Gary Bric lies, and the Portos robbery revealed (and update)

We almost fell out of our Starbucks chair this morning when we read some of Mayor Gary Bric’s evasive comments in a page four L.A. Times story about how the FBI is investigating the Burbank Police Department.

Bric casually mentioned that the city had already commenced investigations before these discrimination lawsuits were filed, thank goodness, and that they had also been the ones who requested the Sheriff’s Department come in and investigate the department because they were just so concerned about things…

Both these published comments are mighty disingenuous, and don’t tell anything close to the whole story. We’re still trying to sort it out for ourselves. But it’s a clear lie for anyone in the Burbank hierarchy to claim or imply that any formal outside personnel investigations were begun before these pesky little lawsuits were filed by the officers. While there may have been a captain or two looking in on some of the employee complaints (only to whitewash them out of existence) any formal outside investigations in this area commenced only fairly recently.

And there’s actually two different problems going on within the BPD, and they only dovetail with each other. The new employee discrimination lawsuits have nothing to do with the recent accusations of misconduct that have been levied against the department, even though some of the filings may cite these incidents as corollary evidence to their specific claims of employer wrongdoing. The outside agencies like the FBI are not investigating any of these discrimination claims, because that’s not what they are about.

So Bric is clouding the issue to make it appear as if Burbank has been on top of all the employee discrimination problems. That’s not true– the earlier outside investigations are not about this issue and are even worse.

Where the personal lawsuits come in right now is that they have publically revealed these other misconduct allegations. But don’t confuse the two. And to our knowledge, Bric lies again when he claims that the Sheriff’s Department was somehow invited in by a contrite Burbank city in order to sort out these little misunderstandings. That’s not what happened at all.

The reason why the LASO came in was because of a serious robbery down at Portos. That’s right, the fantastically lucrative Portos Bakery was robbed here in Burbank a few years ago, and you never heard about it in our little local newspaper, as far as we can detect. This Portos crime was big news to us when we first heard about it awhile back, and apparently there might have been a good reason to keep it all quiet, because it has turned out to be more than just a simple robbery.

We’re trying to get a line on just what happened, but apparently for now, the Sheriff’s investigators happened upon Burbank police misconduct in the course of their findings, and then others called in the FBI, which is why the federal agency got involved. And things branched out from there, as they often do.

The linchpin in all of this is Portos. We understand the DA’s office placed this robbery case within their organized crime division for investigation, but we’re not sure if this means possible gang participation, or whether the DA thinks the city itself is the organization that conspired to do something wrong.

Either way, it was Portos that dragged in both the FBI eventually and the Sheriff’s Office, not Gary Bric or anyone else in the city on their conscientious own, and then things got very complicated and out of hand. And we’re wondering just what the city’s motive was to get the Sheriff’s Department involved later on, especially after they started having personnel problems with some of the officers who were attached to the case. It looks like reprisal to us– another set up.

Don’t forget, the Portos robbery was two years ago, and the Sheriff’s have just completed their investigation, so they were called in only recently. Why the wait? We have a theory: in the intervening time, several of the cops involved in the robbery case have been very vocal troublemakers for the department. So what better way of getting them out of the way but for the BPD bosses to invite in the LASO, feed them misleading information, and then nail some employees who– coincidentally– might have just filed serious discrimination lawsuits against you a few months ago…

More soon on details of the Portos robbery, and how this mess got started. It’s not pretty, but not too surprising either to us Burbank natives.

LOL time: we got a kick out of the Times article today claiming that the Leader broke the FBI story. Right. It was actually Fronnie’s blog that revealed the FBI involvement a few months ago, as far as we can tell. It was about the same time that the managing editor of the Leader was giggling on Twitter about his chips and dip get together with Dennis Barlow down at the Mall– right before Barlow passed them ex-BPD employee Christopher Dunn’s confidential personnel file.

If anyone can cite a Leader news story about the FBI from the recent past, or especially the Portos robbery, please let us know. We can’t find one.

**UPDATE **

We might have helped to create some confusion here, so let’s clarify the timeline as to what went on at Portos. There was a gang-related, inside-job takeover robbery at Portos two years ago. During the course of the investigation there were incidents of excessive force, allegedly. Officers reported these, an internal investigation conducted at the time by the BPD whitewashed blame, and nothing more was heard of Portos until both Chief Stehr and Julie Scott suddenly decided to reopen the case this year.

But some of the individuals involved with the Portos case had also been filing discrimination complaints over the last two years. To help bolster their internal investigation, the BPD also called in the Sheriff’s Office to do their own review–an extremely rare event for Burbank. The big question is, why now and why the Sheriff’s Office after all this time? And why is Mayor Bric and the others trying to pawn this LASO investigation off as being somehow connected to the other big newsworthy complaints, when it is clearly a very separate and limited situation?

Is there an internal agenda here, one of evasiveness? What is the city doing about its response to the employee discrimination complaints? They are not the same problem. And is the mayor and the city council aware of the possibility that this is all part of a higher-lever BPD cover up, that involves the city attorney’s office as well, that has them soliciting this complaint to the LASO and cherrypicking evidence and testimony for no other reason but to discredit the complainers?