On August 4, former Adelanto, California mayor Richard Kerr was found guilty of taking cannabis-related bribes while in office. According to coverage from the Los Angeles Times, Kerr was sentenced to federal prison for 14 months.

Initially, federal prosecutors sought to sentence Kerr to 46 months, but U.S. District Judge John W. Holcomb reconsidered the sentence because of Kerr’s age at 66 years old, in addition to his two decades of service in the Marines, as well as family-related responsibilities.

Kerr was elected as Adelanto’s mayor in 2014, a small desert city in southwestern San Bernardino County. Kerr claimed that 40% of Adelanto residents lived in poverty at the time (as of data from 2014-2018, that percentage has decreased to 26.5%) and he wanted to make the city the “Silicon Valley of medical marijuana.”

In 2017, Kerr was arrested by federal officials for taking a $10,000 cash bribe, and also trying to find someone to burn down his restaurant (called Fat Boyz Grill) so he could collect the insurance. The following year in 2018, Kerr’s house was raided by the FBI and he was seen in handcuffs outside of his home.

Later in 2021, he was charged with accepting $75,000 in bribes while in office, which influenced approval for cannabis-related ordinances and permits.

Finally in February 2023, Kerr pleaded guilty to fraud. The most recent case revealed that he considered bribery funds as donations to a charity fund.

Carlos L. Juarez, Kerr’s attorney, defended his client by claiming that he didn’t have a college education and was naïve. “He did his darnedest to serve the people but along the way got caught up in a web of political corruption,” Juarez stated. 

Kerr called his actions the result of “stupidity” and “doing dumb things.” However, he praised how the cannabis industry benefited the city, bringing “thousands of jobs and hundreds of new homes.”

However, U.S. Attorney Sean Peterson addressed the seriousness of Kerr’s actions. “It’s not that there was just one bribe. It’s serious conduct,” Peterson said, asking the judge for Kerr to serve four years in prison as an example of the consequences for others who choose a similar path.

Many witness came forth to discuss Kerr’s behavior. One local, Edwin Snell, said that Kerr promised him and his partner that they would be permitted to open a dispensary in the city, but Kerr sold the permit “to the highest bidder.” “He promised us a dispensary and Semper Fi’d it,” said Snell. “Every person that voted for him was betrayed. Every person that voted for him was hornswoggled.”

Another resident, Diana Esmeralda Holte, said in 2017 that she applied for a dispensary license, but her attempt was rejected because she wouldn’t pay a $7,000 bribe. “I think he deserves a million years, but 20 would be reasonable,” Holte said.

In his defense, Juarez said the court case and ruling is “a complete embarrassment to Kerr.” While once well-renowned and respected in the community, he has brought his family name to shame,” he described.

Kerr’s supporters wrote letters to the judge, explaining that he grew up in poverty, has issues with alcohol, suffers from emphysema (a lung disease that causes breathlessness), and supports five of his grandchildren. Kerr’s wife in particular spotlighted his more positive decisions as mayor, which included movies in the park, a public rodeo event, and food and toy drive donations during the holidays.

Former Adelanto mayor pro tem Jermaine Wright was convicted in 2022 for accepting a $10,000 bribe from an undercover federal official claiming to be a cannabis business owner. Wright was sentenced to five years in prison.

A recent podcast called “Dreamtown: Adelanto,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, covers the city’s history and corruption, as well as Kerr’s involvement in the cannabis industry. “…reporter David Weinberg delves into what happened when a newcomer on the local council helped the city legalize weed production, and documents the fallout that happened next,” wrote High Times author Molly Lipson.

The post Former Mayor of Adelanto, California Sentenced to Federal Prison for Accepting Pot-Related Bribes appeared first on High Times.

The post Former Mayor of Adelanto, California Sentenced to Federal Prison for Accepting Pot-Related Bribes appeared first on Paradise Found.

In many ways, what happened in Adelanto, California, is an epitomic American tale: a failing prison town wanted to turn itself into a place of prosperity so it turned to another of the country’s greatest commodities, marijuana. In other ways, however, the story of Adelanto is unique, full of twists you would never see coming, and people who defy their own self-curated stereotypes.

In the new podcast series Dreamtown: Adelanto by Crooked Media, reporter David Weinberg delves into what happened when a newcomer on the local council helped the city legalize weed production, and documents the fallout that happened next.  

In the middle of the Mojave Desert, on land indigenous to the Vanyume tribe, sits the small city of Adelanto. Home to around 32,000 people, its name comes from the Spanish for ‘advanced’. For many years, this was fitting—the town was founded in 1915 by Earl Homes Richardson, the inventor of the Hotpoint Electric Iron. Covered in glorious orchards nourished by the nearby Mojave River, Adelanto was designed to be a retreat for the recuperation of war veterans, a place of growth and abundance.

