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View Winners → Politics Dec 29, 2023
José Huizar. | Photo courtesy of Charlie Kaijo/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
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By Fred Shuster
A day after federal prosecutors recommended a 13-year prison term for disgraced former Los Angeles City Councilman José Huizar, defense attorneys Friday countered that nine years would be sufficient punishment for the “humiliated and destroyed” ex-politician.
“To say that Mr. Huizar is chastened and remorseful — for committing crimes, for hurting his family, for disappointing his friends and the community, for wasting his potential — would make understatement blush,” according to the defense sentencing memorandum. “He has been publicly pilloried and subjected to the mob. He has been personally humiliated and destroyed.”
Huizar pleaded guilty to felony charges for using his powerful position at City Hall to enrich himself and his associates, and for cheating on his taxes. He faces a sentencing hearing scheduled for Jan. 26 although he is asking for a month’s continuance.
Along with the 13-year federal prison term, the government is asking for more than $1.3 million in fines and restitution.
“Huizar was a powerful career politician who swore an oath to defend the Constitution, faithfully discharge the duties of his office, and serve the interests of his constituents,” prosecutors wrote in their sentencing papers. “Instead, time and time again, defendant violated that oath and duty, choosing instead to place his own lust for money and power above the rights and interests of the people he was elected to serve. Through an astoundingly brazen and long-running RICO conspiracy that defendant led, he corrupted himself and other powerful developers and city officials at the public’s expense.”
Huizar, 55, of Boyle Heights, pleaded guilty in January to one count of tax evasion and conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, Act.
According to his public federal defense attorneys, Huizar “did what few high-profile officials in his position do: he fully accepted responsibility for his wrongdoing without attempting to point fingers or shift blame, signed an exceptionally-fulsome and -detailed factual basis, and entered into a plea agreement with a binding range of 9-13 years.”
The 142-page defense sentencing position includes photos and documents illustrating Huizar’s life from his birth into poverty in rural Mexico, his education as the first in his family to go to college, his entry into public life as a board member, then president, of the Los Angeles Unified School District, which lead to his election as a city councilman for 15 years.
Huizar represented Council District 14, which includes downtown Los Angeles and its surrounding communities, from 2005 until his resignation in 2020. According to his lawyers, Huizar sought to make downtown Los Angeles befitting of a “world-class city.”
In his plea agreement, Huizar admitted to leading the so-called CD-14 Enterprise, which operated as a pay-to-play scheme in which Huizar — assisted by others — unlawfully used his office to give favorable treatment to real estate developers who financed and facilitated bribes and other illicit financial benefits.
“For years, defendant operated his pay-to-play scheme in the City of Los Angeles to monetize his public position and leverage his political clout for over $1.5 million dollars in cash bribes, gambling chips, luxury trips, political contributions, prostitutes, extravagant meals, services, concerts, and other gifts,” according to the memo filed in Los Angeles federal court by the U.S. Attorney’s Office. “If anyone dared rebuff his call to pay bribes, he punished them and their City projects, threatening developers with indefinitely delayed projects and financial peril.”
Huizar also admitted to accepting a $600,000 bribe payment in the form of collateral from a China-based billionaire real estate developer for use to secretly settle a pending sexual harassment lawsuit against Huizar by a former staffer.
Huizar “covered his tracks with layers of concealment, including by shamelessly exploiting his elderly mother, brother, and wife to launder his illicit proceeds. Finally, when defendant felt the walls of the instant federal investigation closing in on him, he made the calculated decision to obstruct justice by tampering with witnesses and lying to government prosecutors and agents,” according to federal prosecutors.
In return for Huizar pleading guilty to the two felony counts, prosecutors agreed to seek no more than 13 years in prison for Huizar, who also has agreed to forfeit $129,000 in cash that law enforcement found during a search of his home in November 2018. Huizar agreed to accept a nine-year term.
“Five years from now, the only people who will remember whether Mr. Huizar got 9, 10, or 13 years will be the parties and his family, the latter of whom will grow up, grow old, and die in his absence,” Huizar’s attorneys wrote. “For everyone else, specific memories will fade, and even with a 9-year sentence, the lasting message will be that Mr. Huizar confessed and received a lengthy term in prison.”
