The Binge Cases: Denise Didn't Come Home - The Sellout | 9: There's A Fire

Episode Date: December 14, 2021

Mariah talks to the Boyle Heights residents who watched as FBI agents raided Huizar’s home and offices. Three months into the pandemic, he’s arrested and pleads not guilty. The residents of CD14 are left in limbo. We look at what the FBI investigation reveals about Los Angeles’s housing and homelessness crisis. 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. It's a late fall day in Los Angeles.

It's cloudy, kind of cold, for us anyways. It's like 69 degrees. So, it's November 7th, 2018. Nancy Mesa is at home. And all of a sudden, she starts getting a bunch of messages on the Defend Bull Heights Instagram account, which she runs. We got a DM from someone who lives across the street from Wisad. And they're like, hey, y'all are always talking mad shit about Wisad. And like, I live in front of him and the FBI is here right now. And they send a screenshot of the FBI and like agents with their jackets on with the big FBI letters in the back going into Jose Huizar's house. And then after that first DM. And then we started getting mad more messages from like neighbors who

were just like, hey, y'all need to come. Like there's no news here. Like they're raiding his house. So another organizer goes down there to livestream and they put the word out on social media. We put out a hood alert, like hood alert. Jose Huizar is getting raided. Like for those of you who didn't believe us, like this is happening. If you can go down there.

Then the news breaks and then there was just like a parade of reporters like every single camera was there trying to get the story right trying to get the inside scoop but it was really defend boheis that was the first to go live and to report what was happening so i think that made me feel super happy right that like again like we were the first to respond back here in la we've got more breaking news fbi agents are at city hall and the boyle heights home of la city councilman jose huizar they are searching both places but the big question is what are they looking for and everybody was like oh shit did you see like when fbi went to huizar's house and like and everybody just like coming together in that community vibe of like,

ooh, look at that car crash over there. Nobody knew the details of the investigation yet. All they knew was that the FBI had to have something if they were going to do a raid like that. And by that point, Nancy had been saying for years that something shady was going on. My mom called me right away and she's like, Nancy had been saying for years that something shady was going on. My mom called me right away and she's like, Nancy, like, oh my God, you've been ranting about this forever.

And she's like, I can't believe it. Like, y'all were right. This whole time y'all were right. For me, it was a happy moment. It was because it validated everything the neighborhood had already been saying, right, had already been feeling. But the raid was still a shock for some people in LA, like Raquel Zamora. Remember, her family owns that taqueria in Boyle Heights with the amazing carnitas. It was extremely painful to watch the news that actually showed the pictures of all the cash. Right up until that moment, Raquel still believed in what he said. She watched him make something of himself as an immigrant kid from Boyle Heights. He'd got all these degrees from all these prestigious schools. She was inspired by him. It was really heartbreaking.

I just cried. And it still makes me sad. It still makes me sad. You don't want to believe it. You're like, you know, and you try to make up things in your head. And I'm like, you know, maybe he was like a Robin Hood. He stole from the rich and he gave to the poor. Then the news showed pictures of like wads and wads and wads of cash.

And it's just like, damn. This moment, the raid was the first time a lot of people realized something really wrong might be going on with CD14. Like FBI agents are at his office. They're at his house. And at the beginning, it was like, okay, you see boxes and it said fundraising because they were taking those boxes out. And I just I thought, wow, I really feel for his wife and his children. When the raid happened in November 2018, it was big news. Remember Herb Wesson, the city council president who used to call WESAD his BFF? He removed WESAD as the chairman of the Plum

Committee. After that, everything's quiet for over a year. Wissad is still going to work, still voting in city council, and still getting paid his $200,000 a year salary. That very same week of the raid, this weird thing happened. It felt kind of foreshadowy looking back on it. A colleague of mine at LA Taco wrote a story about Wissad staffers suing him, like Myra Alvarez. Remember that staffer who said that Wissad demanded she bring him tea by texting TTTT over and over? So we published the story. We tweeted it. And we sad himself tweeted back at us. He was like, anyone can shout out there is a fire when there is none. And then these are serious allegations to make of anyone and are absolutely untrue. I remember thinking, why does a city council member who's presumably busy from sunup to sundown have time to tweet at LA Taco like that?

