Post by VOR on Feb 23, 2009 7:06:06 GMT -5
The country was in turmoil over the Vietnam War and many of America's youth were becoming activists. So did Roger, but spurred by the infamous 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, he focused his energy on saving the environment. Hedgecock helped organize an environmental law curriculum at Hastings and began working with the Sierra Club.
He told the L.A. Times in a Feb. 21, 1983 story. “Some of the [anti-war] protesters were pretty high-profile guys and I didn't want to get drafted.” Hedgecock became eligible for the draft after graduation from UCSB, but was later classified 4-F because of his severe acne problems. He told the Reader that he was originally 1-Y but got the 4-F classification after being recalled to the draft board. In his final year at Hastings, as class president, he helped organize a peaceful one-day strike against the bombing of Cambodia.
This is the same Roger Hedgecock who attacks Liberals as cowards. The same one that sat out the Vietnam War because he had acne.
These activities brought him to the attention of the Del Mar City Council, which hired him to be the city attorney in 1974. Two council members, Nancy Hoover and Tom Shepard, were to play pivotal roles in Hedgecock's subsequent political career. The following year, he married Cynthia Coverdale and they soon started a family.
In 1976, with a wife and a track record, it was time for Roger to seek public office. He unseated county Supervisor Lou Conde by telling voters the incumbent was a tool of greedy developers.
The race was marked by acrimony, and just the slightest hint of impropriety. In the middle of the campaign, District Attorney Ed Miller filed a misdemeanor charge against Hedgecock for violating campaign-finance law. Hedgecock pleaded no-contest and the conviction was “set aside” after a probationary period. This is the first of Hedgecock's criminal problems.
In 1983, Pete Wilson vacated the mayor's office and Hedgecock went after it. Shepard, who had quit his job as Hedgecock's chief of staff to open a political consulting firm, ran the campaign.
The campaign highlighted Hedgecock's fiscal and environmental accomplishments. It also positioned him as tough on crime, and according to one campaign letter, “he required criminals to pay back the cost of their trial and imprisonment.”
On the advice of his campaign staff, Hedgecock took his cause to the people, and tagged his strongest opponent as a member of the moneyed elite. The San Diego Tribune remarked on May 5, 1983, “The Hedgecock coalition was generally regarded as one of the most impressive elements of his campaign, and it clearly had much to do with his closer-than-expected victory over Port Commissioner Maureen O'Connor.”
Speaking wistfully about how changed the Hedgecock of today seems, Robert Meadow said, “This was a guy who reached out to the gay and lesbian community. This was a guy who worked with the service employees. There were whites, blacks, Latinos in the coalition. There were Democrats, independents. I mean it was a very exciting and energizing time when we were working on the campaign.”
“How smart is that?” asked Gayle Falkenthal, who produced Hedgecock's radio show for several years. “You are a member of a community that has no representation. Somebody offers you some, and then listens to you. That's a pretty great thing.”
A Hedgecock campaign insider added, “He was never a liberal but did see the importance of inclusiveness.”
The first months in City Hall were heady. One staffer remembers feeling that the best and brightest were in charge, and they were going to go on to greater things. Hedgecock was popular with the public, and he rewarded his supporters. The history section of the website for the San Diego Democratic Club, a predominantly gay political organization, says, “A major advance came in 1983 when Roger Hedgecock sought lesbian and gay support in his effort to become mayor of San Diego. He won, providing new clout to a minority group struggling for attention.”
Like Hedgecock's earlier political battles, this one left a field of smoldering resentment shrouded by a pall of acrimony. “He made powerful political enemies,” said Robert Meadow. “I think that developers, builders, some of the folks that had been running San Diego-the old-boy network that really characterized it-the Union-Tribune, the Neil Morgans of the world, all these other people-they didn't like him. I think that they thought he was young and brash and was going to change their world. And in fact he was prepared to do that. He had a pretty strong following that cut across party lines. He wasn't the usual person they had in office.”
But the 1983 campaign had been the most expensive mayoral battle to date, and Hedgecock, who had spent around $600,000 to get the job, had to immediately start a campaign to keep it.
This is where Nancy Hoover re-entered the picture. After her term on the Del Mar City Council, she had become romantically and professionally allied with J. David Dominelli, head of the J. David Company. The pair was later convicted of defrauding investors of about $80 million. The scandal started to break in early 1984 and Hedgecock was connected to it through Hoover.
