4. THE YEAR IN GALLEGOS
It would be hard to picture anyone arguing that it was a good one -- except, perhaps, those who would dearly love to see the back of him.
The road didn't really get rocky for District Attorney Paul Gallegos until the summer. Then, in late June and early July, everything seemed to hit at once. Deputy DA Worth Dikeman announced that he would challenge Gallegos in next year's election, kicking off the campaign a year before election day. A Humboldt County Grand Jury report took him to task for the way he ran the office. A bizarre, baroque turn of events in the conflict-of-interest suit against Fortuna City Councilmember Debi August -- a politically radioactive case that the office was prosecuting -- ended with a judge dismissing the case right before it was supposed to go to trial.
But none of these things had quite as severe an impact on Gallegos' reputation as the dismissal of his office's sweeping fraud lawsuit against the Pacific Lumber Co. The case was filed by Gallegos' right-hand man, Tim Stoen, just weeks after Gallegos took office in 2002. In the years that followed, through the bitter recall fight that the suit sparked, his supporters and detractors could tacitly agree on one thing: Gallegos was the fraud suit, and the fraud suit was Gallegos. It never would have been filed if he hadn't been elected, and he and Stoen fought it whole hog -- even going so far as to bring a local judge's sex life into court filings in order to get that judge disqualified. It backfired. The judge they got instead was the one that dismissed it. (His ruling has been appealed.)
The death of the August and Palco cases marked the end for Stoen, who Gallegos -- a former defense attorney -- originally hired to bridge the gap between the office and himself. As Gallegos later noted, that plan didn't work so well. Stoen retreated to his old job as a Mendocino County prosecutor. To fill Stoen's shoes, Gallegos hired San Francisco defense attorney Jeffrey Schwartz, whose pre-hire website -- www.yougofree.com -- occasioned a few courthouse snickers when it was discovered.
Then, in September, the DA's friend and political consultant Richard Salzman became mired in scandal (see below). Unlike other candidates Salzman had worked with, Gallegos was slow to distance himself, saying that he needed to speak to Salzman directly before he made judgments. Apparently, that chat never took place. On Monday of this week, Gallegos finally seemed to say that his political future will be Salzman-free.
Gallegos himself says he's staying focused on the job at hand, but for his still-devoted supporters, everything points to June 6, 2006. It'll be Gallegos' third election in four years. This time, unlike the last two, Gallegos will be running on his record -- not against Terry Farmer, a 20-year-incumbent, and not against the hundreds of thousands of dollars Pacific Lumber spent to try to remove him. Dikeman is a strong law-and-order candidate with strong law-and-order support. With the Pacific Lumber case -- and Pacific Lumber itself -- on the sidelines, there's simply no telling which way things could go.
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THE 99 NAMES OF SALZMAN
As a wise man once said: Before you point your finger, make sure your hands are clean.
Richard Salzman -- founder of the Alliance for Ethical Business, lead politcal strategist for DA Paul Gallegos -- was, in the early half of 2005, well on his way to establishing himself as a king-maker for the local progressive community. His main weapon was his index finger, which he deployed with great talent against his enemies, pointing out dastardly deeds. (The middle finger was only implied.)
In September, all that came to a halt. That's when this newspaper discovered, then proved, that for at least a year Salzman had written a series of letters for publication in various local newspapers under a series of quasi-fake names -- names just close enough to those of actual Humboldt County citizens to seem plausible. Looking back at them, the letters themselves were clearly designed to continue Salzman's work through other avenues, ones that would remain sub rosa. They were exemplars of the black arts of politics, the kinds of thing that Karl Rove might have done in his boyhood.
The Eureka Reporter officially reported Salzman's actions to the Trinidad Police Department, which then proceeded to investigate the matter as a case of identity theft. (Simmons said that he did not consult Arkley -- an avowed Salzman enemy -- before calling the police.) A search warrant was served on Salzman's home, and his computers were confiscated and sent away for analysis. Salzman went quiet for a few months.
Political progressives got a glimpse of the long-term fallout in the run-up to the November elections. McKinleyville Community Services District candidate Bill Wennerholm attacked two of his opponents -- Jeff Dunk and Javan Reid -- for being endorsed by Local Solutions, the leftish political action committee that was formed after the recall. The nut of his argument? Local Solutions is nothing more than a cog in Salzman's dirty-tricks machine. The PAC was pulling Dunk and Reid's strings, and Salzman was pulling the PAC's. (In the end, Wennerholm, Dunk and Reid were all elected.)
"I'm pleased that the matter has been resolved, and I look forward to returning my attention to the vital quality-of-life issues facing Humboldt County," Salzman said in a press release last week after the state attorney general's office declined to take the case to court. But whether that attention will be effective, or even welcome, remains to be seen. Certainly, Salzman's old and often accurate harangues against dirty politicking on the right will no longer pack quite the same punch. And with several key political races coming up next year -- Gallegos' reelection campaign, two county supervisors' seats, Eureka's mayor and the majority of its city council -- the Wennerholm critique will surely be refined and redeployed against other progressive candidates.
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