But it turned out vets didn’t want to live so far out in the desert, and the river began to dry up, leaving Adelanto less fertile and desirable than ever. When the Great Depression came, decimating the city further, it attempted its first significant change, one that in many ways foreshadows the story at the heart of Dreamtown. It became home to an army base and then, in the eighties, California took advantage of the War on Drugs by building numerous prisons across the state. By 2008, Adelanto had three such institutions, one later becoming the largest immigration detention center in the state.

For a while, this kept the city afloat, but it did little more than that and people were becoming increasingly fed up. So, in 2014 someone decided to try and do something about it. A quirky character by the name of John “Bug” Woodward, a long-haired, handlebar-mustached man who dons a MAGA hat in his Twitter profile picture, ran for city council on the promise of legalizing marijuana in the city. He won, and Adelanto indeed became the first city in Southern California to legalize weed. 

David Weinberg was interested in this new development and went to Adelanto to do some short feature stories. “I interviewed all these city council members … and then within a year, some of the people I’d interviewed were arrested,” he says. 

At first, things seemed to be going well—as soon as the legislation had passed, tinted Bentleys were seen driving around town, scoping out potential assets, and celebrity investors including Bob Marley’s son Ky-Mani Marley, B-Real and Tommy Chong amongst others were showing interest. Land was cheap, profit margins were enormous, and the city’s prosperity looked set to reach unprecedented highs.

All this glamor was offset, however, by the rudimentary and often childish nature of Adelanto city council meetings. In one podcast episode, we hear elected officials arguing with a man dressed in full clown getup. This isn’t a one-off; he attends every council meeting in the same outfit. The council start berating him, saying they can’t take him seriously. It feels like a fair criticism, but then, with sincerity, one member also says: “If a man comes in here dressed in a cowboy outfit, I can buy that. But not a clown.” There’s audible agreement on this, then discussion unravels into whether it would be fair to pass a dress code that discriminated against a professional clown who came to a meeting following a day’s honest work.

It’s these comedic moments that break up an otherwise serious story of errant authority and power gone awry. Sprinkled into his storytelling, these moments guide our understanding of small-town politics and the eyebrow-raising nature of local government. In doing this, Weinberg creates the perfect backdrop to the astonishing tale of corruption that follows.

Following the initial burst of investment prospects in Adelanto, everything came crashing down. Suspicions of corruption were raised almost right away. They related to council members seemingly taking bribes to pass marijuana legalization zoning bills to benefit certain individuals and businesses. After a sting operation, the FBI arrested council member and pastor Jermaine Wright in November 2017 on charges of bribery and attempted arson. He was found guilty after a trial in June 2022 and sentenced to five years in federal prison. 

Of all the individuals involved, his case is the most extraordinary: he ended up essentially snitching on himself to an FBI informant after he’d been caught out trying to commit insurance fraud and, most oddly, requesting to have himself beaten up to the point of amnesia so he wouldn’t have to appear in court. However, at the start of the series, we hear Wright in recordings made before his arrest, speaking of his moral struggle over voting in favor of weed legalization due to his family background and role as a pastor. He sounds sincere, calm, measured. That he then morphs into the central character in what Weinberg describes as “a plot pulled from the pages of a Cohen brothers movie” is a stroke of ironic genius.

Wright wasn’t the only official arrested. In 2021, the FBI arrested the former mayor of Adelanto, Richard Allen Kerr, on charges of bribery and wire fraud. Featured in the podcast is renowned weed reporter Amanda Chicago Lewis. An expert in weed cultivation, when asked whether what happened in Adelanto was unique her reply was simple: no, this kind of corruption happens everywhere, all the time. The difference, she concluded, was that they got caught. “In Adelanto, it was egregiously dumb people doing the corruption.”

The reason the corruption happens at all is in part due to the federal illegality of weed cultivation. Weinberg explains that if you went to the city council to ask for a permit to open a business and were offered to bribe the councilperson, you could reasonably report this to the FBI. But when it comes to weed, no one wants to get the FBI involved. “It’s ripe for this kind of corruption,” he says, “and city leaders know this.” 

His assumption about what happened in Adelanto is that the city manager most likely had a conscience, saw what was happening around him and tipped off the Feds. “You kind of need these whistleblowers in local government, because that city manager could have taken a cut, but he stood up for what was right and then ultimately got fired,” Weinberg says.

Although Dreamtown is about political corruption, this podcast also tells the story of someone else, someone we’re introduced to early on without realizing until a few episodes in that she’s the real star of the show. After Wright was arrested and automatically lost his place on the council, long-time Adelanto resident Stevevonna Evans decided to run for his seat.

She was already suspicious of power, having had her children wrongfully taken away from her twice by Child and Family Services. It was a traumatizing moment in her life, but it was also galvanizing. “She stopped trusting these institutions around her,” Weinberg says, and that distrust emboldened rather than disempowered her. After sensing something shady was going on in the council, her determination to weed out corruption and provide better representation for Adelanto residents was firm. In 2018, she won the seat, and in many ways, this podcast is her story of trying to fix a broken system.

