"Rudderless Bass Seeks Scapegoats" by Daniel Guss
Shit gets real for grinning/not grinning LA Mayor Karen Bass as DEI, deception and corruption pile-up amid ashes, death and suffering. Oh...and who just deleted the LAFD's "Standards of Cover" report?
On Friday, several days into LA’s deadliest inferno ever, tips from very well-placed sources within the Los Angeles Fire Department landed on my phone as I collaborated with the Daily Mail and its award-winning journalist Josh Boswell on several of them.
(Note: Anything written on this Substack is solely my work and has neither been viewed nor vetted by the Daily Mail or Josh.)
The first story we published was about Janisse Quiñones, Bass’s disastrous DEI hire to run the LA Department of Water and Power, LADWP, for a ludicrous $750,000 a year salary, especially considering her deadly track record:
Later on Friday, deeply embedded LAFD sources independently told us that LAFD Chief Kristin Crowley hugged her closest colleagues as she was summoned to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’s office, “telling everybody goodbye, because she was told the whole purpose of the meeting was to fire her.”
We reported this with the proper caveats, with sources subsequently telling us:
“When she was summoned into the meeting, it was with the direct purpose to fire her.”
“Whatever happened in that meeting, minds got changed.”
“Either Bass realized it would be suicide to fire her, and came to her senses, or Crowley talked her out of it.”
“She came back in the office briefly, told her staff ‘I’m not fired yet’ and went into a meeting with all her chiefs.”
Crowley, a few days earlier, threw Bass under the bus for massively slashing the LAFD budget, with even bigger cuts in queue in the city’s upcoming budget battle.
Our story has been duly updated:
“Chaos as LA Fire Chief 'called in to be fired by Mayor'... but says she is still in her job”
I believe that Bass is now calculating how to replace Crowley with a storyline that celebrates both of them, which you can anticipate the LA Times dutifully trying to sell as champions of diversity; Bass and Crowley extinguish inferno and rumor mill. Crowley to retire and, by the way, give Karen Bass a second term.
Over the weekend, I again got tips that Bass terminated Crowley on Sunday, but have seen no such evidence. Also, in Bass’s desperate search for scapegoats, I hear that she is going to replace Carol Parks, General Manager of the city’s Emergency Management Department, EMD, with Jim Featherstone, a previous EMD boss. Sources say that they spotted Parks and Featherstone this weekend in the bunker where responses to major emergencies are coordinated.
Further, I hear that retired LAFD Deputy Chief Ronnie Villanueva was contacted by Bass’s office to return to the agency as “Acting Fire Chief,” so try to square that circle and tell me that Bass isn’t looking for a smooth way to dump Crowley.
If that’s not enough, someone within this chaos quietly removed Crowley’s November 18, 2024, memo about the International Association of Fire Fighters “Standards of Cover” analysis.
It looked like this on the city’s website:
Note the “Recommendations” line that the LAFD Commission has received the report and recommends transmitting it to the Mayor and City Council, which I guarantee you virtually nobody read or, if they did, failed to use it to enhance fire safety and preparedness.
But when you click on the link to the report — now — you get a 404 error.
The person who, sources tell me, is the only one who could have taken down this report is LAFD Commission president Genethia Hudley-Hayes, whose background isn’t in firefighting, but social services under — wait for it, friends — former LA County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, no stranger to corruption scandals, where Hudley-Hayes’ salary and benefits topped out in 2022 at $240,133.
You have to love how Bass, like her predecessor Eric Garcetti, and their predecessors, plug-in politically connected non-profit consultants into irrational commissioner appointments. Draw your own conclusions as to why.
And draw your own conclusions on whether this sleight of hand is because Bass is likely to lose any bid she makes for re-election, assuming she isn’t recalled or resigns, or because of the rumored class action lawsuits against the City of Los Angeles for gross negligence and the tens of billions of dollars in damages and death.
The Los Angeles Times endorsed Bass for Mayor on October 13, 2022.
Look for LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia to challenge a deeply weakened and wounded Bass this time, which should split a good portion of the vote and allow someone — I don’t know, perhaps Rick Caruso — to get a mulligan and the gig this time.
The Bass-Crowley relationship was never a chosen one.
Crowley was hired (edit: promoted to LAFD Chief) by Garcetti, a move seen skeptically by some players in the firefighting world, as reported by the LA Times, three years ago this week:
“It’s about Garcetti trying to boost his own legacy,” said former LAFD Assistant Chief Patrick Butler, and former president of an LAFD group for Latino firefighters. “And covering for the failures of (former LAFD Chief Ralph) Terrazas.”
But Bass retained Crowley because her preferred candidate for the role, Armando Hogan, suddenly resigned after DanielGuss.Substack.com broke the story about an investigation into Hogan’s alleged sexual harassment of a high-profile civilian employee of the department:
Things continually went down hill for Crowley ever since, with this Substack exposing one LAFD (and related LAPD) scandal after another on her watch:
Bass, Crowley et al continue to mislead the public about the LAFD in other ways that shortchange and endanger the public. The fact that it blew-up in Bass’s face while she was in Ghana last week, makes it all the more scrumptious.
Scrumptious, because Bass told the New York Times while campaigning for the gig, “Not only would I of course live here [in Los Angeles], but I also would not travel internationally — the only places I would go would be DC, Sacramento, San Francisco and New York, in relation to LA.”
Bass repeatedly broke that pledge, and many others, since taking office.
But climate change, right?
Not failed brush clearance. Not DEI over public safety. Not LAFD inspection corruption. Not whistleblower retaliation. Not falsified LAFD response times. Not recruiting dishonesty. Not cronyism. Not domestic violence and sexual harassment at the top of the LAFD. But climate change. And Trump.
Your turn, LA Times.
Oh, speaking of the LA Times, it told a whopper of a lie-by-omission the other day. I’ll be back with that soon, as in Soon-Shiong.
(Daniel Guss, MBA, won the LA Press Club’s “Online Journalist of the Year” and “Best Activism Journalism” awards in June ‘23. In June ‘24, he won its “Best Commentary, Non-Political” award. He has contributed to the Daily Mail, 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.)