DA’s Liaisons Threaten His Political Career

A scandal of devastating proportion is on the verge of descending on the San Bernardino County district attorney’s office, one that could sweep district attorney Mike Ramos from office and effectively end his political career.
Caught up in the scandal are at least a half dozen district attorney’s office employees, a trainer with the state’s district attorney’s association described as Ramos’s current mistress, a former deputy district attorney who is the wife of a county superior court judge, and the San Bernardino County public defender.
Although disparate elements of the scandal have been known for years to the county’s highest ranking officials - members of the board of supervisors, the county’s chief administrative officer, county counsel, the sheriff and senior and other members of the district attorney’s office - recent events have transpired to bring into comprehensive focus the scope and depth of the way in which Ramos has not only left himself open for blackmail and limited his office’s prosecutorial range but created a multitude of potential liabilities for county taxpayers.
Since coming into office in 2003 Ramos has proven reckless in his personal comportment, utilizing his position to forge dozens of liaisons with women, including deputy prosecutors and other staff members working for his office, as well as other county employees.
While in some of those circumstances he exercised a measure of discretion, in others, including ones where alcohol was involved, his involvement with women other than his wife became notorious.
Moreover, while most involved consensual intimacy, others involved unwanted sexual advances that have reportedly resulted in either complaints or threats of action based upon sexual harassment.
In some cases, it has been alleged, the untoward relationships resulted in a few of the district attorney’s paramours being promoted not on the basis of merit but on the dubious grounds of their sexual involvement with their boss.
His relationship with an official with the California District Attorney’s Association has resulted in him making frequent and what some have characterized as unnecessary and unjustifiable sojourns to Sacramento funded by taxpayers so he can engage in illicit trysts.
In what many consider to be the most egregious case, Ramos, as head of the district attorney’s office, was carrying on with his counterpart in the county’s public defender’s office, a circumstance that has compromised the integrity of both offices.
Two dossiers on Ramos’ relationships with nearly a score of women was opened by elements within the sheriff’s department. The first dossier was part of what was formerly known as the department’s red card file, that is, the material kept on the county’s most prominent individuals by the department’s intelligence division in conjunction with the detectives attached to the sheriff’s executive staff. Instead of being recorded on red cards and warehoused in a file cabinet as was the practice during the era when Frank Bland was sheriff, that information is now reposited in computer files. Much of that information made its way to a separate compendium kept by the sheriff’s deputies’ union, the Sheriff’s Employees Benefit Association, known by its acronym, SEBA.
Moreover, bits and pieces of the information pertaining to Ramos and his several paramours are known and have been known to employees within the district attorneys office, high ranking county officials and others.
The catalyst now moving the information into a wider venue - the district attorney’s office’s filing of criminal charges against the former president and executive director of SEBA - is itself the product of a sudden culture of disclosure of malfeasance and the misuse of taxpayer funds in San Bernardino County government.
Jim Erwin, a former sheriff’s deputy who previously served as treasurer, then president and later the executive director of the sheriff’s deputy’s union, was arrested on March 19 by district attorney’s office investigators and charged with ten felony counts of failing to disclose on state reporting documents gifts he received from Rancho Cucamonga-based developer Jeff Burum while he was working as assistant assessor under former county assessor Bill Postmus.
With his attorney, Rajan Maline, Erwin is now assembling information to be presented in court next month in his defense and to seek the removal of the San Bernardino County district attorney’s office as the prosecution. Some of that yet-to-be-presented information suggests that Ramos feared that Erwin knew of and might disclose details relating to his numerous extramarital affairs. Erwin and Maline are set to argue that Erwin’s arrest and the filing of charges against him was an attempt at preemptive retaliation to silence him.
If indeed that was Ramos’s intention, it seems to have failed. Erwin is not going quietly nor remaining supine in the wake of the district attorney’s office’s action against him.
Sharon Gilbert, a former county employee who runs a website, iepolitics.com in which she professes to cover “politics in the wild, wild west of San Bernardino County,” in a recent posting reported that she had met with Erwin.
“I would definitely not want to be Mike Ramos right now,” Gilbert wrote. “Jim shared with me his timeline and all of his documentation. For those that remember the day Jim was arrested, my headline read, ‘Mark your calendar: This is the day that Mike Ramos ended his political career.’
After meeting with Jim, I am more convinced than ever that Mike Ramos will not be re-elected to anything. I will go so far as to say that I can see the possibility of Mike Ramos being indicted for misuse of public funds.”
