San Diego's interim mayor convicted of wire fraud
Posted on: Monday, 18 July 2005, 17:04 CDT
By Marty Graham
SAN DIEGO (Reuters) - A federal jury convicted San Diego's interim mayor and a councilman on conspiracy and wire fraud charges on Monday, the latest scandal in a city that has witnessed the resignation of its mayor and federal probes into the mishandling of its pension fund.
Interim Mayor Michael Zucchet was convicted on his first official day in office and immediately suspended.
Prosecutors said Zucchet and city councilman Ralph Inzunza took campaign contributions from a strip club owner and promised to vote for the repeal of San Diego's ban on customers touching nude dancers in adult clubs.
Zucchet, Inzunza and a Las Vegas lobbyist also convicted of conspiracy and wire fraud will be sentenced in November. They could face up to four years in prison.
The city council did not pass the strip club proposal. The club owner and manager behind the scheme pleaded guilty to charges in 2003.
Zucchet and Inzunza vowed to appeal the jury's verdict, saying they believed they had acted within the law.
"There is not a single public official that doesn't do the same thing. It just isn't tape-recorded. Every single thing he was accused of goes on every single day," Zucchet's lawyer Jerry Coughlan said in a statement.
The trial capped a politically embarrassing six months for San Diego, once regarded as a model of municipal governance. Mayor Dick Murphy announced in April he was resigning after Time magazine named him one of the three worst big-city mayors in the United States.
Murphy, who won a second term after a narrow and hotly disputed election in November, was plagued by myriad fiscal problems and investigations into a $1.7 billion pension shortfall.
Five current and former trustees of the city's pension fund were charged in July with conflict of interest by prosecutors who say the trustees made a deal allowing the city to underfund the pension scheme in exchange for increases in benefits.
The pension underfunding has left San Diego unable to complete fiscal audits for the past two years.
Source: REUTERS
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