California

How California Got Convinced to Lock More People Up

Published

2 years ago

November 9, 2024

How California Got Convinced to Lock More People Up

California voters chose harsher sentencing, the continuation of forced labor in prisons, and tough-on-crime prosecutors this week in overwhelming numbers.

Proposition 36, a bill that upgrades a raft of petty theft and drug crimes from misdemeanors to felonies, was approved by 70 percent of voters in the initial counts. It is designed to incarcerate thousands more people by reversing a ballot measure passed 10 years ago, Prop 47, which downgraded theft and drug crimes from felonies to misdemeanors in response to massive prison overcrowding.

On the same ballot, voters rejected a prison reform measure that would have made slave labor illegal in state prisons. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles County, reformist District Attorney George Gascón lost his reelection bid to a former federal prosecutor, who ran on a tough-on-crime campaign. And in Alameda County, voters decided to recall another reform-minded district attorney, Pamela Price, after two years on the job.

News outlets, experts and elected officials have been quick to frame the election day results on crime as a clear sign that California voters want to undo the criminal justice reforms of the past decade.

“The pendulum of public opinion has swung back,” wrote the San Francisco Chronicle. Dan Schnur, a former Republican strategist told the Los Angeles Times that voters are “notorious course correcters” who “are always adjusting their last decisions to try to make them a little bit better.” California Attorney General Rob Bonta told Politico that he was concerned about effects of mass incarceration from the bill, which he refused to publicly oppose, but said he wasn’t surprised about its passage. “Criminal justice swings back and forth, and four years ago was a huge time of interest in reform,” he said.

Advocates and organizers in criminal justice reform reject the idea that voters are shifting to the right. They instead point to the well-funded, corporate-backed campaign behind Prop 36 that distorted facts, and the complicity of media outlets eager to paint a picture of an unsafe California and echo the fearmongering that became central to Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign. And on the defensive side, some say Democrats and criminal justice organizations themselves failed to mount an opposition campaign until months before election day.

“It’s easy to tell people to blame that on the wrong people for the wrong reasons.”

“All of this was avoidable,” said Lex Steppling, an organizer with Los Angeles Community Action Network, who has been a part of previous successful campaigns against state crime bills and opposed Prop 36. “I don’t want anybody acting like this is just an organic social phenomenon, it’s not. People feel insecure because they’re one paycheck away from having to leave their house, people feel insecure because goods and cost of living has doubled — that is a lack of safety, right? And it’s easy to tell people to blame that on the wrong people for the wrong reasons.”

Jody Armour, a law professor at the University of Southern California, said he was also concerned by the “cyclical and pendulum” analogies being applied to Californians.

“It makes it seem like it’s inevitable, that things are going to go this way and that things are going to go back the other way — no, there is a fierce pitched battle,” Armour said. “This idea that things just happen, it papers over the real pitched battle, the struggle, the political contest going on that makes change happen.”

Copaganda

Police and prison guard groups have tried to roll back Prop 47 multiple times since its passage in 2014, but none have been as well-funded as this year’s Prop 36. Retail giants Walmart, Target, and Home Depot poured more than $6 million into the campaign, while In-N-Out and 7-Eleven each chipped in $500,000. Along with major donations from pro-business PACs and the state prison guards union, the campaign racked up nearly $17 million, dwarfing the opposition.

The opposition raised about $6 million, leaning heavily on major donations from wealthy Democrats such as Patty Quillin, wife of Netflix executive chair Reed Hastings, and oil heiress Stacy Schusterman.

For months, the Prop 36 campaign ran ads presenting the bill as a way to address the fentanyl crisis and make both businesses and consumers safer by putting people committing low-level property crimes behind bars.

After a spike during the initial years of the pandemic, property crimes have again begun to decline across California, continuing a decadeslong trend, which sees rates at about half of what they used to be in the 1990s, according to Department of Justice figures. But that hasn’t stopped media outlets from keeping broadcasts of “smash-and-grab” incidents as mainstays of evening news cycles, often recycling the same footage.

One recording in particular came to stand in for crime and chaos writ large. During the holiday shopping season in 2021, police in Concord, a suburban city just outside of San Francisco, released grainy surveillance footage showing a group of people in hoodies and masks hacking at glass casings of a Kay Jewelers with hammers and crowbars. That same day, television news outlets across the Bay Area and nationally on CNN and NBC News broadcast the police video of the so-called smash-and-grab robbery.

