Court documents released today show disgraced former officials in the tiny city of Bell talked of “pigs” and “hogs” when referring to the “salaries” they paid themselves, with a special snout out to the fattest piggy at the public trough, Huntington Beach resident and ex-city administrator Robert Rizzo.
Jabba the Corrupt, meet Arnold the Pig.
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Better yet, just look in the mirror.
Naturally, the revelation of the sooey speech lit up the Interwebs.
“[H]oly shit at the released e-mails between the city of Bell 8. what a bunch of thieving motherfuckers!” tweeted “textdrivebys” this afternoon.
Orange County city editor Steve Marble also got in on the tweet action, posting on the Los Angeles Times metro staffers' Twitter page, “Lots of hog and pig imagery in e-mails between Bell admin and incoming police chiefs.”
Marbs was referring to the court documents released earlier that showed an e-mail exchange between Bell's assistant city administrator, Angela Spaccia, and the city's then-candidate for police chief, Randy Adams.
“I am looking forward to seeing you and taking all of Bell's money,” Adams wrote in the 2009 e-mail to Spaccia. “Okay . . . just a share of it!!” Adams later added.
“LOL . . . well you can take your share of the pie . . . just like us!!!” Spaccia e-mailed back. “We will all get fat together . . . Bob [Rizzo] has an expression he likes to use on occassion . . . Pigs get Fat . . . Hogs get slaughtered!!!! So long as we're not Hogs . . . All is well!?”
The e-mails are contained in a memorandum in which Los Angeles County prosecutors lay out their cases against eight current and former Bell city leaders accused of misappropriating city money and trying to cover up their fat salaries.
The case is currently in the preliminary-hearing phase. In previous testimony, City Clerk Rebecca Valdez testified those officials were paid for serving on boards that seldom met and that Rizzo ordered her to give false salary figures to a resident who filed a record request for the public information.
Roger Ramirez was told City Council members received $673 per month (or about $8,000 per
year), instead of the $92,000 they took yearly when adding in salaries from city boards and commissions, and that Rizzo was paid $15,478 per
month ($185,736 per year), though he was actually earning $632,700 per year,
not counting the benies and numerous weeks of vacation and sick pay he cashed out.
Rizzo, who is estimated to have made more than $800,000 annually when adding up all that was cashed in–or $1.5
million total when also factoring in benies–faces more than 50 corruption charges.
Adams, who once applied to become Orange County's sheriff, was paid more than $400,000 as tiny Bell's police chief–more than the police chief and police commissioner of Los Angeles and New York City, respectively.
However, Adams is not among the officials targeted by prosecutors.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.