‘Leader’ finally covers the Ramos deposition

After about two weeks of trying to avoid the issue, the Leader has finally come around to mentioning that Marsha Ramos nailed the city last month about their unwillingness to address possible discrimination issues within the BPD, at least on what the lawyer’s like to call a “timely basis.”

In a related interview, Ramos doesn’t name names, although we wish she would. We’re not sure if we buy her contention either that the council was kept in the dark about these long-simmering matters, and it would have been nice to see some comments from Golonski and the others about what they knew and when they knew it.

As a longtime civic activist and member of the Burbank Human Relations Council, Ramos should have known that there was much more she could do than just wring her hands at all the bad ethnic news. There are attorneys she could have talked to and other agencies she could have tipped off.

Today’s article doesn’t add much, and her new interview was a missed opportunity. It seems she’s more concerned now about people blaming her for being co-responsible for the mess rather than using the interview as a chance to spill the beans on her old “staff.”

She obviously has more to say, because we’ve heard that she’s been interviewed by at least one of the outside agencies, and that her comments on the Barlow bunch are not good. There’s also word– unconfirmed at this time– that the FBI has been branching out well beyond the Portos robbery in their questioning of BPD principals and others. We mentioned a few months ago that the DAs had walked out of a scheduled hearing on the long-delayed Pavelka case, which they were all prepared to begin, and that they did so right after they heard about these outside investigations.

The city’s Debra Wong Yang was deeply involved in that case a few years ago when it was part of the related North Hollywood gang mess. Considering that she’s not at all popular in Justice these days because of her bailing out on the Congressional corruption scandal, she seems a likely target for federal scrutiny if there were problems in that joint-effort. If Portos-type behavior was also part of the Pavelka investigation, or North Hollywood, and the FBI has gotten wind of it, then Wong Yang is of no help to Burbank.

She’s more of a liability, and considering that Gibson Dunn is also about as popular in the Justice Department these days ideologically as an impacted wisdom tooth, what was Burbank thinking of by hiring her? (There’s more about Wong Yang here and here). There are career attorneys in Justice who would love to go after her for her sleazy sellout a few years ago that torpedoed one of their biggest and most notorious prosecutions, and Burbank may give them the perfect excuse to do so now. She sounds like a million-dollar lightning rod, honestly, standing smack dab at ground zero. And Washington’s already gotten involved in this current BPD case, too.

Something big is going on, much bigger than Portos.