The Yes on 36 campaign seized on the endless news coverage and used the broadcasts, including footage of the 2021 Concord incident, in TV ads and on the campaign’s website.

“You see it almost everyday, smash-and-grab criminals cause stores to raise prices, lock up items and close their doors,” said Sacramento County Sheriff Jim Cooper in a TV ad urging voters to vote yes on the proposition while the Concord footage played over eerie music. The ad also features former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who said voters have to “do more to solve California’s crime problem.”

“Crime is historically low right now — that’s the big story here that everyone has forgotten.”

This paints a deeply misleading picture of reality, according to criminal justice experts. “You can create the image of out of control crime, if you get enough media attention on specific incidents — the smash-and-grab, the kids going into the stores and knocking windows out and snatching the jewelry, that kind of stuff, it plays in the nightly news,” said Daniel Macallair, executive director of Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice and a San Francisco State University lecturer. “But it doesn’t represent a bigger trend. Crime is historically low right now — that’s the big story here that everyone has forgotten — and unfortunately factual information, statistics doesn’t make for good media.”

Studies have shown a connection between crime news consumption and concern for safety, even while the prevalence of crime trends downward. And in July, Macallair’s center released a report showing crime rates falling in the period after California began to reform and reduce prison populations.

USC’s Armour agreed and said media organizations need to do a better job at holding institutions accountable in their coverage as watchdogs and providing context when it comes to crime. “But often what I’m hearing in crime reporting isn’t that, but just stenography for the police,” Armour said. “Just kind of matter-of-factly reiterating whatever they say, or giving them the lion’s share of credibility even though they’re repeatedly found to be using disinformation.”

The Trump Effect

Fear and crime were not just common themes in California, but also across the country. President-elect Donald Trump ran yet another campaign that vilified immigrants as dangerous criminals who needed to be locked up and deported. Kamala Harris also presented a carceral vision of the border — committing to bolster the Biden administration’s asylum restrictions, pursue felony charges for those who cross the border without documentation, and continue building the border wall that Trump used as a rallying cry during his path to presidency in 2016.

Claudia Peña, a longtime community organizer and lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles law school, said such rhetoric during the presidential campaign, specifically from Republicans, had an influence on the way people saw crime locally, including in blue California.

“So much of their argument was based on fearmongering and ensuring people are scared of each other, really targeting vulnerable groups,” she said. “And they did that by overemphasizing, manipulating and exaggerating certain trends that began during the pandemic. I think because they were so successful at doing that on a national scale all over television, all over these podcasts, it did have an effect in California.”

Peña attributed the passage of Prop 36 and failure of the measure prohibiting forced prison labor, in part, to Trump’s rhetoric of fear but also said she doesn’t think Californians are swinging the opposite direction from 2020, calling the bills “an aberration.” She noted that Prop 36 was marketed as a “middle of the road” and “balanced” bill that was less extreme than crime bills of the 1990s. Prop 36 also received support from Democratic lawmakers such as Tom Umberg and James Ramos, and liberal local leaders, including San Francisco Mayor London Breed, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, and LA County Board Supervisor Kathryn Barger. “And I think more than anything, I think more people were just scared,” she said.

“We all need to do a better job of continuing to have these conversations so that people who make up the state of California have the right information, to weigh in properly and not be misled and manipulated emotionally to make decisions out of fear,” Peña said. “I believe that when the people of California have enough information and proper access to the right data and stories that are true, the people of California come around.”

Too Little Too Late

As soon as the previous effort to roll back Prop 47 was announced in 2020, a coalition of criminal justice reform groups organized to push back against it. From the American Civil Liberties Union to the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation, which gave more than $1 million to the opposition, the coalition led the messaging and education campaigns across the state on the ballot measure, Prop 20, from day one. Democratic lawmakers campaigned against Prop 20 as well, including Gov. Gavin Newsom. Voters went on to reject the measure with 60 percent voting no.

This year, after backers of Prop 36 submitted more than 900,000 signatures to get the measure on the ballot, the same opposition coalition was slow to form. Rather than running a campaign to get voters to oppose the measure, many of the same groups and elected officials who helped lead Prop 20 opposition four years earlier instead attempted to find a solution within the state legislature — a common tactic in California politics.

