A Day Of Fantastic Machines

Yesterday, Incredible Daughter #1 -- who's off to Paris next week for a collegiate visit -- and I did what we often do. We spent the day with some wonderful cars.

First we went to the Saturday morning meet at Irvine Spectrum, where every week a few hundred million dollars worth of some of most amazing automobiles you'll ever see are there to be seen.

Like this one:

If you're a BMW fan, you're probably an ubber-fan of the Z8, the powerful two-seater BMW produced 5,703 of from 2000 to 2003.

Well, ever seen 13 of them all lined up together?

Unless you were in Irvine yesterday, too, you haven't, at least not in the US.

Then we joined a few dozen BMW owners for a drive through OC's canyons and along its coast to end up at Crevier Classic Cars in Costa Mesa, where we saw such beautiful sights as this:

That's a Lincoln in the foreground and a Packard to the rear. American car makers have a gorgeous history. Speaking of history, this is one of several of Cong. John Campbell's cars that was at Crevier.

Anyone care to hazard a guess why the Congressman's Ferrari has a license plate with "NERO" on it? Fiddling while Washington burns? Not Campbell, who Hugh Hewitt listeners know well.

Update: On-the-ball Campbell staffer Janelle Froisland spotted my post and sent this clarification:

Congressman Campbell’s license plate reads: “NERO328” because "nero" is "black" in Italian, and 328 is the model number of that car (Ferrari 328 GTS). So, the license plate "NERO328" means that it is a black Ferrari 328 and the word "black" is in Italian since it is an Italian car.

Could you ask for a more thorough explanation? No, so I thought I'd ask her if I could have Campbell's red '64 T'bird, also on display at Crevier. I haven't heard back yet. (end of update)

Etymologically speaking, this photo of a Caddy from the 20s gave me a pretty good idea of why we call the place we stow our luggage a "trunk." (The Brits call them "boots," but the booty in matching blue to the ... er, rear is purely coincidental.)

Later in the day, Incredible Daughter #3 and I took a drive to see another incredible machine. This one was a Giken, a $1.5 million Japanese number that uses hydraulics to generate gazillions tons of pressure to silently push 40-foot-long sheet piles into a deteriorating levee.

I feel good about this because my client, Shea Homes, is responsible for getting this done. Shea was prepared to spend $15 million repairing the levee and doing other significant flood control improvements, because the existing system didn't even provide protection for a 25-year storm.

But as the Greenies fought us, years dragged by until we saw deterioration like this -- thanks to the County redirecting levee repair funds to pay off the bonds that got us out of their stupid bankruptcy.

Shea brought the deterioration to the attention of the County and made enough noise that OC Flood Control District couldn't ignore the problem -- leading to the Giken silently shoving those long beams into the levee so it can be strong enough to survive a pretty significant storm.

Shea still has a lot of work to do to fulfill its commitments. It will still spend $15 million one way or the other ... money the government should spend, but is forcing developers to pay instead since the levee protects thousands of citizen taxpayers. It looks like we'll get about 125 homes to spread that $15 million over ... or $120,000 per house.

If government took care of its own messes instead of forcing developers to fix them, the homebuyers would have enough additional money in their accounts for one of those beautiful Z8s.

And they say it's greedy developers who makes houses expensive.

"America's Sheriff" Indicted

I first met OC Sheriff Mike Carona a day or two after he was elected -- and by all reports (except his), he was already corrupted by then.

If you believe the federal indictment unsealed yesterday -- drawn largely from the testimony against him of his two closest supporters, who ratted him out on their own plea deals -- even on that day, this smiling, warm future "America's Sheriff" was fully corrupted, sunk in a conspiracy to use his new office to accumulate illegal wealth and intoxicating power.

And it wasn't just Carona. It was also his senior aides, his wife ... and his long-time mistress! Carona always positioned himself as a strong Christian, but apparently not that strong:

In an indictment unsealed today, federal investigators charged the county’s top lawman with seven felony counts for using his elected office to “enrich” himself and offer “favors to friends who paid bribes.” Carona illegally accepted money, high-priced gifts, tickets to exclusive sporting events and loans for his wife and for his “longtime mistress,” the indictment said.

Debbie Carona, along with Debra Hoffman, a Newport Beach attorney and investor identified in the indictment as Carona’s mistress, were also charged along with the sheriff. All three face conspiracy counts while Hoffman faces additional charges that she aided Carona and also committed bankruptcy fraud.