The Sentinel, in addition to attempting to retrace some of the ground Erwin has covered, has spoken with or otherwise communicated with more than a dozen county employees, including current and former deputy prosecutors serving under Ramos, including one who has now stepped up to the bench.
They paint a picture of a man, empowered and advantaged by his political position, seemingly overwhelmed by sexual compulsion, who comes across as incapable of self-discipline. Though occasionally rebuffed in his attempts at concupiscence, he has found willing partner after willing partner in his licentiousness, many of whom are his employees.
Others include his professional rival in the county legal system, the public defender. Another of his conquests is a member of the training staff with the California District Attorneys Association in Sacramento, with whom he has been for sometime carrying out a longtime, clandestine and distant romance at taxpayer expense.
Several of these relationships compromised the integrity of office operations, including the hiring and disciplinary processes, as well as damaging office morale.
A case in point was that of former deputy district attorney Ann Marie Duncan, the wife of judge Brian Saunders who had been a colleague of Ramos before he was appointed to the bench. Duncan and Ramos were caught in a sexual act by then-deputy district attorney David Whitney one night when he stopped by the office after work. On another occasion, Ramos and Duncan were observed in lewdly suggestive and inappropriate conduct in a courtroom. Subsequently, Duncan became involved in another extramarital affair with an attorney in private practice, Wayne Rosenberg. Rosenberg was caught up in a case then being worked by San Bernardino County and state of California investigators pertaining to bail bond and attorney capping, i.e., employing jail inmates to stir up business. When investigators served a search warrant on Rosenberg’s office, they came across evidence showing that Duncan had leaked information pertaining to the case to Rosenberg. Sheriff’s detectives demanded that Duncan be fired and prosecuted. But because of his relationship with her, Ramos refused to do so, placing her on an extended vacation/paid leave and then allowing her to quietly resign. The Duncan episode has been cited as a contrast to the treatment Ramos accorded to another of his deputy prosecutors, Grover Merritt, whom Ramos suspected of leaking information pertaining to the case involving Rosenberg. Ramos fired Merritt. After a lengthy civil service hearing process in which he demonstrated he was not the source of the leaks in question, Merritt was reinstated.
Kelly Snelling, who worked as Ramos’ campaign manager and treasurer, was given the position of volunteer management consultant with the district attorney’s office after Ramos was elected. Though her professional experience had been limited to working as a bookkeeper for board and care homes and she had no actual experience as a management consultant, Ramos arranged to provide her with a contract for up to $25,000 to generate office management recommendations. Snelling was paid just over $8,000 before the scheme was exposed and the arrangement ended. No written reports by Snelling were filed, though she did succeed in having the department’s computer manager, who was the sole member of the department capable of operating the department’s STAR information system, fired.
Jane Allen, an old family friend of Ramos and his wife Gretchen, had previously worked with Gretchen in the insurance industry before she was hired by the district attorney’s office as a paralegal. Allen also had experience as an office manager with a law firm and was eventually promoted into the position of the district attorney’s office’s senior administrative secretary. Allen was also a law school graduate but had repeatedly failed the California bar exam. Upon Ramos’ tutelage and encouragement, Allen, after a respite of many years, retook the bar exam and passed it. Shortly thereafter, though Allen had never worked as a deputy prosecutor, Ramos created a new position for her as assistant to the district attorney and gave her a salary above that of the highest paid trial attorneys with years and years of experience. Her salary went from around $90,000 to over $140,000.
Beth Houser was a deputy district attorney and a close friend of Ramos when he too was a deputy prosecutor then working under district attorney Dennis Stout. After Ramos successfully challenged Stout in 2002 and was sworn in as district attorney, the relationship between Ramos and Hauser, which was already the subject of rumor, intensified.
According to a former member of the office who is now serving in the capacity of superior court judge, the district attorney’s office’s website received an email from a group of deaf people who were dining at the Claim Jumper restaurant in San Bernardino when they, through lip reading, oversaw a conversation between Ramos and Houser, who were dining in a nearby booth at the same restaurant. Ramos was recognized because they had previously attended a function in which he had given the keynote address. Through lip reading the group was able to discern that Ramos referred to his companion as “Beth.” They looked on in stunned amazement as the two discussed a sexual encounter they had while away at a training seminar and Ramos indicated his preference of Hauser’s bikini panties over his wife’s “old lady” panties. The deaf group’s account of the event remained posted on the district attorney’s offices web site until a senior member of the department with administrative control of the site realized its presence, at which time it was removed.
