Scoop: in character reference letters ahead of Federal corruption sentence, Deputy Mayor Ray Chan's wife says Mayor Eric Garcetti refused to let him retire
Gentle reader,
It’s a lot of fun to read about crime and corruption, or to write tours and books set in times past, not so nice to try to live in its filthy backwash.
Yet here we are, loving Los Angeles and compelled to bear witness to its horrible decay and the crooks, creeps and fellow travelers who exacerbate that rot for fun, power and profit.
As New York City clean government fans dance a jig over the indictment of their cartoonishly crooked Mayor, brought down in part by a sacrilegious music video shoot in an historic Brooklyn church and the relentless chipping away by varied news outlets, Angelenos are left deflated and ill-informed while confessed racketeer councilmember Jose Huizar obtains apparently unlimited delays before beginning his 13 year prison term, and his fixer Ray Chan’s public corruption sentencing comes into view.
We attended enough of Ray Chan’s trial earlier this year to lament L.A.’s lack of investigative journalists with the resources and deep sources to track the vast web of wrongdoing revealed in drips and flashes by the DOJ’s case against this former Deputy Mayor and General Manager of LADBS.
There is much more that Angelenos need to know about Chan and the many members of the City Family who aided his criminal acts, but were not themselves charged with any crime. Are they still shaping policy and cutting corners for cronies?
The farther we get from the trial, the more it and the related Federal real estate bribery cases appear to have been a surgical strike, removing one cancerous organ from a body that is riddled with sickness.
Los Angeles is still dying.
Last month, NPR released a stale investigative podcast into Eric Garcetti’s handsy money man Rick Jacobs. The only thing new in the story was the then mayor’s videotaped deposition.
There is plenty happening in Los Angeles today that desperately needs scrutiny. Why would a national radio network waste resources on an old scandal?
We have no idea, but here’s a fresh one that could use some journalistic daylight.
Ray Chan doesn’t want to go to prison. As stated in his defense sentencing memorandum, he’s old, sick, with a sick wife and elderly mother to care for, and his community needs him.
Everybody in his personal orbit adores the guy—really. We observed a lot of these friends and colleagues in the courtroom, and spoke with one who had traveled half the state to sit in silent support for his buddy Ray. The concern and love is sincere.
And like anyone waiting to go before a Federal judge to learn their sentence, Chan has asked everyone who loves him to submit a letter arguing why justice would be better served if he was merely confined to his home, and that his sentence be a short one.
We have obtained 29 of these letters to the court, and make them available for public review here.
Together, it is a remarkable document. In microcosm, each one is a moving account of a meaningful friendship or family relationship with an unusual person.
The letters paint a picture of a man who was obsessively helpful to professional colleagues, to family and members of his martial arts dojo, who was instrumental in helping gay bar Precinct open up at 4th and Broadway and in bringing the Lucas Museum to Exposition Park.
Got a problem? Need a hand? Call Ray! He will drop everything to take care of you. What a mensch.
But look deeper at what the letters tell us, and what they don’t.
How is this civil servant with a chronically ill wife, elderly parents and children with expensive tuition able to make monthly donations to several local charities and be so generous to so many casual friends, paying for plane tickets and meals, supporting multiple children in Mainland China to adulthood and handing out at least two $15,000 cash loans at no interest?
How could Chan afford to subsidize the operation of a free martial arts dojo, many of whose members gush about his generosity in these letters?
And what was the source of $4600 in straw donations filtered through Ray Chan’s son Jeremy, a Nevada resident, to Eric Garcetti and other politicians around the time City Council approved a massive skyscraper on an active earthquake fault in Hollywood—contributions that were subject of an ethics complaint?
In the case the DOJ presented against Ray Chan, it was acknowledged that he personally did not solicit explicit monetary bribes for aiding projects—even while everyone around him was taking cash, booze, concert tickets, flights, meals, frolics with paid escorts and other perks (sniff sniff) from Chan’s developer contacts.