In April, state lawmakers introduced a slate of bills, titled #SmartSolutions, which were aimed at addressing the concerns raised by Prop 36 backers, such as public safety, retail store theft, and fentanyl addiction. The slate was largely designed as a response to and an effort to deflate the momentum built by the Yes on Prop 36 campaign, and had the support of major criminal justice reform groups like the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Initiate Justice, Smart Justice California, and the Vera Institute of Justice.

But the #SmartSolutions package was also designed to satisfy Newsom’s own crime directive, issued in January, which called on lawmakers to crack down on property crimes. Steppling wondered if the directive was a play by Newsom, who has aspirations for higher office, to appear tougher on crime amid Republican attacks that California was in decline.

Newsom said he opposed Prop 36, but unlike in 2020, he didn’t actively campaign against it. As Democratic lawmakers battled over how to respond to Prop 36, the #SmartSolutions slate was effectively killed when several of its bills were absorbed into a separate Newsom-backed slate that increased punishment for property crimes. Newsom signed the slate of crime bills in August inside of a Home Depot store, one of the major backers of Prop 36.

The “No on Prop 36” coalition eventually formed in the late summer, but by then, support for the measure had grown. By October, polls showed that victory for the prop was likely.

For organizers like Steppling, who coordinated opposition to Prop 36 before the coalition had formed, the delay and mixed priorities among lawmakers and organizers proved frustrating.

“When we’re given time and space to fight for what’s right, we usually win, especially at the ballots — instead we lost four to five months of organizing time,” Steppling said. “You then empower a whole discourse that says, ‘Oh, both the Republicans and Democrats agree that Prop 47 needs to be undone, they just disagree on how.’ Why would you create that media climate, rather than saying, ‘Prop 47 has not caused any problems and it should be the floor and the ceiling.’”

“It wasn’t simply social phenomenon — there has to be a real reckoning in a place like California with how the work is done,” he added.

Armour recalled a similar moment of compromise, shortly after Joe Biden was elected president in 2020. After a summer of mass organizing after the police murder of George Floyd that materialized into a host of local and statewide wins for reform, Biden’s election gave many liberals a false sense of security, he said.

“He comes in, takes a lot of that energy and uses his bully pulpit to say to those same liberals, ‘Fund the police,’ and ‘Nothing is going to fundamentally change,’ and so it isn’t surprising that we got from there to here,” Armour said. He criticized Democratic leaders in California for not sustaining the energy of 2020 and opposing Prop 36 more readily.

Macallair, who has been helping oppose tough-on-crime measures for the past 40 years, said such legislative solutions to aggressive crime bills is an old strategy that rarely works. He recalled the failed efforts to oppose the “three strikes” law in 1994 by introducing a nearly identical bill in the legislature.

“You try to head it off and hope the people who are backing the initiative are going to back off and it doesn’t work that way, because there’s a political strategy behind it that usually goes beyond just the essence of the initiative, the language of the initiative,” Macallair said. “So passing legislation to placate the backers of the initiative, I’ve never seen that work.”

We’re Not in The ’90s

With the passage of Prop 36, prosecutors in California will be able to charge people who get caught stealing items worth $950 or less with felonies, which can lead to prison sentences of up to three years. The law also empowers prosecutors to enhance sentences for certain theft or property damage felonies by up to three years. Such sentences, under the new law, must be carried out in state prisons, rather than county jails, which will likely further isolate individuals from their families and communities. The law does allow for certain people charged with drug possession crimes to get mental health or drug treatment. If they complete the treatment, the charges would be dismissed. But for those who don’t finish the program, they may serve up to three years in prison.

The new law is expected to incarcerate at least several thousands more people in both county jails and state prisons, according to the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office, increasing prison costs by $10–100 million. Since its peak in 2006, when California incarcerated more than 173,000 people, the nation’s highest, the prison population dropped to around 95,000 people, due to prison reforms and the pandemic. Prop 47 had reduced prison populations by the thousands and saved the state money, which largely went to drug treatment services. That same money will likely be used to imprison more people under Prop 36.