Not all of the women Ramos displayed a libidinous interest in reciprocated.
Megan Wagoner was working as an investigative technician with the department to put herself through college. Universally described as attractive, Wagoner had already proved the object of considerable attention of the men in the office and elsewhere, which she rebuffed with a casual aplomb, making it clear that she was focused on her education so she could move on. In late 2002, after his victory over Stout but before he had assumed office and was putting together his management team, Ramos offered Wagoner a position on his team. His manner suggested to her that he was more interested in her sexually than in her management skills. She was direct in
her refusal to accept something that she was clearly not qualified for on the merits, knowing he intended to get her obligated to him.
Though she is not an employee in the district attorney’s office, Ruth Stringer is a lawyer with the county who holds the position of county counsel, the highest ranking in-house civil attorney with the county. In 2007 while at that year’s city county conference in Lake Arrowhead, a number of elected county officials, including then-sheriff Gary Penrod and Ramos, were commiserating during an alcohol-fueled discussion over what they considered to be inadequate pay for countywide elected officials, including themselves. When it was mentioned that any effort to increase their pay would need to first be vetted by Stringer, Ramos, who was at that point clearly inebriated, stated repeatedly that he would seek to influence Stringer to see things their way by seducing her. Subsequently he approached Stringer, who was also present at the conference, and according to witnesses, groped her. Stringer lodged a complaint over the matter with then-chairman of the board of supervisors Paul Biane, who counseled Ramos about engaging in such behavior and the matter was settled quietly.
More recently, Ramos’s stance with regard to her was impacting Stringer. According to a well placed source, last week, Stringer felt compelled to assure attendees at a county staff meeting that she was “not sleeping with Mike Ramos.”
Stringer this week did not confirm that she had made such a statement. Nor, however, did she deny it.
Other women in the district attorney’s office in whom Ramos has been said to have taken more than a professional interest are deputy district attorney Denise Yoakum; Brenda Rossi, a paralegal; and Cheryl Barnes, an investigative technician, although sources were unwilling to say whether these three willingly entertained the affection of their boss or were the unwilling victims of his attention.
Ramos is frequently absent from San Bernardino County, traveling often to Sacramento. The ostensible purpose of these trips is his activity with regard to the California Victim Compensation and Government Claims Board, of which he is a member; his participation in events related to the California District Attorneys Association and his association with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Ramos was a member of Schwarzenegger’s transition team in 2003.
Since 2004, records show, Ramos has been in Sacramento 181 days. In 2004 he made 15 round trips to the state capital. In 2008, that number had increased to 21 round trips. In nearly all of his sojourns to Sacramento, Ramos has flown in the day before a claims board or district attorneys association meeting and stayed overnight, generally at the Hyatt hotel. On a few occasions, he remained for a second night. This has occurred even though the meetings he attends do not normally begin until 10 or 10:30 a.m. and last only into the early or mid afternoon, such that he could fly up in the morning and return to San Bernardino County the same day.
According to Bret Granlund, a former state assemblyman who has since served as a lobbyist for San Bernardino County through his company, Platinum Advisors, the reason for Ramos’ extended stays is so he can spend the evenings with Suzanne Hunter, a training consultant for the California District Attorneys Association.
According to Granlund and others, including current and former members of the district attorney’s office, Ramos has been having an affair with Hunter for several years.
Though some of the trips Ramos has taken to the state capital have been paid for with money from his campaign funds, others have been paid for as county business related travel.
It is in this regard that Ramos may have created a legal problem for himself in that it appears he has used public money for a personal purpose unrelated to the performance of his job.
Moreover, the extended absences these trips entail, averaging over five days every two months, leave the district attorney’s office without his guidance.
Of all of Ramos’ indiscretions, the most serious might be the one he engaged in with Doreen Boxer, who was hired by the county to serve as public defender in early 2006.
Less than two months later, at that year’s city county conference in Lake Arrowhead, Ramos and Boxer were witnessed by nearly a dozen municipal county officials cavorting together.
According to those present, Boxer and an intoxicated Ramos departed from the hotel bar together and went up to the floor where the hotel’s rooms are located. Shortly thereafter, the couple was seen, with both in a state of partial undress, in an elevator.
