On this episode of Sleuth, we hope you recognize our efforts throughout this podcast, to shine a light on just how justice is dispensed and determined in Orange County, California. With the checks and balances a platform like SLEUTH has brought to bare on this subject, there is now a new District Attorney in town. On November 6th the people of Orange County spoke and voted in new DA Todd Spitzer, who dethroned twenty year incumbent Tony Rackauckas. Mr. Spitzer won on a platform of cleaning up corruption in the Orange County DA’s office. With that, we welcome a timely roundtable discussion with a trio of guests including: Wozniak defense counsel Scott Sanders, victim advocate Paul Wilson, who lost his wife of twenty six years to Mr. Sanders client Scott Dekraai, and a thirty year award winning veteran journalist, Scott Moxley. Mr. Moxley, through his Moxley Confidential OC weekly column, informs the publicly by keeping an eye on the political and legal maneuvering which takes place in the Orange County justice system.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Please be advised this story contains adult content and graphic language.
It's not justice at all to know that the respect
that I had for these guys and what I thought
they would produce for me and do for me, they
did the complete opposite, and they they made my pain worse.
(00:23):
And they continued to do that by not admitting what
they did and not just holding themselves accountable. Welcome to Sleuth.
I'm Linda Sawyer. We hope you recognize our effort throughout
(00:47):
this podcast to shine a light on just how justice
is dispensed and determined in Orange County, California. With the
checks and balances a platform like Sleuth has brought to
bear on this subject, there is now a new day
in town. On November six, the people of Orange County
spoke and voted in new d A Todd Spitzer, who
(01:10):
dethroned a twenty year incumbent in Tony Rococcus, Mr Spitzer one,
on a platform of cleaning up corruption in the Orange
County d A's office. With that, we have invited a
timely roundtable discussion welcoming back our trio of guests, which
include Wosniak defense counsel Scott Sanders, victim advocate Paul Wilson,
(01:33):
who lost his wife of twenty six years to Mr Sanders,
clients Got to Cry, and a thirty year award winning
veteran journalist Scott Moxley. Mr Moxley, through his weekly Moxley Confidential,
informs the public by consistently keeping an eye on the
political and legal maneuvering taking place in the Orange County
(01:55):
justice system. Welcome to Sleuth again, gentlemen, and thank you
for being here today. For this past season of Sleuth,
the focus has been on the Dan Wozniak case because
I believe Dan was not alone in committing the murders
of Sam Hair and Julie Kibuishi, and I've shared with
listeners my work in support of this theory. There are
(02:17):
others involved in these murders who should have been charged
as accomplices, but we're not due to perhaps political expediency,
with the d a's office seemingly consumed by a win
at all costs mentality, So the narratives seem to be
get the death penalty for Dan Wozniak, and the others
will simply be summed up as collateral damage. Therefore, I
(02:41):
wanted to invite all three of you, gentlemen, back to
the program today, so each of you can discuss some
of your concerning issues that your work has revealed regarding
the shortcomings of the Orange County justice system, not only
you covering them, Mr Moxley, but you experiencing them from
a personal standpoint as of the MS family member, and
(03:01):
of course Mr Sanders experiencing it as a as a
public defender in the county for over twenty six years.
So with that, let's talk about the election. We just
had an election and an incumbent of twenty years was
basically ousted. The people spoke and uh, I know that
(03:22):
you had a lot to say about it in your coverage,
So why don't we start with you, Mr Moxley. Sure,
as we film this or record this, it looks like
Mr Spitzer, the challenger, is up by forty votes and
which is a trouncing and particularly given the history of
the office. Racoccus one in June the first time and
(03:43):
has been openly seeking a six four year term and
I think entered into the year believing he would be
the next district attorney and was stunned that the voters
in the June primary wanted someone other than him, And
I think you could look at what the office did
in the following weeks leading up to the election and
(04:05):
wonder whether decisions were made in the interests of justice
or attempted to be made to an influence an election.
I'd like to know, Mr Sanders. I know that I've
heard that in fact, Mr Spitzer really was running on
it clean up the d a's office platform. Do you
(04:26):
feel like all your work and the informant scandal had
the results that you were looking for in this election? Well,
we weren't doing it for the election, first of all,
so it really wasn't part of the analysis. Never was
I ever doing work and going out there and LiTi
getting these issues thinking that Mr ra Caucus would would
be replaced. It's happened, and now we'll look forward to
(04:48):
see if Mr Spitzer brings in a new thinking about
how to deal with issues of misconduct, both within the
office and outside of it. So it's really in his
ball field. Now he can he can assuring a whole
new era that looks nothing like the one we've seen
for the last couple of decades. But on the campaign,
he was touting all your work and he was giving
(05:10):
you credit for what you uncovered. I don't know how
much he was directly recognizing our work, but I think
he was speaking to at least what the work had
done to show that there were problems that he believed
needed to be changed or responded to. So he's talked
a lot about it. It's been a big issue for him.
I think it was an issue that did move people, unquestionably.
(05:31):
I think it's just you know, and and the writing
people like Scott Mr Moxley covered it. How many articles
would be he wrote over a hundred, He's written over
a hundred and sixty. I know on the that's a
lot of articles on the informant. How many words is that?
Have you ever figured it out? I don't want to
really know, it's a lot. Mr Wilson, I know you
had firsthand experience and got involved with Mr Spitzer's campaign
(05:55):
to the point where you just spoke about your firsthand experience.
Why don't you tell my listeners about sure? Well, I'm
at Todd six years ago. Seven years ago. Todd gave
me a platform to speak. He was a lot of
victims rallies and it was instrumental in helping me heal.
At that time. I give thought a lot of credit
(06:15):
for that, and he was very kind to me, and
like I said, he gave me that that platform that
I very much needed at that time. And in context,
how how long ago was that? It's uh spent seven years?
So Todd reached out to me, and my first victims
rally would have been probably six months after Christie was
shot and killed in Seal Beach. I Scott to Cry
(06:36):
who was one of Mr Sander's clients. Correct, So Todd
is he ran on victims rights and and cleaning up
that office and everything I know about Todd, he's been
true to his words. So he's got a large clean up.
And so was there a commercial that you did with
him or what I did? I did do a commercial
(06:56):
for Todd. I wanted the voters to know the corre
option and the scandal that I experienced with Tony Rococcus
in that current District Attorney's office, and that's basically what
the commercial was about. Did you want to share with
listeners your experience when you did actually meet with Tony directly?
(07:16):
It's time with that When you said that you sat
down with Mr Roccoccus and you could tell that it
was his choice. Yeah, well, I had numerous meetings with
Tony over the course of six and a half years,
so many of those were face to face, and um,
they were very heated. What were they heated about? Well,
because I was contesting his decisions and what he was
(07:39):
doing and didn't agree with them, and we basically just
decided we didn't like each other. So definitely a different
experience than you had with Mr Spitzer. Completely different. But
but again, I mean, Toodd's giving me a platform to
speak on it as a victim, and Tony Roccoccus is
out there cheating and lying to me and doing things
that I don't agree with. So I held Tony accountable
(08:02):
and I knew he was lying and he was cheating,
and he didn't like that very much. Do you have
a sense, Mr Moxley, of your readers how they feel
about perhaps this new administration? Was it just time? I mean,
tell me, what, if anything, you're getting any feedback. The
Weekly's readership is twenty to forty market essentially, so it's
(08:24):
younger people, and they're always suspicious of law enforcement, particularly
political law enforcement. Let me go back to something about
how he won or how he ended up losing this contest,
I think you have to start the very beginning is
that Tony Corococcus abandoned his public oath. And without him
(08:45):
doing that repeatedly, nothing else would have fallen into play.
I wouldn't have written certain articles, uh Todd would have
been struggling in a way, but just repeatedly abandoning his oath.
And then give us an example of that, well, I
think in the in the in the Ry case, where
it was very evident by two thousand fourteen, and let
me just say for listeners, Scott to Cry was the
(09:07):
largest mass shooter in Orange County history, and one of
his victims was your wife, Mr Wilson. That's so the
key was in a place like Orange County, where there's
largely suburban juries who are not hesitant to vote for
the death penalty. This was considered a slam dunk death
penalty case. And yet they violated the defendants constitutional rights constantly.
(09:31):
They had records covered it up in light about it right,
and then they committed perjury. And in the process of that,
Tony could have gone the high road and ended the
cheating and fired the people on his staff who were
cheating and go after the deputies a committed perjury in
a death penalty case. He did none of that. So
that's the basic right there. In fact, even said they
(09:53):
didn't agree with Judge Goethe's ruling. Right. I mean, I
remember the sheriff saying that she bloody overstepped himself. You
had a speaking engagement, I believe it was at a
competing tabloid, and you spoke with and she was there sheriff,
and they've they've she and Mr ra Caucus have repeatedly
(10:13):
talked about their frustration with what happened. I don't know
that people listening understand that we had a debate that
got spurred by an informant that was both on the
Wasnia case and the Decry case. And in the Decry
case we ended up writing a lengthy motion of five
page motion analyzing what we believed was a hidden informant program.
(10:33):
That's how it all came to pass because you had
both clients, so you all of a sudden saw things
happening in both cases that ultimately drew you into the
informant scandals. So the line of the Sheriff's department, District
Attorney's office is that this informant ended up in these
locations next to high profile defendants by accident. It was
just a coincident. You represented two of those high profiles
(10:57):
and that then Wosnia and Scott to Cry and Judge
Gouldals in the Decry case did some miraculous, really incredible things.
First of all, he told the D's office to turn
over materials they didn't want to turn over, and then
he allowed us to have hearings over three years in
which more and more evidence poured into the courtroom. Prosecutors
took the stand, which was very different in Judge Connolly's
(11:19):
courtroom because he wrote similar motions, but there was no hearings. Well,
they were just a decision was made, that's right, and
Judge Goltals moved over time. He first denied our recusal,
then looked at more evidence and granted it, then dismissed
the death penalty. Judge kindly didn't allow any hearing. And
by the way, what's kind of important is the Wosnia
(11:40):
case actually led to some of the most important evidence
in the Decry case. So, for example, when we lost
and Decry, we went and got records in the Wosniak case,
and those records with Judge Statler as a matter of fact.
He then ordered some records. I don't think he knew
what they were, but they were devastating to what witnesses
had said in the Decry case. He saw a similar
(12:00):
name coming up, Is that right? Similar names, informant names,
informant names, and evidence we had never seen before. An
evidence had contradicted what witnesses had said on the standover months,
and Mr Moxley was covering it like incredible, Yeah, yeah, incredible,
award winning incredible. And not to speak for Paul, but Paul,
(12:21):
who started as someone who couldn't have been more opposed
to what we were doing, I would say, was watching
you would had not a happy relationship, nothing, no cooperation.
It was very contankerous. First, he was rightfully angry. Right,
you were representing his wife's killer. This is the guy
(12:41):
that's defending the guy that part of your life away.
Changed my life. I was married for twenty six years,
three children, it's a sky changed the course of my life.
And here's the guy defending him. And how could you
not how could you not feel the way you felt?
But I also want to talk about the conversation stion
you had with the prosecutor. I think it was Dan Wagner.
(13:03):
You told me that you went right up to him
and and said, is are the things that Mr Sanders
saying in court about this informant scandal? Are they true?
What was that correct? I mean, when all of this
started coming out and we noticed that Judge Goethe's was
allowing this to go on and happen in the courtroom,
we would ask the public appropriate questions, and the Wagner's
(13:28):
answer was, that's just the public defender throwing up smoking
mirrors and trying to dance around this thing, and extended
out that's none of that's true. They're all lies, nothing
you need to worry about. So no ownership. No, he's
sitting there lying to families that are all murder victims
and he's lying to us. Was that the inciting incident
(13:50):
for you was that when it all turned was already
starting to turn. I think there was about about years two,
about two thousand fifth, maybe about two thousand fifteen, that
I started to see this thing unhinging and asking why
why is you know, this is a very simple case.
Why is the judge allowing all this? Common sense has
(14:12):
to tell you that there's a reason why. I mean,
this is a very good judge, and he's allowing it.
