Politics
JA S O N M C G A H A N
The Case of the Crooked Councilman
CONNECTED AND CHARISMATIC, JOSÉ HUIZAR BECAME ONE OF THE CITY’S MOST POWERFUL POLITICOS. NOW HE’S EMBROILED IN THE WORST CORRUPTION SCANDAL IN ALMOST A CENTURY
the Korean Air chairman wasn’t Huiin June 2017, hundreds zar’s only foreign fan. The councilman of Los Angeles grandees was equally popular with Chinese depacked together downvelopers who were building skyscrapers town to salute the latest downtown. In 2009, after the Chinese addition to the city’s skyline—a billiongovernment loosened restrictions on dollar behemoth with a soaring glass outside investments, mainland Chinese crown that lit up like a futuristic pedireal estate speculators lined up to put ment. The Wilshire Grand Center had their stamp on the L.A. skyline, pumping opened to great fanfare. Yang-ho Cho, billions of dollars into landmark projects the chairman of Korean Air, had perin the city’s reviving urban core. sonally overseen the construction of the Between 2014 and 2016, two out of evnew building, which housed the airline’s ery five land deals closed in downtown North American headL.A. were financed by quarters. Rising 1,100 Chinese investors, genfeet, it was the tallest erating headlines like building in the western the one in The Real Deal Reelected by United States. Among that asked, “Is L.A. the increasingly the boldface names and New Shanghai?” corporate chieftains who Thanks to a fractious wide margins, addressed the crowd political culture and a he loved was a politician most of laundry list of cumberthem had never heard some regulations, Los the trappings of—a then-48-year-old Angeles has long been a of power. Los Angeles City Counnotoriously tough city for cilman named José Huiinternational developers zar, who represented the to crack. The Chinese had Eastside and downtown. all the money the market In a frothy speech the councilman toastcould absorb, but little know-how. Huied the mammoth project as a “true testazar was happy to lend a hand. ment to downtown Los Angeles’s bright Huizar was not only the council disfuture and vibrant culture … a building trict representative for downtown L.A.; that shines beautiful light—literally and he was also the chairman of the Planfiguratively—on our entire city.” Cho, ning and Land Use Management Comwho flew in from Seoul for the occasion, mittee, the powerful panel that reviews stood next to him, nodding and beaming. the city’s biggest development projects. As would soon become apparent, A former Huizar staffer says the coun40 L A M AG . C O M
cilman recognized two things about the Chinese: first, they didn’t know how things were supposed to work in America; second, they were used to how things worked in China, where bribing government officials was viewed as a normal part of business. Huizar thought he could be helpful on both counts. It is an unwritten rule of Los Angeles real estate that a council district is a fiefdom and a councilmember its lord, which made Huizar, a son of Mexican laborers, an improbable Medici of the downtown renaissance—a powerhouse at the center of the city’s greatest construction boom since the roaring twenties. A N I V Y L E A G U E - E D U C AT E D real estate lawyer with a dimpled smile and a weakness for pricey suits, Huizar, 51, comes off in person like an affable urban planner. But his smooth charm belies a hardscrabble childhood. When Huizar was four years old, his father, a seasonal laborer, resettled the family from a small village in Zacatecas, Mexico, to the Eastside barrio of Boyle Heights. As a child, José lived with several brothers and sisters in a tiny stucco home beside the 4th Street Bridge, a five-minute drive from City Hall. People who knew Huizar then describe him as ambitious and impulsive. As a boy in the early 1980s, he would ride his bike through the neighborhood’s run-down warehouses and artist squats to deliver Japanese-language
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