Will LA City Council Double-Down On Crazy?
Curren Price as Interim President? Hey, go for it, but don't say I didn't warn you.
By Daniel Guss — LA City Councilmember Curren DeMille Price, Jr. may not be Jewish, but he’s got chutzpah. This is a man with baitzim!
And he must be out of his mind.
(LA City Councilmember Curren D. Price - Los Angeles Times)
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.
During a segment I did yesterday at the top of the 5 o’clock hour on “The John and Ken Show” on KFI AM 640, one topic we touched upon was Price’s interest in becoming interim council president in the wake of the City Hall racism scandal that became a national disgrace just a week ago and for the foreseeable future.
Price, I told hosts John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou, must be insane to seek the spotlight during a time of extreme uncertainty in City Hall as well as in his personal endeavors.
As previously noted, this column wrote extensively about Price’s bigamy. He lied about it to Dakota Smith at the LA Times, which is easy given her fear of asking a pointed question and following up based on the response. Simultaneously, Price had engaged an attorney named Sven Buncher to finally divorce Wife #1, Lynn Suzette Green, after posturing for years that he had long since married wife #2, Delbra Richardson. Price wound up paying Green $100,000 to finally make the problem go away on February 8, 2018. The Times knew this was going on while it let Price publicly deny that he was married to two women at that time.
As I wrote in this 2017 column for CityWatchLA, somehow the LA County voter registration of Green (Wife #1) was changed to an address where she never lived, which just so happened to be owned by Richardson (Wife #2). And while that was going on, Price claimed under penalty of perjury that he couldn’t locate Wife #1 in order to serve her with divorce papers even though she had a website promoting her law practice in New Jersey, where she was registered to vote for more than two decades.
It would be pretty interesting to find out whether Wife #1 cast votes while registered at a home owned by Wife #2 (where she never lived) while Price claimed in court filings that he couldn’t locate her.
More recently, Price started recusing himself from City Council votes only after I started pointing out hundreds of prior votes where he failed to do so. Do his City Council peers who will choose their interim president in the coming days think that the District Attorney isn’t looking closely at each of those votes, especially those which favored clients of Richardson, aka Wife #2?
As John and Ken pointed out, Price’s name has also repeatedly surfaced in the ongoing corruption probe that has already sent his pal Mitch Englander to federal prison, with Jose Huizar and Mark Ridley-Thomas facing increasingly likely similar outcomes, unless they start singing to the feds.
But if City Council wants to double down on crazy juice, let’s squeeze that orange a little further.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, the LA County District Attorney recently executed a search warrant on Inglewood City Hall specifically seeking “any and all records ever provided by Curren Price and/or Del Richardson documenting Del Richardson as a beneficiary, dependent and or/(sic) spouse of Curren Price.”
Zero in on the word “ever.”
Because anything the DA’s office got with that search warrant is going to be measured against everything I proved in my columns and who knows what else.
The happy couple couldn’t leave well enough alone and applied for benefits from Inglewood that the District Attorney feels is worthy of an investigation and search warrant. But Price has made millions in public office and Richardson is a successful entrepreneur. He is going to get a pension that would make most of us deliriously happy. Did they really need the extra dough, or did they just go for it because it was there for the taking?
But enough about crazy. Let’s talk sheer incompetence.
Price was born in 1950, which made him a teenager in the late 60s during the Vietnam War. He went to college and then law school, but never obtained a law license.
The phrase a man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client means that someone who has not studied law and tries to represent himself in legal affairs is a fool. Price did go to law school and should know this risk better than most people.
Yet that’s precisely what he did.
In 1998, Price represented himself in a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing, which is known as pro per. This was a penny-wise and pound-foolish decision because he was so inept at it, he failed to list all of his creditors, meaning that he still owed any debt he forgot to include in the filing. Seven years later, he had to re-open the matter, which led to a slew of other completely avoidable problems.
Yeah, Curren Price is the steady hand needed when LA has never been in worse condition.
Any Councilmembers who vote for Price to be interim president for a month or even a minute should be voted out at the next opportunity because they, too, must be out of their minds.
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(Daniel Guss, MBA, was nominated for three 2022 LA Press Club awards and was a runner-up in 2021 and 2020. He has contributed to Mayor Sam, CityWatchLA, KFI AM-640, iHeartMedia, 790-KABC, Cumulus Media, KCRW, 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.)