So something's not something's not sitting something legitimate about what
Mr Sanders is discussing. Your listeners should know that in
the early years of the case, the prosecutor's office went
out on a pr mission to blame Mr Sanders for
(14:34):
all the delays in the case, as they did in
Lasniak and as as it turned out, as which judge
was determined, it was actually the Sheriff's department and the
prosecutors that had delayed the whole time because they were
hiding stuff that should have come in along a lot earlier.
So they weren't they weren't submitting what the court was
asking for, coming up with all kinds of excuse. You've
(14:54):
can understand. I mean that when I talked about this,
sometimes on the defense side it can be difficult. This
is a case were ultimately, when we had marshaled all
the evidence and gone through everything and spending year study,
we owned the facts. When we walked into the courtroom,
we had documents that showed the movements of informants and
the concealment of it and how it wasn't coming forward
(15:15):
in cases, So you would be asking witnesses questions and
their answers would be ridiculous. And I remember at some
point Paul and I have talked about this. I would
look back at him, can you believe it? Kind of
a little bit like this is this is absurd and
kind of wanted to see his reaction. And I did
see the reaction. Again, that's before we were friendly. I mean,
(15:36):
we were still but it's starting to unravel. And he
notices that I'm noticing that it's unraveling, and he's like
watching an Abbot and Costello show. Absolutely and something that
two days after the shooting happened, we were all summoned
down to the d a's office and it brought us
all upstairs and Tony's up there telling us what he's
(16:00):
going to do and how he's going to do it,
and the news media is assembling downstairs. It's a it's
a huge news comp of course, UM, and he says
to us, I don't want you guys exposed to the
media at this time. This is something that I'm going
to carry and I've I've got your backs and I'm
going to take care of you guys. And he did
(16:20):
anything but take care of us, and UM did you
feel like, right, then there was something funny that No. No,
I mean this is two days. This is my first
exposure to the system. Right, the system is gonna work
because we all wanted to labor, all Americans, and it's
the best system in the world. Never been in court,
never had any exposure to it. Here's the top law enforcement.
(16:42):
Certainly not to be there, you didn't want to be there.
I'm a hundred percent convinced that they're going to protect
is going to protect me, and they're gonna do what's right,
and the system is going to work exactly how it's
supposed to work for me. Did complete the complete opposite.
I think get people don't realize sometimes as they think, well,
(17:03):
if you uncover misconduct, it only helps defendants, like yeah,
but but all of this it's for society well and
also for victims. So the problem is if you're in
a death penalty case and twenty years later evidence that
comes forward that could have been available twenty years earlier,
(17:23):
that's when victims lives get unraveled again. So cheating doesn't
help on any side. And in reality, here, if they
would have played it straight from the beginning, they would
have gotten the death penalty. They would have had a
pretty good shot, not that I would have ever wanted it.
I would have always been opposed to it, but they
but they could have done it clean from the beginning.
And one of the great and terrible examples is that
(17:45):
we are years into this litigation, we are the D's
Office has been recused, and we discover a whole series
of records called a special Handling Log that basically said
that everything we had said way back in two thousand
in fourteen when we first filed the brief was accurate.
If they had turned that over when they were supposed to,
(18:06):
and they were required to, because in two thousand and
thirteen they had in order to turn over all of
these types of materials they refused. If they had done that,
Paul wouldn't have gone through this, none of it. It
would have all right there been out What would have
happened happened to tell us? I would have dealt with
all the informant issues right there. We would have understood
what was the scope of the litigation. We would have
realized it all there wouldn't have been But what would
(18:28):
have been the downside for the d A's Office to
admit all of that well, and let's let's say, you know,
some stuff D's office sometimes Sheriff's office. If the Sheriff's
office had admitted, why do you think they were afraid
to say, Okay, this happened. Let's move on. Because it's
devastating because because behind all this, unfortunately is years of concealment.
It's not just the Scott Decry case. So other cases
(18:49):
would have. Is that what you think, Mr Moxley? A
whole lot of Absolutely. In January two fourteen, when Matt
Murphy and Dan Waggoner in the homicide unit received Scott's
motion and to cry, I was with them and they
huddled around, and they looked through it and they told
(19:10):
me and they trusted me at this point. I trusted
them at that point. This is nothing. This is just
wild stuff. But I could see the look on some
of their faces of cringet, trepidation, and and so I
you know, it's a five page motion And I remember
on a Saturday going to a coffee shop thinking I'm
gonna I'm gonna speed read this puppy, and I get
(19:32):
like forty pages in. It's been like four hours because
it's so dense. That's how much hard work went into
that to that brief, and I'm talking about Mr Sanders,
the original brief, and I knew that I was. I
just it's not the first document that revealed the informant scandal,
and I knew this is gonna take me forever to
(19:55):
digest because there's so many and you didn't have any
real professional relationship with Mr Sanders at that point. I
watched him in him. I knew of him. I had
watched him in court um and in fact, some of
the people in the homicide unit had previously told me
good things. They thought he was a really good lawyer.
It's true. And so eventually, when I felt I got
a little bit more into it, I realized the issues
(20:18):
are way beyond me that he's discussing in terms of
all the informant games and the Sheriff's Department, the d
A that I requested a meeting, and we were hesitative
at each other because he'd read my coverage of the
Orange County District Office and a favorable that I've written
favorable stories about their homicide cases. So when we sat down,
we didn't know exactly where we were going to go.
(20:39):
All I wanted out of the meeting was one thing,
that that he would open up a channel that I
could ask him questions. That was it to start with
that he was worried whether he could trust a reporter
who was so close to everybody in the homicide unit.
Thank goodness, you went first. I was second after that.
(21:00):
That's the article where he came with the cowboy hat
and the think oxide on his nose and you were
afraid of the sunshine at that. I never really had
any um communications with reporters. Maybe once in a while
somebody would ask me something, but this is really my
first time I've ever media, and you know, and it's
(21:20):
the most media don't say very nice things about your clients,
so I could understand you not. One of the one
of the remarkable things for me in terms of signals
was in the after maybe a week or two where
the d a's office had time to digest more about
what was in the in the brief, there was a
hearing in in No wazni At case with Murphy and
(21:41):
Matt was walking behind him at the pacing and standing
right behind him, and and I was sitting in there.
You hadn't seen that kind of behavior before. I hadn't
seen that from him that I could remember. But what
the difference was Scott swiveled around in the divince here
and just stared up at him. It wasn't frown or
just just he was digesting, like you could see he's
(22:03):
just take but he spun around. He wasn't afraid. He
wasn't afraid. And that was the signals, Like because one
of my pet peeve covering court for for so long
is I hate lazy lawyers, you know. And I was like, oh,
this guy's this guy is ready to fight, and he
wasn't over the top. It was just you hate lazy journalists.
I do, but I've seen so many. Matt is an
(22:24):
impressive courtroom figure, and I've seen many defense lawyers just
crumble around him. And for for Scott Sanders to spin
around and follow him like it's sick. I'm not afraid
of you. I'm not afraid of you on this and
it was it was a turning point for me that
I have to pay attention, I have to learn more,
and thankfully my company allowed me to drop covering other
(22:47):
things to spend more time kind of digesting this and
learning the issues. And they were tough at first. The
Messiah rules and when you can when the cops can
talk to you or not, and that sort of thing.
It was. It was a learning experience. It took years
to kind of feel like I understood it appropriately. But
it all began there with them telling me I couldn't
trust Scott, but me seeing a signal of him ready
(23:10):
to fight. And then he he slowly opened up and
helped me understand what was in his motion and why
he put it in. Do you feel satisfaction? Anybody could
answer this with the election results, Well, my friends joked
with me that as an investigative journalist it's better to
have Tony Rococcus in there because he's just a scandal machine. So, UM,
(23:33):
I laugh at that. I think I've told you that before.
And uh, I mean I've I've known Todd Spitzer and
Tony Rococcus since the late nineties. Maybe we have no
Todd since my listeners about a little bit about Todd
Spitzer's background. Well, Todd has been on a school board,
he's been a county supervisor twice, he's been termed out
(23:57):
at the state Assembly. Um, he's a radio show and
KFI many years ago, or at least he was a
producer or something like that. He's been a reserve a
Los Angeles Police Department officer and um, you know, so
he has served the public over the years. Yeah, he's
a he's a He's unlike Ricoccus, Tony a touch bitzer,
is much more of a policy wonk. He gets into
(24:19):
the nitty gritty of why you have to do something right.
Rococcus is more, Uh, my friends calling on the phone
that needs help, maybe a case doesn't get filed for example. Uh.
One of the first indicators for me about Tony Ricoccus
was his office filed a complaint against George Arduous, who
(24:40):
was a billionaire Newport Beach real estate developer. He has
an apartment complex massive, and he was refusing to give
refunds to all these poor people, just systematically. That was
in the complaint. Within like forty five minutes of it
being filed officially in court with the time stamp, he
had it yanked. Arduous was one of his campaign contributors,
(25:02):
and that cleared the way for George Arduous to pass
Senate confirmation to become a US ambassador to Spain. That's
the type of thing that Todd has campaigned a bit,
not just recently, but kind of fought against or argued
against that. You can't have a system operating like that.
And I can tell you that the prosecutors on that
case were horrified that they had They had worked on
(25:25):
it for years and years, and for him to yank
it for what they believe our political concerns was unacceptable.
Do you think that with a new administration, the cleanup
that Todd Spitzer promised to his constituents will indeed take place?
I just am taking the perspective that it's a possibility
that he will, he'll bring that in. I want to
(25:46):
be positive about that, but this is what I would say.
It's not going to be enough to just look forward
and make sure that it doesn't happen in the future.
There's issues to address here that are not going to
just go away. And like what, well, right now we
have a phone call scandal. We have issues with regard
to and to say what that is. There's been calls
(26:07):
that recorded from inmates to their lawyers improperly. Unquestionably those
numbers have grown as really well, you're not allowed to
record calls from inmates to their lawyers. It's strictly prohibited
and has lots of legal implications and they have been recorded.
They have and you know this for fact. Yes, this
has been admitted. This has been admitted by the telephone
(26:29):
provider and by the Sheriff's department. There's no question. Yeah,
it's not it's not a disputed issue. It's been admitted
by both entities. The numbers that the sheriff Department admitted, Yes,
and they're at this reluctantly. Reluctantly. They took a long time,
and I would say they absolutely concealed it for three
and a half years. So now they come forward and
(26:49):
they have admissions of a very small number of calls.
How did you come to realize this is And it
wasn't me. It was another lawyer by the name of
Joel Garson who covered it in a case. Our office
then has been leading an effort to bring it out
in other cases. I have one of the cases that's involved.
But they admitted a thousand calls on Friday, we're talking
(27:12):
here on the Tuesday and Friday. They've admitted now that
the calls maybe vastly greater. We think the numbers are
more like an excess of two thousand calls, and we
think there's lots of logic supporting that and lots of
cover up on it. So that's not going to go away,
and he has to handle issues like that. There's also
the issue of the people that were involved in the
informant scandal have moved to the streets. So if you
(27:33):
were a deputy working in the jail and you then
were part of what we're part of it, that's supposed
to follow you your whole career. If you made the
decision to engage in governmental misconduct and concealment of that,
and that should follow you. So when you take the
witness stand, you get to be questioned about that. It
does not look like there's been any disclosures of that
(27:54):
in cases, and so that's another issue we've raised. But
so that's gonna be the issue you for Mr Spitzer.
I think there's a really good chance he's going to
say I don't want cheating to take place. I'm hoping
that's the case. Well if he, I mean, you said
he ran on that, but that campaign promise. But that's
I just want to say, But that's just not enough.
(28:14):
He has to remedy what's going on to date. He's
got to make sure that cases from the past get
handled correctly. Well, we'll have Mr Moxley watching out for that,
right sure. Let me just add something on the phone
call for your listeners. The importance is that your pre
trial inmate, the the Shares Department controls every aspect of
your day and night in there, and you're supposed to
(28:36):
constitutionally have the ability to communicate with your defense lawyer.
