the red-pilling of DWP
even after a shell company's garbage re-brand, DWP officials kept throwing money at it.
If there is one takeaway from the latest criminal charge in DWP, it’s that despite it being known publicly that a pretend cyber security company was trash, DWP officials kept green lighting multi-million dollar contracts on its behalf.
By March 2019, that company, cloaked in the vapid name, Aventador Utility Solutions, had been the subject of unflattering reporting by me and the LA Times. It came out that Aventador, named after a $400,000 Lambo, scored a $30 million DWP contract to apparently fix DWP’s massive billing problem. But the guy who scored that contract, Paul Paradis, an attorney also working on underlying DWP litigation for the city, had bribed his way to the top, shaking down DWP officials along the way, as three federal plea agreements now map out. And also he reportedly had no IT experience.
Aventador’s business address at the time was an oceanside Santa Monica condo, and it appeared to have been formed with the specific purpose of fleecing DWP. It had only been a company for three months when it got the contract, and its president and only member was Paradis. Further, its rates, which were $400 an hour, were higher than normal for the market. Did DWP officials just not care? Or not know? Both are bad.
We now know Paradis pushed this through by bribing David Wright, the head of DWP, with a Mercedes and annual $1 million Aventador salary, according to plea agreements. It’s another story of men who scheme too much and use public office to enrich themselves through a revolving door. Indeed, several former DWP employees went on to work for Aventador, including Mark Townsend, once an IT guy at DWP. Two people who worked on the underlying Jones case under the so-called “Independent Monitor” went to work for Aventador, and then went back to working on the Jones settlement, according to the massive special master’s report looking into DWP.
But back to March 2019. That month Paradis sold Aventador to an employee, who changed its name to Ardent Cyber solutions, another nod to an apparent hard-on for really cool cars. According to prosecutors, Paradis was supposed to have nothing to do with the company. He was also cooperating with the FBI.
It was a shell game. Despite this information being out in the public, and certainly on the radar of DWP officials, the DWP board and its officials kept giving money to Ardent. And Paradis allegedly was still benefitting financially. Two days after the name change, Ardent got paid by the city, according to the court report. In April 2019, the board kept approving contracts for the re-branded Ardent. Ardent was paid $4.3 million, according to the special master’s report.
The Special Master was informed by the City it believes some of those proceeds were paid by Ardent to Mr. Paradis. Ardent’s November 2019 filing with the California Secretary of State lists Mr. Paradis as the member/manager and president of Ardent.
And at an April 2019 meeting, the DWP unanimously approved a $3.6 million contract for Ardent. Those voting included then-board president Mel Levine, the former Democratic congressman, and commissioners Cynthia McClain-Hill, who today is the president of the board, Jill Banks Barad, Christina Noonan, and Aura Vasquez.
Never mind the $30 million Aventador contract that passed unanimously in 2017. The rubber-stamping continued after the cat was out of the bag. No one cared.
But it kept going, as the government’s plea agreements now map out the scope of corruption. Some guy named David Alexander, who had a couple fancy titles at DWP, will soon plead guilty to lying to the government about his plans to financially benefit from Ardent. As the federal plea agreement makes clear: Alexander pushed a couple Ardent contracts in exchange for a job with Ardent. Then he lied about it.
In April 2019, the SCPPA Board, a collective of public utilities, approved a contract for Ardent and two other vendors valued at about $17 million, prosecutors stated. Then, in the summer of 2019, Alexander manipulated in Ardent’s favor a Request For Proposal process, which is how municipal contracts go out to bid, from LADWP for the award of a three-year, $82.5 million “cybersecurity consulting services” contract. Alexander allowed Paradis to edit the proposal, according to the government. The process in awarding the contract was supposed to be fair and competitive, but it wasn’t, the government said.
In 2020, Paradis and Ardent filed for bankruptcy.
The government has announced its movement in DWP over the last three Mondays. Stay tuned next week for what may be the government’s season finale!