California

The surprising force stalling climate progress: California restaurants

Published

2 years ago

May 13, 2024

The surprising force stalling climate progress: California restaurants

By Ben Elgin | Bloomberg

In the fight to ratchet down climate emissions and soothe the most dangerous effects of an overheating planet, one of the most withering setbacks in recent memory wasn’t delivered by the oil industry or coal excavators, but, rather, a group of restaurants in California.

When Berkeley became the first city in the country to ban the extension of gas pipes into new buildings, it targeted a contentious source of climate pollution. The combustion of gas inside of homes and businesses to power things like furnaces, water heaters and stoves accounts for 9% of California’s emissions, or 33 million metric tons of heat-trapping gases per year, equivalent to the entire climate footprint of Hong Kong.

With the US gas system continuing to expand – the industry connects one new customer to the gas grid each minute – Berkeley was the first to try to stop this climate problem from becoming bigger. Since it enacted its ordinance in 2019, more than 100 cities, counties and states across the country have followed.

Today, these efforts are reeling. The California Restaurant Association took the city to court in November 2019, arguing that its 20,000-plus members preferred cooking with a gas flame and that, even though the rule wouldn’t require changes to existing buildings, such an ordinance would limit their options when opening new locations. Moreover, they argued, federal energy laws preempt these aggressive local ordinances.

After a see-sawing legal battle, the restaurants prevailed. When Berkeley’s last-ditch request for a rehearing was rejected earlier this year, the city in March canceled its ordinance, prompting a jubilant CRA to declare it a “significant triumph for chefs and restaurateurs.”

Now, Bloomberg Green has learned, a coalition of gas companies and their supporters are planning to wield the restaurants’ legal victory to beat back similar rules across the western US. This puts restaurants directly at odds with a hospitable planet, as there’s no feasible pathway to avert catastrophic warming if places like California don’t sharply reduce gas combustion in buildings, according to climate experts.

“It’s rather irritating to have restaurant owners put their heads in the sand,” says Robert Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University. “We have to move away from natural gas. The planet demands it.”

This is not the first time restaurants in California have sided with industry giants in an epic battle over public health. In 1987, a year after US Surgeon General C. Everett Koop warned second-hand smoke was causing lung cancer in healthy nonsmokers, Beverly Hills became the first city in the state to ban smoking inside restaurants. Several nearby towns followed with similar proposals.

A couple smokes at the Beverly Hills Café restaurant, after the city’s anti-smoking law was rescinded in 1987.(Ben Martin/Getty Images)

Restaurants howled in protest. Some eateries in Beverly Hills complained their sales plummeted overnight by nearly a third, though tax records later showed no such drop had occurred. Within months, the Beverly Hills city council walked back its rule.

These public health battles, nearly four decades apart, share another striking resemblance: Restaurant groups served as the public face for both efforts, while they worked alongside hidden powerful interests.

In the smoking fracas, millions of cigarette-company documents later unearthed during litigation revealed the tobacco industry recruited and worked closely with restaurant groups around the country, including CRA, to fight smoking restrictions. The industry even surreptitiously funded and created the Beverly Hills Restaurant Association, which led the successful pushback against the state’s first ban.

“Public health advocates need to understand that, with rare exceptions, when they talk to organized restaurant associations, they are effectively talking to the tobacco industry,” warned researchers at the University of California San Francisco in a 2002 paper.

In today’s fight over gas, CRA also hasn’t acted on its own. It refuses to say who paid the legal bills for its Berkeley suit. As a nonprofit, it must make its tax filings public. In these forms, nonprofits are supposed to disclose contractors to whom they paid at least $100,000 in the previous year. CRA regularly lists law firms working on its behalf, such as those litigating Covid-related restrictions. But the restaurant group has never disclosed a payment to Reichman Jorgensen Lehman & Feldberg LLP, the law firm that spearheaded the Berkeley case.

The Berkeley lawsuit topped the $100,000 threshold. When Sarah Jorgensen, the law firm’s founding partner, spoke at a National Propane Gas Association board meeting in February, she was asked what a legal challenge of this sort would cost, according to a recording of the discussion heard by Bloomberg Green. After an NPGA executive estimated it would require $300,000 to $400,000 to take a case to court and “another couple of hundred thousand” for appeals, Jorgensen said “we definitely spent more than that on Berkeley.” In a written response to questions, Jorgensen declined to say who paid their legal bills.

