief: Comparatively speaking, Ventura County leaders are well-behaved.

After a few of those stories, this county may begin to sound like the kind of freewheeling frontier landscape where anything might happen. After all, it was in the city of Ventura, 82 years ago in September, that City Trustee William McGuire resigned rather than enforce an ordinance banning saloons.

But when the modern-day transgressions and alleged transgressions of Ventura County leaders are stacked in a pile, observers here and in Sacramento agree, they reach a relatively modest height.

“I’ve always had the general impression that Ventura County was relatively clean--a nice suburban area that hasn’t gotten mired down in machine politics very much,” said Bud Lembke, editor of Political Pulse, a Sacramento-based government newsletter.

“I don’t remember Ventura County as being particularly distinguished, one way or another,” said Richard Zeiger, editor of California Journal. “But with the growth out there, you may be encountering a phenomenon that has occurred several places in the state. I think it has something to do with the fact that values are changing, that there are so many opportunities opening up at such a rapid rate. It encourages all kinds of entrepreneurs to get into the government business. Some of that goes well, and some goes ill.”

On the city and county level, Ventura County has seen more than one politician go down for the count.

Searing defeat: 20 months later, Oxnard voters get fired up about shoplifting.

Tsujio Kato, an Oxnard dentist, won election to the City Council in 1974 and began what seemed a prosperous political career. The year he was elected, his colleagues appointed him mayor pro tem. In 1976 he was elected mayor. He held the job for three two-year terms, then in 1982 returned to a City Council seat.

And then on Christmas Eve, 1982, after he’d already made a purchase at the Sears store in Oxnard’s Esplanade mall, he walked back inside and was caught shoplifting two barbecue utensils said to be worth $22.

Kato pleaded no contest to petty theft. He went on probation, paid $300 and held office for another year, during which time he joined a council majority in backing a city utility tax .

In November, 1984, 20 months after the shoplifting conviction, Oxnard’s voters recalled him. The utility tax was a factor, observers said at the time, but so were those missing Sears barbecue utensils.

Loss of innocence: A supervisor finds low tolerance for disturbing the peace.

Edwin A. Jones is another lamentable story. A teacher and family man, Jones won a County Board of Supervisors seat in 1974. He held it for more than 10 years, representing Thousand Oaks, southern Camarillo and parts of Oxnard.

During his first campaign, Jones acknowledged a 1962 arrest for indecent exposure--while he was a junior high teacher in Los Angeles--but prevailed by a 3-to-2 margin. In office, he cultivated his image as a husband of more than 30 years and the father of five.

But on June 12, 1985, according to police reports, the 55-year-old supervisor rented a room at the Charles Motel in Studio City and occupied it with a woman other than his wife. Sometime after 3 p.m., the reports say, Jones exposed himself to a 22-year-old woman, making a lewd gesture while standing across the courtyard from her.

She called the police, who arrived to find Jones extremely intoxicated. When he made a move that was construed as threatening, a female officer fired a burst of tear gas into his face.

Jones was charged with lewd conduct and indecent exposure, but the charges were reduced. Four months later he pleaded no contest to disturbing the peace and public drunkenness. He was fined $1,000, sentenced to two years probation and sent to alcohol counseling.

The incident didn’t keep Jones from seeking reelection in November, 1986, and spending $138,000 in the process, which was a county record. He lost anyway.

Drug of choice: A Moorpark city councilman couldn’t just say no to a developer’s bribe.

If Ventura County were to construct a rogues’ gallery for its former public office-holders, intoxication might make a useful recurrent theme. At about the same time that Jones was losing his last election, authorities in the young city of Moorpark were beginning to notice strange things around City Hall.

Danny Allen Woolard, a postal clerk, was also on the Moorpark City Council. By 1986, Woolard later acknowledged, he had developed a cocaine habit and was stealing from the till. Beyond that, Woolard later said, he took a $2,000 bribe in exchange for his vote on a development project.

In January, 1987, Woolard resigned and pleaded guilty in a Los Angeles federal courtroom to embezzlement of $5,500. A month later, he was sentenced to six months in prison, five years probation and 2,000 hours of community work.

But he did not go down alone. Woolard told authorities that in 1985 and 1986, Thomas C. (Bud) Ferguson, another member of the Moorpark City Council, had arranged up to $30,000 in loans to influence Woolard’s votes.

The district attorney’s office cleared Ferguson of criminal wrongdoing, but Deputy Dist. Atty. Thomas J. Hutchins suggested that Ferguson had “a sense of morality that is out of step with 20th-Century California politics.”

Given the state’s political history, Moorpark’s voters could have regarded that as a compliment. They evidently didn’t. Ferguson was recalled in November, 1987. A year later he attempted a comeback City Council campaign and finished last, with just under 6% of the vote.

That was no lady: Officials unmasked one mover and shaker while investigating her whorehouse.

They are a varied and colorful lot, those errant officeholders. But ultimately they may be only footnotes. The most widely reported scandal in Ventura County history--one that is often forgotten these days--erupted over a local mover and shaker who never held elective office.

In about 1915, the city of Oxnard became the home of Lucy Hicks, a 6-foot-tall black woman with considerable charm and a Kentucky accent. An accomplished cook, she was soon working for the town’s leading families. She became such a part of local society that her other principal occupation--running a whorehouse--brought her little trouble from the authorities.

When the sheriff did arrest her once, one well-circulated account goes, Charles Donlon, the town’s leading banker, bailed her out immediately. He had a huge dinner party planned that night, and it would have failed without her.

So Hicks’ reputation and fortune grew. She gave to local charities, bought war bonds, prepared a celebratory barbecue when a new Catholic priest came to town. By the time President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in 1945, it seemed a logical thing for the Oxnard newspapers to seek out comment from Hicks.

But the Navy traced a case of venereal disease to Hicks’ business later that year, and medical examinations of the business and its employees followed. One of those examinations, conducted by Oxnard physician Hilary R. Mangan, yielded such unexpected news that it reached the pages of Time magazine before three weeks had passed.

“Lucy,” Time informed its readers around the world, “was a man.”