"Why Curren Price Should Be Suspended" by Daniel Guss
He knowingly used government employees to advance lies about his alleged crimes
@TheGussReport - In a court of law, indicted Los Angeles City Councilmember Curren Price, 72, is innocent until proven guilty.
But Price’s effort to stay in office and draw his bountiful public paycheck while fighting those charges should be denied by his LA City Council peers as they grapple with a City Hall still entrenched with corruption, retaliation and elected officials who refuse to call for the forfeiture of pensions for any city employee convicted of felonies related to their employment.
Who would be opposed to that deterrent?
***
Without once again belaboring the background, in February 2017, I started a series of columns explaining how Price’s bigamy and other bizarre transactions led to some of the corruption charges in his indictment. Nuff said.
Eventually, the LA Times reported on it with this March 21, 2017 report from Dakota Smith. It is chock full of denials and dodges that Price was simultaneously married to more than one woman at that time.
Bigamy is not the big issue here. Price, as we now know, got spousal benefits for Delbra Richardson Price while he was undeniably married to Lynn Suzette Price. That is the embezzlement portion of his indictment.
A real estate entrepreneur with a pre-approved “right of way” contract with the city, Delbra Richardson Price is also mentioned throughout the other alleged crimes outlined in the District Attorney’s charging document, including Curren Price acting in ways that enriched her and himself.
One sentence in Smith’s report stands out regarding his divorce court file, which had been dormant for years at that point: “As of Tuesday, Price hadn’t filed any new court documents in L.A. County Superior Court.”
***
Smith’s report was published on the LA Times website at 7:05pm on Tuesday, March 21, 2017, and gave Price his public relations propaganda.
That’s because just 70 minutes later, according to fax data in LASC records, Irvine-based attorney Sven Buncher, was named as Price’s new divorce attorney in a Substitution of Attorney form. While it wasn’t stamped as “Filed” by the LASC Clerk until March 23rd, it was signed 3/21/17 by both Price and Buncher.
Unless you think that Mr. Price hired Buncher in the 70 minutes after Smith’s article was published, the denials and dodges by Price, and by some of his taxpayer-funded city staffers, his campaign re-election team and personal lawyers blatantly misled the public at taxpayer expense.
Who hires a divorce attorney while simultaneously declaring — and using publicly funded employees to declare — that he is already divorced?
Curren Price.
That’s why he should be suspended while his criminal case plays out.
***
On Thursday, the race card started to surface, as Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who is Black, told journalist Alex Cohen of Spectrum News that he feels “Black politicians are being ‘hunted’ by ‘racist’ prosecutors.”
Oddly, he claims as proof that two of the three elected Black politicians recently on LA City Council (Curren Price and Mark Ridley-Thomas) were indicted. One by the feds. One by the District Attorney.
A pattern, that is not.
In the interview, a video clip of LA Mayor Karen Bass is shown expressing the same concern. I reached out to Harris-Dawson’s office for clarity on this claim, and was told that “added context” would be forthcoming.
But here is something Bass and Harris-Dawson should consider as they float racism as the possible motivation behind the charges against Price and Ridley-Thomas.
According to the State Bar of California, 34 percent of attorneys in the state are people of color. Price chose to hire one of the 66 percent who isn’t, and who is based in Irvine, where just 1.5 percent of the population is Black.
Exhibit A, Curren Price’s divorce attorney Sven Buncher:
Also, according to the District Attorney’s charging document, Curren Price and Delbra Richardson Price did not legally marry until May 7, 2018…in Ada County, Idaho.
White population: 91.5%
Black population: 1.4%.
Implying that racism, or any -ism, exists where there is no evidence of it only harms genuine claims of racism.
Your witness, City Hall.
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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.)