Gentle reader,
We write to alert our preservation pals—and anyone with a pending land use matter before any Commission or Department in Los Angeles County—to a nationwide financial scam that last week attempted to defraud every citizen with a potential Historic-Cultural Monument application pending before the Cultural Heritage Commission.
Do you still want your building to be included on the upcoming agenda on which it is listed? That’s gonna cost you thousands, payable before the meeting.
Fortunately, none of them fell for it—not this time.
Most Angelenos who take the time to nominate a building as a landmark in 2026, when there is no Mills Act tax relief available, are not very anxious.
Of course, they want to get a positive initial vote from the Commissioners, followed by a site visit and a recommendation that City Council approves the application. But when a bill arrives for $5200 to ensure their matter is heard at a meeting where they are already scheduled to present, they’ll rightly assume it must be a scam and reach out to their contact in the City Planning Department.
The people we talked to who received fake invoices did just that, and were told that City Planning was aware of the issue, they should not pay and to ignore any additional invoices.
They showed up at City Hall as scheduled and they were heard.
During General Public Comment, at 3:09 in the online recording which we have excerpted above, prolific landmark application author Charlie Fisher attempted to alert the Commissioners, and by extension any member of the public attending the meeting or tuning in to the recording, to the attempted fraud.
But before he could finish a sentence, City Planning staff jumped in, speaking over him to minimize the situation.
Had Charlie been able to finish his comment, the Commissioners would have learned that this is a highly sophisticated hustle, featuring a series of increasingly urgent, and convincingly official-looking, demands for immediate payment, that could easily fool a less sophisticated victim.
The scam, it turns out, is not just local, but national, and it’s been going for months. It appears not to be a hack of internal government servers, but an AI bot that’s scraping public contact information associated with planning matters and contacting the applicants.
On March 9, the FBI issued a warning about Criminals Impersonating City and County Officials in Phishing Emails for Planning and Zoning Permits, with a portal for submitting information about unsolicited emails.
In mid-February, some Neighborhood Councils posted that the City Planning Department was aware of fraudulent emails from planning.lacity.org@usa.com; City Planning also posted a warning on its website.
The County’s Regional Planning Department, too, posted a warning by late May.
Law enforcement is aware, as are civil servants. So why have government planning departments not proactively contacted every individual, land use consultant or LLC with a pending matter? It wouldn’t be hard to generate a mailing list of interested parties and give them a heads up about the ongoing crime spree.
We are particularly concerned about the potential for vulnerable, exhausted victims of last January’s Pacific Palisades and Altadena fires to be tricked by fake invoices as they struggle to obtain permits to grade and rebuild their homes. What’s one more invoice in a snowstorm of them?
As with so much in Los Angeles, it seems like the people in charge do the least they can get away with, and it’s up to citizens to look out for one another.
So we’re using this channel to spread the word about the data scraping scam targeting people with pending land use matters before local Departments, Commissions and Committees. Please share this information with anyone you know who might receive one of these fraudulent bills. We’ll include a redacted, full text copy of one of the fake invoices at the bottom of this newsletter so you know what to look out for.
It seems as if the Los Angeles City Planning Department isn’t generally keen on sending notifications out to citizens.
If you click on the City Clerk’s portal for Council File: 25-1083 - Impacts of SB 79 (Wiener) / Comprehensive Report / City Infrastructure and Utility Systems / Code Amendment (CA); Environmental Clearance (SE), you’ll find numerous public comments from citizens objecting to the City’s claim that it is “too expensive” to proactively alert homeowners and residents about the rezoning of their neighborhoods to accommodate tall, multi-family structures.
That’s balderdash, of course.
But it’s a small step for a department that’s decided not to alert citizens about one threat not to warn them of another. So pass this info on, and never click “pay now” on an unexpected bill without checking twice.
Saturday’s tour is Evergreen Cemetery, 1877, a stroll through L.A.’s biggest and most diverse burial ground, packed with interesting Angelenos, gorgeous monuments and offbeat lore. Come get to know the lively carnie folk who rest eternally beneath a prancing pink tiger—and the lady leopard charmer across the road—hear the lore of the unclaimed, meet the beautiful lady of the ivy, the zombie councilmember, the real Perry Mason and many more wild, departed characters. Join us, do!
Yours for Los Angeles,
Kim & Richard
Esotouric
Are you on social media? We’re on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, Substack Notes, TikTok, Nextdoor and Reddit sharing preservation news as it happens. New: some of these newsletters are on Medium, too.
Our work—leading tours and historic preservation and cultural landmark advocacy—is about building a bridge between Los Angeles’ past and its future, and not allowing the corrupt, greedy, inept and misguided players who hold present power to destroy the city’s soul and body. If you’d like to support our efforts to be the voice of places worth preserving, we have a tip jar, vintage Los Angeles webinars available to stream, in-person tours and a souvenir shop you can browse in. We’ve also got recommended reading bookshelves on Amazon and the Bookshop indie bookstore site. And did you know we offer private versions of our walking tours for groups big or small? Or just share this link with other people who care.
