The Wicked Witch of Los Angeles 

The FBI was in the house. In a sting nicknamed “Clamscam” numerous legislators and staff were caught on tape selling access and votes.  As a result, Federal summer camps, sometimes referred to as minimum security prisons, filled with unrepentant former capitol denizens. In the short term (as that was the length of their sentences for naked “victimless” corruption) the new inmates were stripped of their unwarranted honorifics, though in the medium term most returned as barely chastened government relations experts (lobbyists) providing expertise to deep pocketed “stakeholders” on the workings of the legislature from which they were so recently expelled (sort of) in disgrace. 

Proving once more that “crime DOES pay,” most of the ill gotten gains were retained. Fines levied on these “victims” of prosecutorial excess were significantly less than the moneys received for “granting access,”  and upon prison release, the felons returned to civilian life with bloated bank accounts and minimal remorse awaiting a future when a compliant Governor might expunge the grave injustice from the official record. 

As a result of the former chair’s residence in the Federal pen, the incorruptible Senator Villa was named chair of the newly formed Committee on Environmental Quality. The Pro-Tem, seeking to change the narrative, also agreed to give Villa significant input in selecting the makeup of the Committee, with a focus on members who would look seriously at the emerging issue of environmental justice, also known as environmental racism. This nascent movement made the argument that minority communities were disproportionately burdened by the detritus of industrial society and suffered excessive injury as a result.

With term limits rapidly decimating any notion of institutional memory, each election cycle would bring numerous untested new members to the Capitol. In the Senate, this would usually mean a mix of Assembly veterans moving to the “upper house,” and inexperienced legislators new to Sacramento. Choosing serious members with similar sensibilities would be critical if Villa were to achieve the needed reforms.  

One particularly interesting newly minted Senator who Villa recruited came from a district adjacent to his own. Senator Bianca Ruiz Uxmilla Jaramilla Armendariz of Belle Glade, known to all as Senator Bruja was placed on the Environmental Committee by the President Pro Tempore who asked Villa if he would mentor her in the ways of the Senate.

Having staffed Villa for several years during which his East LA base had previously stretched into areas now served by Senator Bruja, I knew her district and as a result was asked by the boss to serve as a liaison to the new Senator. Villa had spent considerable time organizing the newly emergent Latino population in southeast Los Angeles County into a viable political force. This area of Los Angeles is one not often seen on screen or in popular literature. 

When outsiders think LA, they picture Hollywood and the beaches of Malibu or Manhattan Beach; movie stars in Beverly Hills, tanned and toned bodies at Muscle Beach on the Venice Boardwalk, the Griffith Park Observatory, Mulholland Drive overlooking the San Fernando Valley, or the Art Deco City Hall downtown. 

Those unfamiliar with greater Southern California most certainly do not picture the down-at-the-mouth, Leave it to Beaver after a month-long bender, ticky tacky, soulless sprawl at the southern end of paradise - the one-way cholo infested streets of Southwark, or the whites-only suburban monochrome of the Creekside Vikings. This was Senator Bruja’s home turf. 

For years the area remained in the political throes of old-fashioned labor, white, machine Democrats. The in-power elites focused on keeping their power and holding the line against the changing demographics, and in delivering jobs and services to the “right” people and “right” neighborhoods. 

The city councils of the various bergs in the south part of the county, positioned hard up against the more upscale Orange County Republican wall, remained exclusively the province of these Anglo provincials. They were able to hold on long after the ethnic makeup had shifted because their communities utilized district-wide elections, where all candidates and council seats were voted on by the entire community rather than by more geographically compact neighborhoods. 

Other communities in California, like the states of the old confederacy, had come under Voting Rights Act jurisdiction, requiring single-member districts. When combined with low voter turnout among newer minority residents, the old Anglo power structure stood. And then those uppity Latinos, led by my boss, showed up and started agitating. They raised awareness among the new residents that were, to use legal terminology, being royally screwed. 

Lawsuits ensued. Eventually single member districts were decreed, and city councils changed from 100% Anglo to nearly 100% Latino. And all was well and good in the universe. The sun shone bright, and the heavens opened, raining mana, or at least chimichangas.

Well, not quite. Whether it was the perchlorate-infused water, the lead paint peeling from the homes, or the diesel exhaust that fouled the air off the Golden State Freeway, the politics in this benighted region resembled a corridor of corruption, where, even short of outright legally chargeable quid pro quo textbook bribery, the daily political reality smelled worse than the La Puente Estates Everest-sized dump, the most notable geographic feature in the district, even on its best days. 

