In this city, politics feels like Wrestlemania. Who should we cheer?

Los Angeles Times

01-05-2025

In the eternal spinning wheel that's political scandal in southeast L.A. County, the ticker is now on Huntington Park — and it looks like it'll be stuck there for a while.
The blue-collar, overwhelmingly Latino city faces a lawsuit by former Councilmember Esmeralda Castillo, who alleges she was illegally removed in February in the wake of an investigation that determined Castillo didn't live within city limits and was thus ineligible to serve. Mayor Arturo Flores is battling a recall by opponents who claim on social media he's a 'reckless alcoholic' and abuses women while offering no evidence to back up the scurrilous claims.
His predecessor, Councilmember Karina Macias, woke up on Feb. 26 to the sound of L.A. County district attorney's office investigators outside her apartment with a search warrant as part of Operation Dirty Pond. That's an investigation into a proposed $25-million aquatics center for Salt Lake Park that was first announced in 2019 but so far has nothing to show except half a football field and a fenced-off field of dirt and dying grass. Also served were Councilmember Eddie Martinez, two former council members and City Manager Ricardo Reyes and even Huntington Park City Hall, which saw yellow caution tape block off the front entrance as investigators carried out evidence.
Then there's longtime City Atty. Arnold Alvarez-Glasman, who resigned during a special council meeting in early March just two days after the Operation Dirty Pond raids. He claimed that Flores and his council allies had made his job 'unreasonably difficult.'
Is it any wonder that City Council meetings nowadays easily dissolve into even more municipal desmadre?
While malfeasance in politics happens in all parts of Southern California, the level of skulduggery, and sometimes outright thievery, by council members in southeast L.A. County cities over the past three decades has made this area's politics infamous. There was South Gate, where former Mayor and Treasurer Albert Robles was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison in 2006 on corruption charges and an elderly council member survived a gunshot wound to the head in a case that was never solved. Bell, where five former council members and two city staffers were convicted in the mid-2010s of fleecing residents for decades.
It's local politics as Wrestlemania.
Huntington Park was supposed to be different, a city where a new generation of politicians who helped to take out the previous baddies repeatedly reassured the public they would break the corruption cycle. That's what they told me last year, when I did a series on the history of Latino politics in Los Angeles.
Well, here we are.
At the April 7 meeting, Flores bragged that he wore Macias' vote against him to succeed her as mayor 'like a badge of honor because I definitely do not want [her] support,' which the audience reacted to with groans and mutters of 'Oh, God.'
A few weeks later, as Nancy Martiz was being sworn in to fill Castillo's former seat Macias focused on her cellphone like someone waiting for an Uber ride.
'Your background is just corruption,' Rudy Cruz told the council at the April 7 meeting during the public comments section. 'It's like oysters to a rock. It's hard to get them off.'
Afterward, I asked him if he thought Flores' ascension represented a fresh start for Huntington Park. The 48-year resident laughed.
'There's others, waiting like vultures for an animal to die,' Cruz replied. 'Here [in Huntington Park], the immoral becomes moral, the illegal becomes legal.'
I interviewed Flores and Macias at the site of their choice to size them up and decide who came off as truthful and who was full of it. The loquacious Flores, a self-admitted 'peleonero' — a fighter — who's serving his first full term, showed up to Salt Lake Park in a Carhartt jacket embroidered with the city seal and his name. Macias, calm and dressed in a modest black blouse and jeans, picked a Mexican ice cream shop where she slowly enjoyed a scoop of rocky road inside a waffle cone.
Both are children of Mexican immigrants who grew up in blue-collar neighborhoods — Flores in South L.A., Macias in Huntington Park. They have worked in jobs that require selflessness and attention to detail — Flores was a Marine bomb dog trainer with tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, while Macias became a full-time caretaker for her parents. They were former political allies who previously worked on political campaigns for Efren Martinez, the southeast L.A. County power broker who lost an Assembly race last year and whose residence and consulting business were also searched as part of Operation Dirty Pond.
'This is the Karina Macias legacy, you know?' the 36-year-old Flores told me as we walked around Salt Lake Park. People jogged around the fenced-off lot, which was once a skating park. 'It's a failed pool project riddled with inconsistencies, riddled with questionable acts and questions of legality and incompetence.'
