The Binge Cases: Denise Didn't Come Home - The Sellout | 8: The Downfall

Episode Date: December 7, 2021

Huizar’s carelessness starts to catch up with him. After more than a dozen all-expenses paid trips to Vegas with plenty of perks, Huizar gets played by one of his own. A businessman turned FBI informant gives Huizar an envelope with $15,000 in cash, and then tells the Feds all about it. 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. A lot of what happened actually happened in Vegas.

I think you pop the champagne bottle, jump in the air, click your heels and say, now I'm over here. You know, you know how much money I'm going to get to fly to Vegas. I'm going to get to have a Vegas junket. I'm going to get to get hundreds of thousands in bribes. It's June 1st, 2017. A Los Angeles City Councilman is in the bathroom of a Las Vegas casino. He's not alone. He's in there with someone the feds call businessman A,

identified by the LA Times as Andrew Wong. He sells home electronics and furnishings. The same night they go into the bathroom together, the councilman has gotten a bunch of free stuff from Wong. About $1,000 in casino chips, $24,000 in drinks and bottle service at a nightclub. Escorts came to his hotel room. By the way, this is all in court documents. And in the bathroom at the casino, the councilman gets something else. Wong gives him an envelope. It's got $10,000 cash in it. The councilman is not Jose Huizar. His name is Mitch Englander.

And this is the story of how he became the first arrest in an FBI investigation that wasn't even looking for him. I have to tell you, I have a lot more respect for Huizar than I do for Mitch. I mean, Jesus, if you're going to go to federal prison, you want to do it for a million dollars, not $5,000 and strippers. Over the course of four years, starting in 2013, Wiesad allegedly made at least 19 different trips to Las Vegas, sometimes multiple times in a month. He'd go there with Wei Huang, the president of that company, Shenzhen New World Group. Remember, he's the one who allegedly gave Wissad the $600,000 loan to pay off his sexual harassment lawsuit. So Wissad went to Vegas with that guy, among others, and they wooed Wissad. In the indictment, there's a chart that lists all the gifts that Wissad

got on these trips. Flights, hotel rooms, law services, meals, casino gambling trips, alcohol, and escort services. On one trip, they spent $135,000. The total for all the trips is $890,388, almost a million dollars. And then in June 2017, there's this one trip to Vegas that becomes infamous. That trip with a $10,000 and an envelope in the bathroom. He took money from a developer allegedly in June of 2017 on a junket to Vegas, including in the charges that he accepted $10,000 in cash, $1,000 in casino chips. He rang up a bar bill of $34,000 at a luxury hotel. We're talking about an envelope with cash.

We're talking about a female escort in this indictment, hotel rooms, gambling trips, things like that. Somehow, Huizar wasn't actually on this trip, the one that became infamous. According to his official calendar, he was busy with a bunch of different things, like taking his kids to school for an event called Donuts with Dad. In any case, Huizad stayed home. But George Esparza, the guy who's kind of like Huizad's right-hand man, he did go on the trip.

And this trip looks a lot like their other Vegas trips. Tens of thousands of dollars in bottle service, all allegedly paid for by two men, Wei Huang, the president of Shenzhen New World, and Andrew Wong, the businessman. By the way, we sent requests for comment to Mitch Englander, Wei Huang, and Andrew Wong, and also George Esparza. Nobody got back to us, except for Wei Huang's lawyer, who declined to comment on his behalf.

So, by June 2017, the FBI was already onto WeSAD. Earlier that year, they served Yahoo with a warrant to search his emails. And then the feds got a big break. They overheard a phone call between Esparza and we said, discussing the trip. They returned from Las Vegas and in the indictment, it's just like George Esparza was calling Jose Huizar to tell him, like, what a great time that he had and how great it was that there were escorts there. And that's how the feds found out about Mitch Englander. From Neon Hub Media and L.A. Taco, 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.

I'm Mariah Castaneda. This is Episode 8, The Downfall. As a Los Angeles City Council member, Mitch Englander was kind of known for being conservative. He was the only Republican on council, and he represented CD12, which covers most of the San Fernando Valley. It's this valley that's tucked in between a bunch of mountain ranges on the north side of Los Angeles. It's the only district in L.A. that reliably elects Republicans to represent it. So Englander is an outlier on city council. Among other things, he was the only member to vote against raising L.A.'s minimum wage to $15 an hour. And as of 2012, Mitch Englander was also on the Plum Committee.