And those communications are important because you're talking about strategy
or your feelings or whatever, where a piece of evidence
might be and that sort of thing. And they just
can't violate that. And we know they've come in and
tried to downplay the numbers so far, the number the
system records the calls, that's a violation. But then the
(28:58):
Shares deputies and key cases were going in and monitoring,
downloading the calls for themselves and not telling anyone. And
in the particular case of Josh Wearing that's ongoing right now,
uh my belief that he had said some things only
on the phone. And then Coasta Mesa police department eventually
had the prosecutor had to admit that she she had
(29:20):
been given a rundown of the what was said in
the phone call. That's how they were aware of and
wrote things in certain motions, and was the prosecutor using
that information? They yes, they did. That's what started the
whole ball rolling on us. That's the first indication of
these calls. And the other thing that's really fascinating is
the group in the jail that kind of it was
at the forefront of the informant scandal was a group
(29:41):
called Special Handling. And so in March of two fifteen,
Judge Goltel's removes them from the District Attorney's office. One
day later, that same entity, Special Handling, stops another log
that they were keeping, and that log had all sorts
of information about their monitoring a phone calls. So you
(30:01):
didn't see that at that point, we didn't know. We
had no idea that we didn't have the evidence yet
that they were that they were actually listening to calls
that hadn't come out until a couple of months ago.
But way back they end their log. This is the
second log that they ended in a very strangely time decision.
One just within days of Judge Golde's ordering evidence in
(30:22):
the decry case, and then second within days of Judge
Goltell's throwing them off the case. And here comes the
Attorney General's office, they've been listening to all these calls
and suddenly they just they decided to stop their log
for a second time. So that's just one piece. You know,
they turned over documents that are ridiculous where you're you've
got a hundred law offices you're calling, and there's five
(30:43):
week periods where they claiming there's not a single call
made to a lawyer's office. It's absurd stuff. And so
when you engage in that kind of conduct repeatedly, and
we've gone through this through our litigation and through this litigation,
what do you do with the sheriff's department that keeps
behaving like this? Well, here comes Mr Spitzer and have
to hope it's to the rescue. But that's a that's
a tall order. And how do you feel because for
(31:04):
so long you said your relationship with the d A's
office was a positive one, right where you never saw
any of this. I had no idea. I'd watched certain
battles litigate out and I wasn't aware. I knew that
there were trouble with certain prosecutors. I mean, one, for example,
was tipping off the organized crime about raids that were
on the way. Wait, wait, what does that mean you
you tipped off? I'm aware of a prosecutor doing that.
(31:27):
Orange County was working in league with the organized crime
to tip them when they were going to be police raids. Um,
he lost his license, but now he's back in practicing.
When did that? By the way, he contributed to he
was yes, So couldn't we say his name? Brian Kazarian? Right?
And how long ago? When was he a prosecutor? Was
(31:48):
the beginning of the rococcus term? Right back? And he was.
I mean he was a prosecutor starting when I did.
We were in the almost the same class six years
ago almost. But the key here is that if they
every time you go into court, the judge will say,
(32:08):
or the lawyers are said, during when they're doing jury selection,
when this officer or an officer comes in, our deputy
comes in, you're not going to give them any more
weight than any other witness because that would be wrong.
And they all absolutely not. Now they come in and
they're wearing their weapons, they're wearing their outfit with their
ranks and whatever else, and that carries weight in ours county.
(32:30):
So I think it's an authority figure. I mean that's right.
So that so that the way the system, if the
system is working, you have to rely on the credibility
of those officers to tell the truth. Once that system
is broken down, which it has here, how can you
trust any decision? Then I was just gonna say, it's
a trust based system. And in the in the in
(32:50):
the Informant jail House Informant scandal, they knew the loophole.
Prosecutors and deputies knew the loophole to site. So for example,
you once a pre trial defendant has been arraigned and
has a lawyer, the government and their agents like informants,
are not allowed to question them about the case. So
(33:11):
there's an exemption that if an inmate wink wink that's
not working for the government accidentally overhears the guy confessing. Right,
So they would parade the guy into court and go,
did we make any deal with you? No, No, you're
not gonna get any sweetheart deal at all. So you're
just out of the goodness of your heart. You listened
(33:32):
in and you heard this guy confess, and you get
nothing in return. Right, And so what we've learned in
the snitch scandal is the routine was they had meetings.
They wink wink, and they would move, they would shuffle
the informants around, and the informants were writing notes going
I love my little job I have. And the two
of them that Scott exposed, both of them who that
(33:55):
the d a's office said, oh, we have no deal
with them. There was no prior deal for them. They
did out of the good. These are gang murderous gang members,
by the way, who were facing life in prison unless
they cut unless they cut a deal in some way,
and they were being paraded into court. Oh, no deal
at all. There was nothing there. And we later on,
Um saw the paperwork in the process that worked out
(34:18):
how they were using that loophole to cheat. How did
you how did you confront your sources in the d
a's office when you were seeing this unfold? How did
that change or did it change your relationship or your
feelings towards these people that you had been covering for years? Well, Um,
Susan King Schroeder. She is Tony Roccoccus is right hand person,
(34:40):
and she was the head of Public Aration's office. She
made herself chief of staff. She was the head of
what office at public Relations office? And as I was
writing as I was learning and I watched the developments
in the nich snitch scandal, she repeatedly, routinely said, I'm
gonna cut you off from our agency if you keep
writing these stories. And I just kept well, then you're
(35:00):
gonna have to cut me off because I'm going to
write what I see in court. And quite frankly, she
couldn't even keep up because she wasn't paying attention or
whatever whoever the sources were who were telling her about
what was happening, they were ill advised, or they weren't
telling a story, or she just was down with spin spin.
So I've lost her as a source and she's the
main d a flack or was and so yeah, there's
(35:22):
a ramification for telling the truth in a story about
what you what you see sounds familiar. Well, I mean,
this is what's so incredible about having someone like Paul
involved in another person by the name of Bethany Webb
also who had who lost a loved one. There's it
never happens. You don't have victims who are so stunned
(35:45):
by what they're seeing. I mean that they rise above
their natural feelings would be towards you representing their loved
one's killer, right that they rise above that. That's right,
first of all. Most human beings can't do that. Regardless
like that we would be sitting here today and that
we've sat together many times. It's Marathos, But it's not.
That's not me, that's Paul, because I can do it
(36:06):
as a defense lawyer, you know, I can. I'm trained
to see everybody in in all sorts of shades. But
to have lost your loved one the way he did
and still to say, look, I can't see how horrible
that is and how much it's it's devastated my life,
but I still can't tolerate the cheating that's going on
(36:27):
in the courtroom and that no one's being held accountable.
And that's the key. And I think I don't want
to speak for Paul, but I think that's what's so
motivating to him and why he keeps pushing me, is
that there's the tenants of our system, right, but there's
no there's been zero accountability, right, And that's the problem.
And it's the zero accountability. And does that frighten you?
Of course it frightens me absolutely. I Mean, like I said,
(36:48):
I'm a guy that went into this believing in this
system and this system that's in place for exactly guys
like me. Right, That's that's what you think as we
sit here today. I'm still very pro police, pro law enforcement,
and I believe that there's more good being done than
than there is is bad. Unfortunately, I got put in
(37:11):
with the bad and I had to experience and through
that experience, Yeah, I mean it look at these guys
took almost seven years of my life of and like
Scott said earlier, the only reason I was going back
to court is because they got caught cheating. They got
caught breaking the law, and that extended the time I
(37:36):
had to go to court. And so you no longer
looked at it as Scott Sanders fault. You looked at
it as the d and obviously, and I mean, can't
tell you what it's like sitting ten feet away from
the guy that has changed the course of your life.
It drains, It takes everything out of your soul. I
(37:57):
would leave court that day and just have to go
home and close up my house and just sit there
and and and be alone, because it just takes everything
out of you. It's hard to understand unless you're there
actually had a very similar conversation with me about that
with Dan wisn Yankee says, you just can't imagine. It's
(38:17):
mentally and physically excruciating and draining. And the fact that
I only had to do that because these guys got
caught cheating. They need to be held accountable, and they're there.
They as far as I'm concerned, Scott and it we're
gonna work to get these guys there are going to
be held accountable. So you're angry, of course, I'm angry.
(38:39):
I mean, these guys lied to me. It's difficult. I
had a son in high school going through his senior
year when this all happened. He was he was getting
looked at it by colleges, and there was so much
to juggle in the fact that these guys we're just
using me as a pawn and playing with me and
lying to me, and they knew exactly what they were doing.
It's unacceptable to me, and I'm not going to allow
(39:00):
it to happen. And it's at some point somewhere along
the line, those bad guys are going to have to
be held accountable. I mean, you could understand Paul's gone
and spoken to the attorney General's office himself and asked
for answers because in two thousand and fifteen they announced
we're going to do an investigation of what the Sheriff's
department did. It was obvious cover up. Judge Golds called
out the perjury in written rulings and it's undebatable perjury
(39:23):
and there's plenty of evidence. We're three and a half
years later, not a peep from them, not a word.
Tell me what's going on with the Department of Justice
and the Attorney general investigations. I think as Scott's was
saying earlier, the delay, the three and a half year
delay with nothing to show for it in it may
I believe the California Attorney General, who supposedly independently investigating
(39:46):
corruption in the Arrange County shriffs Department, held a campaign
stunt press conference with the candidate that's trying to replace
and did replace us shriff functions, So to pose in
front of the media right before an election. You're not
gonna do that if you're going to hold these accountable. Plus,
(40:08):
standing right behind him is one of the lead investigators
in this who's also one of the very prominent figures
in the whole snitch scandal. Yeah, who is that? William
Baker was one of the people who's been investigating and
supposedly on the inside level trying to determine who's responsible.
But that investigation that Basara came to speak at and
(40:30):
speak about with Don Barnes, the newly elected sheriff, was
an investigation that's led by one of the primary people
from the snitch scandal, So a fellow by the name
of Jonathan Larson, all through the snitch scandal, in the
heart of it, in the heart of not turning over records,
they chose him, of all people to be their lead
investigator in this very important Mexican mafia investigation. So if
(40:53):
you're us looking at this, you think, but did he
take the standard stand? He testified, he told tests, covered up,
he gave to testimony in two different cases. He never
revealed for years that there was an informant program. So
he's a guy that you would think, well, we just
moved him to the side. Would they put him in
charge of investigating Why? Because they're not afraid at all.
They have no fear of the attorney generals, nobody that's
(41:16):
holding anybody accountable. This is one of the things when
I met with the d o J, and I made
very clear to them that what's happening in Orange County,
they're laughing at you, guys. They don't they operate as
they want to, when they want to, how they want to.
They're laughing at you. They don't care what you have
to say about it. They don't care what you think
or what you'll do. They're laughing at you. And what
was their response. Number of people at the d o J,
(41:36):
the California Department of Justice. So there's the response. Um.
Their response was, we're not here to give you responses.
We're here to listen to you. Mr Wilson, Wow, how
do you feel about that? Mr? Mat doesn't make me
happy because the system is not working. And it goes
(41:57):
back to it's been obvious perjury. There's been the destruction
of records. Even their own records show that they've destroyed evidence,
and nothing's happened so well, And just just to draw
it back to WASNAC for a second, So in the
Waznia case, we actually went further back. The cry is
really limited to about a six year examination of informant
(42:19):
records in the WASNIAC case, even though we never were
permitted a hearing. In our argument in the Waznia case
was that the system is so corrupted right now that
it's not a reliable one for imposing the death penalty,
that you can't reliably count on evidence being turned over.
But when we looked at in Wozniak was looking back
at thirty five years of deception, because it's been going
(42:39):
on forever, the same techniques, the same tactics. And if
you looked at case after case since the early nineteen
eighties where informants were involved, they always coincidentally landed in
the same place. They were using the same what we
call snitch tanks or informant tanks, same techniques, no disclosure.
So and then did those snitches get some kind of
a sweetheart They all us do. They always do. They
(43:02):
come in and their line is, I'm doing it out
of a moral obligation. That's what Fernando Perez said in
the in the Wosniac and Decry cases. That's what Oscar
Morial did in every case. Now, Matt did give you
the letter from Fernando. There's no there's no disclosure issue
in terms of Matt Murphy failing to turn over discovery
and We never argued that he failed to turn over
(43:23):
discovery on that level. We did argue that the Sheriff's
department didn't turn over materials, and they didn't. In fact,
after we lost in the Wosniac case was when we
got this special Handling log that included details about the
contacts with Special Handling and Fernando Perez to get statements
that's almost undeniable. And also wasn't the mail order requests
from Detective Morales discovered at that point, right? That was
(43:46):
discovered afterwards as well, after the trial was complete. That
the trial was completed, So after Wosniak was completed, was
when we got in a in subsequent litigation, this key
document that has so much about what everyone had been
denying up to that. So, really you weren't given everything
in discovery. We weren't giving everything. And I've always said this.
