How California Became a New Center of Political Corruption

Jose Huizar’s downfall at Los Angeles City Hall was as stunning as his rise to success, a political tragedy that, like many in the land of dreams, has become a familiar one.

Born to a large family in rural Mexico and raised in poverty near the towering high rises of downtown Los Angeles, he overcame enormous odds to graduate from the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University and U.C.L.A. law school.

He returned to his old neighborhood in East Los Angeles to run for the school board and eventually the City Council, where he gained control of the influential committee that approves multimillion-dollar commercial development projects across the city.

His spectacular fall — after F.B.I. agents caught him accepting $1.8 million worth of casino chips, luxury hotel stays, a liquor box full of cash and prostitutes from Chinese developers — was cast by federal prosecutors as an epic Hollywood tale. They persuaded a judge in January to sentence him to 13 years in prison on charges of tax evasion and racketeering.

“He was the King Kong of L.A. City Hall for many, many years,” Mack E. Jenkins, chief of the criminal division at the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, told the court. “And with his fall, a lot of devastation was left in his wake.”

This week, when Mr. Huizar is scheduled to report to prison, he will become the third recent Los Angeles City Council member to go down on charges of corruption, part of a much larger circle of staff aides, fund-raisers, political consultants and real estate developers who have been charged in what federal authorities called an “extraordinary” recent wave of bribery and influence-peddling across California.