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OPINION
An ex-member of Los Angeles City Council has been charged with corruption. He had claimed for years that his innocence.
Jose Huizar (Democrat) accepted the plea agreement following a 2020 FBI raid. He was accused of accepting payments from developers. “further exposing a culture of corruption at City Hall,” Breitbart News reported.
The outlet reported:
Jose Huizar (D), L.A. City Councilman, was taken into custody Tuesday morning by Federal Bureau of Investigation. The charges against him included corruption. They claimed that he received hundreds of thousand of dollars in bribes while treating his office as a king. “criminal enterprise.”
Huizar represent[ed]Downtown Los Angeles. According to the DOJ, he solicited money from developers, especially Chinese, in order to speed up the city’s planning process.
In 2014, Breitbart News reported that the city settled a sexual harassment lawsuit in which Huizar was alleged to have carried on a romantic affair with his deputy chief of staff.
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According to Los Angeles Times reports, Huizar confessed to taking $1.5 million in bribes to real estate developers to get their projects approved.
“In a plea agreement filed Thursday in federal court in Los Angeles, Huizar acknowledged that sweeping corruption allegations that he has denied for years were actually true, saying he was ‘pleading guilty because I am guilty of the charges,’”The paper stated.
“Huizar’s unexpected capitulation caps a brutal downfall for a man who was born into poverty on a Mexican ranch, grew up in Boyle Heights, and went on to earn a master’s at Princeton and a law degree at UCLA before serving 15 years on the L.A. City Council,”Further details were added to the report.
A former Democratic Massachusetts mayor, who was convicted on corruption charges, reported to jail in July after the court denied his request to delay.
Jasiel Correia, a former mayor of Fall River, reported to a federal medium-security prison in order to start his six year sentence for the crimes that a judge deemed he committed. “reprehensible.”
Correia was found guilty of defrauding local cannabis businesses and taking money from investors in an app-based smartphone company.
U.S. District Judge Douglas Woodlock in Boston ordered him to be incarcerated for engaging in “reprehensible corruption of a type that is incomprehensibly crude.”
“What I have before me is an absolute lack of remorse,’’ said Woodlock before calling Correia’s corruption scheme “a corrosive crime, it undercuts, it eviscerates a community.”
“If we can’t trust each other, if we can’t trust our government, where are we? This is at the core of who we are,”He went on.
“There is no showing of actual innocence,”Woodlock stated.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Zach Hafer argued before the sentencing that Correia’s “old-school corruption”He was sentenced to an 11 year term of imprisonment for continuing to break the law, even though he knew he was being investigated.
“That is the height of chutzpah,”Hafer added.
“The betrayal of people who considered him like family, the pervasive lying, cheating, stealing, and blame-shifting, and the egregious breaches of the public trust must be met with a sentence that thoroughly repudiates the defendant’s abhorrent conduct and deters both this defendant and others like him from doing it again,”The court was sent a memorandum of sentencing by the prosecutors.
The Boston Herald has added:
Prosecutors claimed that Correia was a Providence College graduate who lured investors to invest $363,690 in SnoOwl. This company is developing an app which connects local businesses and consumers.
Prosecutors claim Correia used more than $231,000 stolen to pay for his campaign. He also enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle including a Mercedes-Benz, luxury jewelry, gambling trips and strip club visits.
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Prosecutors said Correia also extorted thousands of dollars from pot companies looking to open shops in Fall River after he was elected mayor.
Correia was found guilty of 21 charges, including filing false tax returns and wire fraud. The judge this week threw out eight of Correia’s wire and tax fraud convictions, finding that prosecutors failed to prove them.
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