As word of the relationship between Boxer and Ramos spread, county sources say, members of the board of supervisors, in particular Josie Gonzales, became sharply concerned about both the appearance and reality of a conflict. Boxer was brought in for a stern closed door meeting, at which her tenure with the county was on the line. Assurances were given that her relationship with Ramos had ended. Sources say, however, that the relationship between the two persisted for several months thereafter.
This was evinced during a budget hearing before the board of supervisors, at which Boxer was being questioned about what the indigent defense budget was. As she stood at the podium, flustered at the inquiry and unable to locate the line item among the documents she had for reference, Ramos got up from his seat in the gallery and without prompting came to her assistance and answered the question. This produced consternation among some of the board members who had counseled him to stay away from her. In retaliation, one board member’s employee reportedly called Ramos’ wife and told her about what had been going on. Despite the warning that had been delivered to them by the board of supervisors, Ramos and Boxer remained an item until Ramos was distracted by another woman, the girlfriend of an employee in the assessor’s office.
Comment from those involved with regard to the overarching circumstance and the individual circumstances at issue have been sparing, at best.
Ramos, through his spokeswoman, Susan Mickey, declined comment.
Nor would the department facilitate the Sentinel’s attempts to contact the district attorney’s office employees said to have been intimate with him or pestered with his unwanted advances.
Neither Houser, who this week was involved in the prosecution of Terrell Austin, nor Yoakum, returned phone calls to their respective offices.
Boxer’s secretary informed the Sentinel that Boxer was away from the office but that a message regarding the paper’s inquiries would be forwarded to her. She had not returned a call by press time.
Hunter was reached by phone at her Sacramento office.
“I am not going talk to you,” she said upon hearing that her relationship with Ramos was becoming a public issue in San Bernardino County. “I don’t talk to newspapers. I’ve got to go. Bye.”
Ann Marie Duncan, now in private practice, did not return a phone call seeking comment.
Snelling said, “I don’t think I should be discussing this with you.”
Efforts to reach Jane Allen, Brenda Rossi, Cheryl Barnes and Megan Wagoner were either unsuccessful or obstructed.
Stringer did not respond to a detailed email seeking her version of events with regard to the 2007 incident involving her and Ramos or to questions in the email concerning the county’s potential liability stemming from Ramos’s comportment.
The impact of the revelations about Ramos’ involvement with his employees has yet to fully register.
He was reelected without opposition in 2006 and at present, holds a commanding fundraising lead over any potential challengers. The most current documents on file with the county registrar of voters’ office show that as of December 31, 2008, Ramos had a $372,418.19 ending cash balance in his campaign war chest. It is generally believed that he had planned to run for reelection as district attorney next year and will step up to run for the U.S. Congress when Jerry Lewis, the current representative in California’s 41st Congressional District and a Ramos ally, retires.
The unfolding sex scandal in the San Bernardino County district attorney’s office may interrupt those plans.
Ramos this week filed charges against Rancho Cucamonga councilman and former assessor’s office employee Rex Gutierrez for the misappropriation of public funds. And while much of the activity Ramos has engaged in might be excused as non-criminal activity involving consenting adults, his use of county money to carry on with Suzanne Hunter in Sacramento could be construed, like Gutierrez’s use of county facilities to engage in political activity and business pertaining to the city of Rancho Cucamonga, as a misappropriation of public funds. And because of the nature of Ramos’s action, jurors and voters might view his transgressions even more seriously than they might view those of Gutierrez.
Additionally, now that knowledge about the relationship between Boxer and Ramos is no longer restricted to a relatively small circle of county and city officials, serious problems for the county - and both Ramos and Boxer - could ensue. If a lawsuit is initiated and credible evidence is provided that an innocent defendant represented by the public defender’s office received inadequate representation because of the untoward influence of the district attorney’s as the result of Boxer’s relationship with Ramos, the county might have liability. To arrest such conflicts of interest or the perception of them, the county could remove either Boxer or Ramos or both from office.
The county board of supervisors took on the authority to remove countywide elected officials earlier this decade and that authority survived a legal challenge lodged by then-sheriff Gary Penrod.

Tom Schwab Throws in the Towel

Convinced he had little prospect of prevailing, an exhausted Tom Schwab opted out of the Grand Terrace city manager sweepstakes this week.
Schwab had been scheduled to go into a closed door meeting with the Grand Terrace city council on Tuesday night to lay out his case for reassuming the city manager’s post he held for 19 years before he suffered a subdural hematoma in June 2008 and was forced into an extended medical leave.
