* This post originally listed two separate dates for the date on which Price voted to reduce the sale price of an HHH project. The vote actually took place on June 22, 2021. This post has been updated to reflect the correct date throughout.

This is a strange one. By now, the established pattern should be familiar enough. Councilmember Curren Price of the 9th district (South Central and environs) is, after all, only the seventh member or former member of council to meet such high profile scandal since the 2020 indictment of former 12th district representative Mitchell Englander. At a clip of roughly two per year, we should all be old hands by now.

And, yes, I suspect that, when the news broke that Price was facing felony charges, we all figured we could fill in the blanks from there. I certainly had my own expectations: that this might have been some previously-unsnipped loose end dangling off the federal racketeering case in which José Huizar pled guilty; that it might have tied to Price’s time leading the council’s Economic Development Committee, which itself played a significant role in the benefits Huizar delivered to developers; that we might find out more about the underground mycelial network of pay-to-play that seems so core to the basic functioning of electoral politics here.

But this complaint delivers none of that. In fact, it has almost nothing to do with any particular power or influence wielded by Price and everything to do with the murk of his (he says unintentional) bigamy and, particularly, contracts received by a firm formerly run by his second wife, Del Richardson.

Price is the first of the seven to be investigated by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office. Three now former councilmembers (Englander, Huizar, and Mark Ridley-Thomas) were investigated and charged by the federal government; the scandal that engulfed Nury Martinez, Gil Cedillo, and Councilmember Kevin De León, has meanwhile touched off an apparently still-ongoing investigation by the State of California.

The District Attorney’s office, whatever the truth turns out to be in this case, does not have the ferocious reputation of the FBI. A 2019 Pew study put the outcomes of charges brought based on FBI investigations thus, in descending order of prevalence: 90% plead guilty, 8% have their case dismissed, 1.66% are convicted at trial, 0.34% are acquitted at trial.

(Now, there is much that dispositional statistics cannot tell us about the quality of an investigation, and, in particular, that 90% figure may well disguise a complicated reality. But they nonetheless bolster the reputation which is actually enjoyed by the Bureau.)

By contrast, the DA’s office, a significant amount of whose time is devoted to the prosecution of sundry low-level offenses, has a reputation for overshooting the mark. In its 2020 report, (In)Justice in LA, the ACLU found that in 2017-18 more than half of all charges (and 49% of felony charges) brought by the Los Angeles District Attorney were ultimately dropped.

The ACLU found that in nearly a quarter of cases brought by the District Attorney, all charges were eventually dropped. About 6 in 10 cases brought by the DA witnessed more than 50% of the originally filed charges being dropped. The DA has an actual record of swinging and missing, and, beyond a doubt, a proclivity for overcharging.

Apart from the unusual source of charges, the charges themselves are also different. Price is charged with 10 felonies: 5 counts of embezzlement (PEN §504/514), 3 counts of perjury (PEN §118(A)), and 2 counts of conflict of interest (GOV 1090(A)).

These are substantively different than other charges that we have seen in recent years. Englander’s charges, which feel the closest, dealt primarily with his conspiracy to lie to federal investigators in an attempt to keep them off the trail of kickbacks and gifts he had received.

By contrast, though, the Price perjury charges do not make the case that he ever misled investigators. (It is not actually clear that Price was even aware he was being investigated by the DA, although he had known the FBI was looking into him in connection with the Huizar investigation.)

Rather, the accusation is that Price knowingly omitted information from his annual Form 700, California’s ubiquitous “Statement of Economic Interest” document for public servants. And that form does conclude with a signed declaration: “I certify under penalty of perjury under the laws of the State of California that the foregoing is true and correct.”

The accusation proceeds that Price committed perjury in support of his crime of conflict of interest. State law forbids public officials from being “financially interested in any contract made by them in their official capacity.” The DA alleges that Price took part in votes where legally he was required to recuse himself because his personal vote may have been influenced by the knowledge that it would financially benefit himself or his spouse.

The DA has produced four such votes, related to two projects under the city’s Proposition HHH, a voter-approved 2016 program for supportive housing.

On September 17, 2019, (inauspiciously, the complaint appears to incorrectly place the vote on the 18th) Price voted to approve a $4.6 million bond for developer Thomas Safran & Associates to develop a supportive housing project on the westside.

On October 5, 2021, for the same project, Price voted to approve a city-mandated road dedication, which is to say to convert publicly-owned sidewalk into a wider street surface. The complaint allusively refers to this as “donating city property” to the developer, when it was until recently an automatic, though deplorable, part of developing new housing on LA’s major streets.

On May 12, 2020, Price voted to approve the sale of city land to another developer, GTM Holdings/WORKS. The initial sale price was $1,029,000, but, as the complaint says, on June 22, 2021, Price voted to approve a reduction of the sale price “from the previously appraised value” to $440,000.

The complaint lets implication do the heavy lifting here: the reduction in sale price is made to sound as though it were baseless, when in actuality the property was reappraised by a third party. After the reappraisal, the city’s housing department requested that council amend the sale price, and Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson, in whose district the land is located, moved to fulfill that request.

