You know it's painful for me to admit when ex-Sheriff Mike Carona was probably right, but here's one of those moments. While sheriff (and a year before his conviction for attempting to sabotage a federal grand jury investigating police corruption in Orange County), Carona privately described then-Newport Beach Police Bob McDonell (pictured) as a “motherfucker.”
I'd resisted that opinion for years, in part, because of the outstanding police work I'd seen by members of the Newport Beach PD staff in, for example, the Haidl gang rape and grotesque Skylar Deleon murder of a husband and wife on their yacht. (Sadly, a few other cops inside this department are thinly-veiled thugs with no moral compass, a knack for incompetence and a glaring lack of appreciation of the U.S. Constitution.)
But then, McDonell was summoned to testify in the Carona 2008 corruption trial and repeatedly prefaced his short answers with statements making clear to the jury that he believed that cops should remain mum about other law enforcement officers who've behaved unethically or illegally.
Based on that nonsense, I'd suggest that a character like McDonell had no business wearing a badge or heading even a high school campus police department.
Tonight The Orange County Register has published another unseemly allegation made under oath about McDonell. Reporters Jeff Overley and Niyaz Pirani obtained pre-trial depositions in the case of Sgt. Neil Harvey, a 27-year veteran heterosexual cop, suing the police department for blocking his rise to lieutenant because of rumors that he's homosexual. Buried (inexplicably) in the 10th paragraph of their story is the key revelation:
“According to several accounts, McDonell had a religious litmus test requiring those looking to climb the department's ladder to share his 'Christian values,' wrote Overley and Pirani. “One saying in the department suggested that 'you've got to carry a Bible around or he's got to see you carrying a Bible around to get promoted,' Sgt. John Hougan said in a deposition.”
I know Hougan. He's not a liar or a person who exaggerates. He's a damn good cop.
–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.
