Corruption Case

Among names of note to pop up on sales that have finally slowpoked their way into the public record is Todd DeStefano, who has sold his Pasadena house for $1.92 million. The former L.A. Coliseum events manager is charged with receiving more than $2 million in illegal payments for helping to stage raves at Coliseum properties and keeping the costs down, according to Times reports. Listed at $2.05 million in September, the two-story contemporary contains three fireplaces, five bedrooms and seven bathrooms in its 5,585 square feet of living space.

Fifty years ago, in Brady vs. Maryland, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors have an obligation to turn over to defendants any evidence that might help prove their innocence or favorably change the outcome of their trials. Failure to do so, the court ruled, violates the Constitution's promise of due process of law. It was a landmark decision whose underlying principle seems both obvious and fundamental: A prosecutor's duty is not to win cases at all costs, but to seek justice.

KABUL, Afghanistan - An Afghan tribunal handed down the first jail sentences Tuesday in the colossal Kabul Bank corruption case, sentencing the two former top executives to five-year sentences and ordering them to repay hundreds of millions of dollars in embezzled funds. The convictions of former bank Chairman Sherkhan Farnood and former Chief Executive Officer Khalilullah Ferozi were the first to stem from the conspiracy by politically connected Afghans to loot the country's biggest bank, whose collapse in 2010 nearly brought down the war-beaten economy.

NEW YORK -- For the second time in three days, prosecutors announced corruption charges Thursday against a New York state lawmaker, this time accusing a legislator of accepting bribes from businessmen who wanted his help in running and maintaining adult day-care centers. A 36-page complaint charged Sen. Eric Stevenson , who represents the 79th District in the Bronx, with accepting about $22,000 -- most of it stuffed into envelopes and handed over at a number of secretly recorded meetings -- between April 2012 and this month.

Last summer, 17-year-old Rebecca Sanchez's world shrank to the size of her camera's viewfinder. For several months, Sanchez and three other Bell High School students immersed themselves in the city's corruption case. They spent hours after school with their cameras, documenting demonstrations and long, rowdy meetings triggered by the pay scandal that led to criminal charges against eight former officials in the working-class town in southeast Los Angeles County. Last week, the four students were honored for their work by the newly installed City Council.

The long-running political corruption probe that saw 11 lawmakers, lobbyists and government staffers convicted in Alaska wound up this week, along with its stories of drunken hotel meetings, sleazy bribery come-ons, and sex-for-drug deals with underage girls. For the first time in years, Alaskans will wake up with no tawdry political drama to relish on the front page. One person who will be happy to see the end of it is Bruce Weyhrauch, a Juneau attorney and former member of the state House of Representatives who spent four years fighting extortion and bribery charges - only to see the legal footings of the case against him turn to quicksand and evaporate, without much fanfare, into a minor misdemeanor charge.

A fugitive in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum corruption case says that for years he alerted his superiors to alleged criminal wrongdoing at the stadium, but they did nothing. In telephone and Skype interviews with The Times, former Coliseum contractor Tony Estrada, who has been charged with embezzlement and conspiracy, said a culture of self-dealing and fraud thrived at the taxpayer-owned stadium for more than a decade. "I did the right thing," Estrada said in one Skype session, speaking in the accent of his native Cuba.

A former Cudahy councilman agreed Wednesday to plead guilty to bribery and extortion, the third city official to admit guilt in a wide-ranging federal probe into corruption in the southeast Los Angeles County town. Osvaldo Conde, who was arrested last month after a five-hour standoff with FBI agents, admitted that he solicited and accepted bribes totaling $17,000 from the owner of a medical marijuana dispensary who wanted to open shop in the city. Former Mayor David Silva and Angel Perales, who served as interim city manager of the small, working-class city, had already made deals to plead guilty to extortion and bribery in a case that exposed graft, vote rigging and drug use at Cudahy City Hall.

Four Navy civilian employees and three defense contractors have pleaded guilty to corruption charges related to a cash-for-contracts scheme at the Naval Air Station in Coronado, the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Diego said. The Navy workers accepted more than $1 million in cash and gifts, including flat-screen TVs, luxury massage chairs, bicycles costing thousands of dollars and home remodeling services, prosecutors said. Contractors submitted to the Pentagon fraudulent invoices to cover the costs of the items.