I'll put it aside and say we don't blame Matt
(44:07):
Murphy for not giving us a special handling lung wool.
Assume that he didn't know about that. But what about
the Morales mail I don't request. Well, why Morales wasn't
turned over I don't know, but I will just say
we didn't get that, and that mail order request from
Detective Morales to the Orange County Sheriff's Department had it
(44:29):
a letter that spoke about the Coast of Mesa's belief
that there was a co conspirator in the case of
the murders of Sam and Julie, and so they wanted
the mail from Dan Wozniak in case there was mail
between Dan and Rachel Buffett, which shows the mindset of
(44:49):
the Coast of Masa police at the time that they
really did consider Rachel Buffett an accomplice. But again, this
is we're talking about decades of concealment and it would
take an army to dig it all through, and people
are doing it. There's a lot of cases that have
been turned around by our numbers. There's eighteen cases where
(45:10):
the defendant received a new trial, this case was dismissed,
some very positive outcome for defendants related to informant related misconduct.
So this is the arguably the largest scandal in the
nation's history, and it's still growing and it should be
growing even more. But when do you think there's going
to be some form of actionable response from an authority
(45:35):
that as something that they can claim that Okay, we're
going after these people and they're going to pay their
going there's going to be consequences to their actions. Where
do you see the end of this odyssey that you're
all on. Probably never, I mean realistically, I mean, I'm
not hoping for the U. S. Department of Justice or
(45:56):
the California Department of Justice to save this. This This
work is just work that you just have to kind
of keep going on until someone cries uncle. Do you
think it's ultimately going to be the public that makes it?
I mean, here, we do have an election after twenty years,
we have a new administration. I would imagine that gives
you some form of hope, cautiously optimistic. But is it
(46:17):
the public in the end, Mr Moxley, that you think
has the power to make changes? They just showed it
and Todd Spitzer's election. Absolutely. And what one of the
most ridiculous or not ridiculous, but more arrogant things that
Shriff Huchins and Racoccus we're bragging about and when they
were doing private dinners and wealthy communities, was that nobody's
(46:38):
paying attention to niche candle because it's made up. It's
we all know around here that it's not made up,
it's real. And one of the real um facts that
people should know is they were sending in informants illegally,
and they were the informants were doing great intelligent intelligence works,
There's no doubt about that. Some of the notes that
(47:00):
they were making cleared defendants that were in jail, and
they held those notes because they didn't want to change.
They wanted that defendant. One of them was a fourteen
year old boy who had been charged in Santa Anna
with a murder. The notes that they had in their
possession said, everybody knows this guy wasn't had nothing to
do with it. He's a punk. We would never let
(47:22):
him in our game. They kept him in and they
dragged it out. They dragged it out for how long
was that two years? Fourteen year old boy. So they're
selective and when they want to use the information, and
then they pretend that even though this is one of
the biggest informants in history modern history around here, they
didn't really read all of his notes, but they used
(47:42):
them in the cases where they wanted to use them well,
and that would add So when that district attorney took
the stand, do you remember what happened. He said that
they had lost their file. The District Attorney's office had
lost their file. His name is Stephen Shriver, he testified,
and James is here as a prosecutor in that case.
He said they couldn't find their file. The sant Ana
(48:05):
Police Department officers said, oh, it is all in the
hands of the District Attorney's office. The District Attorney's office said,
we can't find our file. But just as Scott Moxley
just said, those notes are a great indication of the mentality.
And I've sometimes when I talk about this case, compare it.
The guy who was making these comments to the informant
named Oscar Maurreal was not is not a great guy,
(48:26):
but he at least had the moral decency to know
that some kid who didn't do a crime shouldn't go
down for it. The folks who got the notes decided
the better route was to keep it to themselves because
they had a better sense of justice. And so when
people are playing on those levels and that type of mindset,
you imagine the damage they're doing in this context and
(48:46):
so many other contexts. Again, I always say this, if
you're cheating with informants who are the most dangerous witness
in the system. Everybody knows this, right. They're super motivated,
they'll say anything. They're half bounced away from being a
car salesman. They're incredibly skilled. They can I had a
difficult time questioning them because they're really talented. Often. But
(49:06):
if you're a district attorney's office and you're willing to
play with evidence of the sheriff's department or hold back things,
what will you do on other cases? Right? Because that
those are easy. You just turn over everything on an informant,
You put it out in front of the jury and
let them make a call it. But for years, here, decades,
I would say that hasn't happened, So it's not. And
this is why the argument I made on the Wisnia case.
(49:29):
In a culture that allows that you don't get to
have the death penalty, that's my argument. And that's one
that you know didn't work. But we'll see what happens
down the road. But it's frightening to me to think
about what else is out there that we won't ever touch.
When you see this type of kind of because I
never saw I I've spent most of my last five
years of my life studying these issues, and I never
(49:50):
found something that was helpful to a defendant from an
informant that was disclosed. I never found it. And in
the case of Oscar or Moreal, this is a guy
who walked down the street with his buddies shooting at
people on their porches and didn't care. So he's technically
a serial killer. And I think he admitted how many
(50:12):
on the witness stand five He admitted five, But he
can't know because he's shooting as he's walking down the
street at night with his buddies. He's doing this all
the time. This is who Tony Prococcus in the Sheriffs
Department put their faith in UM as he's facing a
life sentence. And as far as in the Scotty case
you're talking about, well when well he testified, He testified
(50:33):
in three cases with nine defendants looking at life. He
ended up testifying in the Scott Decry case and having
to answer some of those questions, and this is one
of them. You're saying they used him as a credible witness. Yeah,
they oh yeah, they pretended they didn't have a deal
with him, but he got a sweetheart deal. Recently, as
Scott and Scott wrote a number of stories about Oscar
(50:54):
Morel and the lunacy of this right, true serial killer.
If you go out five times to do shootings, isn't
that the very definition of a serial killer? You don't
become less of one because you're a gang member. Right.
Then he goes up and I don't know if you've
ever heard the recordings that were concealed and which he said,
I can make my memories better if you give me
a better deal. Didn't make it into any of his cases,
(51:16):
and those things can be found online, just terrible things,
and he gets rewarded because you did a deal with
the devil and you can't get out, okay. I think
one of the reasons that the prosecutors loved using someone
like Oscar Moreal grew up in a high crime area
as a serial killer you wouldn't want to be around him,
is that this is actually a remarkable person. I wrote
(51:37):
this a couple of times after watching him for hours
in court. He is brilliant, he is He outraces me
by a trillion percent by his brain function. The federal
government used him in a Mexican mafia case and he
was answering questions before they came out of the federal
prosecutor's mouth. Repeatedly, he knew what the questions should have been,
(52:01):
and he actually, actually, don't you want to ask me this?
That's how smart and slick this guy is. He could
have been the best auto dealer salesperson at at Fletcher Jones, whatever,
But this guy would sales. This guy could sell you anything.
In the battle he gave with Scott at one point
he was able to defend off for hours, but eventually
(52:22):
Scott got him because it was hours and hours of
grilling him. But the few people can hold up to that.
But a person like Oscar Morial everything is he doesn't.
You'll tell you what you want to hear. In other words,
he's a great salesman. But and this is what's the problem.
So he's so good. I had all the tools in
the end because of this crazy situation in a death
(52:42):
penalty case where Judge Goulds made a miraculous ruling, we
learned all these things about him. But when he was
in trial with those defendants with their lives on the line,
they didn't have those tools. They didn't have the evidence
to show he was lying. I had it in some
crazy litigation that nobody could have guessed in a hundred years.
But how's that fairness when people are in trial for
their lives and the prosecutor's office turns over four pages
(53:05):
of his two hundred pages of notes, which they did
in cases, or don't disclose his relationship so you can't
take him apart. Hey, Mr Mariel, here's this and this
and this. That's what you need. That's why I always
say it wasn't that my litigation in the Decry case
was particularly good. I had it all. It didn't take
it didn't take the headiest guy to do this. In
the end, we had we had accumulated all the materials
(53:27):
and we could play things for him that made him
ultimately given. As Scott said, it took a long time
and finally he relented, and then he started to talk
proudly about his shootings in the neighborhood and how he
how he walked in. But it was hard, and those
other people didn't have it. And that's the key. The
key to the fairness is you've got to have the
evidence that you're entitled to have so you can question
(53:49):
witnesses effectively. I mean, that's the foundation of our system. Yeah,
it's and and you know that's again I come back
to Paul that Paul, Paul sees these things in way
that few victims can see it. And I'm still mesmerized
by it. I truly am them. Yeah, you know what,
because it's just incredible that with the pain that he
(54:10):
and his family has suffered, he can see that. You
still don't want this to be the case. This isn't
just it's just not the way to do justice. And
ultimately victims pay too, because what happened on the Oscar
Morial's cases, well one of them, the victims think the
defendants doing life without possibility of parole. He's out in
a year or two. You know, for whatever you think
of this, that's a disaster, right, that's a disaster. Now,
(54:32):
maybe he should have he deserved to be acquitted, but
the victims, they would have said, why don't you just
give him the evidence the first time and we'll litigate
it the right way, or don't use him because he's unreliable.
But it's never good for victims either if ten years
down the road or fifteen down years down the road,
you're learning of evidence that should have been given over earlier.
It turns your life upside down a second time. Well,
(54:55):
that's what I've been saying, and I think I've shared
with you, Mr Moxley, like I don't understand in the
case of Wozniak, he had it all right, he had
a confession, he had the murder weapon, he had the
treasure trove of evidence, as he likes to say, he
didn't have to frame Rachel the way he did. And
it seemed to me like there there's a sense and
(55:18):
correct me if you think I'm wrong, but I feel
like in the case of the Orange County District Attorney's office,
there's a sense of that they cherry pick justice, who
gets justice and who doesn't. I'd love to hear your
reaction to that, But that's someone who has come into
town and covered this trial for in this case for
(55:39):
three years. I don't know the history the way Mr
Moxley does, or certainly you, Mr Sanders, and I can't
speak on behalf of how you feel, Paul, but that's
my impression. It might be cherry picking. But I think
one of the things that I learned about, particularly after
these Wozniak and cry cases, is that they weren't focused
(56:01):
on them to target them for cheating. They were just
cheating against everybody anytime they wanted. They were doing because
they called him capers all the time, against inmates. Um.
And this is what they just routinely do. Nobody was.
They were operating in secret, They had no management accountability,
they were coming into court, they were committing perjury. They
(56:22):
they're above the law. And it just through Scott's work here,
it just got exposed that they took the easiest slam
dunk definitely case and botched it. That's the embarrassment that
Tony Roccoccus and Sheriff Hutchins have to live with. And
I keep asking, how is that justice for the victims families?
(56:44):
I mean, I think you could speak best. It's not
justice at all, it um right, It's just it's heartbreaking.
And you know, to know that the respect that I
had for these guys and what I thought they would
(57:07):
produce for me and do for me, they did the
complete opposite, and they they made my pain worse. And
they continued to do that by not admitting what they
did and not just holding themselves accountable. I mean, right,
that's what I'm just so sorry for what you are experiencing.
(57:30):
I just think it's a travesty. I want to thank
you all today for being here. It means so much
to have listeners hear the truth and know the real
story behind all this, and you all three have contributed
to that in such a powerful, honorable way, and I
just thank you all, Thank you, thank you. On our
(58:04):
remaining episodes of Sleuth, you can expect to hear from
sources who will identify the full extent of others who
helped Daniel Wazniak in the murders of Sam Hair and
Julie Kibuishi. We'll learn about when and where Tim Wazniak
showed up on the scene to help aid his brother
Dan in the murders. And then there is Rachel's brother
(58:26):
Noah Buffett. What and how much did no one know
at the time of the murders. Finally, you will hear
from a couple of explosive surprise guests which will round
out our season, ending with a live call in finale
episode a finale where all our Sleuth listeners have a
chance to talk to me directly with any questions, criticisms,
(58:49):
or suggestions for our team. As we head into the
new year with an all new season, two. Stay with
us as we share all that's left of our work
for this season of Youth and No. You can find
us with the latest sleuth news at Facebook dot com,
Forward Slash Sleuth podcast. If you enjoyed this episode of Sleuth,
(59:13):
share it with a friend and be sure to leave
a rating or review. Follow Sleuth on I Heart Radio,
or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so that you
never miss an episode.
