I would like to recommend the book Anatomy of a Hustle to anyone who’s interested in practical aspects of the governance of the city of Los Angeles. It’s a memoir by Clinton Galloway of his attempt, along with his brother Carl, to get a franchise to bring cable television to South Los Angeles in the 1970s and beyond. They were thwarted at every turn by an astonishingly corrupt city government and an astonishingly corrupt federal judge, spawned in the bowels of City Hall itself; Consuelo Marshall. Things haven’t changed much over there.

Marshall’s blatantly biased decision in favor of her cronies at City Hall was reversed unanimously by the 9th circuit and again unanimously by the U.S. Supreme Court, and yet she continued to violate their orders and judicial ethics at every possible point for almost a decade after the big courts remanded the case back to her with a note attached saying roughly: “Dear Consuelo and city of Los Angeles, are you fucking serious?!”
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