District Attorney Mike Ramos / Attorney General Jerry Brown
.
Thursday, July 1, 2010 – 10:00 a.m.
Once thing is for certain.
San Bernardino County District Attorney Mike Ramos drawing Attorney General Jerry Brown into his crusade against his political enemies was a smart move.
Even though Defendant Jim Erwin pushed him into it.
After Ramos arrested Erwin in March 2009 regarding alleged disclosure violations, Erwin pummeled Ramos in local newspapers. Erwin accused Ramos of selective prosecution in retaliation for budget actions by his former boss, Supervisor Neil Derry, and Erwin’s knowledge of Ramos’ various affairs with employees in his own office. Damaging Erwin’s credibility was paramount.
Erwin demanded the Attorney General take his case from Ramos. As a result, Ramos talked Brown into partnering with him on the case. A decision that may cost Brown.
Ramos squeaked by in the June primary and narrowly avoided a run-off in November. Brown however, faces former Ebay chief executive Meg Whitman in November. Brown doesn’t have anywhere near the resources Whitman commands.
In other words, Brown will have a tough go of it this time, and he may lose.
Whitman is already pounding on Brown, who is relying on labor unions to defend him until he can spend his own money in late September. Whitman’s outside fundraising is even keeping pace with that of Brown.
The already reelected Ramos has stuck Brown with several cases involving defendants that aren’t backing down. The mistrial yesterday in the Rex Gutierrez case is a prime example.
Gutierrez is factually the best case among four pending for Ramos and Brown, and it didn’t go well.
The key witness in three of the four pending political corruption cases, former assistant assessor Adam Aleman, was discredited. Newspapers are reporting that almost all jurors in the Gutierrez trial didn’t believe Aleman.
Sources say Guitierrez’s defense attorney Jim Reiss had around twelve hours of material on Aleman, but elected to use roughly ten percent of it against him. I doubt he’ll hold back during the re-trial.
Let’s take a look at the pending cases.
People v Postmus / Eyler
Attorneys:
For the People: Deputy District Attorney Lewis Cope, Deputy Attorney General Melissa Mandel
For the Defense: Stephen Levine (Postmus), Stanley Hodge (Eyler)
This case is also a result of alleged corruption in the assessor’s office. The charges against former Assessor employee Greg Eyler are essentially the same as against Gutierrez, absent the conspiracy angle. If prosecutors can’t convict Gutierrez of time card fraud they won’t be convicting Eyler, who was part-time salaried. The charges against former Assessor Bill Postmus involve such offenses as misuse of a computer wireless card. Yes. wireless card!
Both Postmus matters involve drug use charges that will likely be dismissed in accordance with Penal Code section 1000.
No guilty plea’s are likely in this case.
People v Defazio
Attorneys:
For the People: Deputy District Attorney John Goritz, Deputy Attorney General Melissa Mandel
For the Defense: Richard Ewanzyck
This case against developer and Postmus business partner John Defazio consists of two counts of perjury before the Grand Jury. Defazio was arrested a few days after he filed a civil claim against the county and Ramos. Also coinciding with Defazio’s arrest was Postmus’ refusal to meet with prosecutiors regarding developer Jeff Burum. The charges make reliance on Aleman and developers Mike Gallagher and Jeff Bentow. There are already contradictions with the witnesses and obviously Aleman is imploding.
Sources say Defazio’s attorney keeps asking prosecutor John Goritz when will he drop the charges?
People v Erwin / Postmus
Attorneys:
For the People: Deputy District Attorney Lewis Cope, Deputy Attorney General Melissa Mandel
For the Defense: Richard Farquhar (Postmus), Steven Harmon and Rajan Maline (Erwin)
The case alleges corruption involving the settlement between the County of San Bernardino and Colonies Partners.
The major problem at the center of this case? Adam Aleman.
A string of affidavits, interviews, evidence, and testimony all involve Aleman. As a matter of fact Aleman is the central figure who launches the investigation. In other words everything flows from him. How he survives this case no one knows. Aleman’s plea deal requires truthful testimony to avoid jail time and a conviction reduced from four felonies to misdemeanors.