Please be advised this story contains adult content and graphic language.
It's not justice at all to know that the respect
that I had for these guys and what I thought
they would produce for me and do for me, they
did the complete opposite, and they they made my pain worse.
(00:23):
And they continued to do that by not admitting what
they did and not just holding themselves accountable. Welcome to Sleuth.
I'm Linda Sawyer. We hope you recognize our effort throughout
(00:47):
this podcast to shine a light on just how justice
is dispensed and determined in Orange County, California. With the
checks and balances a platform like Sleuth has brought to
bear on this subject, there is now a new day
in town. On November six, the people of Orange County
spoke and voted in new d A Todd Spitzer, who
(01:10):
dethroned a twenty year incumbent in Tony Rococcus, Mr Spitzer one,
on a platform of cleaning up corruption in the Orange
County d A's office. With that, we have invited a
timely roundtable discussion welcoming back our trio of guests, which
include Wosniak defense counsel Scott Sanders, victim advocate Paul Wilson,
(01:33):
who lost his wife of twenty six years to Mr Sanders,
clients Got to Cry, and a thirty year award winning
veteran journalist Scott Moxley. Mr Moxley, through his weekly Moxley Confidential,
informs the public by consistently keeping an eye on the
political and legal maneuvering taking place in the Orange County
(01:55):
justice system. Welcome to Sleuth again, gentlemen, and thank you
for being here today. For this past season of Sleuth,
the focus has been on the Dan Wozniak case because
I believe Dan was not alone in committing the murders
of Sam Hair and Julie Kibuishi, and I've shared with
listeners my work in support of this theory. There are
(02:17):
others involved in these murders who should have been charged
as accomplices, but we're not due to perhaps political expediency,
with the d a's office seemingly consumed by a win
at all costs mentality, So the narratives seem to be
get the death penalty for Dan Wozniak, and the others
will simply be summed up as collateral damage. Therefore, I
(02:41):
wanted to invite all three of you, gentlemen, back to
the program today, so each of you can discuss some
of your concerning issues that your work has revealed regarding
the shortcomings of the Orange County justice system, not only
you covering them, Mr Moxley, but you experiencing them from
a personal standpoint as of the MS family member, and
(03:01):
of course Mr Sanders experiencing it as a as a
public defender in the county for over twenty six years.
So with that, let's talk about the election. We just
had an election and an incumbent of twenty years was
basically ousted. The people spoke and uh, I know that
(03:22):
you had a lot to say about it in your coverage,
So why don't we start with you, Mr Moxley. Sure,
as we film this or record this, it looks like
Mr Spitzer, the challenger, is up by forty votes and
which is a trouncing and particularly given the history of
the office. Racoccus one in June the first time and
(03:43):
has been openly seeking a six four year term and
I think entered into the year believing he would be
the next district attorney and was stunned that the voters
in the June primary wanted someone other than him, And
I think you could look at what the office did
in the following weeks leading up to the election and
(04:05):
wonder whether decisions were made in the interests of justice
or attempted to be made to an influence an election.
I'd like to know, Mr Sanders. I know that I've
heard that in fact, Mr Spitzer really was running on
it clean up the d a's office platform. Do you
(04:26):
feel like all your work and the informant scandal had
the results that you were looking for in this election? Well,
we weren't doing it for the election, first of all,
so it really wasn't part of the analysis. Never was
I ever doing work and going out there and LiTi
getting these issues thinking that Mr ra Caucus would would
be replaced. It's happened, and now we'll look forward to
(04:48):
see if Mr Spitzer brings in a new thinking about
how to deal with issues of misconduct, both within the
office and outside of it. So it's really in his
ball field. Now he can he can assuring a whole
new era that looks nothing like the one we've seen
for the last couple of decades. But on the campaign,
he was touting all your work and he was giving
(05:10):
you credit for what you uncovered. I don't know how
much he was directly recognizing our work, but I think
he was speaking to at least what the work had
done to show that there were problems that he believed
needed to be changed or responded to. So he's talked
a lot about it. It's been a big issue for him.
I think it was an issue that did move people, unquestionably.
(05:31):
I think it's just you know, and and the writing
people like Scott Mr Moxley covered it. How many articles
would be he wrote over a hundred, He's written over
a hundred and sixty. I know on the that's a
lot of articles on the informant. How many words is that?
Have you ever figured it out? I don't want to
really know, it's a lot. Mr Wilson, I know you
had firsthand experience and got involved with Mr Spitzer's campaign
(05:55):
to the point where you just spoke about your firsthand experience.
Why don't you tell my listeners about sure? Well, I'm
at Todd six years ago. Seven years ago. Todd gave
me a platform to speak. He was a lot of
victims rallies and it was instrumental in helping me heal.
At that time. I give thought a lot of credit
(06:15):
for that, and he was very kind to me, and
like I said, he gave me that that platform that
I very much needed at that time. And in context,
how how long ago was that? It's uh spent seven years?
So Todd reached out to me, and my first victims
rally would have been probably six months after Christie was
shot and killed in Seal Beach. I Scott to Cry
(06:36):
who was one of Mr Sander's clients. Correct, So Todd
is he ran on victims rights and and cleaning up
that office and everything I know about Todd, he's been
true to his words. So he's got a large clean up.
And so was there a commercial that you did with
him or what I did? I did do a commercial
(06:56):
for Todd. I wanted the voters to know the corre
option and the scandal that I experienced with Tony Rococcus
in that current District Attorney's office, and that's basically what
the commercial was about. Did you want to share with
listeners your experience when you did actually meet with Tony directly?
(07:16):
It's time with that When you said that you sat
down with Mr Roccoccus and you could tell that it
was his choice. Yeah, well, I had numerous meetings with
Tony over the course of six and a half years,
so many of those were face to face, and um,
they were very heated. What were they heated about? Well,
because I was contesting his decisions and what he was
(07:39):
doing and didn't agree with them, and we basically just
decided we didn't like each other. So definitely a different
experience than you had with Mr Spitzer. Completely different. But
but again, I mean, Toodd's giving me a platform to
speak on it as a victim, and Tony Roccoccus is
out there cheating and lying to me and doing things
that I don't agree with. So I held Tony accountable
(08:02):
and I knew he was lying and he was cheating,
and he didn't like that very much. Do you have
a sense, Mr Moxley, of your readers how they feel
about perhaps this new administration? Was it just time? I mean,
tell me, what, if anything, you're getting any feedback. The
Weekly's readership is twenty to forty market essentially, so it's
(08:24):
younger people, and they're always suspicious of law enforcement, particularly
political law enforcement. Let me go back to something about
how he won or how he ended up losing this contest,
I think you have to start the very beginning is
that Tony Corococcus abandoned his public oath. And without him
(08:45):
doing that repeatedly, nothing else would have fallen into play.
I wouldn't have written certain articles, uh Todd would have
been struggling in a way, but just repeatedly abandoning his oath.
And then give us an example of that, well, I
think in the in the in the Ry case, where
it was very evident by two thousand fourteen, and let
me just say for listeners, Scott to Cry was the
(09:07):
largest mass shooter in Orange County history, and one of
his victims was your wife, Mr Wilson. That's so the
key was in a place like Orange County, where there's
largely suburban juries who are not hesitant to vote for
the death penalty. This was considered a slam dunk death
penalty case. And yet they violated the defendants constitutional rights constantly.
(09:31):
They had records covered it up in light about it right,
and then they committed perjury. And in the process of that,
Tony could have gone the high road and ended the
cheating and fired the people on his staff who were
cheating and go after the deputies a committed perjury in
a death penalty case. He did none of that. So
that's the basic right there. In fact, even said they
(09:53):
didn't agree with Judge Goethe's ruling. Right. I mean, I
remember the sheriff saying that she bloody overstepped himself. You
had a speaking engagement, I believe it was at a
competing tabloid, and you spoke with and she was there sheriff,
and they've they've she and Mr ra Caucus have repeatedly
(10:13):
talked about their frustration with what happened. I don't know
that people listening understand that we had a debate that
got spurred by an informant that was both on the
Wasnia case and the Decry case. And in the Decry
case we ended up writing a lengthy motion of five
page motion analyzing what we believed was a hidden informant program.
(10:33):
That's how it all came to pass because you had
both clients, so you all of a sudden saw things
happening in both cases that ultimately drew you into the
informant scandals. So the line of the Sheriff's department, District
Attorney's office is that this informant ended up in these
locations next to high profile defendants by accident. It was
just a coincident. You represented two of those high profiles
(10:57):
and that then Wosnia and Scott to Cry and Judge
Gouldals in the Decry case did some miraculous, really incredible things.
First of all, he told the D's office to turn
over materials they didn't want to turn over, and then
he allowed us to have hearings over three years in
which more and more evidence poured into the courtroom. Prosecutors
took the stand, which was very different in Judge Connolly's
(11:19):
courtroom because he wrote similar motions, but there was no hearings. Well,
they were just a decision was made, that's right, and
Judge Goltals moved over time. He first denied our recusal,
then looked at more evidence and granted it, then dismissed
the death penalty. Judge kindly didn't allow any hearing. And
by the way, what's kind of important is the Wosnia
(11:40):
case actually led to some of the most important evidence
in the Decry case. So, for example, when we lost
and Decry, we went and got records in the Wosniak case,
and those records with Judge Statler as a matter of fact.
He then ordered some records. I don't think he knew
what they were, but they were devastating to what witnesses
had said in the Decry case. He saw a similar
(12:00):
name coming up, Is that right? Similar names, informant names,
informant names, and evidence we had never seen before. An
evidence had contradicted what witnesses had said on the standover months,
and Mr Moxley was covering it like incredible, Yeah, yeah, incredible,
award winning incredible. And not to speak for Paul, but Paul,
(12:21):
who started as someone who couldn't have been more opposed
to what we were doing, I would say, was watching
you would had not a happy relationship, nothing, no cooperation.
It was very contankerous. First, he was rightfully angry. Right,
you were representing his wife's killer. This is the guy
(12:41):
that's defending the guy that part of your life away.
Changed my life. I was married for twenty six years,
three children, it's a sky changed the course of my life.
And here's the guy defending him. And how could you
not how could you not feel the way you felt?
But I also want to talk about the conversation stion
you had with the prosecutor. I think it was Dan Wagner.
(13:03):
You told me that you went right up to him
and and said, is are the things that Mr Sanders
saying in court about this informant scandal? Are they true?
What was that correct? I mean, when all of this
started coming out and we noticed that Judge Goethe's was
allowing this to go on and happen in the courtroom,
we would ask the public appropriate questions, and the Wagner's
(13:28):
answer was, that's just the public defender throwing up smoking
mirrors and trying to dance around this thing, and extended
out that's none of that's true. They're all lies, nothing
you need to worry about. So no ownership. No, he's
sitting there lying to families that are all murder victims
and he's lying to us. Was that the inciting incident
(13:50):
for you was that when it all turned was already
starting to turn. I think there was about about years two,
about two thousand fifth, maybe about two thousand fifteen, that
I started to see this thing unhinging and asking why
why is you know, this is a very simple case.
Why is the judge allowing all this? Common sense has
(14:12):
to tell you that there's a reason why. I mean,
this is a very good judge, and he's allowing it.
So something's not something's not sitting something legitimate about what
Mr Sanders is discussing. Your listeners should know that in
the early years of the case, the prosecutor's office went
out on a pr mission to blame Mr Sanders for
(14:34):
all the delays in the case, as they did in
Lasniak and as as it turned out, as which judge
was determined, it was actually the Sheriff's department and the
prosecutors that had delayed the whole time because they were
hiding stuff that should have come in along a lot earlier.