Remember that powerful committee that makes a lot of big decisions about development and projects in Los Angeles? Yeah, that's the committee that we sat chairs. So even though the San Fernando Valley isn't the focus of a lot of big money development, because it's mostly suburbs, Englander is still in a relatively powerful position in city council. He could still be useful to developers. But he doesn't even get the chance. Because before he can do anything, the FBI is onto him. Here's Bernard Parks Sr. To read the story on Englander, where they said he just kind of wandered into another corruption investigation.

Because they're looking at one guy, another guy shows up, and he just happens to be collateral damage or low-hanging fruit. So, according to court documents, in June 2017, Mitch Englander gets invited to Las Vegas. It seems to have been his first trip to Vegas with his crew.

He takes the $10,000 in the bathroom. And then, a week and a half after Vegas, Englander goes on another trip with Andrew Wong to a golf tournament in Palm Springs, about two hours from LA. Englander gets another $5,000 cash, again in an envelope, again in a bathroom. And by the way, these dollar amounts are tiny. WeSAD allegedly got hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not Englander. Here's Scott Frazier talking to my producer, Carla. So Englander was like the cheapo.

He was like the discount option. Yeah, the bargain bin, apparently. While Englander was away in Palm Springs, the FBI contacts John Lee, the senior staffer who was also on the Vegas trip. The feds want to interview Lee, and he agrees. To be clear, Lee hasn't been charged in the Rico case. Lee also didn't respond to a request for comment. A couple months later, Englander learns about the FBI investigation. And that's when he starts the cover-up. Just to be clear, Englander, none of what he was charged with was federal bribery or racketeering. As far as the charges go, he only admitted to what was basically witness tampering and scheming to falsify evidence.

Here's what Mitch Englander does. He sends a couple back data checks labeled Vegas expenses, apparently trying to make it seem like he was planning on paying that money back all along. And over the course of the next six months and two FBI interviews, Englander repeatedly lies and conspires to lie to the FBI. And then comes a meeting that's like something out of a movie. It's February 2018. Englander and Wong meet up in Englander's car in downtown LA. Here's Scott Frazier. And they are literally driving, doing donuts essentially around a couple of city blocks in downtown. They share some pleasantries and then

Mitch Englander cranks up the volume on his stereo and starts whispering and saying okay so here's what you need to say about blah blah blah and what englander doesn't know is that months prior andy wang had started cooperating become a cooperating witness in the corruption investigation with the fbi so all of the things he's saying are being recorded. The FBI, they have all of this just recorded crystal clear. They have transcripts of what he was saying and everything. And it's just so, the cloak and dagger aspect of it is just so fraught with this black comedy.

It was two months after the Vegas trip that Andrew Wong becomes an FBI informant, which means that everything Englander did to try to cover up his tracks with the FBI, the feds had a lot of it on tape. The cover-up was doomed from the start. Mitch Englander resigned from office in October 2018. John Lee, his senior staffer who was on that Vegas trip, was elected to his seat.

Lee actually gets appointed to the plum committee, you know the powerful one that we sat and chaired. And then last year, just as COVID hit LA, Englander became the first arrest in the FBI's investigation. But Englander was a small fish, and the feds were about to nab the men they were really after. For years, Wissad and Esparza had been feeling like they needed to be more careful. In 2016, WeSat allegedly texted Esparza about one of the Vegas trips. Hey, we should watch what we say on phone. Esparza responded,

You're right. We always have to be safe. But they continued to text. They're leaving behind a paper trail for the FBI and still allegedly taking bribes in broad daylight. Even though soon they will be accused of participating in the biggest corruption scandal in recent L.A. history. It seems like we sad and Esparza don't believe they can actually get caught. Or maybe they just can't handle thinking that they might because they keep just doing what they've been doing. Remember, Wisad hasn't gone to trial yet. He will next year. So all the FBI investigation stuff in this episode comes from either the

indictment or court documents. Like, in the spring of 2017, George Esparza goes to Wiesad's house with $300,000. The money is a payment for Wiesad removing a roadblock to a development. Wiesad allegedly tells Esparza he can keep $100,000 for himself and asks Esparza to hold onto the cash for him. Esparza put the money into a liquor box.

So this is Kim Cooper again, the preservationist from Esoteric Tours. Since the raid, she's become part of a chorus of city council watchdogs who digest each new FBI document as it comes out and dissect them together online. And so it's like he's buying a nice top shelf bottle and presumably he's like, I got to give it to him in something. So I'm sure he took a couple hundred off the top and

bought himself a nice bottle down at Ramirez Liquor. And, you know, that's kind of cute. But I think about that. I think about that, too. And then he's taking pictures of it because he wants to have documentation for himself. Yeah, there's actually a picture of this liquor box made public by the feds in the indictment. It's a dark blue box. It looks like maybe something you'd buy fancy whiskey in. It's stuffed with cash. It's a strange line of thought.