So who picked up the tab? SoCalGas, the nation’s largest gas utility whose territory covers 24,000 square miles from the Mexican border to central California, paid Reichman Jorgensen more than $4 million between 2020 and 2022, according to its regulatory filings and as reported last year by the Sacramento Bee. When compelled by state regulators to explain some of these payments, SoCalGas denied it was for the Berkeley case, but rather to examine legal issues such as “government actions potentially affecting natural gas service” and “whether they might be preempted by federal law” (which was the core issue in the Berkeley case).

Meanwhile, SoCalGas and San Diego Gas & Electric, both subsidiaries of energy giant Sempra, combined to contribute over $1.3 million to CRA and its charitable arm since 2019, a sharp uptick from previous years. In a statement, SoCalGas said that it didn’t fund the Berkeley suit and its contributions went to the restaurant association’s charitable arm, which supported eating establishments that struggled during the pandemic.

Some close watchers of the utility, though, don’t buy it. Given the payments funded an examination of “the very same legal issues raised in that litigation,” declared the Public Advocates Office, an independent watchdog for the state’s utility regulator in a filing last year, “it strains credibility to suggest that the utility did not fund research that supported the California Restaurant Association’s litigation.”

Matt Vespa, a senior attorney at Earthjustice and lecturer at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, who dug through a thicket of utility filings to unearth many of the gas industry payments, agrees. “It’s clear to us that SoCalGas underwrote the lawsuit,” he says. (SoCalGas called such claims “irresponsible.”)

Jot Condie, chief executive officer of CRA, has dismissed such questions, telling one news outlet back in 2019 that it amounted to “looking for monsters under the bed.” He declined to be interviewed by Bloomberg Green and would not say who funded the suit, but in written responses to questions, Condie rejected parallels to the indoor-smoking fight. “If comparing these two dissimilar issues decades apart is intended to portray the association as doing the bidding for other interests, it’s an inaccurate and misleading portrayal of this association’s 118-year history,” he said.

Jot Condie speaks during a press conference in San Francisco in 2021.( Jane Tyska/East Bay Times/)

He added that “the decision to fight the illegal city ordinances was CRA’s alone,” and that it supports California’s climate goals. “There is a way to transition to a greener economy without violating federal energy law and harming the restaurant community,” he said. When asked for details on what such a low-carbon pathway would look like, he declined to provide specifics. “The emphasis must be on a transition,” he said. “No economy, industry, or business can be expected to flip a switch overnight.” (Berkeley’s rule wouldn’t have required any changes to existing restaurants.)

For longtime tobacco watchdogs, like Joelle Lester, executive director of the Public Health Law Center at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law, it amounts to more than a striking case of déjà vu. They’re concerned the tactics that once slowed indoor-smoking bans will also stymie efforts to solve climate change.

“We started realizing how closely the gas companies’ tactics mirror Big Tobacco, almost like they’re following a script,” says Lester, whose group recently published a report examining the similarities. “We thought it was important to sound the alarm that there’s this other industry doing really the same thing.”

Gas wasn’t always a widely viewed climate villain, with the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, even heralding it 15 years ago as a “bridge fuel” to a cleaner future. When burned, it produces about half the heat-trapping emissions of coal. In the mid 2000s, new drilling techniques like fracking unlocked huge quantities of cheap gas. Coal plants couldn’t compete on price and began shutting down.

But as many studies have shown, the climate harms from gas are extensive. When methane is unearthed and delivered to homes and businesses through thousands of miles of pipelines, some of the gas escapes. Because unburned methane causes more than 80 times the warming as an equivalent amount of CO2 over two decades, these leaks nullify much of the fuel’s improvement over coal.

Governments today are pushing for dramatic shifts away from gas. Lawmakers in the European Union agreed in April to abolish fossil fuels in new construction by 2030, while requiring retrofits for the least-efficient buildings. New York State, meanwhile, enacted a rule last year to ban gas in most new construction. Reichman Jorgensen filed a suit in October to block it on behalf of a slew of plaintiffs including homebuilders and gas companies. (The New York State Restaurant Association says it’s concerned about the rule but didn’t join the suit because restaurants are exempt from the ban.)

