Prosecutors rest their public corruption case against L.A. City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas
Prosecutors rest their public corruption case against L.A. City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas
An FBI agent's testimony introduced as evidence two emails regarding now-Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass' USC scholarship when she was in the U.S. House.
Jurors in the public corruption trial of longtime Los Angeles politician Mark Ridley-Thomas likely know by now that his alleged co-conspirator is prone to typos when emailing.
On Thursday, Ridley-Thomas’ lawyer pointed to that sloppiness as an explanation for an email that an FBI agent called “black and white” proof of a bribery scheme.
Is it possible that Marilyn Flynn, the longtime dean of the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work, meant to say a scholarship was “from” the school’s budget, not “for” the budget? asked Daralyn Durie, a partner with Morrison & Foerster LLP.
No, answered FBI Special Agent Brian Adkins, because the email chain centers on USC employees discussing “how to get money into the school.”
Why would Flynn suggest they “push money out of the school by giving scholarships? It just, it doesn’t make sense,” Adkins testified.
The June 2017 email is key evidence in Ridley-Thomas’ federal criminal indictment, which alleges he steered lucrative Los Angeles County contracts to Flynn’s school in exchange for Flynn securing a USC scholarship and professorship for his son Sebastian Ridley-Thomas. Flynn sent the email to Mark Todd, a USC vice provost, explaining that Sebastian planned to enroll for his master’s degree and she was “going to make it a joint degree.”
“I did the same for Karen Bass — full scholarship for our funds,” Flynn wrote, referring to the now-mayor of Los Angeles, who was a U.S. representative from 2011 to 2022.
With the email displayed for jurors, Durie on Thursday asked Adkins in a skeptical tone if he interpreted Flynn’s statement as “an illegal conspiracy.”
“It lays it out, black and white,” answered Adkins. He said the email “speaks for itself.”
Bass’ scholarship — offered in 2011 — and its connections to Ridley-Thomas’ case became an issue in the mayoral election last year after a Sept. 7 Los Angeles Times article detailed the email that was displayed in court on Thursday and mentioned again on Friday.
Adkins said Friday that he took “additional investigative steps” after seeing the email.
“As a result of this email, we issued additional subpoenas, and from that subpoena we learned that, in the past, Dean Marilyn Flynn had provided Karen Bass a full scholarship and about that time —” Adkins testified before being cut off by an objection from Durie.
Adkins never finished, but prosecutors said in pre-trial filings last year that Flynn was hoping to secure more funding for her school through legislation that would allow private universities such as USC “to receive matching grants for certain types of social work services.” The Times reported that the description “tracks closely with the Child Welfare Workforce Partnership Act, which Bass sponsored in 2014. That bill sought to allow private universities like USC to obtain the same federal reimbursement to train social workers that public universities can.”
After U.S. District Judge Dale Fischer sustained Durie’s objection on Friday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Lindsey Greer Dotson told Adkins to limit his testimony to the email. Adkins then said something about Flynn “trying to curry favor with Karen Bass vis-à-vis government funds,” but was again cut off by a defense objection.
Dotson had opened Friday’s line of questioning by asking Adkins about Durie’s suggestion in cross that Flynn mistakenly typed the scholarships were “for” her school’s budget instead of “from.” She was trying to refute Durie’s suggestion that Adkins jumped to conclusions in his investigation into Ridley-Thomas: She asked if Adkins concluded “Karen Bass must’ve been corrupt” based on the email, and he answered no, that he’d taken “additional investigative steps as a result of this email.”
“Was Karen Bass ever charged vis-à-vis this email?” Dotson asked.
“No,” Adkins answered.
Jurors also saw an email Flynn wrote on May 24, 2017, in which she said regarding Sebastian, “I intend to open every door for him, just as I did with Karen.”
Flynn and Ridley-Thomas were charged in a federal indictment issued in October 2021. Flynn, 83, pleaded guilty to a felony bribery charge last September but will not testify against Ridley-Thomas. Prosecutors have said they’ll recommend she be ordered to pay a $100,000 fine. Judge Fischer has allowed her to travel internationally while awaiting sentencing, currently scheduled for June 26.
Ridley-Thomas, 68, likely faces a stiffer sentence if convicted of any of his 19 federal felonies. He’s been suspended from the Los Angeles City Council since shortly after his indictment; the alleged crimes occurred when he was an elected member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.
The evidence in trial includes a trove of emails and documents, foremost being a letter Flynn wrote Ridley-Thomas that chronicles their agreement and was hand-delivered to his office in a sealed envelope.
USC whistleblower testifies about $100,000 payment
In addition to contracts regarding county probation and the TeleHealth mental health and counseling network, Flynn and Ridley-Thomas’ alleged scheme involved $100,000 in campaign money that Ridley-Thomas sent to USC.
Under their alleged quid pro quo agreement, Flynn had the money sent to United Ways of California to benefit a policy initiative Sebastian started in the wake of his resignation from the California State Assembly. A statehouse sexual harassment investigation into Sebastian hadn’t yet been made public, and prosecutors allege his father was trying to protect both their legacies by securing him a respectable landing position.
The $100,000 payment caught the attention of USC School of Social Services programs administrator Michele Clark, whom Dotson called “the whistleblower in this case.”
Clark testified on Tuesday, describing how she discovered a suspicious exchange between Flynn and Ridley-Thomas, then contacted USC professor John Clapp. Clapp helped initiate an internal investigation that grew into a criminal referral to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Emails establish that Flynn directed Clark to enroll Sebastian in the School of Social Work shortly after Ridley-Thomas emailed her saying that John Sherin, then the director of the Los Angeles County Department Mental Health, was “ready to go!” with a smiley face emoji.