They know they're doing things that are wrong, but they want to protect themselves at the same time. Esparza keeps the stash in his house for over a year. And in that time, Wissad keeps doing things that are increasingly risky. Things that seem too risky, even to the developers who are allegedly bribing him. In June of 2017, Wissad allegedly asks one development consultant to coordinate a trip to Cuba for him and his lady friend. The FBI called her a woman with whom he was having a secret romantic relationship.

So apparently at some point Wizar was feeling like, you know, maybe life was getting a little stressful and he wanted to take a lovely vacation with somebody. Blow off some steam. Blow off some steam. Kim Cooper again. Take a lovely vacation with someone he was close to who he didn't want to be seen with in Los Angeles. And it occurred to him that the best place for them to go was Cuba, which is not a place that Americans are necessarily supposed to be traveling to. There's quite a lot of restrictions around it. So he said, allegedly asks the development consultant to help get them to Cuba. The consultant is not into this idea.

There's going to be a paper trail if he helps Wiesad get a visa. That's the kind of thing that could come back to haunt them all. It's one thing to get a cash envelope in a bathroom. But a trip to Cuba is the kind of thing the FBI could notice. It could expose the ties between the developers and WESAD. According to the indictment, the consultant says, So I told WESAD, I said, look, we're all going to be on record. And if something happens, everything, everyone's dead. The next day, he says to a man who does fundraising for WESAD that the council member was making some very stupid requests.

That's an actual quote in the indictment. Kim Cooper again. And I believe that people in his office said that that was an imprudent decision because if anything should happen to him in Cuba, there would be no explanation for why he was in Cuba with a woman, not his wife. I think that the people in his immediate orbit, the people who were running the hustle in his office, because he's not the criminal mastermind. He's just the guy who shows up at city council and runs the meetings. They didn't want the golden goose to run around screaming and alert the whole world.

They wanted him to be a little more discreet. And eventually, Wissad gets tired of Esparza holding that $200,000 in cash for him. Wissad wants it. According to the indictment, he sends Esparza a series of increasingly unhinged text messages. Here's the final one, sent two weeks before the raid. Sounds like you don't ever want to meet and face up to your commitment to meet on October 1, and you're using other pretexts as to why you don't want to meet. You're using excuses as for the real reason you don't want to meet. You know it.

You told me October. Now what? Each time comes up, you don't want to meet at all. You want it all, and that's the real reason why you don't want to meet and are using all kinds of excuses. One more time. When are we going to meet? By the way, almost every time he writes you in that text, it's you, just the letter. Okay, one more thing. Remember how the FBI has managed to turn the businessman Andrew Wong into an informant?

He meets Ouissad at a restaurant less than two months before the raid. Andrew Wong gives Wissad $15,000 in an envelope, which Wissad then covers with a napkin. The understanding, allegedly, is that in exchange for the money, Wissad will help pressure Carmel partners to hire Wong, who, again, is doing all this as an FBI informant. According to the indictment, after Wong left the meeting, Wissad counted the cash inside the envelope, right there at the table. There comes a point at which people begin to take risks that they wouldn't have taken at some point, when there's very little left to lose

and when it feels like the world is spinning out of their control. This is a man with a serious education. He's not an idiot. His compartmentalization of the reality of where he was in the world at that moment fascinates me because anyone who knows anything about crime and money and gambling, he knows this stuff. He knew everybody was watching, but at the same time, he's kind of pretending that it isn't happening.

And it's enormously risk-taking. When you read through the whole indictment, which is more than 100 pages, it's hard not to think about how busy Ouissade was doing all this, allegedly doing favors for developers in exchange for cash. Here's Nancy Mesa again, the Boyle Heights organizer and resident. So I just think that's also important for folks to understand is that Aso Sehwisad was out here like cuddling up with developers and multinational real estate corporations going to Vegas.

Like they were living it up, right? They were living it up and selling out the hood as the rest of us were left to fend for ourselves, you know, and had real implications of basically his laziness. I want to take a minute here. It's comical to talk about what these guys did. You know, all the salacious details and how bad they were at doing

it. But there's a real cost to all of it. Because while Wisad was busy being Wisad, rents soared in his district. Real estate investors began thinking of CD14 as a place where they can make huge profits. And that's just part of it. What happened to CD14 during Wisad's heyday isn't just about what he allegedly did. It's also what he didn't do. Because Wisad's district had a ton of problems at this time. It wasn't just rising rents. There were other threats to residents of Boyle Heights.