A fugitive in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum corruption case said he was in "the jungles of Brazil" and will not return to face trial in an alleged kickback scheme because he shouldn't have been charged. "Let 'em come over here and get me," Tony Estrada, a former Coliseum janitorial contractor who portrays himself as a whistle-blower done wrong, told The Times in a telephone interview. Estrada, who has been charged with embezzlement and conspiracy, said Monday he came forward more than a year ago with canceled checks and other evidence that showed he was making secret payments to the stadium's then-general manager, Patrick Lynch.

KAUFMAN, Texas - Officials investigating the deaths of two prosecutors in this rural community east of Dallas have turned their attention to a former local official who threatened the two victims after losing his job in a corruption investigation, according to federal law enforcement officials briefed about the case. The federal officials said the man who emerged as a person of interest this week was convicted and placed on probation for stealing public property in Kaufman County two years ago. After his arrest, investigators found he had numerous guns, including an assault rifle and survivalist equipment, one of the federal officials said.

Orange County's former sheriff is waging a battle to be released from federal prison, where he is serving time for witness tampering in a corruption case that exposed wrongdoing in the state's second-largest sheriff's department. On Monday, a federal judge heard arguments on whether to resentence Michael S. Carona, once a rising political star before he was indicted in late 2007 in a sprawling corruption case. Carona's attorneys argued that the 66-month sentence handed down by U.S. District Judge Andrew Guilford on the one witness-tampering charge on which he was convicted should be adjusted based on changes in the law. About one year after Carona's sentencing, the Supreme Court narrowed a definition of corruption to just bribes and kickbacks.

With former Bell city manager Robert Rizzo's trial slated to begin in September, his assistant now wants a separate hearing and may join her ex-boss in asking that the case be moved out of Los Angeles. Rizzo and Angela Spaccia were ordered to appear Sept. 9 on multiple public-corruption-related charges, but whether the trial takes place in Los Angeles or elsewhere - and whether the two are even tried together - remains to be seen. Spaccia's attorney, Harlan Braun, said he will ask that his client's trial be "severed" from Rizzo's.

The Bell corruption case is now focusing on Robert Rizzo, who prosecutors allege was the mastermind of public graft that generated national attention. A trial ended this week for six former Bell council members tried for misappropriating public funds. During three agonizing weeks of deliberations, the jury struggled to determine whether the council members' salaries - which approached $100,000 a year - violated state law. The jury found five council members guilty of some charges and not guilty on some others, and they acquitted one councilman outright.

Prosecutors called the outsized salaries Bell officials received "corruption on steroids. " But for jurors weighing the fates of six former Bell council members, the case has turned out to be far less clear-cut. Over the last 2 1/2 weeks, they have struggled to reach a verdict in a case that many observers considered a slam-dunk. It comes down to a basic question: Could those salaries -- which approached $100,000 -- be excessive and still be legal? Based on their questions and testimony read backs, the jury appears to be debating the legality of those paychecks.

KABUL, Afghanistan - An Afghan tribunal handed down the first jail sentences Tuesday in the colossal Kabul Bank corruption case, sentencing the two former top executives to five-year sentences and ordering them to repay hundreds of millions of dollars in embezzled funds. The convictions of former bank Chairman Sherkhan Farnood and former Chief Executive Officer Khalilullah Ferozi were the first to stem from the conspiracy by politically connected Afghans to loot the country's biggest bank, whose collapse in 2010 nearly brought down the war-beaten economy.

Bell's city clerk Wednesday became the first person to be granted immunity in a corruption case that accuses city leaders of looting the city's treasury Rebecca Valdez, who took the stand Wednesday in the preliminary hearing for six current and former council members, testified that she didn't know the purpose of many city commissions and boards from which council members drew most of their extravagant salaries. Prosecutors allege that the board and commissions rarely met, and when they did, the sessions lasted only minutes.

Former New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin, whose lambasting of the federal government's response after Hurricane Katrina helped make him the face of his city's post-disaster tenacity, pleaded not guilty in federal court Wednesday to bribery, money laundering and related charges. The case stems from a corruption investigation during Nagin's two terms in office, which spanned 2002 to 2010.  A 21-count indictment handed down in January alleges that Nagin, 56, accepted cash and gifts - including trips to Hawaii, Jamaica and New York - as kickbacks in deals he cut with contractors.

Former Bell Councilman George Cole testified Wednesday that he was a devoted city leader who gave up his salary during his last year in office, which splintered his relationship with then-City Manager Robert Rizzo. Cole, the third defendant to testify in a corruption case in which city leaders are accused of looting the treasury with their huge salaries, said that in the summer of 2007 he noticed a park had closed and called Rizzo to ask what had happened. Cole said Rizzo told him he needed to reduce park employee hours.