He swore publicly just days before the raid that the lawsuit's allegations were absolutely untrue. There's no fire. I was like, okay, cool. And then, like a week later, when the raid happens, people start tweeting back at him. Hey, here's what the FBI found in your house. Do you still want to try to say there's no fire here? Be sad it doesn't tweet back. And then, a year and a half later, he's finally arrested.

L.A. City Councilman Jose Huizar has been arrested amid a City Hall corruption probe. But if you think he'll just resign, think again. From Neon Hum 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 9, There's a Fire. By the time Wissad gets arrested, his colleagues on city council have been asking him to resign for weeks.

Ever since George Esparza, his right-hand man, pled guilty in the spring of 2020. But Wissad has refused to resign, although he did agree to limit his participation in city council. So Wissad is arrested one morning in June, a couple months into the pandemic. LA City Councilman Jose Huizar pleaded not guilty today to 34 federal charges, racketeering, bribery, money laundering, amongst others. And some of the charges he faces are very serious, carrying maximum prison sentences that could span decades. Wissad was released on a $100,000 bail after a court appearance the same afternoon he was arrested.

Nick Pacheco happens to live like a block away from Wissad in Polk Heights. When he got arrested, I made myself available as a neighbor, a friend, that if he needed anything locally from the community, if he wanted me to go to the market, get milk for his kids or cereal, whatever, anything he needed, where he didn't want to go out in public, that I felt very comfortable running the errand for him and bringing him whatever he needed for his family

because we're friends and we're neighbors. So far, five of Huizad's alleged co-conspirators have pled guilty, including George Esparza, Maury Goldman, and Mitch Englander. Huizad is charged alongside Raymond Chan, who has pled not guilty, and Shenzhen New World Group, and another developer, both of whom have pled not guilty. Jose Huizad is scheduled to go on trial next year for 34 counts of corruption. As I know you know by this point, we asked Huizad and his lawyers about all of this. They never got back to us. So, right after the arrest, the other members of the city council voted unanimously to suspend him from his seat. No one is voting for CD14.

The city controller suspends his salary, but Huizad still refuses to resign. His replacement, Kevin DeLeon, was elected in March. He's ready to take office, but he can't unless Wissad resigns. Wissad refuses. He chooses to just leave his constituents with essentially no representation. By the way, Wissad was refusing to resign in spring and summer of 2020, a time when people really needed help, maybe more than they ever have in recent memory. Nancy Mesa. I don't think people understand that this whole sleazy-weezy novella,

like the climax was during a global pandemic. So CD14, so not just Boho Heights, the entire council district, which is huge, right, was basically left without governance. An LA Times article surveyed the issues facing city council around the time we saw it was arrested. The mass uprising following the murder of George Floyd. A lack of services and support for the thousands of unhoused residents of Los Angeles. People living on the streets needed access to bathrooms and hand-washing stations that actually had soap, as my co-reporter Lexus Olivier Ray reported in a series for LA Taco. The residents of Wisad's district needed

someone to look out for them. And people stepped up. Hi, my name is Penelope Uribe-Aby. Penelope started a free food distribution in CD14 last summer, not long after Wissad was arrested. I started the People's Pantry in my parents' garage, sort of like a family-run, autonomous food pantry that relies not only on our volunteer work, but also the volunteer work of the community around us that show up to do it every time. It's been going well so far. And in terms of how we fulfill this sort of role that you could say government is responsible for, like I think that what we do is that. We're not tied to any like city council district, so there's a little bit more autonomy there. But yeah, like I did start this in the midst of the pandemic, recognizing that there was a lot more that needed to be done in terms of community care and that our local government and our city wasn't doing the best job

of providing services and resources for people. If people in power weren't going to look out for the community, Penelope decided she was going to do it herself. And she wasn't the only one doing that in CD14 at the time. Raquel Zamora got involved in a community trash pickup when she noticed that there was a bunch of garbage around Boyle Heights that wasn't getting picked up. Really, it's like, hey, we're on our own. We're basically on our own. So that continues to happen. I think the beauty that we can see in the positive light is that the committee is like, you know what? It doesn't matter who's the council member. We got each other and we're going to get through this.