The grim outlook for gas has sparked energetic pushback by restaurant groups around the country. In the District of Columbia, where the combustion of gas in buildings contributes 22% of its climate footprint, the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington emailed members in February warning them of “misguided energy policies” that would limit their access to gas. It urged them to become advocates for their local utility, Washington Gas, describing it as a “trusted partner to the business community for over 175 years.” The utility recently fought a rule that would fund retrofits and electrification of homes for 30,000 lower-income residents. (RAMW chief executive Shawn Townsend declined to comment.)

This issue is supercharged in California, where homes and businesses are more reliant on gas than in any other state. That’s why state regulators, when crafting a blueprint to reach California’s goal of a 40% cut in emissions by 2030, stressed the need to shrink the state’s gas system and halt expansion of gas pipes into new buildings.

“If we’re going to have a chance of slowing global warming, we have to deal with the buildings problem,” says Rafael Mandelman, a San Francisco supervisor who authored a rule requiring new buildings in the city to be all-electric beginning in 2021. “It’s an imperative if human beings are going to live comfortably on this planet.”

The gas industry warns these policies will hike customer bills and increase the possibility of electric blackouts. “The choice available to us isn’t how to convert our nation’s energy system away from natural gas but how the customers can continue to benefit from the country’s abundance of affordable natural gas and ensure reliability and resiliency,” said American Gas Association chief executive officer Karen Harbert in a written statement.

Many gas companies also contend the harmful impacts of their fuel can be alleviated by mixing in vast quantities of methane captured from dairy farms and landfills. This so-called “renewable natural gas” counts less towards climate change than fossil gas, because it comes from sources that likely would have vented the methane into the atmosphere.

But state officials aren’t nearly as optimistic. Utility regulators in Massachusetts, for instance, who are examining the future of their gas system as the state tries to slash emissions by 90%, recently rejected proposals by gas companies to bank heavily on RNG, highlighting concerns about its cost and availability. The California Energy Commission came to a similar conclusion in a 2021 report, finding there wasn’t nearly enough RNG to decarbonize buildings and that maximizing its limited supply would cost more than seven times as much as electrification.

But a sharp turn away from gas requires a level of government intervention that the California Restaurant Association has long shunned. The group traces its beginnings to 1906, when a café owner in Los Angeles “got sick and tired of being told how to run his business by City Hall,” Condie recounted during a luncheon speech several years ago. That café operator, he said, “gathered a bunch of restaurateurs and said, ‘We ought to form an organization and fight back against some of these regulations.’” Ever since, Condie added, CRA’s “mission hasn’t changed. That’s what we do.”

Condie has spent much of his career fighting government edicts. During the 1990s, after a stint as a campaign manager and legislative aide to Republican lawmakers in the California state assembly, he worked for the California Manufacturers Association. There, he worked with the “Thursday Group,” a powerful coalition of industry groups that challenged environmental rules they deemed harmful to the state’s business interests, such as early efforts to regulate CO2.

Since Condie took the reins at the restaurant association in 2004, the group has spent time fighting a wide array of measures, like minimum-wage hikes and bans on polystyrene takeout containers, arguing they would erode restaurants’ profits. When a proposal emerged in 2018 for California to study ways to reduce emissions in buildings, CRA officials called it an attack on their preferred fuel. “We’re still not sure how a restaurant is going to tell a chef to not use natural gas,” a CRA spokeswoman retorted in a video briefing. “May as well tell them: ‘Put your knives down and forget the pots and pans, too!’”

On a stormy morning this February, Sarah Jorgensen was warmly introduced to the board of the National Propane Gas Association, which had gathered in a wood-paneled conference room at a hotel perched over Monterey Bay along California’s central coast. There, the Harvard-educated lawyer was feted for her crucial role in beating back gas restrictions around the country. “Sarah has been an absolute asset for the propane and natural gas industry over the past several years,” NPGA’s chief executive Stephen Kaminski told the audience, according to a recording of the event.

