LOS ANGELES — A former senior lawyer in the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office pleaded guilty Tuesday to a federal charge connected to lawsuits involving the 2014 Department of Water and Power billing system debacle.
The defendant’s plea agreement is the fourth prosecutors have obtained in the investigation involving the period in 2014 when DWP faced multiple class-action lawsuits over the flawed rollout of a new billing system — and the city was shoring up its response. In April 2015, an Ohio attorney whom Paradis had enlisted to purportedly represent Jones filed a Paradis-drafted lawsuit against the city and DWP. Paradis secretly agreed to accept — and eventually did accept — an illegal kickback of nearly $2.2 million for steering the lawsuit to the Ohio attorney. Paradis has agreed to plead guilty to a bribery charge.
According to his plea agreement, on Nov. 16, 2017, Peters learned from Paradis that a former long-time employee of Kiesel’s had taken documents from the firm that would reveal the city’s secret agreement with the Ohio attorney in the Jones lawsuit. The unidentified person threatened to reveal the documents if Kiesel did not pay her more than $1 million — later dropped to $800,000 — to return them.
According to his plea agreement, Peters made it known that he would continue to conceal the extortion and collusion by intentionally omitting from his reply that the “settlement” had involved Kiesel paying $800,000 in extortion money to conceal the city’s collusion, that Peters had directed Kiesel to satisfy the woman’s demands or be fired as special counsel, and that Peters had discussed the situation with and received direction from senior members of the City Attorney’s Office.
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