Someone in Orange County's journalism community must routinely sacrifice himself to watch the events taking place in high-end eateries, and for a number of years, the man volunteering for this hazardous duty has been Orange County Register columnist Frank Mickadeit.
This week, Mickadeit was dining at Antonello Ristoranti (where spaghetti costs . . . $29) near South Coast Plaza when he ran into OC's No. 1 public embarrassment: Mike Carona.
The ex-sheriff-turned-convicted felon called him over,
Mickadeit reports in a column. “Carona looked good–smiling, buff, color in his cheeks, pretty much as he did at his peak of power,” he observed.
Mickadeit goes on to claim, “I piled him with pesky questions, some of which he did not deflect.”
Is he still cheating on his wife with multiple loose women while pretending to be a faithful Christian conservative?
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Is he still associating with the mysterious Florida businessman whose history includes illegal Caribbean narcotics running?
Does he feel any remorse for wrecking the reputation of the Orange County Sheriff's Department?
Has he finished shamelessly using the tragic kidnapping, rape and murder of a little girl for his career enhancement?
How did Carona answer?
Well, we may never know. Either Mickadeit didn't ask a single pesky question after all, or he's not sharing the responses.
But the veteran Reg columnist did report that Carona, who is waiting on a federal appeals court to rule on his corruption conviction and pending 66-month prison sentence, dined on a “chicken-and-sausage entrée.”
–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.