Carona, 52, also faces two counts of witness tampering, allegedly for attempting to persuade a former assistant sheriff to lie to the federal grand jury. (OC Register)

He didn't seem like that kind of person back when I met him. He had a gentle disposition, but it was evident there was a lot of strength behind it. He seemed very centered and straightforward, even humble.

I recall him saying that while he was sheriff, crime would drop dramatically in OC ... but he would have little or nothing to do with it. He went on to explain how demographic trends guaranteed that crime would drop because the last population peak had either weaned itself from crime or was in prison, and the next population peak was still in elementary school. "I'm just lucky enough to be sheriff at a time when the population of 17 to 25 year-olds will be relatively low," he said.

I thought, "How refreshing -- a politician that's not taking credit that's not due."

Several years later, I reminded him of this conversation and he laughed, surprised that I remembered it so well. And once again, he gave the credit to demographics, because his prediction had turned out to be correct.

Among the most sordid of Carona's inside circle was Don Haidl -- you may remember that last name even if you live far from here -- who was Carona's money man, as summarized here by the Daily Pilot:

Corona del Mar businessman Don Haidl provided thousands of dollars in illegal payments to Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona in exchange for an assistant sheriff job and special treatment for his family and friends, according to an indictment unsealed on Tuesday.

The indictment of Carona — filed in October 2005 in United States District Court — alleges that Haidl repeatedly made payments to Carona that the sheriff failed to declare, made additional payments to a woman identified as Carona’s mistress, and rewarded Carona for his support by placing him on a previously nonexistent board of directors for a company owned by Haidl’s uncle.

That bit about "special treatment for his family" came in handy when Don Haidl's son Greg was among a group of young men charged with drugging and gang-raping a 16 year old girl. Here's the OC Weekly's Haidl Gang Rape Archive for anyone who's interested.) The case banged around forever before the three assailants finally got convicted in March 2005, and there was plenty of opportunity to point fingers at the Sheriff's office for being less than aggressive.

I agreed. By then I'd seen enough of old school cronyism from Carona. His glory days, when he performed magnificently during the nationally covered, and ultimately tragic, search for Samantha Runion, were far behind him even then.

Today, he says he will be exonerated. Perhaps. But not in the eyes of the people who elected a guy we thought was straight -- but even then wasn't.

If you want to follow this story in a juicy way, well-written way, I suggest you set up a feed for Frank Mickadeit's column in the OC Register. Frank's a long-time acquaintance and Coto neighbor, and has a wicked pen. Here's his lead today, that captures my feelings exactly:

The most shocking part of the indictment against Sheriff Mike Carona is just how well-planned the feds say the conspiracy was. If you believe the charges, what the sheriff did could never be mistaken for mere technical violations of campaign-finance law.

The overall sense I get from the indictment is that this was no case of a politician becoming arrogant with power over a period of years in office and gradually acquiring a sense of entitlement. That's commonplace. These charges, however, emanate from alleged activities dating back to before Carona even took office.

Photo: OC Register

A Nguyen/Nguyen Situation

Actually the headline's wrong -- one of these Nguyens is going to lose.

Nguyen, pronounced "win" -- hence the headline -- is the most common name in OC, a little fact that has been great for GOP politics here since the fall of Saigon kinda turned them against Dems.

These two Nguyens are well-known here in OC, but for readers elsewhere, Trung Nguyen (a former aide to B-1 Bob Dornan) and Janet Nguyen both ran for an empty County Supervisor seat, and right now Trung's leading Janet by 7 votes and a recount's on the way.

OC's Vietnamese population makes the place fun with Little Saigon as a rare splash of funk in a pretty funk-less place and great Vietnamese restaurants on every third corner. Here's a bit of background from a post on Red County:

Here's a quick primer. I hope it will shed a little more light on why the Vietnamese tend to vote Republican, became unified in 1999 when a video storeowner raised Ho Chi Minh's portrait and flew the communist flag on Bolsa Avenue, and why it supported its own political neophytes over mainstream candidates. Furthermore, issues like "No Communist Zone" in Garden Grove and flying/recognizing the flag of South Vietnam are important to Vietnamese voters even though non-Vietnamese could care less.

The seat the two Nguyens are running for was held previously by a rare beast: An OC elected Dem. Technically, Supervisors' seats are nonpartisan, but you can't hide bios and voting records -- like the previous Supes' gleeful vote for a county employee pension plan that is financial lunacy.

Neither Nguyen would do that, so may the best Nguyen win.