It turned out Hoover was a silent partner in Tom Shepard Associates, Hedgecock's campaign consultant, and invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in the company. She also arranged a controversial remodeling loan for Hedgecock's State Street house. Whether it was intended as a loan or an outright gift has been the subject of much debate.
Hoover's support, and her ties to Dominelli, gave Hedgecock's foes a perfect weapon to use in their drive to get him out of city hall. City law prohibited corporate campaign donations and limited individual contributions to $250 per campaign.
The ensuing battle over City Hall was truly a clash of the titans, fought in several arenas.
In the legal arena, the opening salvo was a Grand Jury investigation of Hedgecock's 1983 campaign, mounted in the spring of 1984. Retaliating, Hedgecock accused District Attorney Miller and two members of the Grand Jury of waging a vendetta, and demanded they remove themselves from the investigation. They refused.
There was also a battle with the press. In April, the San Diego Union, whose publisher had supported Maureen O'Connor, reported a story about testimony before the Grand Jury. Hedgecock claimed the information, leaked from a secret proceeding, was false and demanded a retraction.
When the Union printed only a partial retraction of the Grand Jury story, Hedgecock filed a $3.5-million libel suit. This convinced the paper to print a full, front-page retraction. Hedgecock dropped his suit.
Meanwhile, the Grand Jury adjourned before it was able to finish the investigation. So Miller filed a civil suit in May, accusing Hedgecock of failing to report more than $350,000 in illegal donations from Hoover, Dominelli and the J. David Company. The Grand Jury reconvened and in September 1984, after hearing 84 witnesses, indicted Hedgecock on 13 felony counts.
Hedgecock's response to the indictment was defiant. “Finally, I'm going to get a jury trial where both sides will be heard equally,” he said in a Sept. 20, 1984 Union story. “So far, all we've had is secret sessions, lots of leaks from the grand jury, lots of trial in the press with only one side coming out.” He immediately fired legal salvos of his own, drawing from a large arsenal of motions and pleadings.
Bloodied but unbowed, Hedgecock took another hit in October when the state's Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) filed a $1.2-million suit against Hedgecock, Shepard, Dominelli, Hoover and businessman Roque de la Fuente Jr. De la Fuente owned several car dealerships around the county and held a large tract of land in Otay Mesa. Coincidentally or not, Otay Mesa was one of the areas that Hedgecock had targeted for development under his vision of managed growth.
Hedgecock's foes gloated. Lou Conde, still smarting from Hedgecock's treatment eight years earlier, hired a biplane to fly the sneering message “Roger-It's Miller Time!” over the stadium packed with 60,000 Chargers fans. Neil Morgan, who had duly reported the incident, also reminded San Diego Union readers that back in 1975, Del Mar City Councilmember Nancy Hoover had voted to adopt the campaign-spending ordinance, drafted by Hedgecock, limiting individual contributions to a mere $15.
The campaign itself was almost the least of the battles. In spite of it all, Hedgecock beat Richard Carlson, the standard bearer for the “old guard,” with 58 percent of the vote. The people he had empowered remained loyal to him. Doug Case, a longtime member of the Democratic Club, remembers that the group gave Roger a standing ovation shortly after his indictment. Hedgecock had won the political battle, but the fighting still raged on the other fronts.
He got another break when the jury in his trial deadlocked 11-1 in favor of a guilty verdict. After some more maneuvering, a second trial began in July of 1985, this time with Oscar Goodman, known for defending mobsters, running the defense.
On Oct. 9, 1985 the jury returned convictions on 13 felony counts, 12 for perjury and one for conspiracy. But two days later, reports of jury tampering surfaced and Hedgecock asked for a new trial. His request was denied and on Dec. 10, Hedgecock was sentenced to a year in county jail and three years of probation. As legally required, he resigned his post as mayor.
Hedgecock's conviction was later overturned when a juror admitted to a guilty vote when a baliff told him that unless a decision was rendered the juror would not be able to go home.
One of the most telling references to a felons character is when a sitting judge on your trial says this before sentencing you- "As he imposed sentence, Judge William L. Todd Jr. said he had no doubt of Hedgecock’s guilt and that he had “violated the public trust in an onerous, onerous way... Your conduct ... is reprehensible in every sense of the word because you violated the public trust, completely, over and over again.”