Yes, he was secretly moonlighting as a development consultant, but not for long, and not very profitably. So from what source did Ray Chan obtain the funds to play Lady Bountiful to half the San Gabriel Valley and beyond, and when did he become so wealthy? Was he paid in advance for the illegal acts that have hobbled Los Angeles and created so deep a sense of distrust in our elected and appointed officials?
The answers were not forthcoming in the case brought against him, and we’ve seen no investigations into Ray Chan’s influence on Los Angeles City government or the connections that helped him help Jose Huizar.
And then there is the bombshell in Exhibit A, a touching document written by Chan’s ailing wife Sarah. She says her husband sought to retire from City service in 2016 due to his own chronic illness, but… then Mayor Eric Garcetti called Chan at home and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
If NPR wants to keep digging into Eric Garcetti’s dirty laundry, we’d like to see them—or any outlet—track down his 2016 staff and ask them why exactly it was so urgent that Ray Chan not be allowed to leave City employment, but that he be flattered and wheedled into accepting the highest position of his career, directed explicitly to continue making things easy for the overseas developers who were then pouring cash into Downtown Los Angeles—among them Shenzhen Hazens, fined a million dollars for bribing Jose Huizar?
And then there is the largest of those projects, which was then in its early construction stages: the now abandoned and graffiti scarred Oceanwide Plaza, funded by Chinese investors seeking green cards under the Federal EB-5 program, who allege they were defrauded and are suing to be made whole.
The Oceanwide scheme was humming along just fine until Huizar and Chan were indicted, and then the house of cards collapsed.
It was this late career economic facilitator work for which Ray Chan was convicted of public corruption, and for which he is scheduled to be sentenced on Friday, October 4 at the Federal courthouse in City Hall’s shadow.
Eric Garcetti’s particular interest in EB-5 funded projects like Oceanwide Plaza, including filming a marketing video for Chinese investors at his City Hall desk, demands further scrutiny.
We have written more about this and Relevant Group’s illegal gutting of the Morrison Hotel, just two blocks from Oceanwide Plaza, here.
The buck stops at the American Ambassador’s desk. And nobody seems to care.
Yet.
Saturday’s tour is a very special one, Know Your Downtown L.A. Sign up for a rare chance to explore the shuttered landmark Dutch Chocolate Shop, decorated floor to ceiling with custom Arts & Crafts tile and murals by Ernest Batchelder, to visit the Prohibition speakeasy relics beneath the King Edward Hotel and to explore modern Bunker Hill with native son Gordon Pattison, whose family owned the last two mansions that survived redevelopment and might be the last person alive who remembers what life was like in the lost Victorian neighborhood served by Angels Flight Railway. 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 and Reddit sharing preservation news as it happens.
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 and a subscriber edition of our main newsletter, 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 BUS & WALKING TOURS
• Know Your Downtown L.A.: Tunnels to Towers to the Dutch Chocolate Shop (10/5) • Broadway: Downtown Los Angeles’ Beautiful, Magical Mess (Sat. 10/12) • The Run: Gay Downtown L.A. History (Sun. 10/13) • Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (Sun. 10/27) • Westlake Park Time Travel Trip (Sun. 11/3) • The 1910 Bombing of the Los Angeles Times Walking Tour with Detective Mike Digby (Sat. 11/9) • Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice Downtown L.A. (Sat. 11/16) • Charles Bukowski’s Westlake (Sat. 11/23) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (Sat. 12/7) • Raymond Chandler’s Noir Downtown Los Angeles (Sat. 12/14) • Miracle Mile Marvels & Madness (Sun. 12/22) • Human Sacrifice: The Black Dahlia, Elisa Lam, Heidi Planck & Skid Row Slasher (Thurs. 12/26)
I knew the space as Finney‘s Cafeteria in the 50’s when my mother took my sister and me there many times after shopping downtown. I worked downtown 1967-70 and continued that Finney’s lunch tradition
weekly (their chicken wings and rice plus the chocolate banana cream cake were divine!). The interior Dutch tiles motif was magical. I wish it all could be restored as it was in 1967. Sigh……
This article is so important to share on the Jewish New Year4 which is today. Thank you for your efforts to disclose corruption in. our city.
Babs.