Don Haidl: Is somebody paying that goofy bastard [Jon Fleischman]?
Mike Carona: Big bucks. Big bucks.
You and I had a difference of opinion on him. I just think he was a moron on his best day, but . . .
Well, apparently . . .
(Laughs)
They're willing to pay morons a lot of money because I was probably paying him when he left $90,000 a year. He made four times what I was paying him in a year, he made it in six months. And, uh, it's all through that silly ass Flash Report. He was doing consulting for business and stuff like that, too, you know? He's doing a George Jaramillo . . . He's doing a shakedown.
More power to him, I guess, you know?
–An August 13, 2007 FBI-recorded exchange between then-Sheriff Mike Carona and his onetime Assistant Sheriff Don Haidl about Carona's taxpayer-paid flack whose job at the Orange County Sheriff's Department was to spin/attack reporters investigating Carona's questionable activities. Fleischman, who is a heavyweight in California Republican Party circles and is a protege of Michael J. Schroeder, left the OCSD before the FBI and IRS indicted Carona on corruption charges.
(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 ReportingĀ 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 fromĀ New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.