And I think that that has been the beauty of all of this, right? And of course, that kind of thing isn't new in CD14. Like the mariachis and their neighbors, we started this podcast with their rent strike. Fourth generation musicians like Luis Valdivia playing to protest, hoping their landlord could hear them. I've been living there for 21 years. Remember how their landlord tried to raise their rent by hundreds of dollars a month and they stopped paying rent in protest? Well, back in 2018, about a year after they went on strike, their landlord caved.

The Mariachis got him to agree to rent that was affordable for them and to keep it affordable for at least three years. It was a year-long campaign and they won. That's Elizabeth Blaney again, the organizer with Unión de Vecinos. She's the one who helped organize the rent strike and helped the Mariachis negotiate with their landlord. When the rent strike happened in 2017, the building was not protected under rent control, so he could raise it whatever he wanted. But we got an agreement where he would only raise it 5% after the initial year. So basically putting it into a rent control situation. And then they got repairs. All the repairs that they had demanded, they got all of those done. And so it was a very significant and proof situation for them.

The end of the Mariachi rent strike, the landlord backing down, it got a lot of news coverage. It got held up as an example of how tenants organizing can beat back the endless march of gentrification and displacement. It was like this big old win against greedy landlords. But what didn't get as much coverage was the cost of that fight, the compromises that Arturo and his neighbors had to make. And when we spoke to Arturo back in January in his apartment in Bull Heights, Arturo seemed tired. So he said they didn't get what they want. Lo que querían era tener el aumento legal anual normal que se permitía por algo que sería controlado por la renta en Los Ángeles. to the protests. And so we decided that because we were already reaching a point where the desperation and uncertainty of doing something, right?

By that time, people were tired, they were desperate. People stopped coming to the protests and they were just tired of it. The agreement they reached with their landlord was the result of months of fighting, months of protests and interviews and back and forth negotiations, all on top of their lives, on top of Arturo's life as a mariachi musician

and a father. It was a lot. And if we fast forward to the pandemic, two years later, mariachis in general were hit hard. For months, they were barely getting any work, except maybe funerals. One mariachi musician from Boyle Heights estimated that 50 of his fellow mariachis had died of COVID-19 in the first year of the pandemic, and more than 200 had caught the virus.

And for Arturo, the thought of having to fight with his landlord again in the future, it's just exhausting. Y creo que vamos a seguir con el mismo problema, ¿verdad? Nancy Mesa gets why Arturo is burnt out. Everyone in the movement has a moment where they get tired, where they get frustrated, right? Because fighting back and fighting for your neighborhood is hard work. The mariachi tenants didn't engage in the strike for clout, right? They didn't do it to be popular.

They did it to save their homes. Year to year, not knowing if you can stay where you're from takes a toll. The stress is unrelenting. Specifically when you're fighting your eviction, it's 24-hour stress, right? It's not something that you forget about easily, right? I always think about how much money we spend on rent and we can't even come home and rest, right? Because it's eviction, gentrification,

something that's constantly looming. For Arturo and his neighbors, the next round of negotiations with their landlord might be even tougher. The aftershocks of Huizar era gentrification are still spreading across the river from downtown LA, even more than a year after his arrest. We'll be right back. All right, I want to be real with you.

There are limits to what we can do with the current system we have now. As an individual, you don't have the power to set policy. You don't have the power to decide how much rent a landlord should be allowed to charge or what kinds of developments should be built in your neighborhood. Your city council member does. In fact, in Los Angeles, you could say that your city council member has too much control over the kinds of things that get built in your neighborhood. You could argue that's the root of the problem. Because remember, your city council member, all by themselves, can person stands between millions of dollars wasted or millions of dollars well spent, corruption is a feature and not a bug. Scott Frazier.

I absolutely think that this system was designed to create a Jose Huizar and I think that it has not changed meaningfully. I think that this system will continue to create opportunities for corruption. What Jose Huizad allegedly did was illegal. But what's remarkable about this story is that the difference between what Huizad is accused of doing and what is legal, it's not as big as what you might think. And it's not as big as what you might hope. Actually, a couple months ago, WeSAD made the case that what he was doing wasn't corrupt or illegal. He just loved to help developers. His lawyers filed a motion to dismiss significant parts of the Fed's case,

saying that WeSAD was just a, quote, evangelist for robust development. His lawyers also argued favors aren't bribes. The judge has yet to roll in that motion. Scott Frazier again. They have the ability to really target high- developments. And in ways that are legal, they are able to extract significant dollar amounts for pet projects. Let's break this down for a second. It's legal to extract promises from developers and then turn around and prioritize luxury development in a district where people are struggling to hang on to their housing. It's legal to prioritize what a developer wants over everything else.

