And the Bee has a graphic look at how he spent $1.33 million he allegedly stole from CapRadio:
-
Get involved.
We want your input!
Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.
After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.
After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/
Thanks in advance and have fun!
RadioDiscussions Administrators
Former CapRadio GM Jun Reina in court today
- Thread starter michael hagerty
- Start date
Cant read the entire article or see the graphic as its behind a paywall... but i also dont support cheating somehow to see behind the paywall.
Sorry. I don’t either. I was able to read it despite not having a currently active Bee subscription.
And I was able to replicate that. If you Google “Sacramento Bee Reina” and then click on the link for today’s article, it appears the Bee allows you to read it for free.
Reporters waited for hours, and it was over in minutes. The Sacramento County District Attorney's Office requested a continuance. Reina's next court date is September 17 and he is expected to appear in person:
www.capradio.org
A PS: District Attorney Thien Ho came in 5th in the open primary for California Congressional District 6 this month. His current term as D.A. continues until January of 2029, so this will be his case.
Former CapRadio GM’s court case continued until September, no plea entered
Former general manager Jun Reina made a brief court appearance via Zoom on Wednesday, where his criminal case was continued until September. The former executive has not entered a plea to the felony charges leveled against him.
A PS: District Attorney Thien Ho came in 5th in the open primary for California Congressional District 6 this month. His current term as D.A. continues until January of 2029, so this will be his case.
Your P.S. is very interesting, Mike. Back on last New Year's Eve, I wrote in a predecessor thread:
We'll see...
Now that the D.A. isn't going to be on November's ballot for a congressional seat, I'll be watching with interest whether Mr. Ho continues this prosecution or loses interest in a white collar case. To repeat myself, as much damage and heartbreak as this sordid affair has done to the Cap Radio staff and reputation, it's a small potatoes case in the greater scheme of things. Their insurance company has made the organization financially whole and will civilly pursue Reina themselves. So the D.A. might decide its resources could be better applied to higher profile cases.
We'll see...
It's hard to "out lawyer" an insurance company when they have paid out a claim. Even a "small insurance company" has the resources to hire top lawfirms. Unless he skips the country, they will get their money. A conviction makes their job easier. I don't know California's ethics but our local sheriff is in trouble because of selective enforcement.
I wrote that P.S. with your earlier post in mind.
My thoughts:
I can't find it now, but I remember researching and replying to your suggestion that this was "a small potatoes case" a few months ago. And what I found was that by Sacramento standards, it's not. It's actually one of the larger ones (if I remember correctly, top five), and it's made worse by it being a betrayal of a non-profit rather than a crooked private business thing.
It's hard to overestimate the outrage in the community. And with pieces like the Bee's item-by-item analysis of where $1.33 million of CapRadio's money went, that anger remains red-hot.
I don't have any specific knowledge of what D.A. Ho's next move will be, but given his poor showing in the Congressional race, running for re-election in 2028 would seem to be a solid move. His predecessor, Anne Marie Schubert, did three terms as D.A. and only left office to run in 2022 for California Attorney General. Like Ho, she lost in the primary, coming in a distant fourth.
Schubert's predecessor, Jan Scully, did a record-setting five terms.
It appears no Sacramento D.A. has ever been elected to higher office afterward. At least one has become a judge, the others tend to work for justice foundations after they leave office.
Thien Ho is 48 years old. Unless he blows a major case, re-election to a third term as D.A. would probably be a slam-dunk.
Here it is. (It's from a P.M. you sent me back in Feb. Nothing in here is personal or confidential, so I'm pasting the clip into this message.)
"Yeah, but Sacramento isn't New York. Jun's would be in the top 10 embezzlement cases in the town's history.
The DC Solar case is the topper ($1 billion), but that was a statewide thing that just happened to be headquartered in Sac. Then Deepal Wannakuwate---an investment guy who took $100 million from a bunch of investors from all over the place. Again, he just happened to be here. The DC Solar guy was sentenced to 30 years in prison, Wannaukuwate got 20 years.
After that, Jeff David, former Chief Revenue Officer for the NBA Sacramento Kings, stole $13 million from the team and its sponsors. He got 7 years in prison and served 4 before getting early release.
The closest comp to Jun---within $100,000 of what he's accused of stealing---is the former CEO of Goodwill for Northern California and Northern Nevada. That's a $1.4 million case. His attorneys are dragging it out, so it still hasn't gone to trial, but they're talking potentially 20 years for him. Goodwill's legally a nonprofit, and there's a lot of outrage. That one only came to light two years ago, and the community was still buzzing about it when the Jun thing started to break.
And, remember, the D.A. is running for Congress. It's in his interest to look tough.
I think Reina's attorney's best shot is to work out a deal. If she gets an offer for Reina of under 5 years in prison, she should take it and run."
I went through that article and the list of his grifts, and I'm offended by how he misappropriated that money. A bit of which came from my own contributions, even though (as you know) I'm out of market.
Mr. Ho's problem is that he's the D.A. of one county, but the congressional district has been redistricted this year to extend beyond that county into parts of Yolo and Sutter. And the D.A. has to appear to be a tough guy, where voters typically want to start out with warm fuzzies about a new congressman/woman. (Growing a spine, or pretending to, happens later.) That's not typically who voters want to send to D.C. And the last couple of assistant DA's that I can recall getting sent to Washington (Kamala Harris and Eric Swalwell) didn't exactly bathe themselves in glory, did they?
