The article that ran in the Sept. 16 issue of the Los Angeles Times about Mark Ridley-Thomas was a crime that had Bernard Parks’ DNA all over it. Having already identified the guilty culprit, I now want to examine the scene and determine just how complicit The Times was in the commission of that crime.

Immediately upon reading investigative reporter Paul Pringle’s story, appearing under the headline, “Ridley-Thomas ties under scrutiny,” Damien Goodmon, South L.A.’s own young hot and getting hotter investigative activist/reporter, took serious exception to it and fired off an e-mail to Pringle taking him and The Times to task for the lies and innuendoes written about Mark’s supposed ties to the Expo Line, a subject Damien knows better than anybody. Damien sent me an e-mail shortly thereafter stating that Pringle had called him and, after providing some excuses for the story he wrote about Mark, Pringle finally stated he was not sure whether the federal investigation [of “Ridley-Thomas ties”] was even active and that as far as he knew, only questions had been raised by the agencies.
Given the headline above Pringle’s story, this was a damning admission and a crucial point in any rebuttal I would write. So, I e-mailed Pringle and asked him if he had, indeed, said that to Damien. Pringle did not answer my question. Instead, his e-mailed response was as follows: “I pointed out to [Goodmon] that my story dealt strictly with the federal inquiries, that I could offer no information about any investigation beyond what I reported in the story, and that the federal authorities and Supervisor Ridley-Thomas had declined to comment.”

Well now. Let us examine the information about the investigation Pringle reported in his story: Pringle names no one as a “source” throughout his longish story except Parks, the vindictive rival Ridley-Thomas trounced in his run for county supervisor. Attribution throughout Pringle’s piece is constantly rendered as “sources say” while Parks is reported by name as having “urged local and federal officials to investigate any links between [Mark] and ...,” of having given investigators the names of people to be interviewed (meaning Parks, and only Parks, supplied investigators’ rat finks and Pringle’s “sources”) and of “alleging” with his own mouth that Ridley-Thomas’ supporters used Anthony Thigpenn’s SCOPE building during the supervisorial race. Pringle tried to smear Thigpenn, the Black community’s premier grassroots organizer whom Parks has tried to crush for years. Pringle worked on the bulk of his story for a year, and he got nowhere. He started in September 2008 with accusations from Parks against Mark and he ended in September 2009 with nothing more than that.

Along the way, Pringle added attorney Cynthia McClain-Hill, one of our shining stars, to his mess. Cynthia is one of our most beloved, respected, accomplished and sought-after professionals. And Pringle tried to kill her! Pringle insinuated criminal activity on Cynthia’s part by his gratuitous statement, to wit: “No charges have been brought against Ridley-Thomas or the associate Cynthia McClain-Hill, and federal officials declined to comment.” Charges?! No named or anonymous source in Pringle’s story — not even Parks, himself — asserted that she had done anything wrong or improper, let alone criminal! Pringle tried to connect Cynthia to Mark with fasteners that didn’t fit and used her to advance whatever points he was trying to make against the supervisor.

For example, Pringle wrote that McClain-Hill was awarded an Expo Line contract “after Ridley-Thomas asked during a public meeting whether the [current] contract should be canceled” as opposed to citing the unanimous board vote that supported her being hired. Pringle implied that Mark had something to do with her getting the Expo contract, when in fact, a move was afoot to hire her months before Ridley-Thomas got on the Board of Supervisors, and that move was precipitated by former Supervisor Yvonne Burke, who publicly lamented the fact that there were no African-American contractors involved in the Expo Line.

Pringle wrote that Cynthia’s “ties with Ridley-Thomas have financially benefited her firm over the years” citing $140,000 that her firm, Strategic Counsel, received from the African American Voter REP Project from 2005 to 2007. That’s a bold face lie. That money was salary payments for a Strategic Counsel attorney who left the firm to head the AAVREP. Cynthia left the man on her payroll so he could retain health insurance for himself and his family, but the money to pay him came from AAVREP and was perfectly legal. Cynthia’s firm didn’t make a dime off AAVREP. McClain-Hill said she explained all this to Pringle but he didn’t write a word about it.

Know what else he didn’t write about? The Expo Authority, of which Parks is a member, did not start asking questions about consultants until after Mark was elected supervisor and he started asking questions of his own, and it was revealed that one consultant, Adrienne Gardner of GCTech Inc., has reportedly been paid more than $1 million in fees for her community outreach and related work for the Expo Authority. Gardner is reportedly close to Parks. The Times neglected to examine that relationship in Pringle’s story. Pringle spends six weeks probing McClain-Hill for signs of wrongdoing where there were none, while a consultant favored by Parks earns more than $1 million and no one at The Times raises an eyebrow. What’s wrong with this picture?

And then the Times and Pringle insist on tying Mark to disgraced labor leader Tyrone Freeman because he ran a union local that was part of a labor coalition which raised millions of dollars as an independent committee to support Mark’s supervisorial bid. Pringle writes that Freeman’s SEIU local “was a major contributor to the coalition,” but fails to mention that the most major contributor to that coalition were the various well-heeled and politically savvy law enforcement unions whose members hate Bernard Parks more than any living creature on earth and who were hell-bent on keeping him off the Board of Supervisors.

Contributions from Freeman’s one little local were a drop in the bucket compared to the contributions from unions of all kinds of cops, sheriff’s deputies, probation officers, teachers, secretaries, administrators, janitors, etc. and the American Federation of Labor as a whole. If, as Pringle wrote, “The sources say investigators have been questioning people about the coalition,” then they must be questioning a whole lot of cops.

Why would a major metropolitan newspaper use as its only source in an exposé wannabe a vindictive, severely beaten politician who is known by the media-dubbed pejorative “Bitter Bernie” and his equally evil operatives — most of whom are his family members? Why? Because they like him. The Chicago-based Los Angeles Times endorsed Parks against Ridley-Thomas twice — another fact Pringle failed to mention in his story. Instead, the Times runs the story as if Parks was some innocent do-gooder or impartial whistle-blower and not the defeated candidate with an axe to grind that he pathetically is.

In conclusion, let me present this particularly telling piece of evidence of The Times’ complicity with Parks in this crime: The Times has not published any of the letters to the editor sent to the paper by irate readers who expressed feelings ranging from perplexity to outrage over Pringle’s story that smears one of the few politicians in this region who are doing anything to benefit the people. I know The Times received letters because some of the writers sent me copies of them, yet not a single one has appeared in The Times. The general consensus among the letter writers, e-mailers and phone callers is that they are mad as hell that The Times would seek to destroy an effective public servant with a story about a cooked-up Expo Line inquiry and a supposed probe that is not only unconfirmed, but baseless, a circumstance that Pringle accepts, since his story does not venture a hypothesis — backed up by even his unnamed sources — as to what the basis for any probe might be!

It comes down to the fact that this inquiry, this scrutiny, this probe — which Pringle acknowledges may not exist at all — is nothing more than a series of questions being asked and promulgated by … wait, let me think … here it comes: Bernard Parks! Even though I have several other issues I can examine at this crime scene, there are other matters in The Southland that require my attention, so I’m done with this one for now. Unless I’m provoked.