D.A. Declines to Investigate Carson Mailer

The mayor faces trial on corruption charges. Several other elected officials have pleaded guilty to similar crimes in the last year. And federal authorities are still poking through city records for evidence of more wrongdoing.

Even so, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s Public Integrity Division, which enforces state laws on municipal corruption and election fraud, turned down a request to investigate an allegedly illegal campaign mailer in Carson.

The topic of the complaint: a last-minute anonymous “hit piece” that many Carson residents believe tipped the City Council election March 4.

Vera DeWitt, the candidate attacked in the mailer, lost by about 180 votes of nearly 9,000 cast. The glossy brochure was sent the weekend before the election to more than 7,200 registered voters. The law requires that mailers posted to at least 200 homes contain the identity of the sender. Violations are a misdemeanor.

In a four-paragraph letter to Carson City Clerk Helen Kawagoe, Deputy Dist. Atty. David Demerjian declined to launch an investigation into the mailer.

The Times found that information linking the mailer to the alleged sender or senders was readily obtainable.

Demerjian said in his March 28 letter, which he signed on behalf of Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, that the division had not received enough information to warrant an inquiry. He also said his staff is too small to pursue every complaint.

Reform-minded Carson residents, who had hoped last month’s election would mark a clean break from a dirty past, said Demerjian’s response is typical of the division’s passive approach to rooting out sleaze in the city of 90,000. They say the district attorney’s office often seems reluctant to act unless it is presented evidence on a silver platter.

“The D.A. won’t even make a phone call,” said Robert Lesley, who initiated the request for the investigation through Kawagoe’s office. Lesley, a retired Los Angeles police officer, is president of the Carson Coalition of Concerned Citizens. “It’s a pattern, and it’s just not right,” he said.

Demerjian said in an interview that he might have ordered an investigation if Lesley had named a suspect in his complaint. He noted that the law barring anonymous mailers applies only to candidates and campaign committees, not to private individuals.

Lesley and other residents, however, said it’s the division’s job to determine the source of the mailers.

“We’re not investigators,” DeWitt said. “They put these laws in place, they say this stuff is illegal, and then the investigators don’t do anything about it. They just brush it off.”

DeWitt, who served on the council in the 1980s and early ‘90s, said the mailer cost her the election.

The rambling missive is titled “She’s back ... and so are her lies!” It portrays her as a front for “secretive out of town trash companies,” among other things.

The Times traced the mailer by its bulk-mail stamp to a Torrance postal company.

Philip Painter, owner of South Bay Mailing Service, said Basil Kimbrew, a former Compton school board member on probation for an election law violation, arranged to have the brochure sent out. Kimbrew denied that.

Kimbrew’s estranged wife, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Lt. Jenny Bethune, was a candidate in the election. She lost.

Painter said the DeWitt piece was one of several that Kimbrew arranged to have mailed. The others were brochures for Bethune and so-called slate mailers that featured group endorsements of candidates, Painter said.

He said that the mailers were handled as a single account, paid for with a series of checks and about $1,000 in cash. He would not disclose the total paid for the mailers, nor specific records of the transactions.

Painter did say that one check, for $3,500, came from Clifford Cannon, another candidate in the council race. Cannon finished just behind DeWitt.

Kimbrew and Bethune deny having had anything to do with the DeWitt mailer.

Kimbrew, a self-described “political provocateur,” pleaded no contest last year to falsifying candidacy papers by claiming Compton residency when he lived in Carson. He and Bethune are divorcing.

“I’m known for doing hit pieces -- I admit that,” Kimbrew said. “But I didn’t do this one.”

He and Bethune blame Cannon for the mailer. Cannon insists that he knew nothing about it. He said he engaged Kimbrew solely to arrange for the delivery of the slate brochures, paid for with the $3,500 check.

Painter, however, said Cannon phoned him after the DeWitt mailer was sent to say that he, Cannon, would be reimbursed for the postage for the mailer.

“He said, ‘If anybody calls you about that mailer, I got reimbursed -- I didn’t pay for it.’ I said, ‘Whatever,’ ” Painter recalled.

Cannon acknowledges having had that conversation with Painter. He said he had wanted Kimbrew to reimburse him, but that Kimbrew refused.

“I’m a victim,” Cannon said.

Kimbrew said he owed Cannon nothing.

He also contends that Cannon and Carson Mayor Daryl Sweeney met him at a Bakers Square restaurant a few weeks before the election to ask that he arrange for the mailing of various hit pieces, including the one targeting DeWitt. Kimbrew said he declined.

Cannon said the meeting was an above-board discussion about the slate mailers.

In 1997, the state Fair Political Practices Commission fined Cannon for numerous violations of campaign finance disclosure laws. The fines stemmed from his work as campaign treasurer for then-Assembly candidate Juanita McDonald and her son, Keith, who ran for Carson City Council and a water board. The McDonalds also were held liable for the combined $53,000 in fines. Juanita McDonald is now a congresswoman.

Mayor Sweeney, who is among Cannon’s supporters, is under federal indictment for allegedly soliciting and taking bribes from trash companies.

Sweeney was charged in an FBI and Internal Revenue Service investigation that resulted in guilty pleas by a former mayor and two former council members. Sweeney has pleaded not guilty. He did not return calls for comment.

During Sweeney’s meeting with Cannon at the Bakers Square parking lot, a coincidence occurred that is already legendary in Carson political circles. DeWitt, the target of the mailers, happened to bump into Cannon, Sweeney and Kimbrew. “I told them, ‘Isn’t this a picture?’ ” DeWitt said.

“It was a Kodak moment,” Kimbrew said.

Just about everyone involved in Carson politics says 11th-hour illegal mailers have been routine for years. “It’s always been that way,” said city Treasurer Karen Avilla, who was attacked by one before the March vote. She won.

Lesley, the president of the Carson citizens group, said the cycle could be broken if the district attorney’s office stepped in. “Otherwise, it’s just going to go on and on,” he said.

But Demerjian said his division is simply stretched too thin. He said his eight investigators are juggling 140 cases, many of them involving felonies.

“The issue is one of resources,” he said.