Today at ex-Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona's federal corruption trial, prosecutor Brett Sagel introduced the following inflammatory excerpt of a secretly recorded July 7, 2007, conversation between then-Sheriff Carona and Don Haidl, who had served as assistant sheriff.
At the time of the conversation, Carona knew that the FBI was investigating him on suspicion of public corruption. What he didn't know was that Haidl, his longtime pal and the alleged source of a large amount of bribes, had already pleaded guilty to federal income tax violations and was, at the request of federal agents, wearing a hidden wire.
The location was the OC Fairgrounds.
This was the first of three secret recordings Haidl made for the government.
Sagel is expected to introduce other excerpts this afternoon. (Transcript and audio after the jump.)
]
7/07/07 Segment # 1
MC = Michael Carona
DH = Don Haidl
[UI] = Unintelligible
MC: Good night Peggy. Um, Dennis kind of filled like the role that you did, you know, in the first campaign. I mean cause, I literally, I, I didn't wanna run Don. I wasn't gonna run. I just wanted to get through all this shit man. So also I'm trying to figure out how to make this, make this thing—Dennis stepped up, he was the Don Haidl. He was going to you know his friends. Dennis probably raised me, I'm gonna guess, a hundred grand in this campaign, you know by going to his friends and family—
DH: Yeah sure, sure.
MC: —like what you did. I mean literally what you did. Uhm, [UI], we, nothing. Not even uh, [UI]. Hanshaw, had lunch with Hanshaw yesterday. Hanshaw put $700,000 in the our Foundation. And happy to do more, do whatever we want. Uh, [UI] both Hanshaw and Dennis are PSR's. George had Hanshaw convinced to give George, for Hanshaw to give George uh, a brand new Navigator, when George became sheriff.
DH: No shit?
MC: Yeah. And Hanshaw was paying him—
DH: [UI] a little cheap. Could've done better. (Chuckles)
MC: Apparently that's the car George wanted [UI]
DH: [UI] a hubcap deal you know.
MC: [UI] a phrase I…I use this Don Haidl phrase on an ongoing basis man, it's like you know, all this shit surrounds Nigger money. I mean it's, it literally is Nigger money.
DH: (Chuckles)
MC: All, all George and Joe had to be is just C players. They didn't have to be stars, man. You know they, just by not—
DH: [UI]
MC: —fucking anybody over they were valuable.
DH: Sit there and shut up.
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.