Even so, Macallair said the law is not as punitive as 1994’s three strikes law, which locked up an additional 40,000 people within its first five years. He also pointed to several wins in recent years, such as the closure of the state’s youth prisons, the last of which shut down in 2023. And Armour pointed to the California Racial Justice Act passed in 2020, which remains in place. The law allows defendants to argue for throwing out a case, vacating a sentence, or receiving a reduced sentence if police, prosecutors, judges, jurors, or expert witnesses showed racist bias in the course of a case, whether explicit or implicit, such as making a racist comment. Armour has acted as an expert witness in four cases since the law was enacted.

“I don’t think that we’re anywhere near the ’90s either in like crime and policy and attitude and conversations people are having in the streets,” Peña said, recalling conversations with Californians in the late ’90s with people who celebrated three-strikes policies. “And I rarely hear that anymore, and I don’t think that we’re going to go back there, in part because crime rates will continue to trend down as they already are.”

“The way to create safety is for people to have access to opportunities to live a life of thriving.”

Since the boom of mass incarceration in the ’90s, a growing body of evidence has shown that locking people up for longer periods and threatening them with harsher punishments has no effect on whether someone will commit a crime. And Peña believes that crime rates have been trending down not because of any policies that incarcerate, but due to increased access to necessary goods and services and care opportunities in California.

“When people think about crime and incarceration and other forms of punishment, what they really want is safety,” she said. “We want our communities to be safe, we want our streets to be safe. We want people to be able to walk from school or from work and be OK. People want to be able to have confidence that their home and their property is OK. And that’s universal. The way to create safety is for people to have access to opportunities to live a life of thriving: having access to jobs, having access to housing, having access to health care services. All of these things are what causes drops in crime rates.”

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California

Cowboys, margaritas and toxic trash: Some sour on lawyers in lucrative L.A. landfill cases

Published

10 hours ago

July 12, 2026

Press Room

Cowboys, margaritas and toxic trash: Some sour on lawyers in lucrative L.A. landfill cases

Val Verde is a place with few strangers.

Forty miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles, the tiny foothill community of 3,000 has one main road, spotty cell service and a lone local market.

Yet nobody could remember ever seeing the man in a cowboy hat before 2024, when he was spotted talking to residents about lawsuits against the local dump.

At the time, the neighboring Chiquita Canyon landfill had never smelled worse. For more than a year, an uncontrolled fire had burned in the bowels of the dump, broiling old garbage and sending nauseating fumes into nearby homes.

Oshea Orchid, a local lawyer, filed the first class-action lawsuit in 2023 against the operators of the county’s second-largest landfill, alleging the fumes were sickening her neighbors, causing headaches and heart palpitations.

An aerial view of the Chiquita Canyon landfill in Castaic, photographed in February 2024.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

For months, she said, she’d been the only lawyer taking on the cases. But as she passed the town’s market Feb. 4, 2024, she spotted the cowboy promising lawsuits to patrons, according to a complaint Orchid later filed with the State Bar of California.

The man, she said in the complaint, told her he was hired by Downtown LA Law Group, a firm under criminal investigation by L.A. County’s district attorney over claims that some of its clients made up stories of sexual abuse in juvenile halls in order to sue.

“He admitted he was an actor and that the DTLA Law Group had paid him $5,000 to drive from Las Vegas, put him up in a hotel, given him Western attire and directed him to pretend to be a local cowboy to solicit residents of Val Verde in front of the Fast Stop,” Orchid recounted in the April 2026 complaint. “Before agreeing to leave, he gave us the chaps he didn’t know how to use.”

The brown leather chaps, Orchid said, are still stuffed in her office.

Attorney Oshea Orchid poses with a pair of chaps at her ranch

California bans non-attorneys from directly soliciting or procuring clients to sign up for lawsuits. The practice, known as capping, was outlawed over concerns it allows law firms to exploit victims in pursuit of hefty payouts.

A spokesperson for DTLA said the man had been hired solely to ask “local businesses for permission to display educational fliers,” and accused Orchid of filing the complaint to tarnish lawyers vying for the same pool of clients.

This “is not a story about our firm’s marketing,” the spokesperson said, but rather “a story about a competing law firm attempting to use the press and the State Bar to eliminate competition in the same litigation.”

Now, Orchid and other attorneys on the Chiquita Canyon case worry about the future of some of the most significant environmental justice litigation in Southern California.

DTLA has signed up roughly 1,300 of the 10,000 people who have filed claims over the landfill.

