Sometimes they are the result a relatively innocuous question, as was the case for Jeff Gottlieb, who explained on Thursday at Pacifica Institute in Los Angeles, how he and fellow reporter, Ruben Vives, discovered and broke the story of the Bell City scandal, which led to the downfall of city administrator Robert Rizzo and other city officials.
What directed the attention of these Los Angeles Times reporters to the seemingly invisible city of Bell in June of 2010, Gottlieb said was an article Vives was writing about the neighboring city of Maywood that had immersed itself into financial troubles.
“Because the [Maywood] city council had screwed things up so bad, they decided to lay off almost all of their employees,” Gottlieb said.
With almost all of the city’s employees gone, the policing of Maywood was delegated to the LA county sheriff’s department and city services were given to Maywood’s next door neighbor, the city of Bell.
In trying to find out what had gone wrong in the city of Maywood and whether or not the city was being investigated, Gottlieb, who had been called on by Vives to help with the story, ended up calling the Public Integrity Division at the District attorney’s office, which is in charge of keeping an eye on political officials.
“So I got on the phone with the head of division and asked if Maywood was being investigated and he said ‘No, because other people are investigating them’,” Gottlieb said, “I’m not sure why I asked this [next question] but I said ‘What about Bell?’”
The answer was yes.
The head of Public Integrity informed Gottlieb that the Bell City Council was in fact being investigated by the District Attorney for unusually high salaries they were receiving.
Gottlieb and Vives had their lead and their next stop was at the Bell City Hall to talk to the city administrator, Robert Rizzo.
“He wouldn’t talk us, which was odd, because it’s not every day that two reporters from the LA Times show up in the city of Bell,” he said, “Instead, the city clerk comes out.”
Gottlieb and Vives asked to see minutes of city council meetings, employment contracts, and expenses and are told that they would receive the documents in 10 days in accordance to the Open Records Act.
Day Nine, after calling the city clerk every day to inquire about the documents, Gottlieb gets a call from her and she says “we’re going to give you the documents tomorrow and Mr. Rizzo would like to meet you.”
The next day in a conference room at the Little Bear Park, Gottlieb and Vives, met with Rizzo and his 10 person entourage, which consisted of two lawyers, the police chief, a couple city council members and a couple council members from Maywood.
“He was obviously trying to intimidate us, which is pretty funny because what are they going to do? Beat us up?”
For four hours in the conference room of Little Bear Park, tensions rose and fell as Gottlieb and Vives probed the council members for information about their salaries and what they found out was startling Gottlieb said.
They found out that “ Victor Bello a former council member who had resigned , was given a job as the only paid employee of the city food bank, was working only four hours a month and was getting almost $100,000 a year,” he said.
When Rizzo was asked how much he made, he said he made $700,000 a year, which he admitted was high for a public worker but added, in an attempt to justify those figures, that the parks of Bell were great.
However, after a closer examination of Rizzo’s contracts, which were written in such a way as to make it impossible to find out how much money he was receiving, Gottlieb said they found out that Rizzo was making almost $1.5 million a year by giving himself 26 weeks’ vacation each year which he would then cash in along with a 12 percent raise each year.
Rizzo, who had been on the city council for 17 years, was able to get way with a lot of this, Gottlieb said, by falsifying documents when people inquired about his salary. Another reason why his salary went undiscovered for so long was because instead of having his contract approved by the city council, he simply filled it out and submitted it through the city.
How this poor city afforded to pay its city council members such outrageous salaries, Gottlieb said was by having incredibly high property taxes, enforcing every code rigidly and by setting up regular drunk driver check stops so they could impound cars and charge the owners ridiculous amounts to get it back.