Too bad for San Diego that an error by a baliff allowed this criminal to escape justice.
Thus is the criminal past of Conservative Talk show host Roger ( the conviction dodger) Hedgecock.
He told the L.A. Times in a Feb. 21, 1983 story. “Some of the [anti-war] protesters were pretty high-profile guys and I didn't want to get drafted.” Hedgecock became eligible for the draft after graduation from UCSB, but was later classified 4-F because of his severe acne problems. He told the Reader that he was originally 1-Y but got the 4-F classification after being recalled to the draft board. In his final year at Hastings, as class president, he helped organize a peaceful one-day strike against the bombing of Cambodia.
This is the same Roger Hedgecock who attacks Liberals as cowards. The same one that sat out the Vietnam War because he had acne.
These activities brought him to the attention of the Del Mar City Council, which hired him to be the city attorney in 1974. Two council members, Nancy Hoover and Tom Shepard, were to play pivotal roles in Hedgecock's subsequent political career. The following year, he married Cynthia Coverdale and they soon started a family.
In 1976, with a wife and a track record, it was time for Roger to seek public office. He unseated county Supervisor Lou Conde by telling voters the incumbent was a tool of greedy developers.
The race was marked by acrimony, and just the slightest hint of impropriety. In the middle of the campaign, District Attorney Ed Miller filed a misdemeanor charge against Hedgecock for violating campaign-finance law. Hedgecock pleaded no-contest and the conviction was “set aside” after a probationary period. This is the first of Hedgecock's criminal problems.
In 1983, Pete Wilson vacated the mayor's office and Hedgecock went after it. Shepard, who had quit his job as Hedgecock's chief of staff to open a political consulting firm, ran the campaign.
The campaign highlighted Hedgecock's fiscal and environmental accomplishments. It also positioned him as tough on crime, and according to one campaign letter, “he required criminals to pay back the cost of their trial and imprisonment.”
On the advice of his campaign staff, Hedgecock took his cause to the people, and tagged his strongest opponent as a member of the moneyed elite. The San Diego Tribune remarked on May 5, 1983, “The Hedgecock coalition was generally regarded as one of the most impressive elements of his campaign, and it clearly had much to do with his closer-than-expected victory over Port Commissioner Maureen O'Connor.”
Speaking wistfully about how changed the Hedgecock of today seems, Robert Meadow said, “This was a guy who reached out to the gay and lesbian community. This was a guy who worked with the service employees. There were whites, blacks, Latinos in the coalition. There were Democrats, independents. I mean it was a very exciting and energizing time when we were working on the campaign.”
“How smart is that?” asked Gayle Falkenthal, who produced Hedgecock's radio show for several years. “You are a member of a community that has no representation. Somebody offers you some, and then listens to you. That's a pretty great thing.”
A Hedgecock campaign insider added, “He was never a liberal but did see the importance of inclusiveness.”
The first months in City Hall were heady. One staffer remembers feeling that the best and brightest were in charge, and they were going to go on to greater things. Hedgecock was popular with the public, and he rewarded his supporters. The history section of the website for the San Diego Democratic Club, a predominantly gay political organization, says, “A major advance came in 1983 when Roger Hedgecock sought lesbian and gay support in his effort to become mayor of San Diego. He won, providing new clout to a minority group struggling for attention.”
Like Hedgecock's earlier political battles, this one left a field of smoldering resentment shrouded by a pall of acrimony. “He made powerful political enemies,” said Robert Meadow. “I think that developers, builders, some of the folks that had been running San Diego-the old-boy network that really characterized it-the Union-Tribune, the Neil Morgans of the world, all these other people-they didn't like him. I think that they thought he was young and brash and was going to change their world. And in fact he was prepared to do that. He had a pretty strong following that cut across party lines. He wasn't the usual person they had in office.”
But the 1983 campaign had been the most expensive mayoral battle to date, and Hedgecock, who had spent around $600,000 to get the job, had to immediately start a campaign to keep it.
This is where Nancy Hoover re-entered the picture. After her term on the Del Mar City Council, she had become romantically and professionally allied with J. David Dominelli, head of the J. David Company. The pair was later convicted of defrauding investors of about $80 million. The scandal started to break in early 1984 and Hedgecock was connected to it through Hoover.