Thanks for finding and sharing that! I knew I'd written it and I knew it was to you, but I completely zoned it being a PM.
I stand by my thought on what Reina's attorney should do, but we won't know for at least three months---this has gone on this far without a plea entry.
The one that offended me most was a $526.00 contribution to Sacramento's Big Day of Giving. If you're making $200,000 a year (with or without an extra $1.33 million in allegedly ill-gotten money), you should be able to make your own damn charitable donation---and not put it on the station's credit card.
The thing I found most interesting was the "local haunts" heatmap, showing where Reina spent money in town. Now, food and drink are legitimate expenses in that position, so, if he were to find a shoebox of receipts that match them, that'd be one thing. But this one...
Temple Coffee Roasters is an excellent local chain of coffee places. Jun visited 14 times and spent $3,933.
To spend $3,933 in 14 visits results in an average per-visit expenditure of $280.92. That's a LOT of coffee.
No. The redrawn CD 6 is part of Sacramento County, part of Yolo County (West Sacramento), and the urban/suburban parts of Placer County (Roseville and Rocklin).
D.A. Ho chose District 6 after the lines were re-drawn. And he chose to do it after former State Senator Richard Pan announced. That put him up against both current Congressional District 3 incumbent Kevin Kiley, a Republican who quickly announced he was running as an independent, and Pan.
Maybe. Depends entirely on the district and the election cycle. The smart money is Democrats want folks with backbone to be elected to and gain a majority in Congress.
Ho is D.A.--not ADA. Six years in the top job.
I wouldn't lump VP Harris and Swalwell together, given that Swalwell is accused, credibly, of sexual assault and Kamala---isn't.
Harris won every election until she had to parachute into a presidential general election in 107 days and even then, in the popular vote, she missed by 1.5 percentage points.
While Swalwell did go from Assistant D.A. to Congress, Harris was an ADA for four years before being elected as District Attorney and serving eight years, then being elected Attorney General of the State of California where she served six years before being elected to the United States Senate. After four years in the Senate, Joe Biden chose her as his running mate and when he won the 2020 election, she became Vice-President of the United States.
That's not too shabby for a kid from Oakland.
Last edited:
I agree. It might be legal malpractice if she isn't trying her best to negotiate a plea.
I caught that too. It only makes sense if he was buying wheelbarrows of ground coffee beans to bring into the station to keep the hard-working staff well caffeinated. But something tells me you and your colleagues were brewing a lesser grade of rot-gut than Kona or Jamaican Blue Mountain in the station's Mr. Coffee.
My bad. I misread which counties were gerrymandered into district 6. But I knew it no longer included all of Sacto County. I could have written that more clearly.
True, but this is going to be anything but a typical off-year election. We can thank The Pride of Queens for that too.
I didn't intend to imply Ho was an ADA. Just that, for very different reasons, both Swalwell and Harris were former ADA's who left office in less-than-glorious ways. I know Kamala went through a number of higher offices on the way to the 2024 race. I also agree it was unfair to airdrop her into a presidential race in the last few months. But ... that's what a vice president is supposed to be there for. If Biden had suddenly died in office 107 days before the election, it's very likely she would have had to run the rest of the campaign at the top of the ticket while adjusting the staff and strategy on the fly.
No, it's not.
I mean, we had a restaurant-style two-burner coffee maker. This one, in fact ($500-ish on Amazon):
And with a staff size at the time of 112, we probably went through a pound or two of coffee a day.
We weren't drinking Folger's or any other supermarket brand, but I really don't think we were downing several thousand dollars worth of freshly-ground stuff from Temple, either. Maybe (we scooped from two generic resealable Tupperware pitchers---one regular, one decaf). But if so, that's exactly the kind of legitimate, easily-documentable expense that shouldn't be in question, and really, should be a regular budget item under contract to a supplier, like the vending machines.
No, a vice-president is supposed to be there to execute the duties of President of the United States. Winning an election on short notice isn't in the qualifications---isn't something someone should be judged for their ability to do, as much as their political party would like it---and no one has had to before. Let's look at the deaths in office:
JFK died a little more than 11 months before the 1964 elections. Historians and political scientists say the sympathy vote gave LBJ the landslide victory over Barry Goldwater and that, had Kennedy lived, it would have been less of a blowout.
Here's TIME magazine two weeks before the JFK assassination. Essential pull-quote:
Politics: The Polls
The surveys' story sounded both sweet and sour to Barry Goldwater. Since last summer, Goldwater has steadily lengthened his lead over Nelson Rockefeller in presidential preference polls. Last...
time.com
Johnson beat Goldwater with 43 million votes to Barry's 27 million---61% to 38% and 486 electoral votes to 52.
It's reasonable to assume that, had Biden passed, Harris would have benefited from some sympathy vote as well, even though the country is far more divided than it was in '64 and the modern GOP couldn't be counted on to observe a "decent interval" before resuming politics as usual.
That was the closest to an election that a U.S. president has died while in office.
FDR died more than three years before Harry Truman had to run.
Warren G. Harding died a year and three months before the election, giving Calvin Coolidge plenty of time.
And each of the in-office deaths prior to that had lead times of between two and three years for the VP to show how they could run the country and mount an election campaign in their own name.
Last edited: