The Binge Cases: Denise Didn't Come Home - The Sellout | 5: How Downtown Was Won

Episode Date: November 16, 2021

No man is an island. Huizar couldn’t have pulled off the alleged corruption scheme without help. Host Mariah Castañeda tells the story of how Huizar allegedly built the criminal enterprise the FBI would eventually arrest him for. It all started when downtown was reassigned to his district. A Neon Hum Media and Sony Music Entertainment production. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to binge all episodes now or listen weekly wherever you get your podcasts. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was. Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, wherever you get your podcasts. There used to be this big event that happened once a year in downtown L.A.,

and it was called Night on Broadway. Broadway cuts right through the middle of downtown and for a long time it's been this kind of historical looking street. It's got a ton of theaters with their original vintage marquees. Some of the brick buildings have these old faded painted advertisements on them. For Night on Broadway, the theaters would open up to the public with free shows. Broadway would get shut down to cars. Street vendors and performers

were right in the middle of the street. And no matter where you looked, you'd see these posters with a very familiar face on them. Here's Raquel Zamora. And his name was everywhere, like Jose Huizar, Night on Broadway, Jose Huizar, and his picture was everywhere. Night on Broadway was this time to celebrate what We Sad thought Broadway could be, to indulge in glitz and glamour and watch

fancy shows and eat at expensive restaurants. But it ended up being just a mirage. It was a part of this plan we sad had to restore Broadway to its former glory or whatever. The plan was called Bringing Back Broadway and it was backed by millions of dollars. Tonight is about reviving Broadway, the arts, our theaters, economic development as people come explore downtown LA. Every great city needs a great downtown. When we said Hatch This Plan, it says in a name, Broadway was pretty much the only part of downtown that was in CD14. He was kind of obsessed with it. Totally nostalgic for what it used to be.

Broadway was the mecca for shopping for Latinos, including myself as a kid. This is actually, we said, talking about Broadway, in an interview he did in 2015 with Neon Hum executive producer Shara Morris. I recall going to Broadway to do back-to-school shopping. It was our entertainment area. I mean, I lived that era of Broadway where largely Latino immigrants roamed the streets of Broadway. And we still do, but not in as large numbers as we used to.

But back then, this was a place where, you know, Latino immigrants from all over the region would come and do shopping and be entertained at one of the 12 historic theaters. But Luisad didn't want to bring back the Broadway that he'd grown up with, the one where Latinx workers went to buy work clothes and parents shopped for quinceanera dresses. Not that Broadway. Nope. Wisad's Broadway was going to be cool, hip, and attract a whole lot of people with deep pockets. Here he is again. People have used the G word, gentrification, for Broadway and the efforts that we are doing. But, you know, gentrification as

defined, in my view, is when you push out a demographic of people to make way for new people to come in. On Broadway, there's just so much vacancy. There's so much space to allow growth in whatever demographic may be and allow the quinceanera stores, allow the immigrant Latinos to continue to do their shopping there. So for years, Broadway has kind of been this Latinx shopping district, and it seems like Visad is saying it doesn't exist anymore. He's saying that if we redevelop Broadway, it's not gentrification because there's no one to displace. It's a pretty bold statement. And he's partially right. Some of those kinds of businesses had already moved out by 2008 for a whole lot of reasons, like the Great Recession, which, like the pandemic, disproportionately

affected Latinx immigrants. But lots of the businesses were still there, and so were their customers. Here's the preservationist couple who runs Esoteric Tours again. Jose Huizar created the Bringing Back Broadway initiative, which was, in my opinion, a complete ruse because it was supposed to study the economic potential of Broadway, which has never been in question. Retail space, rental space on Broadway on the ground floor was one of the highest in the city. And all of the businesses that were up and down Broadway,

they weren't very cool and they weren't very hip. They were pretty old school. It was a place to get your work clothes and your boots and, you know, maybe buy some musical instruments. But remember, that wasn't the Broadway we said was trying to bring back. He wasn't pouring money into attracting those kinds of businesses back to Broadway. Instead, we said wanted brand name restaurants.

Some person might want to go there and buy their quinceañera dress. Another person's going to go to Umami Burger. You know, where a burger and fries cost like 15 bucks. They're the kind of copy and paste places you can find literally anywhere in the USA. The kind of place where you step inside and you feel like you're everywhere and nowhere all at once. Down the street is one of the most famous hamburgers around right now. Someone else may go to the Million Dollar Theater for one of our newly reopened and refurbished historic theaters in the area. The thing is, Wiesad wasn't even that successful in filling up Broadway with

umami burger type businesses. Some of the mood's there, but what actually happened was the street ended up with a bunch of empty storefronts. Kim Cooper from Esoteric Tours. You know, Broadway is so freaking precious, and it's a ghost town now. What was a thriving, beautiful district? The big plan Wesad had for Broadway wasn't just about the businesses. He wanted a full trolley to run up and down Broadway. It was initially supposed to cost $100 million, and then $125 million, then more than $325 million. It would have been a big project. They were basically going to have to rip up a busy downtown street and then put all these trolley tracks through it.

It was baffling to a lot of people. Oh my God, that dumb, stupid money racket Broadway trolley thing with all the problems in LA and everything that needs to be done. Let's build a trolley in a part of L.A. nobody goes to. Are you effing kidding me? Yeah, so that's Zuma Dog. He was kind of a watchdog for the city council back around 2010. He wasn't the only one asking questions.

Lots of people at the time didn't understand why, considering all the problems downtown was facing. Why Broadway needed this shiny new toy? It might be because it was the kind of attraction that we sad hoped would convince rich people to move to Broadway. Actually, the plan was for a developer to partially finance the trolley. A company called Shenzhen Hazens agreed to donate $750,000 to the trolley and threw in about a half a million to bringing back Broadway itself. The donations were part of an agreement with the city to get the developers two skyscrapers built. That agreement was legal. One

way for big projects to get built is for developers to donate some money to a city project or a city-approved charity. Tit for tat. But there's another way to get big projects built in Jose Huizad's downtown Los Angeles. Bribery. Shenzhen Hazens allegedly did that too. And soon, the FBI was going to be onto them. We'll get to that later in our series. In this episode, we're talking about how Isad got his crown jewel.

From Neon Hub Media and LA Talker, this is Smokescreen, The Sellout, a podcast about a politician dogged by allegations of corruption, harassment, and pathological pettiness. It's about the residents who fought gentrification even as their neighborhoods were auctioned off to the highest bidder. This is Episode 5, How Downtown Was Won. I'm Mariah Casneda. There's this thing that always comes up when you talk to people about Jose Huizar, something that changed the kind of money he had access to and what influence he had. It made it possible for him to allegedly take those bribes from Shenzhen Hazens and other developers. It basically gave him the power to overstep. Without it, it's possible that Wissad never would have been arrested. This is Eric Akopian, Rudy Martinez's campaign consultant.

The sort of the industrial scale criminality started after downtown got redistricted into a district, which was after this campaign. And if you look at almost all of the major cases, they all involve big projects in downtown. Here's what happened. Downtown became part of CD14, which meant that Wisad became the deciding voice on what kinds of developments would get built there. It allowed him to build that criminal enterprise the FBI eventually arrested him for.

And it meant that he could expand his vision of umami burgers and urban outfitters from Broadway to all of it. A downtown made for people with money to burn. But Ouissad didn't get downtown all on his own. He had help. A lot of people had to fall in line. This country was constructed.

This is Herb Wesson speaking at a Black History Month kickoff in City Council one year. To ensure that Black people and other minorities, it was constructed to all but guarantee failure. If you Google Herb Wesson, you'll mostly find pictures

of him looking jovial. He's middle-aged with a neat mustache and a contagious smile. Sometimes he's got his hand on his hips, smiling like, I'm serious, but I can also be fun. Really. By the way, we've reached out to Herb Wesson multiple times for comment, and he never got back to us. Anyways, Herb Wesson is a city council member for CD10, which includes parts of South LA and Koreatown. He's been in office for about six years by this point.

And in that time, he and Weesad have come to be known as best buddies. And I don't know where the friendship developed, but they were publicly always commented on. They were the closest friends in the council. This is Bernard Parks Sr. He's a longtime cop who rose through the ranks to become the chief of LAPD. But what you need to know is that his tenure on the city council overlapped with Wesad and Wesson. I don't know where that relationship started or when or how, but there was no other relationship like that amongst other members of the council. I don't recall anyone on council referring to each other as best friends or close enough to be brothers or brothers with other mothers.

That was a term that particularly Wesson would use. So that was the thing that I thought was interesting and unlike any other relationship on the council. So it's 2011 and Herb Wesson decides that he'd like to be city council president. It's an important position. It's right up there with the mayor for most powerful in the L.A. city government. We said is of course gonna support Wesson, his best friend, but not everyone was convinced. That's not to be mean or whatever, but I challenged somebody to tell me why he stood out ahead of everyone else and why there was this

push to make this happen. So we kind of laughed it off because we didn't think it was serious. This is Bernard Parks Jr., actually. He was his father's chief of staff. He sometimes signs his emails B2. We're going to be hearing a lot from them both in this episode. Then as days progressed, there were these growing, this growing sentiment that this needs to happen. And then you hear other council members are going to support him. And you were trying to figure out, again, what was the, I guess, the impetus is the best word. What was the reason for all of this? Why was it happening?

By the time Wesson went to Bernard Parks Sr. to ask for his support, Parks had already noticed something weird going on in city council. Typically, if there was an issue on deck, the members of city council were supposed to get together in a public meeting and hash it out, then decide. But lately, everyone just seemed to agree on stuff without discussing it. Dad would spend all night reading these reports and be ready to vote and prepare and everything else to find out that when it got to council, things had already been obviously been decided. Because I mean, you'd have these major issues passed with no real debate. And so that was a frustrating part, but that was how it worked. For the record, this isn't how it's supposed to work. There's actually an act, the Brown Act, that specifically bans a quorum of California politicians from discussing public matters in private. Any discussions of a law or a vote between a majority of the council is supposed to happen in public.

That includes something called a serial meeting, where a person can act as a go-between to coordinate consensus. Like, let's say John and Betty have a conversation, and then John calls up another politician to discuss how Betty's going to vote, then another and another, you got it. The point is, a majority of council members aren't supposed to be coordinating their votes ahead of time. But to Parks, everyone seems to be discussing this stuff in private, or like they're following orders on how to vote or something. Dad and I would talk in the office about how much the council began to sort of replicate organized crime. Because what would happen in organized crime is that you would find the dissenters and you'd punish them. And then you'd keep everybody close. You'd keep everybody real close and tight.

So Wesson's campaign for city council president seems to be following the same pattern. Parks can't figure out exactly why, but everyone seems to be all in on Wesson. Except him and one other city council member, Jan Perry, whose district is basically all of downtown. Let me just say up front, two people get screwed in this story. One of them is Bernard Parks Sr., and the other is Jan Perry. By the way, Jan Perry declined to comment for this podcast. Jan Perry, um, yeah, boy, they sure lost that one. That's Zuma Dog again, who, by the way, is a character. He came to our interview wearing a cowboy hat and rhinestone sunglasses. I wanted to speak to him because for years he was such a big presence at city council.

He'd show up at pretty much every public comment session. He became kind of a voice for transparency and accountability, despite also being pretty goofy. Here's one video of him. That's Z-U-M-A-D-O-G-G because I'm twice the G-11-B, you feel me? If you can hold this time for one second. Don't you see I got an L.A. Times article right now. I've been coming to city council. The L.A. Times picked up on my whole story, y'all. Public advocate. And Zuma Dog wags tail in council space, y'all.

There are a lot of videos like this. Zuma Dog's silly. And he's also really memorable. And he also takes local government really seriously. If everyone took it that seriously, it might be a lot harder for politicians to get away with shenanigans. Zuma Dog actually ran for mayor twice. He didn't win, although he did come in fourth one time, in 2009. Anyways, he said that he got so well known that even city staffers trusted him,

which meant that when it was his turn to speak during public comment, things got interesting. Bernard Parks, let me just say, yeah, let me just say I love that man so much. He was the best council member because he was the fiscal watchdog and he and his associate would literally pull me over to tattletale to say the stuff he wasn't allowed to say. So Wesson comes to ask Parks Sr. for his support. And Parks is kind of like, no, why would I? My producer Carla asked him about this. And what was your relationship with Herb Wesson like at this time or in general? I realized that dealing with him on a couple of issues, that it was not something that I look forward to

nor would I look into. He asked me at a breakfast meeting, would I support him for council president? And I told him no, because I didn't view that he would be the person that I'd want to represent me on the council. Here's his son again. After that, Weston met with dad about voting for him for president.

Dad said he had real reservations and he told him that. And then we first got that first real hint of redistricting where he says, well, you know, vote for me and you, you know, you'll keep whatever, what do you want in your district? And you say, well, wow, I didn't know the two things were connected, but okay. As it turns out, they were connected, which meant that for Bernard Parks, redistricting was going to be a bloodbath. Here's how I find out about redistricting. Hey, Zumba Dog, this thing redistricting is going to start so that Weezer can take downtown and it's going to be a corrupt thing and needs to be stopped.

ZumaDog wouldn't say who told him that, but he's right about open secrets. He just got a sneak peek of what was coming for the world to see. So, here's how redistricting works. Every 10 years, at the same time as the census, each district in LA gets reassessed. Their boundaries get reshaped a bit. Here's Scott Frazier, the LA podcast host. So it is supposed to be this boring thing where you look through and say, this is how the population of the city has changed over the last 10 years.

Maybe this district has a little bit more population. This other one has a little bit less now. We want to re-equate them. So we're going to make adjustments around the edges to even them out. Where people live, how many people live there, it changes over the years. Populations shift, which means that the boundaries of certain city council districts might also have to move. Just a little bit to account for the population change. It shouldn't be interesting, but I promise you, it is. So it's 2011.

Huizad is fresh off a win in his re-election campaign against Rudy Martinez. The redistricting commission is in full swing. The commission is basically 21 people who vote on how to redraw the districts. They are the 21 deciders. And for the record, who represents you in city council really matters. It affects your daily life. It affects what kind of things your city council office prioritizes. If your council person is a-okay with rent hikes and displacement, you can see it in real life. Like in Highlands Park, the district line goes right down the center of the neighborhood. It separates these two main streets, York and Figueroa.

The York half is in CD14, and it's pretty gentrified. There's all these fancy vintage shops and expensive bars that have set up shop in recent years. The Figueroa half is in CD1, which is still gentrifying. It's got boutiques too, but it also still has a lot of taquerias and old-school raspado and florispots. Okay, so stay with me. So those 21 commissioners are all appointed by high-level city employees. Like, Wissad gets to appoint one. The city controller gets one. You get the idea. So there are these commissioners, and then there's the staff.

The people hired to actually work on redistricting as their job 40 hours a week or whatever. The staff aren't supposed to be political appointees. They're supposed to be neutral. But somehow, the executive director of the redistricting commission, the head of the whole thing, ended up being a man who used to work for Wesson.

Herb Wesson's assistant chief of staff was appointed to be the director of the commission. And when we protested that, the council ignored it and moved on. All this time, Bernard Parks thought he had to choose who should be the next president of the city council. But that wasn't the choice. He finally got it. Wesson was running the redistricting. Either he supported Wesson or else. Here's Bernard's son again.

We went and hired a lawyer before the process started to say, hey, man, you know, redistricting, you could take a look at this. We know we're getting screwed. How badly and how illegally are we being screwed? Because we had seen the writing on the wall and we had already heard, well, Herb's coming after your district. That was your district and Jan Perry's district. Correct. Correct. Now, I'm going to be honest. There's precedent for this. Council members often try to snatch parts of each other's districts. It happens all the time. Here's Nick Pacheco, the former city council member for CD14, talking about the redistricting in 2002. I definitely wanted to get downtown and I was new to politics, so I misplayed my head. I misplayed the whole thing. Pacheco didn't get the votes he needed, and he backed down.

But this time around, Wisad had his sights on downtown. And Wisad got it. Let's stop for a second to talk about what it looks like to get screwed in redistricting. In the case of Parks, it meant his district got carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey. Well, I mean, a lot of it was personal. So in one of their moves, which they thought was, I'm sure, pretty funny, is that they thought that it would be great to write dad out of his own district. That's Parks' son and chief of staff again. And there were other weird things that happened.

They took one half of a shopping mall and put it in the 10th and left the other part in the 8th. You know, and so you say, OK, well, if you do business in this shopping center, think about the people who say, well, who is my councilman? Well, if I'm on this side, it's Herb Weston. But if I'm on that side, it's Bernard Park. But there were all sorts of personal, I mean, everything about this was personal. In Jan Perry's case, redistricting meant losing downtown. Basically all of it. They took Staples Center and they took essentially the big resources out of downtown. They took, you know, the hotels and everything else that tax increment money, Jan Perry was using to basically support

the poorer section of the district. This was the funniest, I mean, not funny, but one of the most bizarre things. In redistricting, you looked at the map and you singled out probably two of the three poorest districts, probably the two poorest districts, and you made them both poor.

So how did that happen? The census did not support such drastic steps. You know, what is our deviation or whatever they call it, was only in the small percentages and only small shifts were necessary. But it became personal. So Perry and Parks districts get eviscerated. Meanwhile, whatever the opposite of screwed is, that's what we said got. When the lines were redrawn, CD14 included basically all of downtown,

from the Arts District all the way over to the 110 freeway that's on the western edge of downtown. So this all happened in 2011 and 2012, and over the next decade, downtown totally changed. Luxury development after luxury development. WeSAD got to redesign downtown to fit his dream of what it could be. Because city council members are basically like little kings of their district. They get a lot of say over what kinds of things get approved. Here's Bernard Parks Sr. again. You have no idea, nor do you have the time to go and unravel every deal and see whether the person is being honest. You assume they're bringing forth their honest judgment as to what they're offering as a solution. But you find when people are self-dealing, they're keeping a lot of things from the body,

or they're winking at each other other or people are shying away saying, this doesn't look right, but I'm just going to stay away from it, as though they're absolved from that responsibility. Wisad was not the first to reimagine downtown LA. He was just the latest in a long tradition of politicians who have redesigned pieces of downtown, who envisioned bulldozing and erasing the thousands of working class people who had already made it their home. Here's Nancy Mesa. He ran on bringing back Broadway, right?

I think that's why he kept on getting reelected, right? Because he kept on getting like the votes of people who want to see, you know, downtown how they quote unquote get revitalized and be brought back. But I remember just kind of seeing all the marketing scheme and really the narrative of the narrative that I feel really erased the immigrant community. And we felt that we felt that every day. And we continue to feel it. Right. Folks working multiple jobs or having jobs and then having to do a side hustle just to keep up with the rent. Right. Like all of these things are not natural. And I think our homes being so expensive

is not natural, right? So Bissad gets downtown, but that's not all that happened. It was the first of two dominoes to fall. Two things that had to happen to set him up to remake downtown, to reshape the skyline and create the downtown he wanted to see. The second domino after the break.

