Snyder Gets 6-Month Term in Political Corruption Case

Former Los Angeles City Councilman Arthur K. Snyder slumped slightly in his chair and listened quietly Wednesday as a Superior Court judge sentenced him to six months in County Jail for conspiracy and money laundering.

Snyder--30 pounds lighter than when he was one of City Hall’s most powerful figures--was also placed on three years probation, forbidden to lobby or run for office for four years and ordered to pay $216,000 in fines and penalties.

Judge John Ouderkirk told Snyder that his use of phony donors to disguise large political contributions “undermines the fabric of democracy.”

Snyder pleaded guilty last fall to nine counts of conspiracy and money laundering stemming from what investigators say was the largest and most complex political corruption case ever brought in California.

Ouderkirk ordered Snyder to begin his sentence March 28. Because of jail overcrowding, a typical six-month sentence now results in only about six weeks in custody. When Snyder’s attorney suggested that Snyder, who is 63 and suffers from a heart condition, be allowed to serve his sentence at home with electronic monitoring, Ouderkirk replied: “My intention is to give the defendant six months in jail.”

Snyder, who represented the Eastside on the City Council for 18 years before becoming a successful lobbyist, responded almost inaudibly when the judge asked him if he agreed with the terms of his probation, saying “yes” only after he was prompted by his attorney.

But outside the courtroom, the charismatic politician quickly found his voice.

“I don’t expect to ever go to jail,” he said.

Snyder accused the former head of the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission, Ben Bycel, of trumping up the case against him, and said he had filed an appeal of the case Wednesday morning.

Gary Huckaby, a spokesman for the California Fair Political Practices Commission, said Snyder’s incarceration would mark the first instance in which anyone has served time for a violation of the state’s political reform act.

“This says that there is a reason to abide by the rules,” said Rebecca Avila, executive director of the city Ethics Commission. “It sends a really strong message to City Hall.”

The case against Snyder began in 1992, when the chief investigator from the Ethics Commission, Mimi Strauss, called the Fair Political Practices Commission and said she had uncovered information that might implicate Snyder and others in a scheme to hide campaign contributions, said Mark Morodomi, the FPPC lawyer who worked on the case.

When the case got to the grand jury two years later, prosecutors alleged that Snyder had helped Evergreen America Corp., a huge shipping conglomerate with links to a proposed major development downtown, launder $170,000 in illegal donations to City Council members and others.

Along the way, the case took some bizarre turns.

Bycel was ordered off the case by a Superior Court judge who said he was biased against Snyder. And after a series of disputes with the Fair Political Practices Commission, the Ethics Commission pulled out.

Moreover, it was difficult to track the money because of the way the scheme was conducted, according to an investigator. Normally in laundering operations, Morodomi said, a shadow contributor writes checks to people who have been asked to pretend to donate to a politician. Those people, in turn, deposit checks in their accounts and write their own checks to the politician.

In this case, though, Morodomi said, Snyder took checks from Evergreen and others and simply cashed them, so there was no deposit record. Then, he said, Snyder and others handed out cash to phony donors, who wrote checks for equivalent amounts as campaign contributions.

Snyder said he only pleaded guilty as part of a plea bargain so that the charges against him would be reduced to misdemeanors.

The whole mess, he said Wednesday, had started only because he “got into a shouting match” with Bycel in the parking lot of public television station KCET Channel 28 in Los Angeles.

“I called him something he didn’t like and he said he would get me and I said, ‘I’ll be here when you’re gone,’ ” Snyder said.