In the ten years prior to Senator Bruja’s election, numerous city council members, water board officials, and city managers had been indicted, pleaded no contest, or were found guilty at trial of every form of corruption ever imagined by even the most talented grifters. Many locally elected miscreants would be led away in cuffs and derided with public obloquy, though the vast majority, even in their abject disgrace, proved incapable of the most simple mortification, heading off to prison declaring their complete innocence and lamenting the unfairness of it all! 

Theft of public funds qualifying as minor, almost laughable, felonies, padded retirement pensions in the millions. Among the ill-gotten gains there was even a thoroughbred horse ranch in Oregon, paid for by the good campesinos of southeast Los Angeles. The fact that the new boss (same as the old boss) shared an ethnic background with the inhabitants, many of whom spoke little English, just made the grift easier. 

Rather than providing much needed services to the heavily immigrant and first-generation hard working constituents, local electeds often used their public sinecures to line their own pockets, adding one more layer of disrespect to the hard scrabble lives of the ostensibly free men and women struggling to grasp their small piece of the American dream. 

Even by the lowly standards of this band of incompetent bumbling thieves, the three Boracho brothers managed to stand out. Elected to various Assembly and Senate offices over careers spanning several decades, Eusebio, Manuel, and Fernando ran up an impressive list of felonies. They had violated every conceivable provision of the Hobbs Act by selling public favors for Lakers and Raiders tickets, cemetery plots, public bond underwriting deals, deeds to unclaimed property, and plain hard cash. They did make good use of their time in public service. The oldest married a local stripper whom he met at a Norwalk adult entertainment venue after she demonstrated “special” skills with a pet boa. The middle brother had two children (while married) with a cocktail waitress from a capital watering hole and placed her on the state payroll as his “scheduler,” though by all accounts she rarely showed up at the office. The youngest was not to be tied down with marriage or children. He traveled the city in a specially tricked out van with a queen size mattress in the back, known among capitol staff as the “Boracho Fuck Truck.” Ahhhh, public service. What a gig. 

The “dynasty” had managed to trade Assembly and Senate seats among themselves and other family members for well over twenty years before the feds finally caught the youngest and dimmest, Eusebio, collecting a fat $900K a year salary for nonexistent work as a public relations director for a small water district, which had been delivering non-potable drinking water laced with trichloroethylene to the poorest town in the region, Chiapas Gardens. Mercifully, the curtain on this reign of terror and error was finally, and hopefully irretrievably, brought down when Eusebio was sentenced to ten years at the Federal Minimum Security Facility/Country Club at Lompoc.

Following Eusebio Boracho’s unseemly exit, the local power brokers chose Assemblyman Jorge Peron, a well-known though not particularly well-respected inhabitant of the Capitol swamplands to run for the now vacant seat.

Peron, an ex-captain of the guards at Calexico State Prison was a high school dropout who had risen to an executive position in the California Prison Institutional Guards, (Cal-Pigs) the union representing the state’s correctional officers. Captain Peron was notorious for having placed pickets at the home of the Governor for an entire year demanding better pay for his members who at the time barely made $100,000 a year before copious overtime was factored in, an amount he claimed, “was insulting,” to his highly skilled membership, “who walk the toughest beat in California.”

Peron’s campaign claimed the Governor had negotiated in bad faith and was setting mass murderers and father rapers loose on California streets. When the Governor finally relented, Peron’s future seemed bright. The union contract, signed on the last night of the legislative session as the bell tolled midnight, set the base salary for prison guards at twice that of schoolteachers and allowed retirement at full pension at the age of 45. It also tied all other peace officers in California to the same scale. Needless to say, when Peron announced his campaign for Assembly the police unions ponied up copious amounts of campaign cash for their hero. 

In his 4 years in the Assembly Peron had made quite a name for himself. He ran a side hustle as a spokesman for Eternal Life Herbal Supplements, a company whose products, manufactured in Zimbabwe, where government oversight of quality and sanitary conditions at the industrial facilities proved nonexistent, was growing rapidly, despite an opaque ownership structure based in the “Democratic” Republic of the Congo and likely financed by the mining of conflict diamonds. 

The supplements provided no actual provable medical benefits, according to numerous studies, but the company was highly successful as a multi-level marketing (read pyramid) scheme among low-income recent immigrants. When the national press reported that numerous of the company’s products contained dangerous levels of toxic chemicals Peron became the national voice pushing back on the scurrilous (if true) attacks, which he decried as racist smears, on a successful minority owned business. 

Peron combined his ardor for Eternal Herbal with his fierce advocacy for second amendment rights - usually appearing on the Assembly floor carrying both a Mac 10 machine pistol and an antique Colt 45, which he openly carried while his lawsuit seeking to overturn restrictions on open carry in California wound its way to the Supreme Court. Needless to say, in addition to the prison guards, police unions, Eternal Life, and the Chamber of Commerce, the National Rifle Association showered him with campaign cash. 