So when you bend the rules as much as these people bend in the rules, Bernard Parks Jr. It would have to show up somewhere else. It wouldn't be just, oh, I'm just going to do it just this once. Because that'll tell you the psychology of a criminal is whenever they steal for the first time and they get away with it, it doesn't become mentally, hey, I got away with it. It becomes, I got to think about all the times I didn't steal. So now you're catching up steadily. It's like a gambler. You're trying

to catch up on the times you didn't steal and you didn't get over to where you'll never catch up. You'll never catch the money. Here's my producer, Carla, again. Just to be clear, like to our listeners, Herb Wesson hasn't been charged with anything like criminally. What do you think the link is between Herb Wesson and the whole scandal? This is the thing, like you said, accurately, he's not been charged with anything. And, uh, how he's linked is that as city council president, you set the environment for the city council. So when the guy you looked out for in redistricting feels comfortable enough to say, I'm going to ask for however many millions of dollars it was. And so when you set that environment to where it's the

wild west and take what you want, then people are going to take what they want. Remember how we said that redistricting kept coming up over and over in our interviews? There's one other thing that comes up with pretty much everyone, the PLUM committee. Here's Scott Frazier again. The Planning and Land Use Management Committee, or PLUM, as it is known in insider circles, is extremely powerful. After 2012, Wisad wasn't just the king of downtown. He was also on the PLUM committee. That's like getting the power to fly, and then as a cherry on top, you get invisibility. And about a year later, in July of

2013, Herb Wesson appoints him the committee chair. That's when things really get going. So the Plum Committee has the ability to either help out developers by helping them get to market or to make things more costly to them. So a lot of people gave Wiesad the power to do what he eventually did. Wiesad did not appoint himself to be the head of PLUM. That was his BFF, Herb Wesson. Wiesad didn't give himself downtown. The commission did. Here's Bernard Parks Jr.

It was disappointing that so many people, including the mayor, sat back and acted like this is normal. And the thing is, is that although they may not have been, you know, had the money in the pockets and the closets, they all have a piece of this. Because this was something that was totally unnecessary. And it opened the door to the biggest part of the scandal. I would bet you that if you asked any of the folks who blindly hit yes on the vote that day to go ahead and tear up this district, that they would say, oh, I had no idea that that would happen.

Oh, my God. It wasn't me, but the record shows who voted for it. And if you went back and asked them why they did, their answers would be even more confusing than they were then. By the way, we asked Weesad himself about redistricting, bringing back Broadway, and how he got downtown. And he never got back to us. He was the chair of Plum. Scott Frazier again. He didn't need to go necessarily to another office and say, I want this and this to happen. It was able to be handled internally in a team that consisted of him and his staff, according to the FBI allegations, which means that there is a lower chance of detection.

Right. He's like a one-stop shop for getting the development done. Exactly. Once we said head downtown, once he was the head of Plum, there wasn't a lot to stand in his way. He could act like a fixer for developers like, oh, you want this development to get approved downtown? Come to me. I'll get whatever sign-offs it needs. But Jose Huizad did not work for free.

For folks who haven't read the report, I think it's important to know also that the Sweezy Wheezy scandal is one of the biggest corruption scandals that the FBI has investigated in the history of Los Angeles. That's next time on The Sellout. The Sellout is produced by Neon Hub Media and LA Taco. I'm your host, Mariah Castaneda. My co-reporters are Alexis Olivier-Ray and Carla Green. Carla Green is our lead producer, and she wrote the episodes.

Our editor is Catherine St. Louis. Vikram Patel is our consulting editor. Associate editor is Stephanie Serrano. Associate producer is Liz Sanchez. Our executive producer is Jonathan Hirsch. Samantha Allison is our production manager. Fact checker is Sarah Ivry. Our sound designer is Hans Dale Sue.

Eduardo Arenas made our theme music. Other original music by Moni Mendoza, with an additional track from Blue Dot Sessions. Special thanks to If you want to know more about what you've heard on the show so far, head over to to see a beautiful map of some of the places we talk about, made by Tommy Gallegos, as well as new reporting and interviews. This week, we've also got a story about redistricting, past and present, written by associate producer Liz Sanchez and my

producer and co-reporter Carla Green. Before we go, I just wanted to say thank you for listening to The Sellout. We hope you're loving the show as much as we love making it. And we really want to hear from you. Your feedback goes a long way, and it only takes a few minutes. Just head to smokescreen.fans to answer a few questions. We're so excited to hear from you. I'm so excited to hear from you. Thanks for listening. See you next week.