“I, uh, also want you to know that not only isn’t he getting his sheriff’s badge, there won’t be a mother fucker from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department that’ll be there. So I called all of the command staff together and I said, ‘Well, you know, I can’t tell people what to do on their own time, but I’m telling all you guys cause I pay you and you’re at will. If any of you show up to that thing, you’re done.'”
–Then-Sheriff Mike Carona, who says the Bible governs his daily actions, caught on a secret 2007 FBI recording boasting about his petty efforts to punish outgoing Newport Beach police chief Bob McDonell at his retirement party. McDonell’s sin? He wouldn’t bow to Carona’s massive ego.
(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.