The City of Bell, CA was always very corrupt. Everyone in city hall stole tax money, and they all had bloated super salaries. Tiny town, but the corruption was so bad it made national news some years ago.
I’ve read that some of those southeast LA county cities were incorporated strictly to be corrupt. Commerce, Industry, Vernon.
Yes. If the killers were not so obviously just typical brainless fools, I’d suspect organized crime.
From Wikipedia City of Bell Scandal:
“If Rizzo wanted to get rid of you, he’d make some way to pay you off and make it beneficial for you financially”, said former Chief Andreas Probst, who was granted a $250,000 workers’ compensation settlement and an annual disability retirement of $158,057. Probst claimed his retirement was properly handled because he had suffered on-duty injuries in a crash with a drunk driver. But he said Rizzo bundled severance pay, and pay for unused sick and vacation days, owed to him, into the workers’ compensation settlement, which authorities said would violate the tax codes.
Seems like Probst should have been charged with disability and pension fraud but apparently, he was never charged or called as a witness.