At Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, there were numerous demands from some misinformed members of the public (via Zoom) for Sheriff Kendall to apologize for using a “hurtful” and “racist” photo in his original submission to the Board requesting $4 million for additional deputies to help quell the pot-related violence in the North County. Fortunately, he didn’t apologize as it is completely unwarranted.
There’s also a group of PC Dogmatic-Repressives who obviously know nothing about the violent 4-day incident last September near Laytonville and the origins of what they call a “hog-tied black man’ photo, and alleged vigilantes on the loose in the North County.
Here’s what I wrote last September about this crime:
“There was a violent home invasion in the northern Laytonville area that stretched over several days starting on Thursday, Sept. 17. The mastermind, I guess you could call him, was Louis Bagliere, 73, now of San Jose but formerly a resident of Laytonville. Evidently Bagliere returned to the area to rob some people who he had rented his former property for the purpose of growing weed.
How do you rent property that you don’t own? I don’t know, but evidently that’s what Bagliere did.
“According to a number of people I know, Bagliere sold his property — which by the way and ironically was the site of the Jeffrey Settler pot grow murder four years ago — a couple of years after that homicide was committed. It’s a 160-acre parcel located five miles north of Laytonville and five or six mile west of Highway 101.
“Bagliere, who has been a mid-level career criminal his whole life, reportedly has been arrested and/or charged, and/or served time for mostly drug-related offenses in California, Texas and Utah. He’s been looked at by California authorities for a couple of murders but was never arrested or charged for them, and is known to have associations with Bay Area street gangs, and had some type of “business” relationship (most likely meth) with the Hell’s Angels.
“Anyway, apparently he ‘rented’ his old property to these folks who were growing weed. Most likely, they had some kind of deal with Bagliere over the grow The Sheriff’s reports has all the details of what ensued when Bagliere and his Bay Area crew of heavily armed crooks/gang members showed up at his old homestead. They relieved the “renters” of 20 pounds of weed and said they’d be back Saturday presumably for more weed and/or money.
“Bagliere’s crew returned to the property on Saturday confronting the renters comprised of three men, a woman, and young child. They demanded money from the renters, firing off three or four shots to show their demand was serious (allegedly the gangster who fired the shots is the subject in the photo).
“But it was bad news for Bagliere and his gangsters in that they were all caught and arrested, including the one bad guy, later identified as David Lee Edmonds, a 50 year-old male from San Jose, who managed to evade the cops for a day, but was nabbed by an alert resident who placed him under citizen’s arrest, trussed him up with zip ties, and delivered the violent dolt to Sheriff’s deputies who arrived on the scene. That citizen deserves a commendation from the County.”
There was no vigilante-ism during this caper. I was on the air doing my radio show that Saturday when we started getting calls in the studio right when the whole thing started. My radio sidekick lives up there and they have a pretty sophisticated Neighborhood Watch-like program. They kept us informed of unfolding events until the cops showed up in force and started their operation.
The guy who was trussed up and delivered to MCSO had been at-large overnight trying to find a way out of what appears to be a box canyon but isn’t. He wandered all night, and since he was wearing just trousers and a T-shirt on a chilly night, by morning he was exhausted and dehydrated as he wobbled up a road to the house where he was observed by the occupants sitting in the road. They knew he was the missing gangster. He offered no resistance, they gave him water, trussed him with zip-ties, and drove him down to where MCSO had set up one of their roadblocks.
The cops couldn’t find him, but the neighbors did. They weren’t out hunting for him, but when they found him, they did the right thing. They made sure he was relatively OK, detained him, gave him water, secured him for their safety, and delivered him to the cops. As I said at the time, the Sheriff should give a commendation to them.
Most of the folks up there (just west a few miles of the Hog Farm) are hippie back-to-landers-growers, but they’re not the kind of hippies you want to piss off. They’re also the kind of people who don’t drive around with their Klan hoods and robes tucked under the front seat, ready-at-hand for when they commit their next racial outrage.
By the way, the leaders of the crook crew, Bagliere and Son, are White, the others are Black. Proves a long-held belief of mine, there’s more racial harmony nowadays than ever. It’s everywhere if you just open your eyes, you’ll find it in the damnest places.
I have a good friend, who owns property in the area where career criminal Bagliere lived. He had a few run-ins with the old crook/gangster, including one time when he confronted Bagliere and his Hell’s Angels associates, who were most likely preparing to set up a meth cook op. He “persuaded” them that was not a good idea and it was time for them to leave and never come back. They did.
It’s a different world up here in the North County, take my word for it.
Three Public Health Officers?
I’m sure most of you remember the County’s former Public Health Officer, Dr. Mimi Doohan, who ran her County office long-distance from San Diego during her spell “serving” Mendo citizens last year. The local Health Orders she issued were carbon copies of state-issued Health Orders where she didn’t consider making any accommodations based on local circumstances regarding whether small retail businesses could remain open. She just closed them all. For her less than stellar performance, she was paid $300K, as I recall. Even though she left employment in Mendocino County for a job in San Diego last spring, she was kept on the payroll this past year in some sort of advisory capacity. There was a move to extend her contract for another year at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting. However, the retroactive contract extension was buried in the agenda’s “Consent Calendar.”
The Laytonville County Water District that I manage, has a permanent consent calendar slot on our agenda for each and every meeting, just like the BOS agenda. The multi-item consent calendar is explained as follows with language that is identical on both the BOS and Water District agendas:
“The Consent Calendar is considered routine and non-controversial and will be acted upon by the Board at one time without discussion. Any Board member may request that any item be removed from the Consent Calendar for individual consideration.”
Now that I’ve provided the background, I’ll let Mark Scaramella, of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, pick up the narrative:
“Newly seated Supervisor Maureen Mulheren boldly pulled Item 4k from the consent calendar on Tuesday, saying that she wanted to see some alternatives to extending Dr. Noemi Doohan’s contract for a year at $125 per hour, $100k per year. Her freshly seated colleague, Glenn McGourty, agreed the item should be pulled. Supervisor Ted Williams immediately disagreed, saying that “continuity” was important and he supported the extension of the unimpressive Dr. Doohan’s contract. Supervisor Haschak agreed, saying he would support whatever Dr. Coren and CEO Angelo wanted in response to the pandemic, a statement rather breathtaking in its write-your-own check assumption. “CEO Angelo thought that Dr. Doohan brought a ‘scientific’ approach to the County’s covid response, and that if it was up to the CEO we’d have three Public Health Officers because the pandemic has not subsided and now the vaccine rollout is underway and there’s a surge and all. Angelo added that Dr. Doohan was actually a bargain since, according to the CEO, Dr. Doohan is providing at least twice the hours that she’s contracted for at no extra cost. Supervisor Mulheren repeated that she preferred local doctors to out-of-county consultants. But when the vote came Mulheren was the only no vote and we’ll now have whatever benefits a San Diego doctor can offer for at least another year.”
Anybody know why a county with only 90,000 people needs two Public Health Officers?
According to CEO Angelo, she’d have three Public Health Officers on the payroll. Really?
That’s what you call an in-your-face, screw you response from an out-of-touch bureaucrat.
It’s time for the Supervisors to reassert their authority over the CEO and her office. They should start by removing the Clerk of the Board position and duties from the CEO back to where it was until 2010: under the Board of Supervisors.
(Jim Shields is the Mendocino County Observer’s editor and publisher, and is also the long-time district manager of the Laytonville County Water District. Listen to his radio program “This and That” every Saturday at 12 noon on KPFN 105.1 FM, also streamed live: http://www.kpfn.org.)
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