Justice: Overpaid Centinela Superintendent Arrested, Charged with Public Corruption

The tide is turning in this country.

Even in California, slowly but surely, justice is being done in the land.

Earlier this week, the Daily Breeze announced that fired former Superintendent Jose Fernandez was placed under arrest for 12 counts of public corruption related charges.

Incredible!

He was fired in 2014, and the DA's office followed up on bombshell report from the Daily Breeze which forced his ouster.

After three years of digging through contracts and locating the shenanigans which Fernandez engaged in to enrich himself at the expense of the poor and working class communities which Centinela Valley serves, they finally filed formal charges against him.

Larry Altman reports:

FormerCentinela Valley Superintendent Jose Fernandez arrested on public corruptioncharges

Three years after Jose Fernandez was fired from his position at the helm of the Centinela Valley Union High School District after revelations of excessive compensation, the disgraced former superintendent was arrested Wednesday on public corruption charges.

BAM!

Or so he thought ...

Fernandez, 57, was booked into county jail at 9:30 a.m., according to online records.

The District Attorney’s Office on Tuesday filed 12 felony counts against Fernandez for alleged crimes from December 2009 to April 2014, including a single count of embezzlement by a public official, three counts of misappropriation of public funds, two counts of grand theft and six counts of conflict-of-interest charges that prohibit a public employee from being financially interested in any contract made in his or her official capacity.

OUCH! I want to remind everyone who is reading this account that Fernandez had cut funding from teachers and programs throughout the district. Teachers were losing their jobs in record numbers. He was a savvy political monster who knew how to keep his friends close, and to drive his enemies crazy. He would shut down entire education departments and demote personnel just to get back at them.

The case of Vicente Bravo is one of the saddest and most frustrating.

He is being held on $495,000 bail and is due to be arraigned Thursday morning in Torrance Superior Court.

That's a correct bail amount, and it gets better! Most of his assets have been frozen, since most of the money he has--he had acquired through allegedly ill-gotten gains.

The District Attorney’s Office began investigating Fernandez in February 2014 after the Daily Breeze revealed he was collecting a salary of $663,000 leading the tiny school district serving students in Hawthorne and Lawndale. He also received excessive perks, including a home loan worth $910,000 with an interest rate of 2 percent, and a $750,000 life insurance policy obtained before the school board could approve it.

The series of investigative articles, which won the Breeze a Pulitzer Prize in 2015, also explored campaign donations from a construction firm that seemed to benefit from all the district’s construction projects. It also uncovered high spending on administrative pay and legal costs.

The construction company TELACU is also in big trouble. Word on the street is that Fernandez will cut a deal to throw the construction company under the bus.

The revelations sparked public uproar from hundreds of parents who brought their frustrations to school board meetings and prompted a local state lawmaker to introduce a bill requiring greater transparency for superintendent salaries.

One hundred parents is more accurate. The school board meetings were moved to the newly-built, overly expense auditorium. The meeting room still seemed quite sparse, though, and sometimes the city council members arrived late. Most parents had no idea who the superintendent was, or that there was such a person in charge of the school's major operations.

Most people working in those working-class communities are just struggling to survive from day to day. They work hard, they make sure that their kids are working hard, and they want to ensure that everyone is learning. This Centinela case is much like what happened in Bell in 2010. An unscrupulous superintendent, much like city manager Robert Rizzo

After an exhaustive third-party investigation, Fernandez was fired by the school board in July 2014. He filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against the district in April 2015 alleging breach of contract, defamation, retaliation and age discrimination.

Age discrimination, too? Unbelievable! At the time, Fernandez was 54 years old! The arrogance of these public thieves is beyond incredible. Where do they get the idea that they can steal from working people, then justify such abusive behavior?!

Centinela Valley countersued a year later, alleging Fernandez fraudulently and unlawfully took money from the district and failed to disclose a personal bankruptcy.

How about two bankruptcies?!

The FBI also was reviewing the allegations at the time. Spokeswoman Laura Eimiller declined to comment Wednesday.

School board Vice President Hugo Rojas confirmed district officials learned of the arrest Wednesday afternoon, but said they were advised by legal counsel not to discuss the case. The district was preparing a press release, he said.

