A New Syndicate Moves on Sports, Enertainment, Housing, Health, Beaches
With apologies to Raymond Chandler
The Santa Ana winds were blowing hot and mean over the mountains. It was the kind of weather that curls the edges of your sanity, and sends councilmembers and rats scurrying for deeper shadows.
I wish I could tell you that this caper launched with a blonde walking through my door with a tear in her eye and a dead husband in her trunk.
But, no. It started with basketball.
A mid-level fixer with a nervous twitch and a big Venmo balance hired me to look into some noise buzzing around the Lakers. Mark Walter, the Guggenheim money man who thought he owned the world because he owned the Dodgers and our precious purple and gold, was sweating through his suits. Somebody was making a play for the team, and they weren’t using a bank loan. It was this Kushner kid, capo of the White House family syndicate, and he was rolling into town with bags of cash from Nueva York, Silicon V, maybe Arabia. Neither the green nor his partner, Mouse Man provide any real leverage. Rather, it was his lineage that frightened. He was brother to the son-of-law of the president, who enjoyed bringing federal prosecution on a whim.
I hoped it was just a sports town squabble, a couple billionaires measuring their bank accounts in the men’s room. But then I ran the traps, and the story was as dark as Mayor Bass’ streetlights.
Turned out the federales were holding a magnifying glass to Walter’s financial plumbing, threatening to turn the whole Guggenheim machine upside down if he didn’t cough up his LakeShow equity. Give us the keys to the franchise, Marky Mark, or we send in the G-men.
I wanted to stop there but I couldn’t. I kept pulling that thread, and, wham, the whole damn shirt of Southern California started to unravel.
This was the Plot Against Los Angeles.
How far did the plot reach? I drove my old Plymouth over the hill to where the studio lots sit like walled fortresses. The mood there was as cheerful as a mortuary on a slow Tuesday. The trust fund baby Ellison was moving on Warners after sweeping up Paramount, and the backlot blusters told me he wasn’t acting alone. The White House family syndicate was backing him. And the indie producers, the front-of-camera faces, even the below-the-line rabble—they were all being squeezed. Approve the studio merger, or Paramount would relocate the industry to Tennessee, or worse, the syndicate would audit the town back to the silent era. A regular hostile takeover of the dream factory. Ellison couldn’t possibly want movies. Movies were over. He and the syndicate wanted the land, the libraries, the leverage.
You’d think a town with a Pulitzer-winning paper would be screaming blue murder from the rooftops. But the watchdog had its teeth pulled and its mouth wired shut. I took Sepulveda all the way to the Gundo, to visit the L.A. Times. The billionaire doc who bought the paper to play savior had rolled over and showed his belly. Why? Because the South African Sawbones had skeletons in his biotech closet that danced the rumba.
Threats weren’t needed; Dr. Soon-Shiong could read the chart. RFK Jr. slid into the doctor’s orbit, rasping about health initiatives and shared visions. Soon the old rag’s owner allied with the anti-vaxxer branch of the syndicate. The paper 86ed the ed board, and started reciting the talking points from 1600 Pennsylvania.
Feeling hot around the collar, I took Imperial west to cool off at the beach. To my surprise, the bad guys were already there on PCH. Howie Lutnick, title of commerce secretary (21st century slang for bag man) wanted the whole damn coast so the syndicate could build, pave, drill oil, launch rockets. The only things standing in his way were the California Coastal Commission and the state constitution.
Lutnick was using the syndicate’s playbook. Suddenly, the Coastal Commission was under investigation. The play: Drown the watchdogs in federal inquiries so they could steal the sand right out from under Jane Q. Public’s bare feet.
I could barely wrap my arms around a heist this big—Lakers, Paramount, Warner, Malibu—when my phone rang with a tip. These grifters hadn’t stopped at the water. Now their noses were in the public purse.
RFK Jr. and HUDsucker Turner were in Echo Park. And they had their fingers in two big pots—homeless services and Medi-Cal. They were using anti-woke talk to justify taking back billions for their own purposes. Look at the squalor. The swamp must be drained! The progressives have failed! Cancel Corruption!
I had to tip my Borsalino hat. It was a beautiful con, smarter than any Eddie Mars pulled off. And on a scale that would have made the robber barons blush like rookie shoplifters.
I grabbed a sandwich at Musso’s on my way back to the office. From my window, I watched the setting sun paint the hills in bruised shades of purple and red. I poured myself another finger of bourbon.
The picture was complete, pinned to the corkboard in my mind. The Trump people were tying up every asset SoCal had—the sports, the studios, the beaches, the housing, the media, the social services, and soon the Olympics—and denying the cash to anyone who didn’t kiss the ring.
The syndicate is still selling it on the socials as a war on corruption. But looking across my town, where the truth costs more than anyone is willing to pay, I could see what this really was.
This was a stick-up. And Los Angeles, that desperate old dame, was handing over her pearls without even realizing she was bleeding.
This column is published and syndicated by Zócalo Public Square.
