Where’s the Deception, the Treachery? This Scandal Is a Sham

As scandals go, the one surrounding former Orange County Assistant Sheriff George Jaramillo makes less sense than most.

I don’t mean to sound disappointed over that; it’s just that you’d think corruption in high places would involve a labyrinthian trail of deceit and diabolical cunning. Instead, the charges against Jaramillo involve alleged misdeeds that were right out there in the open.

Which, so far, sounds like Jaramillo’s defense. If I were really doing something wrong, I would have done a much better job hiding it.

We’ll see if that flies, but for my money the case is more intriguing for the questions raised than for the wrongdoing alleged.

On their face, the charges against Jaramillo -- which he has denied -- represent garden-variety corruption. He’s charged with concealing his financial ties to a laser technology company at the same time he was helping to hawk its wares. In layman’s terms, prosecutors allege he used sheriff’s personnel and equipment to help the company, CHG Safety Technologies, put on six demonstrations of its product.

But why, we have to ask, was Sheriff Mike Carona, Jaramillo’s boss and longtime friend, so clueless about Jaramillo’s ties to CHG?

Carona’s answer, backed up by the D.A.’s investigation, was that he didn’t know about them because Jaramillo didn’t tell him. The D.A.’s complaint filed last week alleges that Jaramillo told Carona in the spring of 2000 that CHG “wanted to hire him as a consultant” and that Carona then warned him of a potential conflict of interest. Jaramillo said he’d keep Carona informed but never told him of his financial arrangement, the complaint alleges, “and never informed him about the demonstrations.”

Jaramillo did, however, file economic disclosure statements with the county clerk that detailed the $25,000 he had received in 2001 and 2002 from CHG.

In addition, the demonstrations he set up involving department personnel and equipment were hardly clandestine operations. In at least one case, the news media were invited.

So, in the end, we’re left to assume that no one in the department ever told Carona over a nearly two-year period that Jaramillo was using personnel or equipment for the demonstrations. Or that no one ever thought to check on Jaramillo’s financial disclosure statements.

Maybe this is all 20-20 hindsight and is asking too much of a department head. Maybe the longtime friendship between the two dulled any suspicions. Maybe Carona truly was oblivious to the demonstrations. Or, maybe he knew about them, but somehow never thought to ask why they were continuing.

But if all that is true, it puts the lie to something Jaramillo once said about Carona: “He’s one of the smartest cops I’ve ever met.”

Jaramillo, on the other hand, is no dummy. He’s left a paper trail that provides some evidence to support his argument that he thought it was all above-board.

“George has always maintained that the county counsel’s office blessed the arrangement” with CHG, his lawyer, Peter W. Scalisi, said last week. “He has always maintained that the entire arrangement was disclosed and everyone had full knowledge of the arrangement, and that he in fact reported the funds on county disclosure documents.”

He went on to say: “If they truly wanted George not to do this and put him on notice to stay away from the arrangement, it seems incongruous that George would then disclose the funds on the disclosure document and, in effect, call great attention to the arrangement.”

Stranger things have happened, I suppose.

But if Carona never saw any of this coming, perhaps the best we can say about him is that he may be a good sheriff, but he’d make a lousy detective.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana

.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.