So they weren't they weren't submitting what the court was
asking for, coming up with all kinds of excuse. You've
(14:54):
can understand. I mean that when I talked about this,
sometimes on the defense side it can be difficult. This
is a case were ultimately, when we had marshaled all
the evidence and gone through everything and spending year study,
we owned the facts. When we walked into the courtroom,
we had documents that showed the movements of informants and
the concealment of it and how it wasn't coming forward
(15:15):
in cases, So you would be asking witnesses questions and
their answers would be ridiculous. And I remember at some
point Paul and I have talked about this. I would
look back at him, can you believe it? Kind of
a little bit like this is this is absurd and
kind of wanted to see his reaction. And I did
see the reaction. Again, that's before we were friendly. I mean,
(15:36):
we were still but it's starting to unravel. And he
notices that I'm noticing that it's unraveling, and he's like
watching an Abbot and Costello show. Absolutely and something that
two days after the shooting happened, we were all summoned
down to the d a's office and it brought us
all upstairs and Tony's up there telling us what he's
(16:00):
going to do and how he's going to do it,
and the news media is assembling downstairs. It's a it's
a huge news comp of course, UM, and he says
to us, I don't want you guys exposed to the
media at this time. This is something that I'm going
to carry and I've I've got your backs and I'm
going to take care of you guys. And he did
(16:20):
anything but take care of us, and UM did you
feel like, right, then there was something funny that No. No,
I mean this is two days. This is my first
exposure to the system. Right, the system is gonna work
because we all wanted to labor, all Americans, and it's
the best system in the world. Never been in court,
never had any exposure to it. Here's the top law enforcement.
(16:42):
Certainly not to be there, you didn't want to be there.
I'm a hundred percent convinced that they're going to protect
is going to protect me, and they're gonna do what's right,
and the system is going to work exactly how it's
supposed to work for me. Did complete the complete opposite.
I think get people don't realize sometimes as they think, well,
(17:03):
if you uncover misconduct, it only helps defendants, like yeah,
but but all of this it's for society well and
also for victims. So the problem is if you're in
a death penalty case and twenty years later evidence that
comes forward that could have been available twenty years earlier,
(17:23):
that's when victims lives get unraveled again. So cheating doesn't
help on any side. And in reality, here, if they
would have played it straight from the beginning, they would
have gotten the death penalty. They would have had a
pretty good shot, not that I would have ever wanted it.
I would have always been opposed to it, but they
but they could have done it clean from the beginning.
And one of the great and terrible examples is that
(17:45):
we are years into this litigation, we are the D's
Office has been recused, and we discover a whole series
of records called a special Handling Log that basically said
that everything we had said way back in two thousand
in fourteen when we first filed the brief was accurate.
If they had turned that over when they were supposed to,
(18:06):
and they were required to, because in two thousand and
thirteen they had in order to turn over all of
these types of materials they refused. If they had done that,
Paul wouldn't have gone through this, none of it. It
would have all right there been out What would have
happened happened to tell us? I would have dealt with
all the informant issues right there. We would have understood
what was the scope of the litigation. We would have
realized it all there wouldn't have been But what would
(18:28):
have been the downside for the d A's Office to
admit all of that well, and let's let's say, you know,
some stuff D's office sometimes Sheriff's office. If the Sheriff's
office had admitted, why do you think they were afraid
to say, Okay, this happened. Let's move on. Because it's
devastating because because behind all this, unfortunately is years of concealment.
It's not just the Scott Decry case. So other cases
(18:49):
would have. Is that what you think, Mr Moxley? A
whole lot of Absolutely. In January two fourteen, when Matt
Murphy and Dan Waggoner in the homicide unit received Scott's
motion and to cry, I was with them and they
huddled around, and they looked through it and they told
(19:10):
me and they trusted me at this point. I trusted
them at that point. This is nothing. This is just
wild stuff. But I could see the look on some
of their faces of cringet, trepidation, and and so I
you know, it's a five page motion And I remember
on a Saturday going to a coffee shop thinking I'm
gonna I'm gonna speed read this puppy, and I get
(19:32):
like forty pages in. It's been like four hours because
it's so dense. That's how much hard work went into
that to that brief, and I'm talking about Mr Sanders,
the original brief, and I knew that I was. I
just it's not the first document that revealed the informant scandal,
and I knew this is gonna take me forever to
(19:55):
digest because there's so many and you didn't have any
real professional relationship with Mr Sanders at that point. I
watched him in him. I knew of him. I had
watched him in court um and in fact, some of
the people in the homicide unit had previously told me
good things. They thought he was a really good lawyer.
It's true. And so eventually, when I felt I got
a little bit more into it, I realized the issues
(20:18):
are way beyond me that he's discussing in terms of
all the informant games and the Sheriff's Department, the d
A that I requested a meeting, and we were hesitative
at each other because he'd read my coverage of the
Orange County District Office and a favorable that I've written
favorable stories about their homicide cases. So when we sat down,
we didn't know exactly where we were going to go.
(20:39):
All I wanted out of the meeting was one thing,
that that he would open up a channel that I
could ask him questions. That was it to start with
that he was worried whether he could trust a reporter
who was so close to everybody in the homicide unit.
Thank goodness, you went first. I was second after that.
(21:00):
That's the article where he came with the cowboy hat
and the think oxide on his nose and you were
afraid of the sunshine at that. I never really had
any um communications with reporters. Maybe once in a while
somebody would ask me something, but this is really my
first time I've ever media, and you know, and it's
(21:20):
the most media don't say very nice things about your clients,
so I could understand you not. One of the one
of the remarkable things for me in terms of signals
was in the after maybe a week or two where
the d a's office had time to digest more about
what was in the in the brief, there was a
hearing in in No wazni At case with Murphy and
(21:41):
Matt was walking behind him at the pacing and standing
right behind him, and and I was sitting in there.
You hadn't seen that kind of behavior before. I hadn't
seen that from him that I could remember. But what
the difference was Scott swiveled around in the divince here
and just stared up at him. It wasn't frown or
just just he was digesting, like you could see he's
(22:03):
just take but he spun around. He wasn't afraid. He
wasn't afraid. And that was the signals, Like because one
of my pet peeve covering court for for so long
is I hate lazy lawyers, you know. And I was like, oh,
this guy's this guy is ready to fight, and he
wasn't over the top. It was just you hate lazy journalists.
I do, but I've seen so many. Matt is an
(22:24):
impressive courtroom figure, and I've seen many defense lawyers just
crumble around him. And for for Scott Sanders to spin
around and follow him like it's sick. I'm not afraid
of you. I'm not afraid of you on this and
it was it was a turning point for me that
I have to pay attention, I have to learn more,
and thankfully my company allowed me to drop covering other
(22:47):
things to spend more time kind of digesting this and
learning the issues. And they were tough at first. The
Messiah rules and when you can when the cops can
talk to you or not, and that sort of thing.
It was. It was a learning experience. It took years
to kind of feel like I understood it appropriately. But
it all began there with them telling me I couldn't
trust Scott, but me seeing a signal of him ready
(23:10):
to fight. And then he he slowly opened up and
helped me understand what was in his motion and why
he put it in. Do you feel satisfaction? Anybody could
answer this with the election results, Well, my friends joked
with me that as an investigative journalist it's better to
have Tony Rococcus in there because he's just a scandal machine. So, UM,
(23:33):
I laugh at that. I think I've told you that before.
And uh, I mean I've I've known Todd Spitzer and
Tony Rococcus since the late nineties. Maybe we have no
Todd since my listeners about a little bit about Todd
Spitzer's background. Well, Todd has been on a school board,
he's been a county supervisor twice, he's been termed out
(23:57):
at the state Assembly. Um, he's a radio show and
KFI many years ago, or at least he was a
producer or something like that. He's been a reserve a
Los Angeles Police Department officer and um, you know, so
he has served the public over the years. Yeah, he's
a he's a He's unlike Ricoccus, Tony a touch bitzer,
is much more of a policy wonk. He gets into
(24:19):
the nitty gritty of why you have to do something right.
Rococcus is more, Uh, my friends calling on the phone
that needs help, maybe a case doesn't get filed for example. Uh.
One of the first indicators for me about Tony Ricoccus
was his office filed a complaint against George Arduous, who
(24:40):
was a billionaire Newport Beach real estate developer. He has
an apartment complex massive, and he was refusing to give
refunds to all these poor people, just systematically. That was
in the complaint. Within like forty five minutes of it
being filed officially in court with the time stamp, he
had it yanked. Arduous was one of his campaign contributors,
(25:02):
and that cleared the way for George Arduous to pass
Senate confirmation to become a US ambassador to Spain. That's
the type of thing that Todd has campaigned a bit,
not just recently, but kind of fought against or argued
against that. You can't have a system operating like that.
And I can tell you that the prosecutors on that
case were horrified that they had They had worked on
(25:25):
it for years and years, and for him to yank
it for what they believe our political concerns was unacceptable.
Do you think that with a new administration, the cleanup
that Todd Spitzer promised to his constituents will indeed take place?
I just am taking the perspective that it's a possibility
that he will, he'll bring that in. I want to
(25:46):
be positive about that, but this is what I would say.
It's not going to be enough to just look forward
and make sure that it doesn't happen in the future.
There's issues to address here that are not going to
just go away. And like what, well, right now we
have a phone call scandal. We have issues with regard
to and to say what that is. There's been calls
(26:07):
that recorded from inmates to their lawyers improperly. Unquestionably those
numbers have grown as really well, you're not allowed to
record calls from inmates to their lawyers. It's strictly prohibited
and has lots of legal implications and they have been recorded.
They have and you know this for fact. Yes, this
has been admitted. This has been admitted by the telephone
(26:29):
provider and by the Sheriff's department. There's no question. Yeah,
it's not it's not a disputed issue. It's been admitted
by both entities. The numbers that the sheriff Department admitted, Yes,
and they're at this reluctantly. Reluctantly. They took a long time,
and I would say they absolutely concealed it for three
and a half years. So now they come forward and
(26:49):
they have admissions of a very small number of calls.
How did you come to realize this is And it
wasn't me. It was another lawyer by the name of
Joel Garson who covered it in a case. Our office
then has been leading an effort to bring it out
in other cases. I have one of the cases that's involved.
But they admitted a thousand calls on Friday, we're talking
(27:12):
here on the Tuesday and Friday. They've admitted now that
the calls maybe vastly greater. We think the numbers are
more like an excess of two thousand calls, and we
think there's lots of logic supporting that and lots of
cover up on it. So that's not going to go away,
and he has to handle issues like that. There's also
the issue of the people that were involved in the
informant scandal have moved to the streets. So if you
(27:33):
were a deputy working in the jail and you then
were part of what we're part of it, that's supposed
to follow you your whole career. If you made the
decision to engage in governmental misconduct and concealment of that,
and that should follow you. So when you take the
witness stand, you get to be questioned about that. It
does not look like there's been any disclosures of that
(27:54):
in cases, and so that's another issue we've raised. But
so that's gonna be the issue you for Mr Spitzer.
I think there's a really good chance he's going to
say I don't want cheating to take place. I'm hoping
that's the case. Well if he, I mean, you said
he ran on that, but that campaign promise. But that's
I just want to say, But that's just not enough.
(28:14):
He has to remedy what's going on to date. He's
got to make sure that cases from the past get
handled correctly. Well, we'll have Mr Moxley watching out for that,
right sure. Let me just add something on the phone
call for your listeners. The importance is that your pre
trial inmate, the the Shares Department controls every aspect of
your day and night in there, and you're supposed to
(28:36):
constitutionally have the ability to communicate with your defense lawyer.
And those communications are important because you're talking about strategy
or your feelings or whatever, where a piece of evidence
might be and that sort of thing. And they just
can't violate that. And we know they've come in and
tried to downplay the numbers so far, the number the
system records the calls, that's a violation. But then the
(28:58):
Shares deputies and key cases were going in and monitoring,
downloading the calls for themselves and not telling anyone. And
in the particular case of Josh Wearing that's ongoing right now,
uh my belief that he had said some things only
on the phone. And then Coasta Mesa police department eventually
had the prosecutor had to admit that she she had
(29:20):
been given a rundown of the what was said in
the phone call. That's how they were aware of and
wrote things in certain motions, and was the prosecutor using
that information? They yes, they did. That's what started the
whole ball rolling on us. That's the first indication of
these calls. And the other thing that's really fascinating is
the group in the jail that kind of it was
at the forefront of the informant scandal was a group
(29:41):
called Special Handling. And so in March of two fifteen,
Judge Goltel's removes them from the District Attorney's office. One
day later, that same entity, Special Handling, stops another log
that they were keeping, and that log had all sorts
of information about their monitoring a phone calls. So you
(30:01):
didn't see that at that point, we didn't know. We
had no idea that we didn't have the evidence yet
that they were that they were actually listening to calls
that hadn't come out until a couple of months ago.
