Weeks before the Anaheim City Council readied a June 2020 vote on whether to legalize retail cannabis, an influential lobbyist appeared to declare the effort dead on arrival.
Two cannabis companies, From the Earth and Mr. Nice Guy, paid the Anaheim Chamber of Commerce $310,000 to advance their cause.
The prognosis after the chamber established a cannabis task force with the funds renewed suspicions between consultants and the two cannabis clients as to whether the behind-the-scenes push entailed fraud and deception.
It is a legal question that will go before a federal judge later this month, when former chamber chief executive Todd Ament attempts to withdraw a plea deal in which he previously admitted guilt to a cannabis-related wire fraud charge.
Related emails, financial records and spreadsheets — including those that informed an FBI investigation into task force money transfers as a key part of a federal corruption probe — were obtained by TimesOC ahead of the court date.
The documents detail the fallout from the failure to legalize retail cannabis as well as which companies were paid and how much they received along the way.
With legal retail cannabis seemingly all but dead in Anaheim, Chris Glew, an attorney and listed agent for Mr. Nice Guy cannabis dispensaries, fired off an email on May 28, 2020, to Ament and Jeff Flint, a lobbyist who wasn’t registered with the city but steered most of the task force funds to his affiliated companies, according to records reviewed by TimesOC.
In the email, Glew claimed Flint informed him a week before that the effort would fail to gain enough council votes and the only options going forward entailed a ballot measure or revisiting the issue with council a year from that time.
“The clients, as originally presented on date of hire, view a ballot initiative as a total loss,” Glew wrote in his email. “The initiative process is ripe with numerous pitfalls and makes all efforts to date meaningless from the clients’ perspective.”
Going back to the City Council in a year would “only serve to line the pockets of consultants,” he argued.
Though not named in court documents, Glew was an associate of Melahat Rafiei, a former Democratic Party operative who’d taken on From the Earth as a client, records show.
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