It turned out Hoover was a silent partner in Tom Shepard Associates, Hedgecock's campaign consultant, and invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in the company. She also arranged a controversial remodeling loan for Hedgecock's State Street house. Whether it was intended as a loan or an outright gift has been the subject of much debate.
Hoover's support, and her ties to Dominelli, gave Hedgecock's foes a perfect weapon to use in their drive to get him out of city hall. City law prohibited corporate campaign donations and limited individual contributions to $250 per campaign.
The ensuing battle over City Hall was truly a clash of the titans, fought in several arenas.
In the legal arena, the opening salvo was a Grand Jury investigation of Hedgecock's 1983 campaign, mounted in the spring of 1984. Retaliating, Hedgecock accused District Attorney Miller and two members of the Grand Jury of waging a vendetta, and demanded they remove themselves from the investigation. They refused.
There was also a battle with the press. In April, the San Diego Union, whose publisher had supported Maureen O'Connor, reported a story about testimony before the Grand Jury. Hedgecock claimed the information, leaked from a secret proceeding, was false and demanded a retraction.
When the Union printed only a partial retraction of the Grand Jury story, Hedgecock filed a $3.5-million libel suit. This convinced the paper to print a full, front-page retraction. Hedgecock dropped his suit.
Meanwhile, the Grand Jury adjourned before it was able to finish the investigation. So Miller filed a civil suit in May, accusing Hedgecock of failing to report more than $350,000 in illegal donations from Hoover, Dominelli and the J. David Company. The Grand Jury reconvened and in September 1984, after hearing 84 witnesses, indicted Hedgecock on 13 felony counts.
Hedgecock's response to the indictment was defiant. “Finally, I'm going to get a jury trial where both sides will be heard equally,” he said in a Sept. 20, 1984 Union story. “So far, all we've had is secret sessions, lots of leaks from the grand jury, lots of trial in the press with only one side coming out.” He immediately fired legal salvos of his own, drawing from a large arsenal of motions and pleadings.
Bloodied but unbowed, Hedgecock took another hit in October when the state's Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) filed a $1.2-million suit against Hedgecock, Shepard, Dominelli, Hoover and businessman Roque de la Fuente Jr. De la Fuente owned several car dealerships around the county and held a large tract of land in Otay Mesa. Coincidentally or not, Otay Mesa was one of the areas that Hedgecock had targeted for development under his vision of managed growth.
Hedgecock's foes gloated. Lou Conde, still smarting from Hedgecock's treatment eight years earlier, hired a biplane to fly the sneering message “Roger-It's Miller Time!” over the stadium packed with 60,000 Chargers fans. Neil Morgan, who had duly reported the incident, also reminded San Diego Union readers that back in 1975, Del Mar City Councilmember Nancy Hoover had voted to adopt the campaign-spending ordinance, drafted by Hedgecock, limiting individual contributions to a mere $15.
The campaign itself was almost the least of the battles. In spite of it all, Hedgecock beat Richard Carlson, the standard bearer for the “old guard,” with 58 percent of the vote. The people he had empowered remained loyal to him. Doug Case, a longtime member of the Democratic Club, remembers that the group gave Roger a standing ovation shortly after his indictment. Hedgecock had won the political battle, but the fighting still raged on the other fronts.
He got another break when the jury in his trial deadlocked 11-1 in favor of a guilty verdict. After some more maneuvering, a second trial began in July of 1985, this time with Oscar Goodman, known for defending mobsters, running the defense.
On Oct. 9, 1985 the jury returned convictions on 13 felony counts, 12 for perjury and one for conspiracy. But two days later, reports of jury tampering surfaced and Hedgecock asked for a new trial. His request was denied and on Dec. 10, Hedgecock was sentenced to a year in county jail and three years of probation. As legally required, he resigned his post as mayor.
Hedgecock's conviction was later overturned when a juror admitted to a guilty vote when a baliff told him that unless a decision was rendered the juror would not be able to go home.
One of the most telling references to a felons character is when a sitting judge on your trial says this before sentencing you- "As he imposed sentence, Judge William L. Todd Jr. said he had no doubt of Hedgecock’s guilt and that he had “violated the public trust in an onerous, onerous way... Your conduct ... is reprehensible in every sense of the word because you violated the public trust, completely, over and over again.”
Too bad for San Diego that an error by a baliff allowed this criminal to escape justice.
Thus is the criminal past of Conservative Talk show host Roger ( the conviction dodger) Hedgecock.