“The Price Of LA Corruption” by Daniel Guss
LA City Councilmember Curren Price's corruption trial finally begins tomorrow. Eight years after I broke the story, LA news media remains incurious. Here are the questions I would ask the Defendant.
Valentine’s Day is an ironic starting point for the corruption trial of Los Angeles City Councilmember Curren DeMille Price.
For years, starting way back on February 27, 2017, I was the only journalist in Los Angeles waving a red flag about Price, who was married to one woman, but insisted he was married to another.
By my fourth column about Price just one month later, I wondered whether a grift had flown under the radar for a very long time, while the LA news media remained incurious.
By October 16, 2017, Price’s bizarre shenanigans filled its own bin under my desk, leading to my column asking whether the latest smoking gun would eventually send him to prison.
On October 18, 2022, in my tenth column about him, I foreshadowed that, “Price, who turns 72 in December, is my pick for ‘City Hall’s Likeliest to be Indicted,’ based on past scandals and ongoing risks, only some of which are known to the public.”
Finally, on June 13, 2023, the Los Angeles County District Attorney filed a ten-count indictment against Price for embezzlement, conflict of interest and perjury.
That is also when the Los Angeles Times — in a column that failed to reference any of my investigatory work or columns which preceded theirs by years — amusingly implied that it deserved credit for the indictment after years of sitting silently on the sidelines, other than to give Price an unchallenged platform to deny the undeniable and remain in elected office.
“The case was launched by the district attorney’s bureau of investigation. It was unclear how long the office had been mulling over charges…
…The charges come four years after a Times investigation found Price had repeatedly cast votes that affected housing developers and other firms listed as clients of his wife’s consulting company.”
— James Queally, Julia Wick and Dakota Smith, Los Angeles Times, June 13, 2023
Unclear?
Really?
Did they not read the District Attorney’s Investigative Summary?
Did they not read the District Attorney’s footnotes, in which citations of my columns preceded — by years — those citing the Times’?
Over the past eight years, I have only spoken with Price on two occasions, totaling perhaps a single minute of polite dialogue, though I offered him countless opportunities to clear the air.
But it was a single sentence that he spoke on another occasion that led to my digging and, ultimately, to the start of his trial tomorrow morning, Valentine’s Day.
If only he had not…
Some of Price’s other shenanigans did not lead to charges in this case. If I were the District Attorney, I would love to ask him about some of them:
Mr. Price, when you swore under penalty of perjury that you could not locate your wife, Lynn Suzette Green, to serve her with divorce papers, did you, your attorney Al Robles and your process server Antonio Inocentes, Google her name? Had you, you would have come across her eponymous law practice in Trenton, New Jersey, and her New Jersey contact information on the State Bar of California website, since she is licensed to practice here, too.
Mr. Price, there are more than 3.6 million residential addresses in Los Angeles County. Why did you attempt to serve Ms. Green at an address where she never lived that — remarkably — is owned by your second “wife,” Delbra Richardson? Isn’t that an address where you — simultaneously — and had for years claimed on your Financial Disclosure Forms, aka Form 700, that you derived rental income from a tenant who is a UCLA medical doctor? What made you believe that Ms. Green resided there with the doctor and her family?
And lastly…
Mr. Price, how do you suppose that Ms. Green’s Los Angeles County voter registration was transferred to that same address — the one where she never resided?
Curren Price is considered innocent of all charges until and unless he is proven guilty. Nobody else has been charged in this matter.
(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.)