UPCOMING WALKING TOURS
• Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (5/30) • The Real Black Dahlia (6/6) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (6/13) • Know Your Downtown LA: Bradbury Building, Basements of Yore and the Dutch Chocolate Shop (6/20) • Miracle Mile Marvels & Madness (Sunday, 6/21) • Westlake Park (6/27) • Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice (7/11) • Hollywood Noir (7/18) • Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (7/25) • Raymond Chandler’s Noir Downtown L.A. (8/1) • Film Noir / Real Noir (8/8) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (8/29)
CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS
An iconic Hollywood residency hotel that’s featured on our Hollywood Noir tour is for sale. It was home to fascinating characters like Kenneth Anger and photographer Penny Wolin at the start of her career. The Gershwin will always be The St. Francis to us—it seemed unlucky to change the name.
Years after the City Hall machine crushed her scrappy congregate housing start up Haaven, Heidi Roberts names and shames the powerful players opposed to a program that helped keep vulnerable Angelenos housed and alive, fairly cheaply. It’s a rough read, but these stories need to be told if we’re going to fix the city.
It’s not just the burro (which is still hanging on, go take a photo this weekend!) or La Golondrina on the ropes. Now Cielito Lindo (est. 1934), the pretty stall at the top of Olvera Street, needs YOUR help. Chip in if you love it. And tell your elected officials you want L.A. to foster the landmark’s legacy vendors, repair City-owned buildings, forgive Covid debt and give Richard Chase Hernandez a new lease for his burro photo concession.
Steven Taylor, facing Federal charges for the Weingart Center Cheviot Hills homeless housing flip, now seeks $5,750,000 for the partially protected Little Country Church of Hollywood site at 1750 N Argyle. It must be made a park!
A year before the fires, we encouraged oddball investors to buy Glendora’s Route 66 mortuary and turn it into a grim inn or spooky restaurant, to no avail. It’s going to be town homes. Fine. But to not move the 1917 house to Altadena is a moral crime.
A neat benefit of attending Curren Price’s court dates on the secure floor reserved for high profile prosecutions: this stunning view of the Hall of Justice through the grubby window behind the snack machine.
Bunker Hill historian Nathan Marsak visits Glendale in search of gorgeous stained glass and other relics salvaged from the old neighborhood—and watches ecclesiastical history made.
Lovely effect through the prisms in the lobby floor of the Barclay Hotel (Morgan & Walls, 1896), the oldest continuously operated hotel in Los Angeles, when swinging a light around the basement. Maybe we’ll do this again on the Know Your Downtown LA tour next month.
Lyrical Queen of the Corn mural by Israel Valenzuela on La Blanquita Carniceria, just outside the oil spill cordon in East Los Angeles.
File under: empty Los Angeles. The caracol tower of the lonesome Southwest Museum, spied from the elevated Figueroa walk street. Every landmark held vacant diminishes the experience of being an Angeleno. How about we take our heritage spaces back?
Dead Outlaw, the musical about our favorite mummified Old West screw up, is getting a run at Chicago’s Porchlight Theatre. If you can sing with a twang and hold still real good, you can be the star, in the role originated by Andrew Durand.
The Pacific Dining Car, a long goodbye (1921-2020-2024, R.I.P.): Now updated with the new real estate listing for the torched, demolished, scraped clean lot and the mysterious reopening date on the archived Yelp page: June 24, 2026. If only!
We stopped to smell the feral roses at the scorched Charles W. Eliot Junior High School (Marston & Maybury, 1931). Altadena has lost too much and the iconic campus tower shouldn’t join the list. C’mon Pasadena Unified, preserve and rebuild, don’t demolish!
Last minute amended complaint by Marilyn Monroe house property owners claims the value of the cleared lot is $17 Million—but with the derelict landmark standing, it’s just $820,000. Plus, the famous 5th Helena gates survive, will be auctioned on June 4. Read all about it here.
As a lovely multi-family Craftsman burns, Empty Los Angeles finds that code enforcement complaints of abandoned or vacant building left open to the public were deemed “no violation” or “referred to Housing Department.” Typical buck-passing from bureaucrats who have no respect for the city that issues their paychecks.
Cultural Heritage in Los Angeles has no age requirement: The City Planning Department has accepted a landmark application from the M.T.O. Shahmaghsoudi, School of Islamic Sufism for its 20-year-old Reseda campus.
Let’s Talk Taix! https://esotouric.substack.com/letstalktaix The Board of Building and Safety Commissioners will meet on June 2 at 9:30am (agenda link) to consider Holland Partner Group’s application to export a mind-boggling 43,125 cubic yards of earth from the already congested Taix site. In June 2022, City Council determined there was “no environmental impact” in a project that will require thousands of truck trips between Echo Park and a landfill dump. The scale of the excavation raises questions about the impact of the increased traffic on public transit (Metro Local 2 and 4 bus lines) and commuter traffic, dust, truck exhaust and pedestrian safety—and why this project should be exempted from environmental guidelines.
