Burbank Ex-Councilman Pleads Guilty to Bank Fraud

Former Burbank City Councilman James Richman pleaded guilty to bank fraud Monday, but federal prosecutors persuaded a judge to seal the plea-bargain deal.

Richman, who turned 63 on the day authorities filed their case against him two weeks ago, pleaded guilty to defrauding Western Federal Savings & Loan in Tarzana in connection with a home he attempted to purchase in Bell Canyon six years ago.

Under the deal, Richman will not face additional fraud charges, but may be required to make restitution on those charges.

“We are discussing four other transactions [Richman made] in this plea agreement,” Assistant U.S. Atty. Harriet Rolnick said. “If restitution is ordered by the court, the amount can exceed the loss arising out of the Hackamore [Lane] transaction, which he pleaded guilty to.”

The one-term councilman, who served from 1977 to 1981, submitted falsified tax returns to the bank and lied about the source of money he intended to use for a down payment on a Hackamore Lane house in 1991, according to the U.S. attorney’s office. Richman gave the false information to obtain a bank loan for more than a half a million dollars, Rolnick said.

The plea agreement stipulated that the financial loss arising out of Richman’s conduct was between $800,000 and $1.5 million, Rolnick said.

Rolnick declined to comment on why other terms of the deal were kept secret.

Neither Richman nor his attorney, David Houchin, could be reached for comment Monday. Sentencing was set for Dec. 15.

Richman has a colorful history in Burbank, during his tenure on the council and after. He survived an attempted recall drive in 1978, led by opponents who claimed Richman was aggressively abrasive and ineffective.

In 1985, he announced that he was writing a book on the city’s politics and his own career to be titled, “The Political Sewer; Beneath Beautiful Downtown Burbank.”

In spring of 1985, Richman was ordered by a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge to pay $10,000 to a political foe whom the judge ruled had been libeled in a newspaper article written by Richman.

The judge ruled that Richman had implied his foe was a homosexual in a column that appeared in the now-defunct weekly Burbank Scene, which in 1979 invited City Council members to write columns on a rotating basis.

Later that same year, Richman was ordered to pay a libel judgment of $5,000 to an area concert-promotion firm as part of a $4.6-million judgment against Burbank for barring the promoters from staging rock concerts at the city’s Starlight Amphitheatre.

Richman had led opposition to the concerts by arguing they would attract crowds of “homosexuals and dopers.”