Both defendants here want to go to trial. The evidentiary challenges will be interesting to say the least.
Sources say the prosecution has yet to turn over any relevant evidence to defense attorneys in the case.
People v Miller
Attorneys;
For the People: Deputy District Attorney John Goritz
For the Defense: James Reiss
Jim Miller, a former Grand Terrace city councilman, is charged with a single county of violating Government Code section 1090, conflict of interest. Miller is accused of voting to approve the city check register. The registers in question reflected payments previously made to his wife’s newspaper. The payments made, were for city advertising that was contracted for by the city manager, without council approval or knowledge.
A check register??
This case is set for trial in August.
It’ll be interesting to see the same attorneys in the Gutierrez case face-off in this one.
_____________________________
Sources say prosecutors have been operating under the assumption all defendants would take plea deals. Instead, no defendant appears willing to do so.
It will be interesting to see if the Whitman campaign can resist that scripted Ramos / Brown press conference video. You know, the one where Brown said things like “righteous” prosecutions, or “possibly the biggest corruption case in California history”.
Now, for the first time, material is available to pair the press conference video with newspaper quotes from jurors in the Gutierrez case depicting the star witness in Brown’s big corruption case as a liar.
There will likely be more in the weeks to come. That’s weeks, not months.
This scenario gives Whitman a very effective example of Brown abusing his office for political gain.
Expect Brown to get smashed in the mouth with this one.
Make no mistake, prosecutors and investigators already knew of Aleman’s credibility issues before they filed charges, but they never-the-less went through with it anyways.
Insiders close to Brown say the career politician just couldn’t resist the free press opportunity of alleging a $102 million scandal.
A recent article at FoxNews.com used the term “lawfare” to describe Brown’s abuses.
Brown needs to thank Ramos for the great press and the bad cases. If Whitman’s lucky, the cases will keep blowing up on Brown between now and November.
Mikey and Moonbeam will go down in history as the official originators of the LAWFARE state that is San Bernardino County.
I am so over all of this political BS! We are spending millions of dollars investigating, and attempting to prosecute Rex Gutierrez? For what? Because he took ten days off of work to attend City business meetings and used sick time, total amount of alleged fraud $2,800. I lost count of the number of DA employee’s that were present at his trial. I hope they were using thier sick time because they certainly weren’t doing anything! If everyone is at Rex’s trial who is prosecuting the murderer’s, rapist, and gang bangers?
If you don’t like what’s happening in our county, vote Rex and Paul out of office. It is a hell of a lot cheaper!
Send Rex off to sell papers, Paul can go back to real estate (good luck on that one), and Erwin can blog till the cows come home. Just don’t waste our tax dollars on these cases.
Does anyone really think they are going to successfully prosecute Burum or get back a penny of the 102 million? (See Biane for Florida land if you do).
The federal government lowered interest to zero percent and spent 9 trillion dollars on stimulating our economy. Yet, only achieved a 3% growth in GNP. The stimulus dollars are now gone. We are in the middle of the worst economy in a Century. Entire welfare programs to help the poor and disabled are being cut from state budgets, education is suffering major cuts, unemployment is 14%, prisons are on the verge of being taken over by the federal government because of mismanagement. People are losing their home and others have lost their retirements. Yet we spend millions to put Rex in prison for falsely claiming 10 days of sick time. Are you kidding me! Just fire his ASS, and move on.
We need to lower our taxes, give businesses incentive to expand, and create jobs. I hate to ever quote Bill Clinton but even he knew “it’s the economy stupid”.
If we don’t set our priorities straight and start creating jobs we are going to end up as the next Great Britain!
It is time to stop wasting our tax dollars on these political investigations and spend our efforts creating jobs!
Ramos’ other problems about to come to light will be an even bigger issue for moonbeam.
It’ll be entertaining to watch Brown unload on Ramos.