In some parts of L.A., including some parts of CD14, lead dust is unavoidable. It's on people's cars, in the streets, in people's bones, and even their teeth. After the break, an industrial plant and the community it poisoned. You know that sinking feeling you get in your stomach when you find out something that totally changes things? Like, maybe you suspected something was off, but you weren't sure, or you convinced yourself not to worry? And then you find out the truth.

For residents of Boyle Heights, that's the moment when they found out about Exide. It was like something like environmental toxicity was something that was mentioned in a class. Melissa Vasquez didn't find out about the lead dust or what it was doing to her and her community until she was in college about five years ago. After undergrad, she went on to do a master's in public health. And this thing happened in class. They were talking about EPA and Exide and the communities it impacted. I didn't understand the feelings I was feeling around the topic, but I kind of had to like remove myself from it a little bit and kind of process like, yo, this is me that they're talking about in the screen. And these exam questions, that's me, you know. So it kind of was like a little check into reality, I guess.

Imagine finding out that hundreds of thousands of your neighbors had been breathing in lead dust, that a battery recycling plant was just expelling into the air. That was Exide. I didn't find out about it until college, and that was only because somebody that I knew was being personally affected, and then I came to figure out how I was being affected and impacted by it.

And then, you know, other friends whose family members had fallen ill, like, oh, have you guys thought about this? I didn't find out about Exide until college either. I actually went to high school pretty close to this toxic plant. I was on the cross-country team, and some days we would run extremely close to this plant. We really had no idea that the air we were breathing in was filled with lead dust. So the plant that became Exide opened about a century ago in Vernon. Vernon is on the other side of the train tracks that run along the south side of Boyle Heights. It's its own city, but only about 100 people live there. Most of Vernon's inhabitants are actually businesses, 1,800 of them, most of them manufacturing-type places, like factories. And Vernon's inhabitants are actually businesses, 1,800 of them.

Most of them manufacturing-type places, like factories. And Vernon's got this stench. I think the smell is like clockwork. Like, from this time to this time, it smells like burnt people. From this time to this time, it smells like burnt pig. From this time to this time, it smells like cracked eggs. Like, the stench is there. It just changes what a stench is for, you know? So Vernon, 1920s, a new factory opens. The plant that would eventually become Exide. At that time, it's run by Morris P. Kirkenson, a family company. The plant

was a lead smelter, which basically means that it recycles lead so it can be made into something else. Over the years, the company that owns the lead smelter changes a bunch. But all you've got to know is around 1979, the plant got a temporary permit to operate pending, you know, safety and environmental checks. It operates under that temporary permit for decades. It never gets a permanent one. And then, in the year 2000, the plant becomes Exide. For decades, the Vernon plant kept doing what it was doing, processing lead and then just pouring this toxic dust into the air, contaminating the soil and groundwater with other

chemicals. Exide has poisoned at least a quarter million people in East and Southeast LA. And that was the count in 2013. So by now, it's got to be way more than that. The lead dust from Exide is unavoidable in some parts of LA, especially in the east and southeast parts where working class, black, and brown people live, like Boyle Heights. The dust coats people's lawns, their driveways, and the inside of their homes. The lead gets into your lungs, and it makes its way into your bones. A study in 2019 found alarming levels of lead in the baby teeth of children living in five communities near the Exide plant. The researchers said that if the lead was in the children's teeth, that meant it was probably also in their brains and in their kidneys. Me personally, I have reproductive health issues that stem in my endocrine system.

You know, my family had always had some level of weird health issues. Shmuel Gonzalez, the tour guide from Boyle Heights, again. Asthma issues. They're really weird, you know, strange kind of cancer issues that were more common within my family and the families that lived in my neighborhood than other places. But it really became clearly evident to my family that there was an environmental problem. In 1984, at the time, my sister, who's, I have two sisters, she's the oldest of my sisters,

was just four and a half years old at the time. And she was diagnosed with ALL leukemia. There was a constant just barrage of questions from the doctors about things that, you know, were related to our jobs and where we lived and a lot of speculating that people made about us living in communities that were too close to industry, too close to dumping, you know, stuff like this. My sister at the time was understood to be dying of basically blood cancer that was caused by the environment. That kind of leukemia that Shmuel's sister had, that's the kind of cancer you get when you're exposed to something like lead in the womb before you're even born. But the reality is, is that for generations, many of our families were, we didn't have a choice. This is where we were designated to live. And economically,

even after segregation ended, we were still limited to these communities. You know, every parent wants to think that they're doing the best thing for their children. You know what I mean? And it can become that when you see what's happening and doctors are asking all these questions and they're speculating about all these environmental issues, that it really just hits on the parent like, oh my gosh, what have I allowed to happen to my child? So Exide was happening on Wisad's watch, but it also happened before he was even elected. Before he was even born. Because for decades, Exide was slowly poisoning the residents of Wisad's district and others. And for the longest time, they didn't know. And if you watch the news, you probably saw Wisad being really mad about