It is also unclear to me what relevance HHH has to any alleged criminality here, apart from that it is a program that has been a magnet for bad press since its passage 7 years ago. It reads as though it is supposed to confer some sinister intent to what otherwise might be considered an unremarkable error.

And, indeed, what difference did any of this make? Let us look at the votes themselves.

September 17, 2019: 10 ayes, 0 nays, 5 absent.

October 5, 2021: 15 ayes, 0 nays.

May 12, 2020: 15 ayes, 0 nays.

June 22, 2021: 15 ayes, 0 nays.

At least some of these were consent calendar votes, meaning they were routine business for which no question about passing them was even raised. In none of them did Price play a determinative role. The perjury charges – perjury involving “willfully [stating] as true any material matter which he or she knows to be false” – imply that Price sought to hide his conflict of interest so that he could get away with voting on these matters.

Are we to believe that Price would have willfully lied about economic interest in these companies so that he could cast a non-decisive vote in favor of these projects? Why bother? What is described here, even taking the DA’s part, would be less corruption than a baffling curiosity. It seems overwhelmingly more likely that Price’s votes were the product of oversight or incompetence.

This is only supported by the fact that Price’s Form 700s over the years list an enormous number of companies from which his wife’s company received substantial payments, including, in years other than those for which the perjury charges apply, the developers Safran and GTM.

A reasonable person might conclude Price had been inattentive or even that he was unaware of things that he ought to have known when casting his votes. But the DA’s hypothesis of covert conspiracy to no material effect seems wildly out of bounds compared to the tamer alternative that Price did not recuse himself because he was actually unaware of the existence of the conflict.

So, what of the embezzlement? This second tranche of charges seems less obviously ridiculous than the first, but getting to the bottom of culpability for any of them requires finding a fraudulent intent for Price’s actions.

The embezzlement itself relates to medical benefits which were paid out to Price’s wife, Del Richardson. The problem is that Price and Richardson were not actually, legally married because Price had never gotten divorced from his first wife, Lynn Price. That sounds bad, but under examination it is more confusing than anything else.

Curren and Lynn Price definitely attempted to get divorced. They separated in the early 2000s after 20 years of marriage. Price filed a divorce suit in 2006, but that suit never made it through to the point of dissolving the marriage, petering out before being dropped and re-filed in 2011. Price claims he believed that the 2011 divorce suit, the second one, was completed, and he, without a doubt, had been living apart from Lynn – who had relocated to New Jersey years prior – for a long time.

At some point, Price married Richardson. But that marriage was invalid, unbeknownst to all parties, because the first marriage, yet again, had failed to be dissolved. Once Price was made aware of this – the LA Times picked up a story that originated with local gadfly blog CityWatch – he was adamant that he was, in fact, divorced. Faced with the undeniable legal truth of the matter though, Price resumed his second divorce suit with a new lawyer and finally was able successfully to divorce from Lynn after 15 years of living apart.

Then, he married his second wife once more with feeling. And, of course, the fact that he did so is also the basis for that first tranche of felony charges he’s facing: if he were not legally married to Richardson, there would be no conflict of interest in his votes.

So the first question that should be answered with regard to the charges of embezzlement is: During the period in question (2013 to 2017), did Curren Price know that he was not legally married to Richardson and intentionally misrepresent that fact in order to receive medical insurance benefits for her from the city? That sounds like the bare minimum that the DA would need to prove in order to get a conviction against Price.

The DA leans on the fact that Price and Richardson were not legally married until 2018, following the legal dissolution of his marriage to Lynn Price earlier that same year. But no evidence is provided that Price was aware of the illegality of any of this until 2017 when he resumed his efforts to conclude the divorce proceedings. Certainly, no evidence is given that Price thought in some way to benefit from multiple marriages. Price and Richardson were living as though they were married; they appear to have believed that they were married.

If not, why, turning to the same Form 700s that the DA’s office used, would Price have already been disclosing Richardson’s economic interests in 2016 and 2017 (the earliest years available through the city ethics portal)?

These charges to me have a potentially clearer path to conviction than the others if only because there was some gossip years back that the City of Inglewood (where Price had previously been elected) had rejected similar efforts to provide medical care for Richardson. If this is the case, it is harder, though not beyond the realm of possibility, for Price to claim that he was unaware of any potential impropriety when entering a similar arrangement with the City of Los Angeles.

Ultimately, convicting Price of these charges will almost certainly require convincing a jury that Price was a willing bigamist who, for reasons unclear, preferred to attempt extraction of unlawful benefits via an invalid marriage to the simpler path of divorce and remarriage.

If I were more conspiratorially minded, I might suspect that the Assistant District Attorneys were purposefully setting their hated boss up for a public and embarrassing fall. As is, none of what is presented here seems to rise to the level of malicious corruption and all of it might reasonably merit a sanction of far less weight than ten felonies.

There is so much real, tangible corruption in this city. And I cannot, would not, stake a bet on Price being innocent of the same excesses of that City Hall culture in which he has been immersed for a decade, but these charges, outlandish and flimsy, can only undermine the project of attempting to correct the course of city government.