The firm is currently facing a state bar probe and a criminal investigation by L.A. County’s district attorney following Times reporting last fall that found nine clients of the firm who said they were paid to sue the county, ultimately becoming part of a $4-billion sex abuse settlement. Four of the clients said they fabricated their claims, which the firm later withdrew.

Orchid, 43, said the point of starting the landfill litigation was to shutter the dump and squeeze out enough money from the owners for her sick neighbors to move out of town. DTLA, she argues, has now put these life-changing payouts at risk.

Attorneys for the owners of the landfill, which stopped accepting trash last year, claimed this spring in the litigation that the lawsuits may be tainted by fraud. The firm said in a statement to The Times that it remains “deeply concerned.”

“Credible allegations suggest that this case has been infected with lawyer misconduct or even criminal activity that has caused the filing of fraudulent claims,” Paul Chan, an attorney representing the landfill owners, wrote in an April 24 motion.

Andrew Morrow, one of DTLA’s lead attorneys for both the sex abuse and landfill cases, insisted in a May 8 court filing that there was no improper solicitation, arguing the claims were built on a “foundation of speculation, innuendo, and a patchwork of sensational allegations and headlines.”

These allegations in the firm’s sex abuse cases, he said, “are wholly unrelated to the present litigation.”

The court ruled that the allegations against DTLA did not warrant a separate discovery process for the firm’s clients.

After meeting the self-professed cowboy outside the market, Orchid said she invited him to a boozy meal at a nearby pub. He introduced himself as Raymond Henderson, a commercial actor gathering cases for DTLA.

“I buy him a few margaritas and I’m like, tell me all about it,” recounts Orchid.

Henderson told The Times that Orchid accurately described his gig with DTLA, which he says earned him a few thousand dollars. But, he said, his cowboy attire was no costume. The 72-year-old actor said he spent his upbringing around horses in rural Alabama and knew his way around a pair of chaps. He said he has given away several sets over the years, though he didn’t recall handing that particular pair to Orchid.

Henderson said attorneys at DTLA never told him that soliciting clients for the firm was against the law. Henderson sent several texts to a partner at DTLA about picking up checks for his work in Val Verde, according to messages reviewed by The Times.

a man stands for a portraits inside his home in Las Vegas, Nevada on May 22, 2026.

“I do what we call ‘chasing,’” Henderson said in an interview from his Las Vegas home. “They just tell you what they want.”

A firm spokesperson denied soliciting clients and said it was Orchid who had tried to use Henderson to illegally gather plaintiffs in the landfill cases. The firm said Henderson signed a declaration two years ago that accused Orchid of asking him to get “cases for her in the community.”

“He refused. She then asked him to lie and say he was being paid for cases,” the firm said in a statement. “She told him these cases were her ‘territory’ that no other firm had a right to market there, and that she would use her ‘clout’ to generate complaints against any firm that took her landfill cases. That is exactly what has followed.”

The firm declined to share Henderson’s declaration, citing a confidentiality agreement. Henderson did not respond to an inquiry about the February 2024 declaration.

Orchid said she had liked Henderson. He was chatty and upbeat, and she told him she would try to find him work, potentially as an assistant at her law firm. But that job, which never materialized, was not going to be as a recruiter, she said.

For the longest time, the residents of Val Verde could not find a lawyer willing to fight the landfill enveloping their neighborhood in clouds of stench.

Cher Arabalo, a former Denver sheriff captain, said she moved to the town in 2022 and promptly regretted it.

“Like a sour milk base or something, mixed with porta potty with a little chemical on top of it,” she said, describing the aroma.

Neighbors hosted pancake breakfasts and spaghetti nights to raise money for lawyers. The amounts were measly. They tried to get a firm affiliated with environmental crusader Erin Brockovich interested. No luck.

Then Orchid moved to town, lured by a sprawling ranch for her four horses. Before long, she said, she got persistent headaches, which she blamed on fumes from the dump three miles away.

After word spread that a local attorney was starting a class action, residents said they were besieged by out-of-town lawyers competing aggressively for their business.

On Dec. 29, 2023, a resident emailed Orchid about a group of recruiters at the market who were handing out fliers for DTLA.

“They were asking for a signature on a ‘petition’ but I think it was actually to sign with this firm for a class action lawsuit,” wrote Rosalie Alaniz. “He was using the terms ‘class action’ and ‘petition’ interchangeably. So, yes it was definitely sketchy.”