At the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, where Dreamtown premiered in the audio section, Evans spoke candidly about her take on the city she calls home and the people who ran it, as she does on the podcast. She’s funny, sharp, outspoken and makes you instantly want to be her best friend. In a world where politicians rarely represent the best interests of their constituents, and particularly against the corruption that took place in Adelanto, Evans stands out as an honest and intentional powerhouse dedicated to improving the lives of her community. This is a podcast about what happened when a city council took on the legal marijuana industry and got burnt, but it’s also a story about hope for a better future, and how we can all be part of making that happen.

Dreamtown: Adelanto is available to listen on all podcast platforms.

The post New Podcast Documents Fallout of Adelanto, Its Move To Legalize Cannabis appeared first on High Times.

The post New Podcast Documents Fallout of Adelanto, Its Move To Legalize Cannabis appeared first on Paradise Found.

A former California mayor was arrested last week after being indicted by a federal grand jury over allegations that he accepted thousands of dollars in bribes and kickbacks related to commercial marijuana activity.

Richard Kerr, who served as mayor of Adelanto, California from 2014 until 2018, was taken into custody on Friday by FBI agents. He was indicted on allegations that “he accepted more than $57,000 in bribes and kickbacks in exchange for approving ordinances authorizing various types of commercial marijuana activity within the city, and ensuring his co-schemers obtained city licenses or permits authorizing certain commercial marijuana activities,” according to a press release from the Department of Justice.

The indictment asserts that Kerr “voted on ordinances governing zoning regulations in the city and served on Adelanto’s Cannabis Dispensary Permit Committee, which determined the number of dispensary permits that would be issued and which applicants would receive them.”

It is the latest instance of Kerr finding himself under federal scrutiny, and the second time a top official from Adelanto has been accused of such a pot-related conspiracy. According to the Los Angeles Times, “federal agents served search warrants on Kerr’s home, City Hall and a local marijuana dispensary,” while “then-Mayor Pro Tem Jermaine Wright was charged with a similar scheme” in 2017.

In 2016, while Kerr was still serving as mayor of Adelanto, California voters passed a measure legalizing recreational marijuana use, paving the way for a regulated market.

The Department of Justice said that, in his capacity as mayor, Kerr “supported marijuana legalization, voted in favor of an ordinance authorizing marijuana cultivation in the city, voted in favor of an ordinance authorizing the operation of medical marijuana dispensaries, and voted to authorize the distribution, transportation and testing of medical marijuana, among other commercial marijuana activities. At the same time, Kerr secretly used his official position to enrich himself and his co-schemers by passing these same ordinances, according to the indictment.”

He is said to have “drafted zones for commercial marijuana activities to include locations used by his co-schemers, and he ensured they obtained the licenses and permits they sought—in exchange for bribes, kickbacks and gifts.”

Kerr’s alleged co-conspirators are described as “a lawyer who specialized in plaintiffs’ tort litigation—identified in the indictment as ‘Person A’ – and two individuals—labeled ‘Person C and ‘Person D’—who had business interests in the city, including those involving marijuana cultivation.”

“The bribes and kickbacks were disguised by Kerr and his co-schemers as gifts, donations to a charitable fund, donations to Kerr’s election campaign, or advance payments for the proceeds of planned litigation associated with a motorcycle accident,” the Department of Justice said. “In exchange for the bribes and kickbacks, Kerr provided favorable official action on behalf of the city to Person A, Person C, and other co-schemers with business interests in the city by authorizing various types of commercial marijuana activities, ensuring his supporters obtained the licenses or permits they sought, and interfering with enforcement activities by city officials.”

The DOJ provided two specific examples of Kerr’s alleged activity, one occurring in 2016 and the other in 2017. The first centered around a public discussion conducted by the Adelanto City Council in November of that year, where the officials addressed so-called “overlay zones” where medical cannabis dispensaries would be located.

“The initial proposal included two zones, neither of which included a former restaurant—purchased two months earlier by Person A and his spouse. During the discussion, Kerr requested a change in the boundaries of the second overlay zone, which expanded the zone to include Person A’s business. The plans for the business initially called for the building to be an attorney’s office, although they included items such as ‘elongated sales counters,’ a ‘dispensing room,’ ‘cashier,’ and ‘security room,’” according to the indictment, as described by the DOJ. 

On December 5 of that year, Kerr allegedly deposited a check that had the same date as when the meeting was held “from Person A’s real estate trust account into his bank account, and the check’s memorandum line read, ‘ADV XMAS FUND,’” the DOJ said.

It was also reported that in May 2017, the former Adelanto mayor also voted two times in support of a city ordinance that favored the marijuana dispensary overlap zone in which Person A’s business was to be located in. “In February, June and August of 2017, Kerr deposited three $10,000 checks from Person A’s law firm, with the memorandum lines of each check stating, ‘ADVANCE,’” according to the DOJ.

The post Exorbitant Cannabis Bribes Lead to Arrest of Former California Mayor appeared first on High Times.

The post Exorbitant Cannabis Bribes Lead to Arrest of Former California Mayor appeared first on Paradise Found.