Sherin’s support was crucial for a proposal for a partnership between Flynn’s school and LA County, which prosecutors say was part of the alleged quid pro quo agreement between Flynn and Ridley-Thomas. With Ridley-Thomas’ confirmation that he was now on board, Flynn emailed two USC employees and directed them to prioritize Sebastian’s job and “tap our endowed funds” if needed. She said in a later email, “I think in the interest of showing MRT that we can deliver, it would be provident to get the offer letter out before the holidays.”
‘I speak with authority from on high’
Flynn showed the same urgency regarding Ridley-Thomas’ $100,000 payment five months later, with Clark testifying about the dean’s efforts to rush the check to United Way on May 4, 2018, in order to fund a directorship salary for Sebastian’s new endeavor, the Policy, Research & Practice Initiative.
Clark testified that at the time, she didn’t know the money had come from Ridley-Thomas’ campaign account, nor did she know that Ridley-Thomas had emailed Flynn at 10:20 p.m. the night before saying, “At this point it is necessary to act with all dispatch” to facilitate the United Way-funded hiring “in a timely manner.” After Flynn told him the next day that she’d started processing the payment, Ridley-Thomas wrote, “I repeat: You’re the best!!!”
“Shall I restate my assertion about you or do you now believe that I speak with authority from on high?” Ridley-Thomas wrote.
On Tuesday, Clark testified that she noticed Ridley-Thomas’ involvement when she went back through correspondence “mostly” to review multiple spellings of United Way or United Ways of California.
“I started to become concerned about particularly whether this was a direct violation of university policy,” Clark said.
In cross-examination, Durie showed Clark emails from 2014 in which USC employees worry about a probation office relocating near the USC campus and suggested involving Ridley-Thomas.
It’s part of the defense narrative that Ridley-Thomas’ support for the probation department partnership with USC and the TeleHealth contract was driven only by his longtime policy agenda.
Durie also tried to press Clark about her belief Sebastian was “under-qualified” for his professorship and her statement that she had better teaching credentials than him. Durie asked if Clark knew Sebastian had been elected to the State Assembly “before he was 30” and had sponsored hundreds of bills.
She also asked Clark if “at some point your relationship began to sour” with Flynn, but Clark said she doesn’t “think that’s a fair characterization.” Clark acknowledged she worked in a fast-paced and challenging environment, and she said her workload had increased over the years as she dealt with deadlines from Flynn she deemed unrealistic and observed strategic missions she didn't believe were wise.
“Did you refer to some of her strategic missions as ‘death missions’?” Durie asked.
“I did,” Clark asked.
Dotson followed up in re-direct by asking Clark if she was bitter enough against Flynn that she would lie under oath simply to tarnish her. Clark answered no.
‘It felt like it had to get done’
Clark was followed on the witness stand by Adriana Gonzalez, who dealt directly with the $100,000 payment to United Way while a secretary in Flynn’s office. She was working on May 4, 2018, when Flynn urgently asked her to send $100,000 to United Way by the end of the day. Gonzalez described her relationship with the dean as “distant” — she didn’t get her direct assignments from her, but Flynn contacted her directly about the United Way payment.
“There was a lot of urgency around this check. It felt like it had to get done,” Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez testified about receiving frequent questions from Flynn regarding the status of the payment. She’d chronicled her efforts throughout the day in emails Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Morse displayed for the jury, testifying that she did so because she wanted to make sure her bosses knew “I was actually doing my job that they were asking me to do.” She said when she went home for the weekend with the transaction not yet complete, “I couldn’t sleep.”
The payment eventually went through, and United Way extended the job offer to Zeneta Smith for Sebastian’s new Policy, Research & Practice Initiative.
The job funding was rescinded shortly after USC officials requested the money back and met with federal investigators. Flynn also left her deanship around that time.
‘Message from Mark Ridley-Thomas. Please confirm receipt’
Prosecutors rested their case Friday afternoon after calling United Way CEO Pete Manzo as their final witness.
Manzo’s testimony focused on his interactions with Ridley-Thomas regarding the $100,000 payment, with Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Rybarczyk displaying an email Ridley-Thomas wrote on May 4, 2018, with the subject: “Message from Mark Ridley-Thomas. Please confirm receipt.” The men had never met, but Ridley-Thomas was interested in United Way’s $100,000 payment for his son’s initiative.
Rybarczyk also played a voicemail Ridley-Thomas left for Manzo in which he said his issue was “time sensitive,” as well as two voicemails Flynn left Manzo about the payment in which she asked how the transaction and job offer could be expedited “As quickly as possible.”
(It was established in testimony that Manzo only listened to the second voicemail Thursday night. It sat as an attachment in his email, unopened, all this time — nearly five years — until Thursday. Prosecutors apparently asked him to dig it out after noticing a line in an email from Flynn in which she references a second voicemail.)
In a somewhat ironic twist, Manzo was actually on jury duty that day, and the judge was requiring him to turn off his electronics. He explained that to Ridley-Thomas in an email when telling him his availability was limited.
Manzo’s testimony ended with him going over how a USC employee contacted him in July 2018 asking for the $100,000 payment to be returned. He forwarded the request to Sebastian, who did what prosecutors have established was custom for him with emails regarding his USC issues and his new policy initiative: He forwarded the message to his father.
Ridley-Thomas’ attorneys are to begin calling witnesses on Tuesday.