Two days later, on New Year’s Eve, Orchid made her own trip to the market and found a group of men who said they were paid hourly to collect “petitions for the lawsuit” on behalf of DTLA, according to a video she took of the encounter. The “petition,” a portion of which flashes briefly on screen, appears to be a DTLA fee agreement entitling the firm to at least 40% of any future payout.

Sereen Banna, a former DTLA paralegal who sued the firm in December, previously told The Times that landfill clients had reported getting gift cards in exchange for signing a petition. Those names, she said, later appeared on retainer agreements, even though clients insisted they never agreed to a lawsuit.

Morrow, the DTLA attorney, acknowledged allegations that clients had signed up accidentally in his May 8 motion, but said it was “impossible to imagine someone who is still unwittingly in the case at this stage because they believed a retainer agreement was a petition.”

Every client who wanted to drop the firm, DTLA said in a statement, was free to do so.

On Jan. 25, 2024, Henderson ventured into Val Verde to help the firm get in on the Chiquita Canyon action, according to text messages reviewed by The Times.

“The smell ??” Salar Hendizadeh, a partner at DTLA, texted Henderon as he ventured into the foothills. “How bad ?”

“Really bad,” Henderson replied.

“Wow,” Hendizadeh texted.

“Packem
Rackem
Stackem”

Three weeks later, Henderson sent a picture of a group of elderly residents huddled in a circle.

“Get em for me,” Hendizadeh replied.

“all of them”

“Need it”

Over the next month, Henderson would text Hendizadeh the names and phone numbers of more than 40 prospective clients, according to text messages between the two.

Hendizadeh left the firm in October 2025. The State Bar has since charged him, along with the remaining partners at DTLA, over separate allegations that they signed up clients in states where they had no license to practice. The firm has denied all wrongdoing.

Henderson said he started working for DTLA after picking up Hendizadeh in an Uber at LAX around 2018. He said he would listen to the police scanner for car crashes and then rush to the scene to recruit accident victims who would hire DTLA to sue the driver.

If the crash involved an Uber or Lyft, which are required to have top-of-the-line insurance policies, Henderson said he got about $5,000 per client. He got more, he said, if the client’s bones were broken.

The discussions around price-per-plaintiff, he said, were always furtive.

“If I asked him verbally, he’d write it on a piece of paper,” he said of Hendizadeh. “I thought it was just a lawyer thing.”

When it became clear L.A. County was poised to shell out billions on victims who’d experienced sexual abuse in juvenile halls, Henderson said Hendizadeh wrote “500” on a slip of paper in his office. So Henderson said he started looking for people in destitute neighborhoods where “people [have] been going to jail all their life.”

Hendizadeh said in a statement that Henderson’s claims were “demonstrably untrue,” and that the firm has “independently investigated his claims and is confident it has acted in full compliance of all applicable ethical and legal standards.”

Henderson said he only realized the solicitation he’d been asked to do might be frowned upon after Orchid told him as much at their meal.

A DTLA Law Group hat inside the home of Raymond Henderson in Las Vegas on May 22.

“I met another attorney up. There was telling me that what I was doing was unethical,” Henderson texted Hendizadeh after meeting Orchid on Feb. 4, 2024.

“Don’t talk to them,” Hendizadeh responded. “Marketing and community education is 100 percent good.”

Henderson said he had no issue speaking publicly about the work he’d been hired to do.

“I’m talking to anybody,” Henderson said. “I mean, it’s not McDonald’s. You can’t have it your way over here.”

The lawsuit recruiters came to their town bearing gifts, several residents told The Times.

Jorge Real, a 53-year-old house painter, said he was given $10 for each person he convinced to sign up.

Roberto Talamantez, who spends many afternoons drinking beers in the empty plot next to the market, said he got about $25 and a cellphone from a law firm recruiter to sign a petition. So did everyone else he knows, he said.

“Like he was giving potato chips,” said Talamantez, whose suit was filed by DTLA on March 6, 2024. “We’re poor. If someone offers you $20 … and they barbecue for you and they’re buying you beers, why not?”

Roberto Talamantez stands in the doorway of the Fast Stop convenience store

Some residents said they were unclear about what they were being asked to sign up for.

“One got kind of upset, like, ‘Why won’t you sign? You’re going to make money’ … They were really pushing me,” said Salvador Yoguez, a retired farmworker. “They kept following me all the way to the car — ‘look at this, look at that.’ I kept telling them, ‘I don’t know anything about this.’ I had been drinking.”