Peron appeared on his way to an easy Senate victory when Armendariz, an unknown professor at Norwalk Community College, held a press conference with 4 members of the Blythe High School Cheer Squad and Attorney Glory Rojo, an LA based lawyer well known for accusing powerful men of misconduct, in which they claimed that Peron had engaged in numerous lewd acts of sexual misconduct with underage girls, some as young as 14. 

After giving Peron a week in which he held successive pressers with his priest, the local Archbishop, and the Sheriffs of Imperial and Los Angeles Counties totally denying the “outrageous and slanderous” lies by these “mentally ill young deviants,” Peron was brought to heal when one of the girls uploaded to YouTube a grainy sex tape clearly showing Peron and two other union officials naked in a hot tub with the very same girls. 

While this did not end his campaign it did provide Armendariz an opening which she promptly seized, resulting in a particularly nasty campaign in which the State Chamber of Commerce ran ads in the Southwark Examiner claiming Senator Bruja had fathered the bastard child of Fidel Castro. 

She won anyway, defeating Peron by less than a percentage point in the primary. The times they were a changin’. Republicans being as numerous in this part of the world as African Americans at a Klan meeting, Bruja skated her way through the general election to a term-limited senate seat. 

Senator Armendariz was not expected in the Senate or for that matter particularly welcome by the powers that be, having defeated the handpicked Peron, which is why President Pro-Tem Ryan asked Villa if he could guide her in the rules and arcane customs of the Senate.

Senator Bruja - a well-deserved moniker, at first blush seemed like a promising freshman member of the committee. Other than a rather churlish personality which turned off some (I chalked it up initially to her being a woman and necessary for survival), her politics veered left, and her district was littered with every type waste site imaginable. 

In addition to playing host to the largest solid waste dump in the western hemisphere, actually visible from space, her constituents also lived on and above land and groundwater contaminated with carcinogens, mutagens, teratogens, and low-level nuclear waste. From womb to grave the residents of southeast Los Angeles suffered the ravages of our modern chemically dependent world. Birth defects, statistically improbable cancer clusters, and rare diseases were everyday visitors. Senator Armendariz understood environmental racism and seemed primed to act. 

However, my time educating Senator Bruja on the ways of the Senate was trying, to say the least. We got off to a good start. I was able to score her a feature article in an environmental publication, which pleased her greatly. In the interview, I learned much about her that I did not know. Her path to the Capitol was quite remarkable. Her parents were undocumented and lived down an unpaved dirt road near the Mexican border in Imperial County, outside Brawley. Neither parent spoke English, so young Bianca served as their translator and connector to the Anglo world. Her first foray into politics was collecting signatures for a petition to the county to pave their “street,” which flooded every winter, making it impossible for her dad to work. She translated for her father when they came upon the rare non-Spanish speaking neighbor. 

That background could have led her in many directions. On one hand, it drove her ambition and dedication to helping the less fortunate. On the other, it created a deep insecurity that manifested in intermittent explosions of rage. What it did not lead to was a commitment to the details of public policy. 

The reality of working with her was not going to be as easy as I or Senator Villa had imagined, as I would quickly discover. Bruja’s past and present were not without controversy. Reporters had wondered for several years how a little-known professor of Post-Modernist Aztec Folk Dance from Norwalk Community College could so quickly rise from obscurity to a coveted seat in the State Senate. 

As it turned out, she did it the old-fashioned way - with a sponsor. Senator Bruja was the paramour of the President of the Association of the Federation of Used Car Dealers (FUCD) of California, who had cleared the field of more experienced Democrats and directed thousands of dollars in union money and foot soldiers to her nascent campaign. 

The ongoing problem was that her boyfriend, union leader Trayvon Washington, was married. And his wife, Antigone Martin, was also a union leader. She was President of the Southern California Alliance of Tribal Casino Workers, a hugely influential player in Democratic politics through their generous sponsorship of various politicians and educational activities. SCAT as it was known, was currently sponsoring an initiative appearing on a coming statewide ballot to expand casino games to churches and high schools - an initiative purported to fund k-12 education.

Martin carried significant weight in party circles and was known to have quite the volatile temper. To add fuel to the spasmodic and oftentimes violent encounters, the Senator and Washington were not too discreet about their ongoing tempestuous relationship. 

The ensuing year working with her had been enlightening, to say the least. Senator Bruja’s reputation as hard on staff was, in actuality, too kind. Truth is, she ruled her office by terror and fear, and churned through staff like a great white through a school of juvenile seals. Staff came and went. And that was the good part! If truth be known, she treated the white boys on staff reasonably well, considering her temper and insistence on mass firings. 

