Content area
Full Text
CORRECTION: SEE CORRECTION APPENDED SEE NOTE APPENDED; Dam scam-- The "Then and Now" feature in Sunday's California section said Southern California woke on the morning of March 12, 1928, to the St. Francis Dam disaster. The dam broke early on the morning of March 13.
Crooked politicians in Depression-era Los Angeles found "easy pickins" when they meshed their hunger for money with the arid state's thirst for water.
In what became known as the Great Forks Dam fiasco, and what county Supervisor John Anson Ford called "the darkest episode" in the history of Los Angeles County government, a county supervisor-- evidently the only one in modern times to go to prison for corruption--was handed an envelope full of $1,000 bills on a street corner the day after he persuaded his board colleagues to vote for a huge cash payout to the contractor who paid him the bribe.
For most of the early decades of the 20th century, the city of Los Angeles was nationally notorious for its corrupt mayors, bagman cops and dishonest politicians. But the county government had escaped this bad PR--until 1933, when Supervisor Sidney T. Graves was clapped into handcuffs, hauled into court and sent to San Quentin for bribery.
Graves was a state assemblyman when he decided to run for county supervisor in the late 1920s. Then as now there were only five supervisors, and Graves won the 3rd District seat.
Along with his supervisor's title and perks came committee work-- including the job as head of the rich and influential county flood control district.
Before Graves took office, voters had approved $25 million in bonds to build a dam above Azusa and to lay $300,000 in railroad tracks to reach the 12 miles from the Santa Fe Railway line to the dam site. Boosters said the dam would be the world's largest concrete structure, creating a reservoir with a water surface of eight square miles.
It was called the Forks Dam project, and somewhere along the line Graves saw an opportunity for himself. Once the board gave the dam building contract to a San Francisco construction firm and signed off, Graves, as the man in...