A lawyer hired by the City Attorney’s Office was sentenced Tuesday to almost three years behind bars and ordered to undergo mental health counseling for accepting an illicit kickback of nearly $2.2 million in exchange for getting another attorney to represent his ratepayer client in a secretly friendly lawsuit against the L.A. Department of Water and Power related to the botched launch of a new billing system in 2013.
Paul Paradis, 60, of Scottsdale, Arizona, who admitted playing both sides of the fence by representing the city simultaneously with DWP ratepayer Antwon Jones in the collusive lawsuit, pleaded guilty to a bribery charge and provided extensive cooperation in the federal probe of the scheme and with an ongoing California State Bar investigation of the attorneys involved, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
U.S. District Judge Stanley Blumenfeld Jr. ordered Paradis to self surrender on Jan. 8 to begin serving his 33-month sentence. Paradis will also serve three years of supervised release following his prison term.
“I have not yet seen a level of cooperation more than I have seen in this case,” the judge said, adding that Paradis had shown “an extraordinary acceptance of responsibility.”
At the same time, Blumenfeld Jr. described the extent of public corruption in the case as “mind-boggling.”
Paradis was the first defendant charged in the federal investigation into the city’s handling of the flawed DWP system and resulting litigation. The failed system led to many customers receiving wildly inflated bills or none at all.
The judge said Paradis was at the center of at least three other related bribery schemes and his cooperation resulted in a trio of convictions.
David Wright, the former general manager of DWP, was sentenced in 2022 to six years in federal prison for bribery. Thomas H. Peters, a former senior official at the City Attorney’s Office, was sentenced in May to nine months of home detention for taking part in an extortion scheme tied to the billing debacle. David Alexander, DWP’s former chief information security officer and its former chief cyber risk officer, was sentenced last year to 48 months in federal prison for lying to the FBI about a secret business relationship with Paradis.
“And his motive was pure greed,” Blumenfeld Jr. said of Paradis from the bench in downtown Los Angeles.
In a non-scripted statement to the court, Paradis asked for “mercy” and accused former City Attorney Mike Feuer of lying to both the grand jury and investigators. Feuer has previously denied any wrongdoing in the case.
“I ruined my life and there is no excuse,” Paradis told the court. ” What I did was wrong and I accept the consequences. I’m a changed man, a broken man.”
In sentencing the defendant to two years and nine months in prison, the judge rejected the prosecution’s recommendation of 18 months and the defense request for a probationary term.
“In this court’s view, too few people have been held accountable,” Blumenfeld Jr. said.
After the faulty billing system went into use, the city and utility faced multiple class-action lawsuits filed by Jones and other ratepayers. In December 2014, the City Attorney’s Office retained Paradis and Beverly Hills lawyer Paul Kiesel as special counsel to represent the city in the lawsuit meant to be used to settle all related claims on the city’s desired terms.
Kiesel also cooperated with the investigation and was not charged with any wrongdoing.
Prosecutors contend that when Paradis began representing the city as special counsel in litigation against PricewaterhouseCoopers over the company’s handling of the billing system rollout, city prosecutors were aware that he was already representing Jones, the ratepayer who had a claim against the utility arising from billing overcharges.
Jones was unaware that Paradis also represented his intended adversary, according to court filings.
At a February 2015 meeting with at least one senior member of the City Attorney’s Office, Paradis and Kiesel were authorized and directed to find an attorney who would be friendly to the city to supposedly represent Jones, prosecutors said.
After the meeting, Paradis recruited an outside lawyer to supposedly represent Jones in a lawsuit against the city. Paradis told the lawyer that the city wanted the lawsuit to be “pre-settled” on the city’s desired terms, and that Paradis would do all or most of the substantive work on the case.
In exchange, Paradis and the outside lawyer agreed that Paradis would receive 20% of that lawyer’s fees in the Jones v. City case as a secret kickback.
The DWP has estimated that the billing scandal has cost the city more than $120 million.
In July 2017, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge issued a final approval of the $67 million settlement agreed to by the parties in Jones v. City, including about $19 million in plaintiffs’ attorney fees.
Pursuant to the settlement agreement, the city sent a check to the outside attorney in the amount of more than $19.2 million. After disbursing some of those funds in accordance with the terms of the settlement agreement, the outside lawyer and his firm retained about $10.3 million in fees.
The outside attorney then secretly paid $2.1 million to Paradis, disguising the kickback as a real estate investment, and funneling it through shell companies that Paradis and the lawyer had set up exclusively for the purpose of transmitting and concealing the illicit payment, according to Paradis’ plea agreement.
As part of his plea, Paradis admitted giving bribes to multiple DWP officials, including the DWP general manager and a DWP board member, in exchange for their help in securing a three-year, $30 million no-bid contract with the utility in June 2017 for Paradis’ downtown Los Angeles-based cyber-services company, Aventador Utility Solutions.
At the time it approved the no-bid contract, the DWP board was not informed that Paradis had ghostwritten a May 2017 independent monitor report on the Jones v. City settlement on which the utility based its decision, prosecutors said.
The Paradis-written report claimed that the DWP could not meet its obligations under the Jones v. City settlement agreement unless it contracted with Aventador.
The DWP board also was unaware that the then-DWP general manager advocating for the award of the no-bid contract to Paradis’ company had secretly agreed to become its CEO with an annual salary of $1 million and a luxury company car, prosecutors say.