Whipped Cream Difficulties

About a month ago, I noted the case of Bruce Malkenhorst, former city administrator of the notoriously corrupt city of Vernon (later convicted of misappropriation of public funds) who was suing Vernon for the difference between the pension Vernon said they’d give him and the actual pension that he was given by the state.

Vernon has taken the gloves off. You see, back in 2002 or thereabouts, people were starting to become suspicious of Malkenhorst. The LAT was tailing him:

Although time sheets routinely showed Malkenhorst working between 40 and 52 hours a week, he sometimes kept a far more abbreviated schedule at City Hall.

And the city attorney at the time, Eduardo Olivo, started investigating Malkenhorst as well.

In the report, Olivo wrote that the city reimbursed Malkenhorst for golfing, including participation in the Bob Hope Classic. The report also alleged that the city reimbursed him for $21,000 in property taxes he paid on land he owned in Riverside, Orange and Los Angeles counties.

There’s more. The full report ran to 85 pages. And of course the city responded by firing Malkenhorst.

Wait, did I say Malkenhorst? I meant Olivo, the city attorney that prepared the report. They also sued Olivo for “breach of contract”. And Vernon has gone to great efforts to keep the report and supporting data secret:

Greg Tsujiuchi, a former assistant to the city administrator, told a district attorney’s investigator about a particularly bizarre instance in which Fresch insisted that he burn magnetic tapes that were an important backup for original hard copies of city records.
Tsujiuchi said he took the tapes to one of Vernon’s fire stations and had baffled firefighters set them ablaze. He regretted doing so and told Olivo, who told Tsujiuchi about the report. Not long afterward, Tsujiuchi resigned.

“Fresch” is Eric T. Fresch, who replaced Olivo as city attorney, and later replaced Malkenhorst as city administrator. By the way, Fresch died last year.

Anyway, the gist of the story is: now that Malkenhorst is suing, all of the sudden, the notoriously corrupt city of Vernon is being very open about Olivo’s report, even providing copies of it to the LAT. I wish the paper would post the whole report as a PDF, but you can’t have everything. Otherwise, where would you put it?

(Side note: no change of venue for Robert “Ratso” Rizzo.)

This entry was posted on Friday, August 30th, 2013 at 9:23 am and is filed under California Über Alles, Clippings, Law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.