Disgraced LA County Assessor John Noguez finally sees day in court

LOS ANGELES (CN) — More than 13 years after he was arrested on bribery charges, former LA County Assessor John Noguez is finally getting his day in court.

“This case is about corruption and greed,” Deputy District Attorney Bobby Zoumberakis told the jury Monday morning, during his opening argument. He added that Noguez and his two co-defendants had “manipulated the property tax collection system to gain political power, to rise up in the assessor’s office, to secure tax breaks for wealthy developers and to gain money.”

Their various schemes cost taxpayers roughly $12 million, the prosecutor said.

Zoumberakis spoke for more than three hours, and will continue on Tuesday. Noguez’s attorney, Anthony Falangetti, told Courthouse News in the hallway outside the courtroom, that his client is “innocent of all the charges,” and that “there are large, large gaps of evidence in the people’s case.”

Noguez is facing 16 felony counts or embezzlement, theft, bribery and misappropriation.

Noguez — a longtime employee of the assessor’s office, the county agency tasked with assigning property values for the purposes of collecting property taxes — was elected as the head of the office in 2010. Prosecutors say he helped arrange the values of numerous properties to be lowered in exchange for campaign contributions.

His co-defendant, Mark McNeil, worked in the office as an assessor’s representative, and is also accused of helping to lower the assessment of property values, saving property owners tens of thousands of dollars in taxes.

The third defendant, Ramin Salari, was a longtime friend of Noguez who worked as a tax agent and was hired by property owners to lobby the assessor’s office to lower property values. At times this was done in front of the assessor appeals board, where property owners can appeal the assessment of their property.

In theory, property owners and their tax agents are on one side, and assessors are on the other, in a sort of quasi-judicial process. But, Zoumberakis said, McNeil, Salari and another employee at the assessor’s office, Scott Schenter, would all meet in the cafeteria before hearings “and talk about what value to use and how to get it past the board.”

“That is where the gravamen of these crimes come from,” Zoumberakis told the jury. “When they agree, the board is just a rubber stamp for that agreement.”

Schenter was the first to be arrested and accused of taking bribes from Salari. He agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for a reduced sentence, and is expected to be the trial’s star witness. Zoumberakis said that Schenter will testify that Noguez never directly told him to reduce property values, but gave veiled orders like, “Take care of my donors.”

Many of the property value reductions took place in 2010, during Noguez’s campaign and while the housing market was still reeling from the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis.

The crash in home prices gave Salari the excuse he needed to drastically lower the price of property values. According to prosecutors, he saved the owner of one large single-family home in Brentwood, across the street from the house formerly owned by O.J. Simpson, some $188,000, by drastically lowering the assessed home value from $8 million to $3.7 million.

Salari typically billed his client for half the savings he secured; in this example, his invoice was for $94,000. In an email to his client, Salari boasted, “As you know, there was not market data to support anything below seven million.”

Salari is also accused of writing three checks to Noguez’s campaign, totaling $180,000, that he said at the time were loans, but that Zoumberakis said was actually a bribe.

The case against Noguez, Salari and McNeil, who is representing himself, has proceeded at an unusually glacial pace.

First filed in 2012, clerical error and appeal meant the case was thrown out on a technicality in 2020, and then refiled. In 2023, Salari cut a deal with prosecutors, agreeing to a $9 million fine and two years probation in exchange for no prison time.

But at the last minute, a Superior Court Judge rejected the plea deal — against the wishes of both prosecutors and defense attorneys — saying that it was far to lenient, and that Salari should have to face jail time. That ruling, too, was appealed, but eventually upheld.

The trial faced one last delay late last year when Salari sued his own attorney’s law firm, Larson LLP, for breach of contract, claiming that he’d been promised that Stephen Larson himself would represent Salari at trial, only to have his case taken over by a mere partner.

Salari asked for more time to allow a new lawyer to get up to speed. Superior Court Judge Larry Fidler denied the motion, calling the gambit “bad faith on the part of Mr. Salari,” who he said didn’t “want to go to trial.”

Jury selection finally began in January, but managed to drag on for more than three months, as lawyers sifted through hundreds of candidates to serve on a trial that is expected to last for six months. Eventually, 12 jurors and 13 alternates were sworn in — too many to fit in the jury box. Some of the alternates will have to sit in the gallery.

The lengthy trial will feature dozens of witnesses and a seemingly endless parade of financial and legal documents full of math and acronyms, some of which were discovered in a trash bag in Noguez’s back yard.

“By the time this trial is done, you will be intimately familiar with the lingo of the assessor’s office,” Zoumberakis promised the 25 jurors, who did not appear at all excited by that proposition.

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