Officials, D.A. Spar Over Land-Fraud Case

A pair of angry Los Angeles County supervisors grilled a defiant Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti Tuesday on why his office failed to act effectively to stop Marshall Redman, the developer charged with defrauding working-class Latinos in a High Desert land swindle.

In an hourlong session filled with rancor before the Board of Supervisors, Garcetti was repeatedly pressed by Supervisors Mike Antonovich and Gloria Molina, who demanded to know why his office was not the lead agency in the case and what prosecutors were doing to stop Redman from making further sales.

Redman was charged in May with fraud and theft in a scheme that allegedly targeted 1,500 buyers, some of whom remain stranded without utilities and running water on desert land throughout three Southern California counties.

A combative Garcetti said his office has been “on top” of the case since the beginning, and he chided supervisors for their lack of legal expertise and blamed them for failing to provide funding for an effective program to combat land fraud.

In one pointed exchange, Molina chastised Garcetti’s staff members for unresponsiveness to her inquiries on the Redman case and the role of the district attorney’s office in putting it together.

“This is a very annoying discussion for me. I don’t appreciate being on the receiving end of someone playing games with me,” Molina told the county’s highest-ranking law enforcement official. “We’ve been chasing around your staff, Mr. Garcetti. They’re very difficult to get answers from.”

Molina said she did not know why prosecutors filed charges more than two years after Kern County prosecutors and the Los Angeles city attorney’s office in 1992 filed a civil lawsuit against the developer to recoup some of the losses in the sales.

Last month, Garcetti’s office filed a written report explaining his agency’s handling of the Redman case. Supervisors rejected the report as insufficient and called for the district attorney to appear in person.

And the moment Garcetti addressed the board Tuesday, the fireworks began.

When Antonovich suggested that Garcetti’s office had been informed of the Redman matter in 1992, a year before the date Garcetti supplied in the written report, Garcetti erupted.

“Now wait, wait, wait, wait, wait,” he said. “Mr. Antonovich, if you have some facts, I’m willing to discuss them. But let’s make sure all the facts are correct. If you’re going to throw out general statements that it was someone who brought the case to someone else, that’s totally unhelpful to anyone. If you want to be specific about it, I’ll address specifics.”

Moments later, Molina broke in with her criticism of Garcetti’s staff members.

“I still can’t figure out what kind of role you are playing at all. I have no understanding and that’s because your staff has not been forthcoming and I don’t appreciate it,” Molina said. “So that you understand it, in the future when we ask a question, it requires an answer.”

When Garcetti said he wasn’t sure any such questions were asked, Molina erupted.

“Now, you just wait one minute,” she snapped. “We need lawyers on our side to talk to your lawyers. So I have to hire a lawyer to get answers?”

And so it went.

For more than an hour, Garcetti and the board cut each other off, stepped on each other’s sentences, raised their voices and pointed fingers.

At one point, Antonovich suggested that since the charges against Redman came years after the land sales were halted in 1994, perhaps prosecutors would not be able to proceed at all because the statute of limitations on any crimes would have expired.

“In due respect, Mr. Supervisor, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” a visibly riled and red-faced Garcetti responded.

Garcetti said his agency had heard about the case in November 1993, but at the time decided to wait until a civil case designed to stop Redman was resolved. He emphasized that officials had obtained an injunction against Redman’s companies to stop misleading sales practices. But before any criminal charges were brought, he said, authorities wanted to help victims recoup their losses.

He argued it made sense for Kern County prosecutors and the Los Angeles city attorney’s office to take the lead in the civil suit, since they had done the most research into the case at that time.

“The point is we were on top of this case,” he said. “We were working with the various agencies. Everyone’s goal was, ‘How do we stop the fraud? How do we protect the assets so the victims will have some chance of getting something out of this fraud?’ The victims in this case have been protected as much as humanly possible.”

When Antonovich pressed him on the effectiveness of his actions, Garcetti asked angrily, “Do you know how the legal process works? Can you show me one more victim who has come forward since we filed our injunction? Can you? Answer me.”

Garcetti criticized the board for inadequate funding for land-fraud investigations in past years, saying his office had to go before the state Assembly to lobby for a bill that funds fraud investigations through a $2 fee on some property transactions.

“For the last four years I have been district attorney. Almost every year I have come before this board and said there are huge real estate frauds going on that essentially affect the minority community,” he said.

“You said, ‘Oh yes, we have to do something.’ But I didn’t see any motion or any money, so we went out and did it ourselves,” Garcetti said.

Molina questioned claims that prosecutors were monitoring a court-appointed receiver hired to marshal funds for Redman buyers, noting that the first receiver had been fired and is now under investigation for his activities in the Redman matter.

“The first receiver went off the wayside, so maybe the second one could too,” Molina said. “The present receiver is making $225 an hour. How many hours? How is he going to get paid off? We’ve all seen too many cases of this type, where the victims end up with nothing, but the lawyers end up with a lot.”

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky defended Garcetti by saying there were other county agencies that failed to take effective action against Redman.

“This is a problem for all of county government,” he said. “It didn’t start with the district attorney’s office. There was also the county Department of Regional Planning and public works and the building and safety people.

“All of us are part of the process of democracy, trying to best answer the question: How do you respond to a complaint by the public? This situation was brought to the attention of a number of county agencies. Why didn’t they pick it up?”

Echoed Molina: “Some of our departments, I think, were negligent. We’re going to have to investigate that.”

For his part, Antonovich called for an investigation of the county Department of Regional Planning to learn why it didn’t take a stronger stand against alleged illegal sub-development by Redman and others and report back to the board within 30 days.

Antonovich asked Garcetti to use information from the regional planning report and try to be more aggressive with illegal developers by filing more cases.

Said Antonovich: “We need a proactive policy against this kind of crime.”

Interrupted Garcetti: “We have a proactive policy. We’ve always had a proactive policy. We just need more people to put it into effect.”

Garcetti later told reporters he was surprised by the harsh tone of the questioning.

“I’m not sure why Mr. Antonovich asked some of the questions he did,” he said. “Maybe it’s because it’s a political season. Maybe he feels it’s entertaining, I don’t know. But I wasn’t going to permit him to take on my office without reason and without fact. I was going to call him on it.”

But Garcetti’s performance also did not satisfy Antonovich, who criticized the prosecutor after the hearing.

“To quote an old Chinese proverb,” Antonovich said, “Talk doesn’t cook rice.”