What a deal. Former City College Chancellor Phil Day and one of his associates have agreed to a plea bargain in the City College corruption case. There will be no jail time for Day and Stephan Herman; they’ll pay a fine ($30K for Day, $20K for Herman), make some sort of undetermined “restitution” and walk away with no felony convictions on their records. Cris Arguedas, Day’s celeb attorney (who also represents Barry Bonds), did a hell of a job turning all the years of sleaze at City College into a relatively modest non-event. Ho hum. Pay a fine (which, with his string of well-compensated jobs, he can certainly afford — he clearly paid Arguedas more than the fine will ever be), walk away. No big deal.
But as G.W. Schulz reported for us over the years, this wasn’t just a little tiny mistake. There’s been a pattern of underhanded operations out on Phelan Ave. for years — and now the office of District Attorney George Gascon is allowing it all to disappear under the well-worn rug.
Damn.
Here’s what I wonder: Does anybody really believe that Day and Herman acted alone — that nobody on the Community College Board knew what they were doing? Did the chancellor cook up this whole scheme to ship money to a bond campaign without any of the elected officials who were directly involved in that campaign realizing what was going on?
I realize that the majority of the folks on the college board today are trying to clean up the mess that Day left behind and move the institution forward, but I have always thought that there was more here than the formal legal charges indicated. And now we’ll never know.