Whipped Cream Difficulties

The LAT has a longish summary of how the city of Bell got to where it is today, along with some background on Robert “Ratso” Rizzo.

A few choice quotes:

It was 1993, a bleak, recession-bit year, and Robert Rizzo arrived in Bell trailing the vague whiff of scandal. His last city administrator job, in the high desert city of Hesperia, had ended badly, with accusations that he’d steered city improvement funds toward salaries.

Hmmm. Perhaps someone should have been reading documents.

Diminutive and rotund, Rizzo was self-conscious about his appearance. Behind his back, people called him the Penguin, a reference to the “Batman” villain. He liked to mention his bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley and said that everything he’d achieved was the result of dogged effort.

…

Only rarely did Rizzo draw attention to himself, as on one election night at City Hall. People who were there recall that he had too much to drink. Peter Werrlein, a former mayor who had served prison time for holding a hidden interest in the poker club, said he confronted him.

Wait a minute. There was a former mayor who did time? That’s an interesting detail I don’t recall hearing before.

…although the Police Department swallowed more than half the city budget, it generated less than 10% of the revenue.

“He said, ‘You guys are costing me this and you’re only bringing in that? You’re not holding your own,'” [former police chief Michael] Trevis said. He said Rizzo encouraged officers to write more tickets and impound cars, and he monitored which cops were “earning their way.” He said Rizzo justified the tactic with a veiled threat: “Hey, if we don’t do this, we might not have a Police Department.'”

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