"EXCLUSIVE: District Attorney Investigating Karen Bass's LA Animal Services For Severe Animal Cruelty, Financial Misconduct" by Daniel Guss

More whistleblowers allege LA Times reporter Dakota Smith ignored pleas, and now covers her tracks, while Bass and City Council fumble fixable animal cruelty

Sep 25, 2023

@TheGussReport on Twitter — Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon’s animal cruelty unit has for months been investigating Los Angeles Animal Services, LAAS, for continuously severe, inhumane conditions, financial misconduct and how some city officials, including Larry Gross, a Democratic Party operative who is Mayor Karen Bass’s LAAS commission president, allegedly enabled corrupt practices by using multiple clandestine email accounts from his job as Executive Director of the Coalition for Economic Survival to conduct city business and dodge public records requests made by this column. Each of those stories was exclusively broken by this column.

A Real LAAS Nose Knows - Karen Bass's Criminally Cruel LA Animal Services

Conditions at LAAS, which were already bad when its GM Brenda Barnette was forced to retire in 2021, further nosedived when Annette Ramirez, a high-ranking animal control officer, served as interim gm for the past few years; a period marked by retaliation against whistleblowing pound volunteers and massive plundering of funds donated exclusively for the care and comfort of animals in LAAS’s custody for expenses that should have been paid for by the city budget, including travel, lodging, meals, technology and maintenance.

If it looks cruel, it’s likely criminal in Karen Bass’s deadly animal pounds

Deputy District Attorney Kim Abourezk, a 24-year veteran assigned to the DA’s animal cruelty unit, has, at minimum, led the cruelty part of the investigation. But it appears that while conditions are as hideous as ever, as documented in this (and other) clips from over the weekend showing dogs in a filthy, feces-strewn LAAS kennel in severe disrepair with no food or water…

…that Bass and Staycee Dains, who the mayor hired months ago as LAAS gm, refuse to declare a state of emergency with an all-hands-on-deck order to immediately clean, disinfect and repair its facilities, and then (i.e. at the same time) address the severe overcrowding not only in the kennels, but also its back rooms and neglectful medical units.

Water and food are not options at LA Animal Services

LAAS continues boxing animals in crates — which may constitute criminal animal cruelty — and taking them out, if at all, for only a few minutes per day, leading to unhygienic conditions and preventable behavioral problems. That leads to sickness, fewer adoptions and more deaths (often disingenuously referred to as euthanasias), which is not only cruel, but costly.

Instead, it is believed that Dains is headed this week to yet another convention, this time in Baltimore, to which she should have sent a delegate or commissioner.

Why is Staycee Dains, who LA Mayor Karen Bass hired months ago as LAAS GM, jetting to another convention when there is a crisis in their deadly, diseased and filthy pounds?

Kenneth Mejia Underwhelming On Pledge

Various City Hall sources say that Deputy District Attorney Abourezk has also been in-touch with rookie City Controller Kenneth Mejia on these matters, including what if any role his opponent in the race for that office, former City Councilmember Paul Koretz, may have played in hiring a vendor named The Glue for a pointless, wildly overpriced website rebuild for LAAS despite the vendor having no background in such work, no known business address and no known full-time employees.

Koretz, who had fancied himself as Barnette’s successor as LAAS gm if he were to lose the controller’s race despite having no background in animal control, wound up losing 15 of 15 districts to Mejia, did not respond to this column’s inquiry last week.

Similarly, Mejia has dodged multiple inquiries into LAAS, per his campaign pledge to deal with its endless suffering and failure.

Funny: Koretz had never previously supported gm candidates from outside of animal control, even those who had substantial humane policy experience…until he decided he’d like that job. As I have long stated, Koretz made a career of never-solving humane problems as a way of keeping himself relevant until people stopped buying his bullshit.

Eunisses Hernandez: Well-Intended But Misguided

Rookie LA City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez doesn’t listen or at least doesn’t get the humane problems to which she was tasked by council president Paul Krekorian to fix.

After this column spent an hour speaking to her chief of staff, Ivette Serna, about these and other problems at LAAS shortly after taking office, it appears that she still doesn’t understand the cause of the deadly and infected pounds’ overcrowding, among other things.

On Wednesday, Hernandez is going to hold a doomed-to-fail committee meeting for a proposed moratorium on breeding permits in the city. Well-intended, but as I have cautioned, it is low-hanging fruit that shows that she doesn’t understand that the overcrowding has to do with backyard breeders who don’t have breeder permits (so a moratorium in this regard is irrelevant) and people dumping their dogs. But more than anything, the overcrowding has to do with the city’s never-ending failure to provide completely free, widely available spay and neuter, along with the need to improve — and enforce — spay/neuter laws.

While the city should eliminate breeder permits altogether, Hernandez (whose office is more focused on protocol than an effective solution) is already off on the wrong foot.

The motion that she and Councilmember Traci Park propose will be discussed at Wednesday’s special meeting of the Neighborhoods and Community Enrichment Committee, which Hernandez was appointed to chair by Krekorian, will be held at 8:30am in City Hall… with no call-in option.

Talk about shooting one’s self in the foot!

This is a misguided, but well-intended, idea, where valuable information that could be gathered, won’t. And even then, the Councilmembers tend to play on their phones or eat instead of show-up, sit-up and pay attention.

This misses the mark — by a lot — and intentionally silences those people who know the most.

Nothing But Silence From Those Who Could Fix This Cruel Chaos

The people who, if they wanted to, could cure these immediate emergency conditions and institute effective long-term policies (and become shining examples for failing animal control agencies around the country) have remained defiant and silent.

Roll Call ‘Em: Mayor Karen Bass and her chief of staff Chris Thompson and communications director Zach Seidl. LA City Council, but especially its temperamental president Paul Krekorian, Eunisses Hernandez and Marqueece Harris-Dawson and their senior staffers. Controller Kenneth Mejia. Staycee Dains, Annette Ramirez and Larry Gross.

This column could, and might at some point, publish the emails with the questions that each refuses to answer. They expect everyone in City Hall and in the media, but especially at the LA Times, to toe the line.

It is corruption, just of a different orientation in which powerful people in government and the media pat themselves on the back and dismissively pat everyone else on the head as they cover for one another.

But that isn’t happening here.

Oh. The LA Times Thing…

Last week, I published a column on how LA Times reporter Dakota Smith kept dodging a student at one of the most prestigious veterinary schools in the world, whose email to Smith late last year detailed how LAAS’s chief veterinarian Jeremy Prupas allegedly ignored severe animal cruelty inflicted upon the agency’s sick and injured animals in its closed-to-the-public medical units.

It appears that in the hours immediately following my column being published, Smith has allegedly tried to cover her tracks.