And developers are running a business. Sometimes what makes a developer the most money might actually be giving the neighborhood what it really needs. But a lot of times times it won't be. Of course, city council members don't always prioritize a developer's profits over everything else. But remember, this system is built to encourage developers to do anything they can do to get close to their city council member. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.

Nancy Messa. to get close to their city council member. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. Nancy Mesa. I don't think the council prioritizes affordable housing or prioritizes tenants because they don't see themselves as public servants, right? They happily cash each paycheck they get and don't give a fuck that it's the public who's paying for that, right? Their interest, I feel, is not in what do my constituents need?

What do my constituents who are not only paying my paycheck, but funding this entire city, what do they need? There is so much money in housing, in building housing, buying it up, and renting it out. Because we don't treat housing like a necessary thing that people need to survive. Like everyone should have a safe place to live. End of story. We act like housing is a financial investment. Like it's a profit machine. Here's what we said. Here in Boyle Heights, we are now undertaking a great facelift, as we call it. You know, we do have years of neglect, lack of resources. But now if you see what is happening in Boyle Heights, in just these past two years alone, we've seen about $1.5 billion in new public project improvements.

That includes this beautiful new Gold line, four new schools, a new police station, a new daycare center, improvements to parks. We just announced last week that First Street will undertake a $12 million public improvement project where we were... That kind of investment sounds great at first, but when a neighborhood like Boyle Heights starts to change, lots of people have figured out what that means. It means displacement isn't far behind. It means that developers look at their homes and see big profits. And as long as housing is driven by what's profitable, rent prices are going to continue on this race to the top, consuming half or more of people's

take-home salaries, churning through tenants, and sending thousands of people onto the streets unhoused for the very first time. Scott Frazier. For Los Angeles, where we have an incredible proportion of our residents who are paying 50% or more of their income in rent every month, the construction of new housing by private market actors is probably not ever going to be sufficient to meet their needs. There needs to be a sustained effort to build public housing. Those out-of-control rents, that's capitalism. Private for-profit developers are going to make as much profit as they possibly can. That's their motivation for building housing. But it doesn't have to be the only motivation.

The state can decide they want to build housing for the sole purpose of providing people with a place to live, not for profit. There's this thing people say pretty often, that developers run Los Angeles City Hall. But when you ask Scott Frazier, he says, no, city council members run City Hall. Because if developers ran things, they wouldn't have to cozy up to council members just to get their projects built. I don't think that developers of their own accord, even the corrupt ones, would come up with a system even remotely like the one that currently exists, which is almost comically Byzantine. But given the disparity that still exists between them and an average Angeleno, I think that it's completely understandable that Angelenos look at them and say, my council member won't even take my calls or respond to my emails, but they are going to move whatever mountains they're capable of moving to shepherd projects from an individual developer. And then also there's a very marginal level of trust between average Angelenos and the

politicians that the politicians are doing that in the interest of Angelenos at large and not for purposes of lining their own pockets. Scott's like, it just seems like developers run City Hall because the average person has so little power. Developers definitely have an outsized role in the machinations of the city, but outsized being relative to everybody else's power. And it seems to me that almost everyone in Los Angeles

is ridiculously disempowered. Remember that story Pete White told? The one about coming to an agreement with a developer about affordable housing and then having that agreement evaporate after it passed through WESAD's office? Well, here's what he said next. That's a WESAD story, but I'm sure once again,

if we were to map many of the folks currently in chairs, you would find that story a few more times. A version or a rendition of that story a few more times. I had a council member say to me, like, Jose just got greedy. And if you say Jose just got greedy. And if you say Jose just got greedy, that means there's a level of greed that's acceptable. That's part of the culture, right? The same person said, and he messed it up for everybody, right? So that means he's part of a culture where the activities that

he's engaged in is par for course. But I guess even on the inside, they just feel like he got reckless. He got reckless with it. In other words, Wisad stood out because he's the kind of guy who allegedly counts a $15,000 bribe in a restaurant. But he's just one part of something much bigger. Actually, just as this podcast was about to drop its first episode, another Los Angeles City Council member was indicted by the feds, Mark Ridley Thomas. The indictment alleges that a couple years ago, when Ridley Thomas was in the LA County government, he organized a quid pro quo