But way back they end their log. This is the
second log that they ended in a very strangely time decision.
One just within days of Judge Golde's ordering evidence in
(30:22):
the decry case, and then second within days of Judge
Goltell's throwing them off the case. And here comes the
Attorney General's office, they've been listening to all these calls
and suddenly they just they decided to stop their log
for a second time. So that's just one piece. You know,
they turned over documents that are ridiculous where you're you've
got a hundred law offices you're calling, and there's five
(30:43):
week periods where they claiming there's not a single call
made to a lawyer's office. It's absurd stuff. And so
when you engage in that kind of conduct repeatedly, and
we've gone through this through our litigation and through this litigation,
what do you do with the sheriff's department that keeps
behaving like this? Well, here comes Mr Spitzer and have
to hope it's to the rescue. But that's a that's
a tall order. And how do you feel because for
(31:04):
so long you said your relationship with the d A's
office was a positive one, right where you never saw
any of this. I had no idea. I'd watched certain
battles litigate out and I wasn't aware. I knew that
there were trouble with certain prosecutors. I mean, one, for example,
was tipping off the organized crime about raids that were
on the way. Wait, wait, what does that mean you
you tipped off? I'm aware of a prosecutor doing that.
(31:27):
Orange County was working in league with the organized crime
to tip them when they were going to be police raids. Um,
he lost his license, but now he's back in practicing.
When did that? By the way, he contributed to he
was yes, So couldn't we say his name? Brian Kazarian? Right?
And how long ago? When was he a prosecutor? Was
(31:48):
the beginning of the rococcus term? Right back? And he was.
I mean he was a prosecutor starting when I did.
We were in the almost the same class six years
ago almost. But the key here is that if they
every time you go into court, the judge will say,
(32:08):
or the lawyers are said, during when they're doing jury selection,
when this officer or an officer comes in, our deputy
comes in, you're not going to give them any more
weight than any other witness because that would be wrong.
And they all absolutely not. Now they come in and
they're wearing their weapons, they're wearing their outfit with their
ranks and whatever else, and that carries weight in ours county.
(32:30):
So I think it's an authority figure. I mean that's right.
So that so that the way the system, if the
system is working, you have to rely on the credibility
of those officers to tell the truth. Once that system
is broken down, which it has here, how can you
trust any decision? Then I was just gonna say, it's
a trust based system. And in the in the in
(32:50):
the Informant jail House Informant scandal, they knew the loophole.
Prosecutors and deputies knew the loophole to site. So for example,
you once a pre trial defendant has been arraigned and
has a lawyer, the government and their agents like informants,
are not allowed to question them about the case. So
(33:11):
there's an exemption that if an inmate wink wink that's
not working for the government accidentally overhears the guy confessing. Right,
So they would parade the guy into court and go,
did we make any deal with you? No, No, you're
not gonna get any sweetheart deal at all. So you're
just out of the goodness of your heart. You listened
(33:32):
in and you heard this guy confess, and you get
nothing in return. Right, And so what we've learned in
the snitch scandal is the routine was they had meetings.
They wink wink, and they would move, they would shuffle
the informants around, and the informants were writing notes going
I love my little job I have. And the two
of them that Scott exposed, both of them who that
(33:55):
the d a's office said, oh, we have no deal
with them. There was no prior deal for them. They
did out of the good. These are gang murderous gang members,
by the way, who were facing life in prison unless
they cut unless they cut a deal in some way,
and they were being paraded into court. Oh, no deal
at all. There was nothing there. And we later on,
Um saw the paperwork in the process that worked out
(34:18):
how they were using that loophole to cheat. How did
you how did you confront your sources in the d
a's office when you were seeing this unfold? How did
that change or did it change your relationship or your
feelings towards these people that you had been covering for years? Well, Um,
Susan King Schroeder. She is Tony Roccoccus is right hand person,
(34:40):
and she was the head of Public Aration's office. She
made herself chief of staff. She was the head of
what office at public Relations office? And as I was
writing as I was learning and I watched the developments
in the nich snitch scandal, she repeatedly, routinely said, I'm
gonna cut you off from our agency if you keep
writing these stories. And I just kept well, then you're
(35:00):
gonna have to cut me off because I'm going to
write what I see in court. And quite frankly, she
couldn't even keep up because she wasn't paying attention or
whatever whoever the sources were who were telling her about
what was happening, they were ill advised, or they weren't
telling a story, or she just was down with spin spin.
So I've lost her as a source and she's the
main d a flack or was and so yeah, there's
(35:22):
a ramification for telling the truth in a story about
what you what you see sounds familiar. Well, I mean,
this is what's so incredible about having someone like Paul
involved in another person by the name of Bethany Webb
also who had who lost a loved one. There's it
never happens. You don't have victims who are so stunned
(35:45):
by what they're seeing. I mean that they rise above
their natural feelings would be towards you representing their loved
one's killer, right that they rise above that. That's right,
first of all. Most human beings can't do that. Regardless
like that we would be sitting here today and that
we've sat together many times. It's Marathos, But it's not.
That's not me, that's Paul, because I can do it
(36:06):
as a defense lawyer, you know, I can. I'm trained
to see everybody in in all sorts of shades. But
to have lost your loved one the way he did
and still to say, look, I can't see how horrible
that is and how much it's it's devastated my life,
but I still can't tolerate the cheating that's going on
(36:27):
in the courtroom and that no one's being held accountable.
And that's the key. And I think I don't want
to speak for Paul, but I think that's what's so
motivating to him and why he keeps pushing me, is
that there's the tenants of our system, right, but there's
no there's been zero accountability, right, And that's the problem.
And it's the zero accountability. And does that frighten you?
Of course it frightens me absolutely. I Mean, like I said,
(36:48):
I'm a guy that went into this believing in this
system and this system that's in place for exactly guys
like me. Right, That's that's what you think as we
sit here today. I'm still very pro police, pro law enforcement,
and I believe that there's more good being done than
than there is is bad. Unfortunately, I got put in
(37:11):
with the bad and I had to experience and through
that experience, Yeah, I mean it look at these guys
took almost seven years of my life of and like
Scott said earlier, the only reason I was going back
to court is because they got caught cheating. They got
caught breaking the law, and that extended the time I
(37:36):
had to go to court. And so you no longer
looked at it as Scott Sanders fault. You looked at
it as the d and obviously, and I mean, can't
tell you what it's like sitting ten feet away from
the guy that has changed the course of your life.
It drains, It takes everything out of your soul. I
(37:57):
would leave court that day and just have to go
home and close up my house and just sit there
and and and be alone, because it just takes everything
out of you. It's hard to understand unless you're there
actually had a very similar conversation with me about that
with Dan wisn Yankee says, you just can't imagine. It's
(38:17):
mentally and physically excruciating and draining. And the fact that
I only had to do that because these guys got
caught cheating. They need to be held accountable, and they're there.
They as far as I'm concerned, Scott and it we're
gonna work to get these guys there are going to
be held accountable. So you're angry, of course, I'm angry.
(38:39):
I mean, these guys lied to me. It's difficult. I
had a son in high school going through his senior
year when this all happened. He was he was getting
looked at it by colleges, and there was so much
to juggle in the fact that these guys we're just
using me as a pawn and playing with me and
lying to me, and they knew exactly what they were doing.
It's unacceptable to me, and I'm not going to allow
(39:00):
it to happen. And it's at some point somewhere along
the line, those bad guys are going to have to
be held accountable. I mean, you could understand Paul's gone
and spoken to the attorney General's office himself and asked
for answers because in two thousand and fifteen they announced
we're going to do an investigation of what the Sheriff's
department did. It was obvious cover up. Judge Golds called
out the perjury in written rulings and it's undebatable perjury
(39:23):
and there's plenty of evidence. We're three and a half
years later, not a peep from them, not a word.
Tell me what's going on with the Department of Justice
and the Attorney general investigations. I think as Scott's was
saying earlier, the delay, the three and a half year
delay with nothing to show for it in it may
I believe the California Attorney General, who supposedly independently investigating
(39:46):
corruption in the Arrange County shriffs Department, held a campaign
stunt press conference with the candidate that's trying to replace
and did replace us shriff functions, So to pose in
front of the media right before an election. You're not
gonna do that if you're going to hold these accountable. Plus,
(40:08):
standing right behind him is one of the lead investigators
in this who's also one of the very prominent figures
in the whole snitch scandal. Yeah, who is that? William
Baker was one of the people who's been investigating and
supposedly on the inside level trying to determine who's responsible.
But that investigation that Basara came to speak at and
(40:30):
speak about with Don Barnes, the newly elected sheriff, was
an investigation that's led by one of the primary people
from the snitch scandal, So a fellow by the name
of Jonathan Larson, all through the snitch scandal, in the
heart of it, in the heart of not turning over records,
they chose him, of all people to be their lead
investigator in this very important Mexican mafia investigation. So if
(40:53):
you're us looking at this, you think, but did he
take the standard stand? He testified, he told tests, covered up,
he gave to testimony in two different cases. He never
revealed for years that there was an informant program. So
he's a guy that you would think, well, we just
moved him to the side. Would they put him in
charge of investigating Why? Because they're not afraid at all.
They have no fear of the attorney generals, nobody that's
(41:16):
holding anybody accountable. This is one of the things when
I met with the d o J, and I made
very clear to them that what's happening in Orange County,
they're laughing at you, guys. They don't they operate as
they want to, when they want to, how they want to.
They're laughing at you. They don't care what you have
to say about it. They don't care what you think
or what you'll do. They're laughing at you. And what
was their response. Number of people at the d o J,
(41:36):
the California Department of Justice. So there's the response. Um.
Their response was, we're not here to give you responses.
We're here to listen to you. Mr Wilson, Wow, how
do you feel about that? Mr? Mat doesn't make me
happy because the system is not working. And it goes
(41:57):
back to it's been obvious perjury. There's been the destruction
of records. Even their own records show that they've destroyed evidence,
and nothing's happened so well, And just just to draw
it back to WASNAC for a second, So in the
Waznia case, we actually went further back. The cry is
really limited to about a six year examination of informant
(42:19):
records in the WASNIAC case, even though we never were
permitted a hearing. In our argument in the Waznia case
was that the system is so corrupted right now that
it's not a reliable one for imposing the death penalty,
that you can't reliably count on evidence being turned over.
But when we looked at in Wozniak was looking back
at thirty five years of deception, because it's been going
(42:39):
on forever, the same techniques, the same tactics. And if
you looked at case after case since the early nineteen
eighties where informants were involved, they always coincidentally landed in
the same place. They were using the same what we
call snitch tanks or informant tanks, same techniques, no disclosure.
So and then did those snitches get some kind of
a sweetheart They all us do. They always do. They
(43:02):
come in and their line is, I'm doing it out
of a moral obligation. That's what Fernando Perez said in
the in the Wosniac and Decry cases. That's what Oscar
Morial did in every case. Now, Matt did give you
the letter from Fernando. There's no there's no disclosure issue
in terms of Matt Murphy failing to turn over discovery
and We never argued that he failed to turn over
(43:23):
discovery on that level. We did argue that the Sheriff's
department didn't turn over materials, and they didn't. In fact,
after we lost in the Wosniac case was when we
got this special Handling log that included details about the
contacts with Special Handling and Fernando Perez to get statements
that's almost undeniable. And also wasn't the mail order requests
from Detective Morales discovered at that point, right? That was
(43:46):
discovered afterwards as well, after the trial was complete. That
the trial was completed, So after Wosniak was completed, was
when we got in a in subsequent litigation, this key
document that has so much about what everyone had been
denying up to that. So, really you weren't given everything
in discovery. We weren't giving everything. And I've always said this.
I'll put it aside and say we don't blame Matt
(44:07):
Murphy for not giving us a special handling lung wool.