Exide. He made a lot of headlines. He knew Exide really mattered to his constituents. He knew they wanted him to do something about it. When I come out my front door each and every day and I look at the 5 freeway, I look across some of the parks, the few parks in our neighborhood to the industry that's polluting our air. I ask myself what the future is like for my kids. Initially they were cited for excess lead, then arsenic. Now we see there's possibly metals on the ground. I mean, where does it stop? Today, LA City Council Member Jose Huizar introduced a motion calling on the city attorney to explore possible legal action against Exide Technologies. Governor, we need immediate cleanup, an immediate plan to do that,

and we need the funding attached. WeSide is like, let me call out Exide on TV. He's saying all the right things. I want to be clear. Exide isn't WeSide's fault. WeSide couldn't have stopped Exide or erased all the harm that it did. But ultimately, Melissa says he did more of the headline-grabbing stuff

than things that might have actually protected his constituents. You know, like a public information campaign. He didn't go around knocking on doors telling his constituents, hey, you've got poison in your backyard. I think he just liked to talk about it, honestly. And I think he liked to talk about it just so it could seem like he was doing something about it. I personally lived in the district during the time of his administration, but I never really heard or understood what was being done about the issue until I personally got involved in it.

By the way, Exide's plant in Vernon finally closed in March 2015. That same month, We Sad in Esparza allegedly took two trips to Vegas. And look, I'm not saying that Exide happened because We Sad went to Vegas. But what I am saying is there are only 24 hours in a day. When you make one thing a priority, like Vegas, maybe other things take the back burner. We asked Weesad about his response to Exide, along with other questions about those trips to Vegas and what's in the indictment. He never got back to us.

So, Exide ultimately got shut down after people in the community started to organize. And the fight didn't end there. In some ways, that was just kind of the beginning. The lead dust didn't just magically go away just because the plant closed. It needed to be cleaned up. So in 2016, the Department of Toxic Substance Control, the DTSC, decided to draw a 1.7 mile radius around the plant in Vernon. If you were inside the radius, according to the DTSC, you were officially considered at risk from the lead dust, and they were supposed to clean your house or whatever. But right from the start, there were a lot of problems with the cleanup.

The front house would get cleaned up, but the house across the driveway in the back wouldn't get cleaned up. And the house to the right wouldn't get cleaned up, and the house to the left wouldn't get cleaned up and the house to the left wouldn't get cleaned up. So the one in the middle is being cleaned up, but it's still being surrounded by all the contamination. So eventually over time, it's going to get contaminated again. It's impossible to know exactly how many people were poisoned or continue to be poisoned by Exide. Exide eventually declared bankruptcy, and the company ultimately escaped any kind of responsibility for the lead dust.

The DTSC finally sued the former owners of the company late last year. But as far as we know right now, they don't have to pay for the cleanup. The state does. Nobody went to prison. But by 2018, the threat of prison is very much looming for Wissad. That fall, Wissad meets the businessman Andrew Wong in that restaurant. Wong gives him

$15,000 cash in an envelope, which Wissad counts right at the table. He's acting like he might never get caught. But just a month and a half later, Wissad's home and offices would be raided by the FBI. We got a DM from someone who lives across the street from Wissad. And they're like, hey, y'all are always talking mad shit about Wissad. And like, I live in front of him and the FBI is here right now. 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 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. Thanks to our voice actors Memo Torres, Jorge Labastiva, Jod Caftan, Chad Addy, and Woodrow Curry. Special thanks to Erica Lindo, Javier Cabral, Tana Robbins, Haley Fager, Natalie Wren, Adrienne Riskin, Shara Morris, Navani Otero, Janet Villafana, Vanessa and Jorge Castaneda,

and Ivan Fernandez. If you want to know more about what you've heard on the show so far, head over to smokescreenpod.com to see a beautiful map of some of the places we talk about made by Tommy Gallegos, as well as new reporting and interviews. By the way, if you like this show, please, please, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. 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. I'm so excited to hear from you. Thanks for listening.

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