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.

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