Politicians can be super sneaky when they want something done! There are several government officials in California that were arrested; the former mayor included. These political figures would bribe others to vote in support of weed shops. And the amounts that they were offering are crazy. Hit the jump to find out.
LOS ANGELES — If someone wanted to do business in the small Southern California city of Cudahy, federal prosecutors say one-time city manager Angel Perales had some advice.
“Money makes the monkey dance,” Perales told an FBI informant, according to court documents.
Perales, Mayor David Silva and Councilman Osvaldo Conde were arrested Friday and charged with soliciting and accepting cash bribes totaling $17,000 to support the opening of a medical marijuana dispensary. If convicted of a bribery charge, they each face up to 10 years in prison.
The three officials were in court Friday afternoon for bail hearings. Silva and Perales were released on $50,000 appearance bonds. Conde was released on $100,000 bond.
It wasn’t immediately known if they had retained attorneys.
Court documents laid out the scheme to approve a pot shop in exchange for cash and also portrayed the suburb of 25,000 as a virtual den of iniquities where drug use, voter fraud and illicit sex permeated City Hall.
The arrests are the latest in a series of corruption scandals plaguing small cities south of Los Angeles. Most notable were the 2010 arrests of the former city manager and several other officials from neighboring Bell, who are accused of misappropriating funds to overpay themselves.
Federal prosecutors said in an affidavit that after weeks of soliciting bribes, Conde, Perales and Silva accepted $15,000 in February from an FBI informant who formerly owned a medical marijuana shop in a nearby city.
Conde later met with the informant and received $2,000, court documents show. The informant estimated the dispensary could generate up to $2.5 million within a year.
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