Like many in the working-class community, Yoguez speaks only Spanish and said he didn’t understand why the group of young guys wanted his name and ID as he made a beer run at the market. His wife, Delia Yoguez, who drove him there, said she, too, gave her name to the men.

DTLA filed lawsuits for the couple on March 4 and March 18, 2024, alleging the odors were causing them to “remain inside their homes” and “embarrassment and reluctance” to invite any guests over.

Both told The Times they were unaware they had a lawsuit with DTLA and believed they had only signed up with Orchid, a friend of their daughter. DTLA said every client provided an ID card, proof they were in the zone affected by the landfill, and signed a “clearly labeled contingency fee agreement” before a case was filed.

This spring, DTLA announced plans to get out of the landfill litigation, passing on most of its caseload to Carpenter & Zuckerman, a Beverly Hills-based personal injury law firm.

Carpenter & Zuckerman is taking on a growing role in environmental litigation in the region. The morning after the evacuations due to a leaking chemical tank in Garden Grove, firm representatives were stationed outside an evacuation center, taking contact information and handing out fast food and coffee, according to two volunteers working at the Red Cross stand next door. The next day, the firm would claim to file the first lawsuit against the owners of the leaking chemical tank.

Some Val Verde residents who unwittingly signed up with DTLA said they were confused why Carpenter & Zuckerman was insistently calling them, trying to get them to sign a new agreement.

“Beginning in or around March 6, 2026, I have been called numerous times,” Delia Yoguez wrote in a signed declaration from June 23, which Orchid says she took as part of a bar complaint. “The lady told me that I had signed paperwork with them and that I could not back out.”

The new agreement entitles lawyers to 45% of the settlement, which will be split evenly between the two firms. “In short, Client is getting two law firms for the price of one,” it explains.

On May 25, Val Verde’s civic association sent Carpenter & Zuckerman a cease and desist letter, citing reports that attorneys had been “misleading, coercive, and exploitative” and “had repeatedly contacted, pressured, harassed, and misled residents into signing retainer agreements.”

“Targeting vulnerable residents, particularly non-English-speaking individuals, is especially concerning and entirely inappropriate,” the letter stated.

Carpenter & Zuckerman said in a statement to The Times that it “independently evaluates every matter and client on an individual basis and represents only those clients who desire to pursue their claims and whose cases meet the firm’s standards.” The firm denied engaging in “high-pressure tactics” and said it remains committed to “ethical advocacy and ensuring that individuals who wish to pursue their claims are not left without representation due to circumstances involving prior counsel.”

Some locals say the renewed jockeying for clients is the latest distraction from the fight over the toxins they believe are polluting their home.

“We’re just trying to survive this,” said longtime resident Abigail DeSesa. “And it’s like the Val Verde ‘Hunger Games.’”

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California

‘Explosive diarrhea’ parasite surfaces in California as health officials fear statewide surge

Published

20 hours ago

July 11, 2026

Press Room

‘Explosive diarrhea’ parasite surfaces in California as health officials fear statewide surge

A parasite that causes bouts of “explosive diarrhea” has surfaced in California as a fast-growing outbreak sweeps across the US — with health officials warning the state’s official case count likely captures only a fraction of the true number of infections.

State data show between that between 1 and 10 California cases have been linked to a broader statewide outbreak as authorities continue tracking the spread.

But officials say many infections are never confirmed because some people recover without seeking medical care or getting tested, the parasite requires specialized laboratory testing to detect, and confirmed cases can take about six weeks to be reported.

Most of California’s infections have been tied to international travel rather than the expanding multistate outbreak.

Across the country, at least 2,944 people in 32 states have been sickened, with Michigan bearing the brunt of the outbreak.

The state has reported 1,562 infections, roughly 31 times the approximately 50 cases it typically records in a year, and at least 44 people have been hospitalized.

Investigators are examining whether contaminated food is driving the spike, but they have not identified a specific produce item, supplier or grower responsible for the outbreak.

Cyclospora, the parasite behind the illness known as cyclosporiasis, is typically spread through food or water contaminated with feces.

Previous outbreaks have been traced to imported fresh produce, including raspberries, basil, snow peas, mesclun lettuce and cilantro.