with the University of Southern California. The deal was that his son would get a professorship and tuition-free graduate degree. Ridley Thomas would deliver favorable votes for USC. So when you've got three Los Angeles City Council members indicted over the course of two years, you've got to wonder, what is going on here? This could not happen. Kim Cooper. This could not happen without many, many people in the city family being part of this. And I don't think that every city employee is benefiting from this sort of thing. And I don't think every city employee deserves to be taken up on federal charges.

But Jose Huizar is nothing. Jose Huizar is the top layer of the epidermis of a cancer that goes to the bone. Four months after Huizar was arrested, a new city council member finally took office in October 2020. His name is Kevin DeLeon, but he has already announced that he's running for mayor, which means he'd leave his seat representing CD14 several years early if he wins, leaving CD14 in limbo again.

Anyways, about a month after DeLeon took office, I filed a public records request for his calendar. I wanted to see who he was meeting with. His very first meeting on his second day in office was with Brookfield Properties, a huge multinational developer with 12 different properties in downtown Los Angeles. Which doesn't mean that Kevin DeLeon is gonna be another WeSAD. It just means the system hasn't changed. By the way, DeLeon did not respond to an interview request. Scott Frazier. We have this system wherein, yes, city council members prioritize the needs of developers. It's normal within the existing system, but we shouldn't take that to mean that it is healthy. And I don't think that it's healthy

for city council members to be of a mindset that they get to be sort of like an emperor giving the thumbs up or thumbs down to various project proposals of different types. But that's exactly how they view it. And so again, to me, it is normal, but it's not healthy. All right. I'm going to be honest with you. Working on this podcast has been making me feel kind of defeated. It can feel like everything is stacked up against you

if you're someone looking for housing that's affordable in Los Angeles. And even if you find it, it's like, am I gonna be able to stay here? Am I gonna be able to afford the rent in three years or five? What's the point in fighting to stay in your community if you're just gonna be pushed out eventually?

Then I talked to Nancy and she was like, yeah, things are stacked up against us. But that doesn't mean you can just throw up your hands. You need to do something. So if you feel like, oh, it doesn't matter if I show up to this meeting and voice my opposition, it matters, right? So, it could be as small as that or as big as, you know, when your neighbor's on rent strike and the cops come putting your body on the line to support your neighbor, right? Right. So I would welcome any renter out there that's trying to figure out how do I get involved? What do I do? Where do I start to join your local tenants union? Right now, that is where the fight is going. And it is strong in the alley tenants union and the Eastside local, but also because they're great organizers.

There's locals everywhere. And as we mentioned, right, organizing and fighting back against these injustices. Los Angeles has a lot in common with other cities that have runaway housing crises and skyrocketing rents. In a city like ours, most people can be just a couple months of unemployment away from homelessness. So what is a city full of renters supposed to do about all this? I'm going to let Nancy close us out. I think what a city of renters can do in a city run by people that oppose the interests of renters is organize. And that can mean many different things. We lose power in isolation.

We build power in community, right? We build power with each other. It's going to be hard, right? But I feel like it's going to be harder if we don't, right? The current political situation is only going to continue to worsen unless we get involved. 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 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. Special thanks to Erica Lindo, Javier Cabral, Tanner Robbins, Haley Fager, Natalie Wren, Adrienne Riskin, Shara Morris, Navani Otero, Janet Villafana, Vanessa and Jorge Casaneda, and Ivan Fernandez. If you've been listening to the show and you thought, wow, I want to get involved with my neighbors, I got you. Here's some groups you could volunteer with or donate to in Los Angeles. There's the Los Angeles Community Action Network or LACAN, K-Town for All, CCEDLA, East Yard, the We the Unhoused podcast, J-Town Action and Solidarity, Polo's Pantry, the People's Pantry, and of course, your local tenants union. If you don't live in Los Angeles, I'm sorry, but want some suggestions?

Hit us up on Twitter at SmokescreenPod. Our producer, Carla Green, will help you find some. And if you want to know more about what you've heard on this season, 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. 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. This has been The Sellout. Thank you for listening to our story.