'They're [Flores and his allies] putting a gray, dark cloud on something that can change the lives of the community,' Macias, 38, replied when I shared his thoughts. She has sat on the City Council since 2013. 'There was no wrongdoing or things being hidden or money misspent or being stolen. What he's saying, there's nothing of that, you know?'
Both used 'You know?' a lot in our conversations, like any typical Latino Angeleno. Both claim the 'community' is behind them and welcomed any and all scrutiny.
'I'm not panicking, you know what I'm saying?' the 36-year-old Flores boasted. 'I'm cool like a cucumber.'
'If you don't have enemies, then you're not pushing the buttons or trying to do good for the community,' Macias, 38, offered with a hint of pride.
This isn't her first brush with scandal. In 2017, the D.A. investigated and ultimately cleared her for raising money for an Efren Martinez Assembly campaign from companies that sought to do business with Huntington Park.
This time around, Macias presented me with a folder of documents that included a timeline of the Salt Lake Park aquatic center complete with all the council votes in its favor, including a 2023 motion that gave Huntington Park's city manager the authority to execute all contracts associated with the project. Among the yes votes then? Flores.
'The mayor decided just to make something out of nothing because he's known about the project since the time that he started,' Macias said matter-of-factly. Later on, as we walked down Pacific Avenue and she handed me her business card, she noticed it was out of date.
'It still says mayor,' Macias said, a small smile on her face. 'Don't tell the mayor.'
Flores handed me no documents, but something perhaps more powerful: a confessional.
After working in L.A. County politics for a decade, including serving as a body man for Antonio Villaraigosa during his failed gubernatorial campaign, Flores moved to Huntington Park in 2018.
'I'm not going to say there wasn't a political ambition there,' he admitted.
He helped on the successful 2020 City Council campaigns for Eddie Martinez, Graciela Ortiz, and Marilyn Sanabria; the latter two also saw their residences searched as part of Operation Dirty Pond. Flores said they and Macias initially sold him on the Salt Lake Park pool project.
'I felt inspired. I thought it was a beautiful thing,' he said. 'I'm like, 'This is what we need. Latinos need this.' Why can't we have nice things in our communities, right?'
They told him that criticism by watchdogs were just 'los haters.' But Flores said his perspective changed once he was appointed to the City Council in 2022 and he went to City Hall during a rainstorm.
'The staff had 30-gallon trash cans filled up with water. There's mold on the walls. The roofs are leaking. I went to the city manager's office and I said, 'Hey, like, you know, excuse my French, but what the f—'s going on here?''
The subsequent fire hose of allegations he unleashed during our hourlong chat seemed haphazard compared to Macias' measured responses. Humblebrags by Flores like 'Every time that they've tried to maneuver against me, they're met with an insurmountable reaction because I've already anticipated that that's their tactics' sounded like the words of someone asking to be hoisted by their proverbial petard.
But Macias did herself no favors when she insisted Efren Martinez had 'zero involvement with' the Salt Lake Park pool project. One of the clients he listed on campaign disclosure forms for his failed 2020 Assembly race was the construction company whose owners saw their residence searched for Operation Dirty Pond as well.
Flores and Macias were both pleasant unless the subject was each other. They struck me as earnest about improving Huntington Park and confident they're innocent of what opponents claim about them.
But one of them has to be wrong, right?
As a tiebreaker, I called up former Assemblymember Hector De La Torre, who entered politics a quarter century ago to help cleanse his hometown of South Gate. He's now executive director of the Gateway Cities Council of Governments, which advocates for 27 cities stretching from Montebello to Long Beach to Cerritos and all the southeast L.A. County cities, and has worked with Flores and Macias in that capacity.
De La Torre praised both of them for their 'dedication' to better Huntington Park, and urged they let Operation Dirty Pond investigators do their job. But in a wearied tone, he told me 'in SELA, sometimes it isn't about someone getting rid of corruption and cleaning up the city.' (SELA is the nickname for southeast L.A. County.)
'Sometimes, it's two different factions, both as shady as the other,' he said. 'And the swings are not from corruption to good government; they're from one type of corruption to the other.'