"Curren Price Indicted After LA Media, Politicians Ignored Red Flags" by Daniel Guss
ITYS
@TheGussReport - Last October 18th, I wrote that LA City Councilmember Curren DeMille Price, "is my pick for 'City Hall’s Likeliest to be Indicted.'” The story is linked below.
Actually, I have been predicting it since 2017.
For years, this column was the sole voice in Los Angeles that meticulously detailed some of Price’s maneuvers that led to a slew of embezzlement, conflict of interest and perjury charges filed against him on Tuesday.
The media let him get away with it.
The City Hall vote trading, in which the Councilmembers voted for almost everything their peers put on the agendas, continued.
And the rest of us paid the Price(s), literally and figuratively.
So leading off, let’s review where we’ve been, because absolutely nothing in Price’s indictment comes as a surprise to anyone who follows this column.
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As outlined in Tuesday’s indictment, Price’s alleged crimes are varied and substantial. But his life of lies started to unravel in early 2017, when he could not explain to me when or even where he divorced his first wife, Lynn Suzette Green Price.
In this series of columns that I started at that time, I outlined Price’s bigamy, lies under oath and a heck of a shell game.
2/27/17: “LA’s Own Bigamist-ery.”
3/2/17: LA Sentinel Throws Up a Smoke Screen for Councilman Price on the Bigamy Mystery
3/6/17: LA Times Tiptoeing Around the Price Bigamy Allegations
3/27/17: Curren Price Plot Thickens: Councilman’s Problems are Bigger than Bigamy
4/17/17: Fraud? Perjury? LA City Councilman Implicated by His Own Attorney
10/16/17: City Hall’s Bigamist? Could a Smoking Gun Sink Him for Bigger Crimes?
2/12/18: Will This LA Judge be Hoodwinked by an Alleged Bigamist Lawmaker?
7/9/18: Fresh Problems for LA’s Now-Divorced Bigamist Lawmaker
10/3/22: The In(dictment) Crowd
This column laid it out year after year. But Price kept getting away with it.
Price’s alleged crimes are far bigger than bigamy, as you’ll see as the criminal case unfolds. What I can confirm is that Price repeatedly lied under oath to judges, in public records and in scores of LA City Council votes that his vote-trading colleagues knowingly embraced.
I write knowingly because I asked every single one of Price’s peers during those years, about his failures to disclose, failures to recuse and massive conflicts of interest. Regardless, they kept overwhelmingly approving agenda items that Price kept putting in front of them.
Every rigged vote was theft of the public’s trust and someone’s money, including yours and mine.
Every one of those rigged votes should be unwound and paid for with the pensions of Price and his corrupt enablers. But that’ll never happen in City Hall because it would require integrity to make a law that holds themselves accountable for their crimes.
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A couple of funny stories on Price’s never-ending grift.
Born in 1950, he graduated high school in the thick of the Vietnam War, avoiding the draft with college and then law school. But like former LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, having a legal education didn’t mean being able to pass the State Bar of California. Neither Price nor Villar-Raigosa did.
Price was so inept at law that, a few decades ago, he represented himself in bankruptcy court, but failed to include all of his creditors. Later, possibly when some of those creditors caught up with him, he had to re-open the bankruptcy case. In doing so, his bankruptcy file evaded the cutoff date for a massive destruction of federal records, making it impossible for him to deny that he failed to properly notify all of his creditors. It is unclear whether he has since settled any of those debts.
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But by far, the zaniest thing I discovered about Curren Price while exploring his crimes has to do with the LA County voter registration of his first wife, Lynn Suzette Green Price.
For who-knows-what-reason, Price wanted a divorce from Green without serving her papers. He and his then-attorney, LA political figure Al Robles, repeatedly misled the court that they couldn’t locate her, even though it took this column less than five minutes to find her voter registration in Mercer County, New Jersey, and - oh! - her law firm website.
The judge rejected Price’s request to serve her by buying a tiny newspaper ad.
While poring over public records, I discovered something odd. Long after Green had left California, her LA County voter registration was switched around the time that Price claimed under oath that he couldn’t locate her.
But it wasn’t switched from Los Angeles County to Mercer County.
It was switched from one address in LA County to another, specifically, 4519 Don Arturo Place.
Stick with me, now!
That’s not the crazy part!
The crazy part is that the property to which (Wife #1) Lynn Suzette Green Price’s LA County voter registration was switched just happens to be owned by (Wife #2) Delbra Richardson Price, whose name and business activities are mentioned throughout the indictment.
What are the odds?
Of all the property owners in Los Angeles County!
It was a scam so stupid, even Price’s personal attorney, Stephen J. Kaufman, repeatedly told me in 2017, perhaps without understanding the implication of what he was saying, “Lynn Suzette Price never lived at 4519 Don Arturo Place.”
The only person in LA County’s population of 10 million people who would benefit from being able to manipulate his first wife’s voter registration, LA City Councilmember Curren Price, has as his second wife, the woman who owns the house to which it was transferred.
Neither Price nor Kaufman could explain why he tried to serve her with divorce papers there. And that is what triggered my deep investigation that directly led to the 10 corruption counts against him in 2023.
It’s because Price never assumed anyone would figure it out.
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At 72, Price is looking down the barrel at legal proceedings for most of whatever remains of his life. The question I have now is whether, and on who, he might flip so that he doesn’t wind up dying in prison.
I have a few ideas. And if you’ve read my columns closely, so do you.
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(Daniel Guss, MBA, is nominated for four ‘23 LA Press Club journalism awards. He is City Editor for the Mayor Sam network, and has been a featured contributor for CityWatchLA, KFI AM-640, iHeartMedia, 790-KABC, Cumulus Media, KCRW 89.9 FM, KRLA 870 AM, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal, Pasadena Star-News, Los Angeles Downtown News and the Los Angeles Times in its sports, opinion, entertainment and Sunday Magazine sections among other publishers.)