While he ran California's second largest police agency, Mike Carona had sex with a county secretary in a car while his wife and young son sat oblivious nearby in an SUV. That fact, first revealed at OC Weekly, is part of the charming legacy the disgraced ex-sheriff left at the Orange County Sheriff's Department prior to his FBI/IRS arrest and 2009 conviction for corruption. Now, Carona wants taxpayers to pay for an alleged back injury he sustained while allegedly on duty.
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According to Orange County Register reporter Jennifer Muir over at the paper's feisty OC Watchdog, Carona is seeking an unspecified amount because he says he sustained a lower back injury while sitting in an unmarked county vehicle that rear-ended another car in December 2006.
No word on what Carona may have been doing (or receiving) in the moments prior to the crash, but Muir cites an internal county memo that notes the cop-turned-convicted felon complains that pain from the incident is “radiating to other body parts.”
Dear readers: Insert your own Little Sheriff joke here.
(For new residents, Carona's ego grew so large in office that he openly called his penis “the little sheriff” while addressing women.)
Though significant evidence produced at his federal corruption trial indicated that Carona stole the 1998 election based on a massive illegal campaign contribution scheme, used the powerful office to reward tainted characters and was convicted of sabotaging a federal grand jury investigating his activities, he receives an annual taxpayer funded pension of about $190,000 a year.
U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Guilford sentenced Carona to a 66-month prison sentence, but he remains free pending an appeal.
Read Muir's post at the
Register HERE.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.
