The Court-Appointed Investigation into the LADWP billing Mess is Not Public

The long-awaited report had trouble tracing bank records of attorneys under federal investigation for bribery and extortion. Is the FBI Coming?

After a year and a half, the court-sanctioned report looking into a controversial Los Angeles Department of Water and Power billing settlement is finished, but it’s not public. That’s because…FBI? It could be at the request of federal prosecutors, who have been conducting their own investigation into whether the $67 million billing settlement was fraudulently executed. They have been clamping down, stopping information about the matter from being collected in a related bankruptcy case. It feels like something might happen soon.

You can go deep on all of this here, but the Tweet is: City Attorney Mike Feuer’s office hired private attorneys to end high-profile billing lawsuits, who then allegedly used the settlement process as a slush fund to get paid a bunch of money and defraud customers. Think selling out your own clients in exchange for more money.

The last public update we received from the report’s investigator, tax attorney Edward M. Robbins Jr., was a year ago, when he made a tentative finding of fraud. Robbins told the civil judge in the matter, Elihu M. Berle, that certain lawyers (he didn’t name names) involved in related cases committed ethical violations, and that some payments made by the city of Los Angeles in connection with the settlement were induced by fraud.

One of the outstanding questions over the course of the special master’s investigation was the paper trail. Where did nearly $12 million in attorneys fees go? Did kickbacks, extortion or bribery take place between attorneys? Robbins said he hit roadblocks in seeking downstream banking records because attorneys refused to talk, making it difficult to determine whether any illegal payments were made.

The attorney fees were paid to a, um, personal injury lawyer out of Ohio named Jack Landskroner, and San Fernando Valley sole practitioner Michael J. Libman. They are the ones accused of colluding with then-city private counsel Paul O. Paradis and Paul R. Kiesel, by filing the bogus lawsuit in exchange for inflated fees. In order to make go away a bunch of other similar lawsuits the city was facing, the private attorneys effectively picked their own opposing lawyers to represent utility customers and manufactured a sham lawsuit they could control. In the process, people sued over incorrect utility bills may have gotten shitty representation. Feuer said he didn’t know about the conduct. The attorneys he hired said he did. An internal investigation by Feuer’s office found that outside counsel failed to disclose representation conflicts. It ultimately said the city attorney’s office didn’t know about the conduct. 

Imagine a judge, over a period of years, being misled about who attorneys in his own courtroom were actually representing. That’s some creepy lawyering, or straight up rank stupidity. Berle commissioned the report and he will be the only one to see it, for now.

Additionally, Robbins was seeking bank records related to the disbursement of payments by the city to Paradis and his former company Aventador Utilities, which was recipient to over $30 million in no-bid contracts to fix the billing issues. Those contracts were ultimately cancelled by the city.

So whether Robbins got anywhere further is under wraps for now. He is a former Assistant United States Attorney who worked in the same office that is currently investigating all of this. For now, it’s wait and see.