After laying out documents from hundreds of boxes seized from Beaumont City Hall and other locations during raids in April 2015, members of the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office’s Public Integrity Unit began the task of poring over the papers, looking for evidence of corruption.
The documents, delivered to the district attorney’s Riverside office in rented trucks, were spread among tables in three rooms.
“Then we were faced with this overwhelming logistical nightmare of going through all these documents, and sometimes it has been described as the proverbial needle in the haystack,” District Attorney Mike Hestrin said. “There’s no magic machine.
“The crime dramas on TV, everyone’s always punching into a keyboard and up pops the answer. That’s not how it works,” he said. “You’ve got (so many) bankers boxes to go through. You know the answer is in one of them, but you gotta go through them page by page.”
Hestrin on Monday, May 23, described the Public Integrity Unit’s actions that resulted in 94 felony charges being filed against seven former top city officials in Beaumont – although because the case is ongoing, he wouldn’t get into specifics about the evidence.
Most of the charges allege embezzlement and misappropriation of public funds totaling $43 million. None of the defendants has entered a plea.
‘CORRUPTION IS HUMAN NATURE’
Public Integrity, with five investigators, is one of several fraud units in the district attorney’s Specialized Prosecutions Section. Others include computer crimes, workers’ compensation, auto insurance, welfare, consumer and real estate.
“Corruption is human nature,” Hestrin said. “It’s a fact of life that exists. Where it exists and where we find it, we’re going to prosecute it.”
One member of the Public Integrity Unit is assigned to the six-year-old Inland Regional Corruption Task Force, which assisted in the Beaumont investigation. The other member agencies are the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office, the FBI and the IRS.
“It’s a priority for me,” Hestrin said. “We’re the only game in town as far as public integrity. The sheriff doesn’t have it. The local police departments don’t have this function. To me it’s an absolutely core, essential function of the District Attorney’s Office. … The people who elected me into this position expect me and this office to do that job.”
Hestrin vowed to protect the unit even if looming county budget cuts affect his office.
“You can’t do this just a little bit. The cases are potentially massive. If you have a case like Beaumont, if you have two investigators, you’re never going to get it done. Never.”
‘STEP AWAY FROM YOUR COMPUTERS’
The Beaumont probe began after local activists Judy Bingham and Libi Uremovic presented evidence to DA investigators in August 2013, while Paul Zellerbach was district attorney. Zellerbach was defeated in the 2014 elections by Hestrin.
Several weeks after he was sworn in on Jan. 5, 2015, Hestrin said, a “private citizen” whom he declined to identify met with about a half dozen investigators armed with possible evidence of wrongdoing in Beaumont, and the office ramped up its efforts.
Still, that evidence, Hestrin said, was not enough proof to establish probable cause that a crime had occurred – the standard for obtaining a search or arrest warrant. The Public Integrity Unit investigators then sought out, and found, enough evidence to get search warrants. Hestrin would not say in what form that information was obtained.
With that in hand, investigators in April 2015 served warrants on City Hall, the Beaumont office of Urban Logic Consultants, the Palm Desert home of then-City Manager Alan Kapanicas and a Temecula residence. (Three of Urban Logic’s principals working as Beaumont contractors, former Economic Development David William Dillon, former Public Works Director Deepak Moorjani and former Planning Director Ernest Alois Egger, were among those charged.)
Hestrin estimated that 30 investigators and other personnel took part in the raids.
“They announce themselves and say, ‘Everyone please step away from your computers and stop typing,’” Hestrin said.
“It’s traumatic for the workers there. I feel bad for the workers because these are regular folks doing their job. … But at the end of the day, we’re there to get evidence,” the district attorney said.
The documents proved helpful in determining that crimes occurred in Beaumont, said Hestrin, who declined to discuss the evidence.
The investigators worked nights and weekends to gain an understanding of the case, he said.
NOT MORENO VALLEY
The arrests of seven former Beaumont officials marked a very different outcome from the result of the Public Integrity Unit’s yearslong political-corruption probe in Moreno Valley.
That investigation ended in 2015 without any county charges, although a former council member, Marcelo Co, pleaded guilty in November 2013 to a federal charge of accepting a $2.36 million bribe from an undercover FBI agent and received a five-year prison sentence.
Hestrin described the DA’s investigation then as “a totally different case, totally different set of facts.”
He said Zellerbach probed the city for more than two years. Hestrin said he then took a fresh look at the case and concluded there was not enough evidence to file charges.
A Riverside County criminal grand jury also did not find enough evidence of a crime to return indictments.
Hestrin said he often receives pleas for the Public Integrity Unit to investigate allegations of corruption, but “nine times out of 10, it turns out to be nothing. Turns out to be someone’s angry about a political decision. That’s not a crime. Someone made a decision that’s a bad decision. That’s not a crime either.”
But he welcomes any evidence of corruption. “Point me in the right direction and we’ll look at it,” he said.
Does Hestrin believe that there is more public corruption in Riverside County than in others?
“It depends on what you mean by others,” he answered. “I think here’s the problem: We have something here in Riverside County that other places don’t have, and that is dirt – land.”
Six of the Beaumont defendants are accused of personally benefiting from the issuance of bonds to pay for public projects for a rapidly expanding city.
“We have a lot of land, a lot of development and a lot of growth,” Hestrin said. “With a lot of growth comes the potential and the temptation for corruption.”
Contact the writer: br****@pe.com or 951-368-9569