Assume that he didn't know about that. But what about
the Morales mail I don't request. Well, why Morales wasn't
turned over I don't know, but I will just say
we didn't get that, and that mail order request from
Detective Morales to the Orange County Sheriff's Department had it
(44:29):
a letter that spoke about the Coast of Mesa's belief
that there was a co conspirator in the case of
the murders of Sam and Julie, and so they wanted
the mail from Dan Wozniak in case there was mail
between Dan and Rachel Buffett, which shows the mindset of
(44:49):
the Coast of Masa police at the time that they
really did consider Rachel Buffett an accomplice. But again, this
is we're talking about decades of concealment and it would
take an army to dig it all through, and people
are doing it. There's a lot of cases that have
been turned around by our numbers. There's eighteen cases where
(45:10):
the defendant received a new trial, this case was dismissed,
some very positive outcome for defendants related to informant related misconduct.
So this is the arguably the largest scandal in the
nation's history, and it's still growing and it should be
growing even more. But when do you think there's going
to be some form of actionable response from an authority
(45:35):
that as something that they can claim that Okay, we're
going after these people and they're going to pay their
going there's going to be consequences to their actions. Where
do you see the end of this odyssey that you're
all on. Probably never, I mean realistically, I mean, I'm
not hoping for the U. S. Department of Justice or
(45:56):
the California Department of Justice to save this. This This
work is just work that you just have to kind
of keep going on until someone cries uncle. Do you
think it's ultimately going to be the public that makes it?
I mean, here, we do have an election after twenty years,
we have a new administration. I would imagine that gives
you some form of hope, cautiously optimistic. But is it
(46:17):
the public in the end, Mr Moxley, that you think
has the power to make changes? They just showed it
and Todd Spitzer's election. Absolutely. And what one of the
most ridiculous or not ridiculous, but more arrogant things that
Shriff Huchins and Racoccus we're bragging about and when they
were doing private dinners and wealthy communities, was that nobody's
(46:38):
paying attention to niche candle because it's made up. It's
we all know around here that it's not made up,
it's real. And one of the real um facts that
people should know is they were sending in informants illegally,
and they were the informants were doing great intelligent intelligence works,
There's no doubt about that. Some of the notes that
(47:00):
they were making cleared defendants that were in jail, and
they held those notes because they didn't want to change.
They wanted that defendant. One of them was a fourteen
year old boy who had been charged in Santa Anna
with a murder. The notes that they had in their
possession said, everybody knows this guy wasn't had nothing to
do with it. He's a punk. We would never let
(47:22):
him in our game. They kept him in and they
dragged it out. They dragged it out for how long
was that two years? Fourteen year old boy. So they're
selective and when they want to use the information, and
then they pretend that even though this is one of
the biggest informants in history modern history around here, they
didn't really read all of his notes, but they used
(47:42):
them in the cases where they wanted to use them well,
and that would add So when that district attorney took
the stand, do you remember what happened. He said that
they had lost their file. The District Attorney's office had
lost their file. His name is Stephen Shriver, he testified,
and James is here as a prosecutor in that case.
He said they couldn't find their file. The sant Ana
(48:05):
Police Department officers said, oh, it is all in the
hands of the District Attorney's office. The District Attorney's office said,
we can't find our file. But just as Scott Moxley
just said, those notes are a great indication of the mentality.
And I've sometimes when I talk about this case, compare it.
The guy who was making these comments to the informant
named Oscar Maurreal was not is not a great guy,
(48:26):
but he at least had the moral decency to know
that some kid who didn't do a crime shouldn't go
down for it. The folks who got the notes decided
the better route was to keep it to themselves because
they had a better sense of justice. And so when
people are playing on those levels and that type of mindset,
you imagine the damage they're doing in this context and
(48:46):
so many other contexts. Again, I always say this, if
you're cheating with informants who are the most dangerous witness
in the system. Everybody knows this, right. They're super motivated,
they'll say anything. They're half bounced away from being a
car salesman. They're incredibly skilled. They can I had a
difficult time questioning them because they're really talented. Often. But
(49:06):
if you're a district attorney's office and you're willing to
play with evidence of the sheriff's department or hold back things,
what will you do on other cases? Right? Because that
those are easy. You just turn over everything on an informant,
You put it out in front of the jury and
let them make a call it. But for years, here, decades,
I would say that hasn't happened, So it's not. And
this is why the argument I made on the Wisnia case.
(49:29):
In a culture that allows that you don't get to
have the death penalty, that's my argument. And that's one
that you know didn't work. But we'll see what happens
down the road. But it's frightening to me to think
about what else is out there that we won't ever touch.
When you see this type of kind of because I
never saw I I've spent most of my last five
years of my life studying these issues, and I never
(49:50):
found something that was helpful to a defendant from an
informant that was disclosed. I never found it. And in
the case of Oscar or Moreal, this is a guy
who walked down the street with his buddies shooting at
people on their porches and didn't care. So he's technically
a serial killer. And I think he admitted how many
(50:12):
on the witness stand five He admitted five, But he
can't know because he's shooting as he's walking down the
street at night with his buddies. He's doing this all
the time. This is who Tony Prococcus in the Sheriffs
Department put their faith in UM as he's facing a
life sentence. And as far as in the Scotty case
you're talking about, well when well he testified, He testified
(50:33):
in three cases with nine defendants looking at life. He
ended up testifying in the Scott Decry case and having
to answer some of those questions, and this is one
of them. You're saying they used him as a credible witness. Yeah,
they oh yeah, they pretended they didn't have a deal
with him, but he got a sweetheart deal. Recently, as
Scott and Scott wrote a number of stories about Oscar
(50:54):
Morel and the lunacy of this right, true serial killer.
If you go out five times to do shootings, isn't
that the very definition of a serial killer? You don't
become less of one because you're a gang member. Right.
Then he goes up and I don't know if you've
ever heard the recordings that were concealed and which he said,
I can make my memories better if you give me
a better deal. Didn't make it into any of his cases,
(51:16):
and those things can be found online, just terrible things,
and he gets rewarded because you did a deal with
the devil and you can't get out, okay. I think
one of the reasons that the prosecutors loved using someone
like Oscar Moreal grew up in a high crime area
as a serial killer you wouldn't want to be around him,
is that this is actually a remarkable person. I wrote
(51:37):
this a couple of times after watching him for hours
in court. He is brilliant, he is He outraces me
by a trillion percent by his brain function. The federal
government used him in a Mexican mafia case and he
was answering questions before they came out of the federal
prosecutor's mouth. Repeatedly, he knew what the questions should have been,
(52:01):
and he actually, actually, don't you want to ask me this?
That's how smart and slick this guy is. He could
have been the best auto dealer salesperson at at Fletcher Jones, whatever,
But this guy would sales. This guy could sell you anything.
In the battle he gave with Scott at one point
he was able to defend off for hours, but eventually
(52:22):
Scott got him because it was hours and hours of
grilling him. But the few people can hold up to that.
But a person like Oscar Morial everything is he doesn't.
You'll tell you what you want to hear. In other words,
he's a great salesman. But and this is what's the problem.
So he's so good. I had all the tools in
the end because of this crazy situation in a death
(52:42):
penalty case where Judge Goulds made a miraculous ruling, we
learned all these things about him. But when he was
in trial with those defendants with their lives on the line,
they didn't have those tools. They didn't have the evidence
to show he was lying. I had it in some
crazy litigation that nobody could have guessed in a hundred years.
But how's that fairness when people are in trial for
their lives and the prosecutor's office turns over four pages
(53:05):
of his two hundred pages of notes, which they did
in cases, or don't disclose his relationship so you can't
take him apart. Hey, Mr Mariel, here's this and this
and this. That's what you need. That's why I always
say it wasn't that my litigation in the Decry case
was particularly good. I had it all. It didn't take
it didn't take the headiest guy to do this. In
the end, we had we had accumulated all the materials
(53:27):
and we could play things for him that made him
ultimately given. As Scott said, it took a long time
and finally he relented, and then he started to talk
proudly about his shootings in the neighborhood and how he
how he walked in. But it was hard, and those
other people didn't have it. And that's the key. The
key to the fairness is you've got to have the
evidence that you're entitled to have so you can question
(53:49):
witnesses effectively. I mean, that's the foundation of our system. Yeah,
it's and and you know that's again I come back
to Paul that Paul, Paul sees these things in way
that few victims can see it. And I'm still mesmerized
by it. I truly am them. Yeah, you know what,
because it's just incredible that with the pain that he
(54:10):
and his family has suffered, he can see that. You
still don't want this to be the case. This isn't
just it's just not the way to do justice. And
ultimately victims pay too, because what happened on the Oscar
Morial's cases, well one of them, the victims think the
defendants doing life without possibility of parole. He's out in
a year or two. You know, for whatever you think
of this, that's a disaster, right, that's a disaster. Now,
(54:32):
maybe he should have he deserved to be acquitted, but
the victims, they would have said, why don't you just
give him the evidence the first time and we'll litigate
it the right way, or don't use him because he's unreliable.
But it's never good for victims either if ten years
down the road or fifteen down years down the road,
you're learning of evidence that should have been given over earlier.
It turns your life upside down a second time. Well,
(54:55):
that's what I've been saying, and I think I've shared
with you, Mr Moxley, like I don't understand in the
case of Wozniak, he had it all right, he had
a confession, he had the murder weapon, he had the
treasure trove of evidence, as he likes to say, he
didn't have to frame Rachel the way he did. And
it seemed to me like there there's a sense and
(55:18):
correct me if you think I'm wrong, but I feel
like in the case of the Orange County District Attorney's office,
there's a sense of that they cherry pick justice, who
gets justice and who doesn't. I'd love to hear your
reaction to that, But that's someone who has come into
town and covered this trial for in this case for
(55:39):
three years. I don't know the history the way Mr
Moxley does, or certainly you, Mr Sanders, and I can't
speak on behalf of how you feel, Paul, but that's
my impression. It might be cherry picking. But I think
one of the things that I learned about, particularly after
these Wozniak and cry cases, is that they weren't focused
(56:01):
on them to target them for cheating. They were just
cheating against everybody anytime they wanted. They were doing because
they called him capers all the time, against inmates. Um.
And this is what they just routinely do. Nobody was.
They were operating in secret, They had no management accountability,
they were coming into court, they were committing perjury. They
(56:22):
they're above the law. And it just through Scott's work here,
it just got exposed that they took the easiest slam
dunk definitely case and botched it. That's the embarrassment that
Tony Roccoccus and Sheriff Hutchins have to live with. And
I keep asking, how is that justice for the victims families?
(56:44):
I mean, I think you could speak best. It's not
justice at all, it um right, It's just it's heartbreaking.
And you know, to know that the respect that I
had for these guys and what I thought they would
(57:07):
produce for me and do for me, they did the
complete opposite, and they they made my pain worse. And
they continued to do that by not admitting what they
did and not just holding themselves accountable. I mean, right,
that's what I'm just so sorry for what you are experiencing.
(57:30):
I just think it's a travesty. I want to thank
you all today for being here. It means so much
to have listeners hear the truth and know the real
story behind all this, and you all three have contributed
to that in such a powerful, honorable way, and I
just thank you all, Thank you, thank you. On our
(58:04):
remaining episodes of Sleuth, you can expect to hear from
sources who will identify the full extent of others who
helped Daniel Wazniak in the murders of Sam Hair and
Julie Kibuishi. We'll learn about when and where Tim Wazniak
showed up on the scene to help aid his brother
Dan in the murders. And then there is Rachel's brother
(58:26):
Noah Buffett. What and how much did no one know
at the time of the murders. Finally, you will hear
from a couple of explosive surprise guests which will round
out our season, ending with a live call in finale
episode a finale where all our Sleuth listeners have a
chance to talk to me directly with any questions, criticisms,
(58:49):
or suggestions for our team. As we head into the
new year with an all new season, two. Stay with
us as we share all that's left of our work
for this season of Youth and No. You can find
us with the latest sleuth news at Facebook dot com,
Forward Slash Sleuth podcast. If you enjoyed this episode of Sleuth,
(59:13):
share it with a friend and be sure to leave
a rating or review. Follow Sleuth on I Heart Radio,
or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so that you
never miss an episode.
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