In his absence, assistant city manager Steve Berry stepped into the post of acting city manager.
After a three month hospitalization and three further months of home rest, Schwab was entrusted by the city council with the limited duty of working on the city’s 2009-10 budget. By this spring, with his health substantially recovered, Schwab began campaigning to be brought back as city manager.
That petition was not enthusiastically received by the city council, however. Three of its members - Bea Cortes, Lee Ann Garcia and Walt Stanckiewitz - had gravitated toward keeping Berry at the helm. An outpouring of popular sentiment in favor of Schwab was heard from around the community over the last three months, a movement that seemed to overwhelm the lukewarm support for Berry. Simultaneously, an information campaign pertaining to alleged and actual missteps by Berry in his tenure as assistant city manager sprung up spontaneously, giving a lift to the effort to reestablish Schwab.
Ultimately, however, the commitment on the part of the council to install Berry as the city’s top administrator outlasted the countervailing pressure brought to bear by the traditionalists in town who favored Schwab.
Early this month, the council declared its intention of doing a recruitment drive to hire a city manager to guide the city over the next several years. Both Schwab and Berry were encouraged to apply. Still, there were unmistakable signs the council was leaning in favor of choosing Berry. Last week Schwab summoned up the courage to ask the council to give him an opportunity to lay his qualifications out and plead the case for simply allowing him to return to his executive office on the second floor of City Hall. He earnestly set about making that pitch. He was ready to go into the closed session with the council and remind them that he had spent five years as the city’s finance director from 1984 until 1989 before he was elevated to the city manager’s spot. He was prepared to regale them with his mastery of the major considerations and the minutiae involved in the government structure, the infrastructure and the lay of the land both geographically and politically in the community. That comprehensive tour-de-force to show his qualifications never took place, however. Instead, he approached city attorney John Harper with a retirement proposal, which Harper took to the council.
“I’ve grown weary of the entire process,” Schwab told the Sentinel. “I’ve come to be convinced that I’m not going to get my job back. I stopped deluding myself.”
In a moment of scrupulous examination, Schwab said, he realistically appraised what it all had come down to.
“That they are going to go out to do a statewide search for a city manager tells you what the score is,” Schwab said. “They’re looking to get applications from twenty or thirty or forty candidates and bring them in for an hour interview and evaluate them on the basis of that as to whether they will make a good city manager.
“I’ve had a 19 year interview as city manager already,” Schwab said. “I was finance director for five years before that. Do they really think they can get enough out of any one of those candidates in one hour versus what they’ve seen from me over 24 years? 24 years. That’s half my life. I know everything there is to know about this city. I can see I’m not going to get my job back.”
For that reason, Schwab said, he decided to simply put in for retirement and walk away. Asked if that decision is irrevocable, he said, “If they change their minds, it could be revoked, up to 30 days of me drawing the first retirement check. The second I draw the first retirement check, it would get very complicated.”
He had pushed for the retirement to go into effect as of August 1, Schwab said, but added that September 1 is the more realistic date for his retirement to become official.
He said he could not disclose the terms of the retirement settlement at this time
Now that he has made the decision to retire, Schwab said, he feels “good about it. It’s a relief. And its better for the community. This whole thing was tearing the community apart. Every meeting where there was a discussion about me or Steve it was just an ugly scene. Until that ends we’re not going to get anywhere.”
His exodus will benefit the city financially, Schwab said.
“They need one of us out of the budget,” he said. “By my leaving the city will save all of my salary and benefits, which comes to almost $200,000 over the next year. So
the city will be able to balance the budge t next year.”
And Schwab said, the timing is right otherwise. “I
would have retired in two years anyway,” he said. “It makes sense for me to retire now.”
He said he did not think he would apply for the city manager’s post in Colton, where an opening was created by yesterday’s departure of city manager Daryl Parrish.
His immediate plans were to visit his parents in Sacramento to celebrate with them their 50th wedding anniversary. He said he might go back to work in some capacity in time. “I’m going to take off for about six months and then figure out what I’m going to do,” he said.
He would not be lured into bad mouthing Berry, whom he had hired as assistant city manager in 2001 and whom he had mentored for seven years.
“I don’t really want to start criticizing anyone or talk about what mistakes I think the council is making,” he said. “They are paying me to keep my mouth shut. There’s a confidentiality clause in my retirement package.”