Just weeks earlier, Jorgensen scored a big victory on the restaurants’ behalf when a federal appeals court in the Ninth Circuit shot down Berkeley’s request for a rehearing, all but ending the four-year legal battle. This now meant that scores of cities and counties that followed Berkeley to restrict gas in new buildings might be in violation of the court’s ruling, whose jurisdiction covers nine states in the western US.

The plan now, Kaminski explained to the audience, is to reach out to these local governments “and, for lack of a better word, strong-arming those municipalities into following the law.” Jorgensen then said this might begin with an initial “letter-writing campaign” to these cities to see if they’re going to withdraw their rules.

“The decision doesn’t do too much good if people just don’t follow it,” she told the audience. “If cities still don’t comply, I think there will have to be a couple of lawsuits.”

A chef cooks over a flame at a restaurant in the Oakland Food Hall in 2021.(Stephen Lam/The San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images)

When asked about the remarks, Jorgensen replied in writing that any efforts to enforce the court’s decision are “confidential client matters.” Kaminski said in a statement that “NPGA does not strong-arm,” but, rather, is “exploring” whether local governments are continuing to enforce gas bans “despite binding jurisprudence” from the Berkeley suit.

While many cities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, are sticking with their gas bans, at least 10 others, including Sacramento and Menlo Park, have already halted their rules after the Berkeley decision.

There are other endeavors that could slow the expansion of gas in California. The state’s utilities have long used ratepayer money to help fund the extension of gas and electric service to new homes and buildings. The California Public Utilities Commission recently abolished this practice for any new buildings using gas. This will add $28,000 to the average home that wants to use gas, and over $95,000 for new commercial buildings.

Meanwhile, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, which regulates air pollution for over 7 million people in and around San Francisco, has implemented rules that will effectively ban the sale of new gas-powered water heaters and furnaces. These regulations will be phased in starting in 2027.

Gas companies “are not going to win this thing,” says Charlie Spatz, research manager at the Energy and Policy Institute, a utility watchdog. “The whole point of the lawsuits is to intimidate the cities and wear them down.”

Ironically, the first major blow to the tobacco industry’s vice-like grip over restaurant groups was delivered by the California Restaurant Association. After adopting a resolution opposing smoking bans in 1983 and working alongside cigarette companies for years, CRA knew they were losing and began to tire of the struggle, according to Paul McIntyre, who helped run government and public affairs for the group in the 1980s and 1990s.

“It was like the restaurant association had become a smoking association,” says McIntyre. In 1990, after months of tortured deliberations and a contentious board meeting, CRA held a press conference to announce a monumental shift: It would now call for a statewide smoking ban in all public places.

In 1995, California became the first state to prohibit smoking in enclosed workplaces, including restaurants. Three years later, it extended the ban to bars and taverns. ( Boris Yaro/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images)

It’s unclear if any similar turnabout is in the cards for California restaurants today. But loyalty to gas may not be ironclad.

Chipotle Mexican Grill, for instance, has vowed to halve climate-warming emissions from its 3,500 restaurants by 2030. It recently announced a new all-electric kitchen design that it plans to implement at over 100 locations this year.

Meanwhile, induction cooktops, which use electricity to send pulses of electromagnetic energy to heat up cookware, have made significant improvements and “generally outperform” all other options, including gas, according to Consumer Reports. “No other technology we’ve tested is speedier.”

But induction ranges cost two to three times more than a comparable gas stove. And some restaurants will need to upgrade the electric connection into their building to handle the increased power demands.

Induction cooktops are more precise than gas stoves, though the potential costs to retrofit could add tens of thousands of dollars (Juan Algar/Moment/Getty Images)

“The technology exists, it is state of the art and it is expensive,” says Sammy Monsour, a chef who co-owns and operates Joyce, a restaurant in downtown Los Angeles, which uses gas.

That can be too tall an order for restaurants already facing huge hurdles, he says. So, if governments want to phase out gas, he says, there needs to be plenty of financial support to help restaurants make that jump.

But restaurants need to get on the right side of the climate issue, Monsour adds, and stop fighting gas bans that have no impact on existing buildings. “That’s a little ridiculous to hold back progress for an if-what-maybe situation,” he says. “We do need to be greener. We do need to get away from natural gas.”

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California

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

Published

50 minutes 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

11 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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California

Disneyland turns to cheaper evening passes and the internet speculation explodes

Published

21 hours 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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