Her special vitriol was reserved for young, smart Latinas thinking they would find a mentor. Her animosity was worse still if the offending member of staff was even minimally physically attractive. I watched in horror as a young, brilliant daughter of undocumented parents from Boyle Heights, with a newly minted degree in criminal justice from Princeton, was torn, shredded, and broken over the course of her Senate Fellowship. 

Special days were had by all when she and President Washington had a rough weekend, or when something specific came to the attention of Martin. When that happened, staff would arrive early at the office to a freshly delivered, greenhouse-worthy armload of red roses at the front desk. This was the signal that things had gone terribly wrong over the preceding days, and Washington was attempting to buy forgiveness. On those days at Villa’s instruction, my job consisted mainly of convincing Senator Bruja that firing her entire staff for the third time that year tended to poll poorly. 

To truly grasp the black heart at the center of Senator Bruja’s soul, one incident stands out. It occurred at the already legendary game six of the NBA Western Conference playoffs between the LA Lakers and the Sacramento Kings. It was a truly memorable game between two fantastic teams. Kobe and Shaq vs. Chris Webber and Vlade Divac. The Kings up 3-2 in the series. A game that would be decided by a referee who would end up in jail for rigging the contest. It was a tough ticket to come by, even by LA standards. 

The game was on the day of Bruja’s daughter, Marisol’s quinceanera, an important moment in every young Latina’s coming of age. Bruja wanted to treat her to the game and asked me if, through my LA contacts, I might be able to score tickets. I told her I was doubtful but that I would give it a shot. I called Bobby Rose, a friend in senior management at Disney, to inquire about availability. I added, “Of course the senator would be happy to pay for the tickets,” because, as vile as was her temperament, if the good Senator had one redeemable quality it was that she was totally honest in her official duties.

Bobby called back in an hour and, with a somewhat hesitant voice, let it be known that all tickets in the box had not been claimed as the CEO was forced to cancel because of an emergency appearance before the Congressional Subcommittee on Inane Entertainment. His two seats might be available, but Bobby cleared his throat, coughed twice, and cautioned, “Coop, before you say yes, let me read you the names of the other four people who will be sharing the box: Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Elgin Baylor,” and then, rapidly and almost inaudibly, “Union officials Washington and Martin.” I was not sure I had heard the last two, so I asked if Rose could repeat the list more slowly. When he did, I audibly gasped. 

“Oh yeah. Got it. Let me get back to you,” I hastily replied.

I spent the next hour calling every conceivable contact in LA. I called Edison and SoCalGas, Universal Pictures and Trident Oil, anyone who might conceivably have extra seats, all to no avail. Shortly thereafter the Senator appeared at my door to ask whether I had any luck. I told her that I was not certain, and that there were two possible tickets, but being as they were directly behind the Lakers bench, they would be exorbitantly expensive, and that she would have no privacy with Marisol because she would have to share the corporate box. “With whom?” She asked. 

“Kareem, Elgin,” mumble, mumble, “Washington and Martin,” I informed her. 

“I’ll take them,” she said without hesitation. 

A week later, Cal and I were at home watching the pregame show when it all blew up. I had gone into the kitchen to bring Cal a snack. She was lying on the couch languidly waiting for her nightly helping of teriyaki beef jerky when she abruptly jumped up and started barking at the TV.

“Holy shit Coop, that batshit crazy Senator on your committee is on national TV.  You gotta see this!” she shouted before laughing uncontrollably.

What we were witnessing was truly remarkable. Right there on ESPN, with the whole nation watching, with Marv Albert and Bill Walton calling the action during pregame warmups, and with Washington and Martin seated in their box next to Kareem and Elgin, the Senator jauntily walked down the gilded aisles of the Staples Center with her lovely young daughter, Maree. 

All hell broke loose. Leaping over Kareem and Elgin, a nearly foaming at the mouth Martin was threatening to do numerous unmentionable things to the “Whitina Chingada Puta Whore!” Blows were exchanged, and security intervened. ESPN cut to commercials. Hall of Famers Kareem and Elgin remained cool. Martin was escorted from the building by security with Washington behind, trying to explain. Bruja and a mortified Maree took their seats and partook of the spectacle, Bruja introducing herself happily and totally unflappably to the Laker heroes before acquiring autographs from the two legends for her permanently traumatized hija. 

After this public spectacle, Senator Bruja went from bad to worse. Washington had died shortly after the Staples Center fiasco of a massive heart attack and the Capitol rumor mill was rife with stories that he had gone out “doing a Rockefeller” in the saddle with his barely concealed paramour. 

After the game six NBA conference finals altercation on national TV, I would have considered it impossible for her to be more erratic bordering on bipolar, but it turned out that I was wrong. Washington’s sad demise in a Motel 6 in West Covina had sent Senator Bruja into a seeming death spiral of despair and hysteria. She even went to the very public funeral where once more  Martin was, to put it delicately, not amused.