'They give the monkey the money.'
Posted on 06/22/2012 5:25:41 PM PDT by Steelfish
Calif. Mayor, 2 Others Accused Of Pot Shop Bribes June 22 2012 GREG RISLING
— If someone wanted to do business in the small Southern California city of Cudahy, federal prosecutors say one-time city manager Angel Perales had some advice.
"Money makes the monkey dance," Perales told an FBI informant, according to court documents.
Perales, Mayor David Silva and Councilman Osvaldo Conde were arrested Friday and charged with soliciting and accepting cash bribes totaling $17,000 to support the opening of a medical marijuana dispensary. If convicted of a bribery charge, they each face up to 10 years in prison.
The three officials were in court Friday afternoon and it wasn't immediately known if they had retained attorneys.
Court documents laid out the scheme to approve a pot shop in exchange for cash and also portrayed the suburb of 25,000 as a virtual den of iniquities where drug use, voter fraud and illicit sex permeated City Hall.
The arrests are the latest in a series of corruption scandals plaguing small cities south of Los Angeles. Most notable were the 2010 arrests of the former city manager and several other officials from neighboring Bell, who are accused of misappropriating funds to overpay themselves.
Federal prosecutors said in an affidavit that after weeks of soliciting bribes, Conde, Perales and Silva accepted $15,000 in February from an FBI informant who formerly owned a medical marijuana shop in a nearby city.
Conde later met with the informant and received $2,000, court documents show. The informant estimated the dispensary could generate up to $2.5 million within a year.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
That racist mayor shouldn't say things like that about the President of the United States.
we've seen it, oh, that monkey
Thanks for posting the article.
Most noted: It’s in a UK newspaper/website.
"a virtual den of iniquities where drug use, voter fraud and illicit sex permeated City Hall. "
Must be a pretty busy monkey.
too big for the federal government to clean up
'They give the monkey the money.'
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