After the vote, an anonymous public comment (likely submitted by appellants Silver Lake Heritage Trust) was uploaded to the council file, alleging corruption by city planners and deputy City Attorneys for deliberately hiding documents from the public and helping to draft the SCPE criteria section, and by councilmember Mitch O’Farrell through his sabotage of the Cultural Heritage Ordinance for the benefit of the developer and campaign donor.
Concerned? Citizens can make in-person comments or submit them in writing before the meeting.
Jamie T. Hall, who is fighting the city over demolition of the landmarked Barry Building for no new project, is representing SEIU Local 721 in an appeal of Karen Bass’ rushed, secretive El Corazon Art Park Project kitty corner from City Hall. Objections: operator AltaMed charging fees, possible stealth permanent development plans, zoning violations, conversion of a public park into a private food hall, liquor service without a CUP, violation of the park space Grant Deed, LA Municipal Code and City Charter. “The permissive language and inadequate protections of the License Agreement allow Altamed to effectively operate—on publicly-owned parkland—a private event venue and a private center for data collection and business referral.”
And a newly uploaded public comment in support of the appeal makes serious allegations of undue influence by Mayor Karen Bass, working with former councilmember Gil Cedillo and City Family lobbyists, to transfer public park space to AltaMed “at a minimal cost” to build a permanent Chicano art museum.
Our opinion: if AltaMed wants to bring its Chicano corporate art collection to Downtown Los Angeles, that’s great, and there are numerous empty buildings around Olvera Street that would be a suitable home where they can rent space and help foster the struggling small businesses.
FAKE INVOICE COVER EMAIL FOLLOWS:
From: CITY OF LOS ANGELES PLANNING COMMISSION <planning-dept.cityoflosangeles-ca@usa.com>
Subject: Outstanding Invoice – Historic-Cultural Monument Application Approval Fee
CITY OF LOS ANGELES PLANNING COMMISSION
201 N. Figueroa St, 4th Floor,
Los Angeles, CA 90012
We are writing in regard to your submission for the Historic-Cultural Monument Application – [redacted]. We are pleased to inform you that, following a comprehensive internal review and assessment by the relevant staff committee, your application has now received a positive recommendation for approval.
At this stage, the process is in its final administrative phase. However, before formal designation and final confirmation can be issued, it is required that the outstanding invoice for the Application Approval Fee be fully settled.
Please treat this matter as urgent, as the settlement of this invoice is a mandatory condition for completion of the designation process and issuance of the final approval documentation.
Importance of the Application Approval Fee
To ensure transparency and clarity, please note the importance of this fee in the overall process:
Application Processing Completion
Enables final administrative closure of the review cycle
Confirms readiness for formal monument designation issuance
Operational Efficiency & Case Management
Supports the coordination of multi-stage application review workflows
Helps streamline documentation verification and archival processes
Staff Workload Offloading
Assists in offsetting administrative resources required for application tracking
Ensures staff can maintain timely processing of other heritage applications
Compliance and Record Finalization
Facilitates proper filing within official heritage designation records
Ensures audit-compliant documentation and financial reconciliation
Preservation Program Support
Contributes to the continued maintenance of heritage designation programs
Supports the sustainability of historic-cultural preservation initiatives
As noted above, staff have formally recommended approval of your application, and the file is currently pending only the settlement of the associated invoice. Once payment is confirmed, the approval process will be immediately finalized and the designation documentation will be prepared for issuance.
Next Steps Required
To ensure timely completion of your application, please follow the steps below precisely:
Reply to this email to request payment guidance and confirm receipt of the invoice settlement instructions.
Settle the issued wire instruction as provided in the attached invoice documentation. Please ensure all banking details are accurately followed to avoid processing delays.
Return the wire transfer receipt to the designated email address for verification and confirmation of payment.
Communication and Audit Requirements
For compliance, record-keeping, and audit integrity purposes, all correspondence relating to this application must be conducted via email only. This ensures a clear documentation trail and supports transparent verification of all steps taken during the approval process.
We appreciate your prompt attention to this matter and your cooperation throughout the application process. Timely settlement will allow us to proceed without delay toward the formal designation of the [redacted] as an Historic-Cultural Monument.
Should you require any clarification, please respond directly to this email.
Warm Regards,
Monique Lawshe,
Chair
CITY OF LOS ANGELES PLANNING COMMISSION
201 N. Figueroa St, 4th Floor,
Los Angeles, CA 90012
FAKE INVOICE FOLLOWS:
INVOICE BREAKDOWN
Description Amount
Application Review & Processing Fee $2,800.00
Zoning & Compliance Assessment $700.00
Legal & Administration Fees $1,000.00
Public Notification & Documentation $700.00
Total Amount Due $5,200.00
REMITTANCE INSTRUCTIONS
● Wire Transfer Instructions: Provided upon request
● Important: A signed copy of this invoice must be returned along with your wire payment
receipt to this email for confirmation.
● For any further details or inquiries, please reply to this email.
Thank you for your prompt attention to this payment.
Best Regards,
CITY OF LOS ANGELES PLANNING COMMISSION
201 N. Figueroa St, 4th Floor
Los Angeles, CA 90012
