Larry Agran Blasted By 3 Former Close Allies As Corrupt & Unworthy of Irvine Mayor’s Job

Three prominent Orange County men who spent years as close allies to
Larry Agran have joined together in a campaign mailer to declare him a corrupt politician unworthy of winning the mayor’s job in the City of
Irvine’s Nov. 6 election.

“He’s betrayed his values–Agran does not
deserve our vote,” said UC Irvine professor Mark Petracca, attorney
and former Irvine city councilman Chris Mears and journalist Will Swaim,
the founding editor of the Weekly. “Larry Agran has turned his back on
his progressive values and wants Irvine to be the most densely populated
city in the county.”

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The two-sided mailer, paid for by California Term Limits and Citizens in Charge, begins with a photograph of Agran and the words: “A message from Former Friends of Agran. First elected in 1978, 34 years ago, Larry Agran has made a lot of promises. What do those who know him best have to say about him?”

Petracca, Mears and Swaim gave anti-Agran testimonials on the back side.

“[Agran] uses taxpayer funds from the City and the Great Park to enrich his political allies and campaign contributors,” wrote Petracca. “He will not have my vote this year.”

Mears, who served on the city council with Agran, wrote, “What I learned on the Council is that the visionary politician who I once supported had become nothing more than another professional politician. It became clear to me that Larry’s decisions were driven by money, and those who have it, and not by the public interest. In good conscience, I cannot tell anyone to support Larry Agran anymore.”

And Swaim observed, “Larry has changed, and evolved as a politician. Now Agran is really all just about political power, and cozy relationship with his developer friends. As a longtime Irvine resident, I will never vote for him again.”

The mailer also contains a message from former Irvine Mayor Mike Ward, who asserted that Agran and the two other candidates on his slate–Beth Krom and P.K. Wong–are trying to buy the election.

In the current issue of the Weekly, I demonstrated that Earle Zucht, a decoy Republican candidate Agran got to sabotage Ward’s 2004 run for mayor, received business opportunities from members of Agran’s political machine after that race.

A week ago, I outlined how Agran’s machine, the one that has run Republican-heavy Irvine for 12 consecutive years, lured this election’s Earle Zucht–Katherine Daigle–into the race as a decoy Republican to sabotage Steven Choi’s GOP effort to top Agran in next month’s mayoral contest.

And if you’ve forgotten the depths of Agran’s corruption, go HERE.

Here are images of the mailer:

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–R. Scott Moxley

(rscottmoxley at ocweekly dot com)

R. Scott Moxley

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.