Of course they will be keeping their mouths shut. They should be going to jail next! They signed off on those excessive contracts without even reading or reviewing the contents of those outrageous agreements. I think that residents in the district should file lawsuits against them, at the very least, and make them pay it all back!

Fernandez’s wife answered a call to her husband’s cellphone Wednesday, telling a reporter she had no comment before hanging up.

The Los Angeles Times reported that "a woman" answered, then hung up. How about that? I wonder how complicit the wife is in all of this corruption?!

A prior attorney for Fernandez, Spencer Covert, said he is not representing him in the criminal case. An attorney for the school district did not immediately return a phone call.

If convicted, Fernandez faces up to 15 years in state prison.

He will start cutting deals, and he will testify against the corrupt contracts and members of the school board. Just you wait.

It's Bell all over again!

FIVE-YEAR PERIOD

According to a criminal complaint, the DA’s office began investigating Fernandez after it received a copy of a Daily Breeze article in February 2014 exposing his extraordinary salary and benefit compensation.

Subsequent interviews and reviews of records and documents showed that, over a five-year period, Fernandez routinely manipulated the school board and its policies to exorbitantly increase his pay and benefits, prosecutors allege.

“Fernandez’s’ frequent concealment from the board of material information largely prevented the board from discovering Fernandez’s crimes against the district,” the complaint states.

On one occasion in December 2010, Fernandez overwhelmed the school board with 3,000 revisions to bylaws and policies, burying provisions giving himself “extra days pay” and approving a $750,000 whole-life insurance policy he had already taken out for himself three months earlier, prosecutors allege.

The school board did not bother to read the regulatory revisions. Or did they purposefully ignore the fine print?

He lied to school board members, saying the changes were all standard, according to the complaint.

The only record of the $910,000 home loan that went before school board members was a copy of a check to a Santa Monica escrow company “surreptitiously” included in several pages of financial records under a consent calendar of routine items, prosecutors allege.

WHAT?! Giving out big money through consent calendar items is a common practice among these local boards--and it's happening in Huntington Park and Cudahy, too!

In 2012, Fernandez bloated his salary and retirement benefits by making last-minute changes to a retirement plan, misrepresenting its cost to the board, the complaint alleges.

“In 2013, the defendant’s wages for purposes of the retirement plan totaled more than $750,000, nearly $500,000 more than the next highest paid employee in the school district,” the District Attorney’s Office said in a press release.

Big Money for the little corrupt Superintendent, huh?!

Remember what former Bell City Manager Robert Rizzo said to his co-conspirators in the city of Bell: "Pigs get fats. Hogs get slaughtered."

Fernandez goes to jail!

“I’m just happy something’s being done,” she said. “I know there were a lot of people and mistreated employees I met while I was at the school district who had been waiting and waiting. This is justice for them.”

That number includes me.

The abusive and disrespect which I had endure as a long-term substitute teacher at Hawthorne and Lawndale High School was beyond the pale. I was falsely accused of terrible things by the students. The racism I had endured from one of the assistant principles--Angela Fajardo--was just plain despicable.

And to see how the district spent more time covering for itself and its well-connected bureaucrats was just abhorrent.

Leuzinger High School turned out to be the best school to work in. Really. I wish that more people would have seen and reacted sooner to the corruption and abuse which Fernandez and his corrupt cohorts were engaging in. The complaints which I heard from other teachers was unthinkable!

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"Bad Boy Bad Boy! Watcha gonna do when they come for you?!"

Charges filed against Jose Fernandez:

1 count: embezzlement by a public official

3 counts: misappropriation of public funds

6 counts: conflict-of-interest charges

2 counts: grand theft

Former Superintendent Jose Fernandez was fired after a 2014 investigation alleged he ...

• Sought and received pay for unused vacation, despite taking vacations.

• Manipulated his work calendar to increase his daily pay rate, getting as much as $1,520 a day.

• Used different compensation numbers: one for public disclosure that underreported his salary, and one to determine his pension and vacation pay.

• Secured benefits, including a second whole-life insurance policy, by burying them in a list of new policies that the school board approved without seeing.

• Was paid more than $770,000 in 2013, partly because he sought reimbursement for unused vacation pay and other expenses.