janbtucker.com Blog: THE DETECTIVE'S DIARY

From Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, 1592 (referring to the families Montague & Capulet):

MERCUTIO:
I am hurt.
A plague o’ both your houses! I am sped.
Is he gone, and hath nothing?

If I were a better person than I am, I would refrain from gloating about the state of affairs between disgraced former Santa Monica Mayor Mike Feinstein and now convicted felon Nativo Lopez. For one perspective on the background of their near blood-feud, here’s what my friend Donna Warren had to say about it:

“ORIGIN OF THE CHARGES

“The origin of the charges against Nativo Lopez stemmed from an internal dispute within the Green Party Los Angeles County Council. Old guard conservative leadership led by Michael Feinstein lost their power sway to a reform slate, which came to prominence in the primary elections of June 2006. Lopez represented the Senate District 22 as a county party delegate, encompassing the cities of Boyle Heights, Maywood, and parts of the city of Los Angeles, and immediately became a target of harassment, surveillance, and spying by the Feinstein faction. Feinstein’s group refused to concede the reins of leadership to the reformers and launched attacks against a number of its leaders, including Lopez.

“Court documents revealed that the source of the original complaint to the California Secretary of State’s Office, and subsequently to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office, was the Feinstein cohorts. This party faction worked with state and county police agencies to run Lopez out of the Green Party. Lopez actually ceased any party activities in 2008 after concluding with other party activists that this party could not be a viable alternative to disaffected Democratic and independent Latino voters. State and county detectives and investigators conducted surveillance against Lopez in 2008 and 2009, with the connivance and cooperation of the Feinstein faction, prior to filing the criminal charges in June 2009. ‘Feinstein and his allies were not interested in a darker hue of green for the Green Party by way of recruiting thousands of new adherents of color to the party as we had intended and repeatedly proposed,’ stated Lopez. ‘And the party has remained a miniature cult under the control of white party activists in the face of a colored tsunami of demographic shift throughout California, but especially in the Los Angeles metropolitan region,’ he concluded.”

Mike Feinstein

Mike Feinstein

I first met Mike Feinstein at a Green Party state gathering in Orange County. The party I’d spent my life in, the Peace & Freedom Party (PFP), had lost ballot status and I was looking for a new home in the Green Party, thinking that it was less sectarian than PFP.

I was sadly mistaken.

People kept coming up to me and warning me about Mike Feinstein, accusing him of being a control freak and of all sorts of other transgressions. From what I’d always seen of him in public before this, I didn’t know what to think. So I approached him entirely in good faith and told him that lots of people were bad-mouthing him to me. Since they seemed to be friendly and trusted me based upon my reputation, I offered to mediate with them if he wanted me to.

The next thing I know, Feinstein is saying all sorts of stuff about me in a whispering campaign.

So to try to keep a long story short, a $10,000 check gets written by Bill Pietz (a well respected Green Party activist who I knew from the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, when I used to represent the Newspaper Guild Local 69 in that organization) to the Green Party which Bill intended to be used for the Green Party’s Los Angeles County Council. It gets deposited into an account at a credit union set up by Mike Feinstein with his personal social security number as opposed to a federal tax identification number of the Green Party. These issues are discussed at length at:

http://www.smdp.com/pdf/020503.pdf

and at:

http://www.surfsantamonica.com/ssm_site/the_lookout/news/News-2003/July- 2003/07_19_03_Police_Search_Bank_Records.htm

Note that Judge Bernie Kamins, who issued the search warrant discussed in these articles, is a well-respected former criminal defense lawyer and is no stooge for the prosecution. I testified in his court once and while he ruled against us in a motion to disqualify a fellow judge, he enabled us to create an excellent record of testimony. The Court of Appeals promptly ruled in our favor.

At some point I learned that Feinstein went to Carleton College in Minnesota.

According to the Healyite Trotskyists (formerly the Workers League, now in the US called the Socialist Equality Party; in England the Workers Revolutionary Party with which actress Vanessa Redgrave is affiliated), Carleton College was a training ground for government agents to infiltrate the left (an entire 58 page document called The Carleton Twelve was published by the organization’s Labor Publications, Inc. in July 1981 which sets forth the case in detail):

“Another peculiar set of facts emerged as a byproduct of the Security investigation. Virtually the entire central leadership of the Socialist Workers Party — including a majority of its political committee — had attended Carleton College, a small liberal arts school in the Midwest. There was no record that the SWP had conducted any systematic work on the Carleton campus during the period between 1960 and 1964, when so many of its students, including Jack Barnes, entered the party and were rapidly promoted into its leadership. The medium of their transformation from conservative Midwestern students (Jack Barnes had been a Republican) into leaders of an ostensibly revolutionary organization was the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which was manipulated by, and riddled with, FBI agents. No credible explanation has been provided by the SWP leadership for the Carleton College phenomenon.” [From: http://socialequality.com/foundations ]

By the way, I’m not a SEP sympathizer nor do I have anything to do with them inasmuch as one of their prominent leaders raped a friend of mine and got sued for sexually harassing at least a couple of his other clients.

Another Carleton alum wound up as an attorney in an ostensibly leftist law firm in the Los Angeles area — and either incompetently or conveniently withheld from the lead attorney some critical information I had turned up in an investigation of a major cause celebre legal and political fight some years ago.

As an “oh by the way,” Mike has on a couple of occasions publicly sent around emails claiming that I investigated him. I was solicited on more than one occasion by his enemies in the Green Party to investigate him (as paying jobs); I categorically refused to do so because I’m not a Certified Fraud Examiner (CFE) which is the kind of certification somebody would need to competently perform such an investigation. Preferably, whoever were to look into what went on with these financial transactions should have been a CFE, Licensed Investigator, and a Forensic Accountant.

Larry “Nativo” Lopez

When I heard that Nativo Lopez was busted, the last thing in the world I expected was
election fraud. I thought it had something to do with financial affairs of the many, many, many corporations that he formed or took over which wound up suspended by order of the California Franchise Tax Board and/or the Secretary of State’s office:n

 "Every officer of this state, or of any county, city, city and
county, or other municipal corporation or subdivision thereof, and
every deputy, clerk, or servant of that officer, and every officer,
director, trustee, clerk, servant, or agent of any association,
society, or corporation (public or private), who fraudulently
appropriates to any use or purpose not in the due and lawful
execution of that person's trust, any property in his or her
possession or under his or her control by virtue of that trust, or
secretes it with a fraudulent intent to appropriate it to that use or
purpose, is guilty of embezzlement."

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