According to the CDC, the illness can cause severe gastrointestinal symptoms, including watery diarrhea “with frequent and sometimes explosive bowel movements.”

Other symptoms include nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, bloating, fatigue, loss of appetite and weight loss.

Symptoms usually begin about one week after infection, although they can appear anywhere from two days to two weeks later, making it more difficult for investigators to determine where someone was exposed.

The CDC recommends treating cyclosporiasis with the antibiotic trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, commonly sold as Bactrim, Septra and Cotrim, over a 10-day course.

As investigators continue searching for the source of the outbreak, some Taco Bell restaurants have temporarily removed fresh ingredients from their menus as a precaution.

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Locations, including some in Metro Detroit, posted notices telling customers they were temporarily unable to serve lettuce, cilantro, onions, pico de gallo and guacamole because of a nationwide recall while health officials respond to the increase in cyclosporiasis cases.

Restaurants in outbreak hot spots, including Michigan and Ohio, have also pulled raw lettuce, onions, cilantro-onion mix, pico de gallo and guacamole from their menus.

However, neither the CDC nor the Food and Drug Administration has linked Taco Bell to any reported illnesses.

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Disneyland turns to cheaper evening passes and the internet speculation explodes

Published

1 day ago

July 11, 2026

Press Room

Disneyland turns to cheaper evening passes and the internet speculation explodes

If you visit Disneyland with any frequency, a discount from the usual price of more than $100 a day would feel like a blessing.

However, almost as soon as Disney recently offered a rare chance to purchase limited evening passes to its two Southern California parks at about half of the regular cost, the online speculation among Disney enthusiasts behind the company’s strategy spiked. It was no surprise that the lower-priced tickets sold out in about a week.

Some fans referred to the five-hour ticket as a “recession” indicator on social media or as a way to “capture random stragglers.”

Others believed the ticket offered fireworks enthusiasts an opportunity to catch a nighttime spectacular, while one person said the pass allowed visitors to partake in other Southern California activities before finishing their evening at Disneyland.

Buyers of the pass are first set to attend the parks this Sunday, with dates extending until August.

Disneyland officials brush off the speculation, saying the ticket sale is business as usual. Fortunately for us, industry insider Dennis Speigel offered some analysis behind the move.

Let’s jump into the offer and his thoughts on the deal.

All about the ticket

Late last month, Disneyland offered a one-park evening pass for $59 to Disneyland or California Adventure. The ticket is good from Sundays to Wednesdays, starting this Sunday until Aug. 5.

California Adventure would allow evening patrons in at 5 p.m. until closing at 10 p.m. and Disneyland at 7 p.m. until closing at midnight.

A park reservation was still required for evening passes.

The tickets became available June 30 and sold out by July 6, according to a Disneyland spokesperson. Disneyland officials declined to say how many tickets were sold.

What’s Disneyland’s rationale?

The ticket offering is not all that rare.

Similar opportunities began as far back as 1957 with Disneyland date nights admission running from 5 p.m. to 1 a.m, a park spokesperson said.

“Our goal is to provide guests with a variety of limited-time ticket offers throughout the year — this being just one example of that,” a Disneyland spokesperson said.

Softer than a dole whip

Speigel, founder and chief executive of Cincinnati-based International Theme Park Services, Inc., a theme park consulting firm, said theme parks, ranging from small, regional locales to international destinations are struggling with a “softness” in admission demand that began in April but became more acute in June.

That slump at Disney and Universal Studios properties nationwide, Speigel said in a call with The Times, is due to three primary factors: the economy, weather and the Iranian War.

“There’s a nervousness from visitors, a lack of understanding of what to expect because of the war and economy,” he said. “We saw something like that last year driven by tariffs with soaring gas prices, and we monitored how people started moving back on their spending.”

Visitors still want deals

To counter that softness, Disney is turning to discounts, hoping to kindle interest, Speigel speculated.

“They understand their guests are in a crucible, and this drives the decision to discount,” he said. “People still want their escapes; that doesn’t go down. They just want to pay less to escape.”

Disney’s evening pass is also a shrewd offer because it aims to attract another type of guest: budget-minded locals who might be enticed by $59, Speigel said.

“It’s a smart attempt on Disney’s part,” Speigel said. “It moves in the local people who aren’t the season pass holders or tourists, and it fills the park. That’s what parks are looking to do right now.”

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