To those of us who live in San Diego, this is a particularly sad story: San Diego’s former Mayor Maureen O’Connor has admitted in court that she misused charity money to pay for a $1 billion gambling habit that has left the widow of the founder of the food chain Jack in the Box broke:
The first woman mayor of San Diego has acknowledged in court she misappropriated more than $2 million from her late husband’s foundation to fund a casino gambling habit with which she allegedly won and lost $1 billion over nine years.
Her attorney said a brain tumor affected Maureen O’Connor’s judgment in playing video poker. She’s now broke and suffering cognitive impairment following brain surgery and a stroke in 2011, prosecutors said.
O’Connor, mayor of San Diego from 1986 to 1992, reported to the IRS more than $1 billion in casino winnings but also reported losses bigger than those winnings, resulting in a net loss from 2000 to 2009, prosecutors said in court papers.
Those net losses amounted to $13 million, her attorney said.
I was a reporter on the San Diego Union when Maureen O’Connor was mayor. It was always said that O’Connor had a warm friendship with the paper’s then-owner and publisher Helen Copley. O’Connor had the image of a mayor who seemed to truly care about all the city’s residents, including the underprivileged. Meanwhile, she also was intent about forging stronger bonds with the neighboring city of Tijuana, and since that was included in my Baja California beat I covered more than one meeting between O’Connor and Tijuana’s major across the border.
In short, there was little bad you could say about Maureen O’Connor since she was a serious, issue-oriented mayor and her heart seemed to be in the right place. The only mystery after she left office is why she didn’t try to go onto a higher office. She certainly had the big bucks:
O’Connor was married to Robert O. Peterson, founder of the Jack in the Box restaurant chain, from 1977 until his death in 1994, but court documents don’t disclose the size of the couple’s fortune that apparently funded O’Connor’s gambling habit.
O’Connor, 66, entered a deferred prosecution agreement Thursday in federal court in San Diego in which she admitted misappropriating money from the R.P. Foundation, on which she served as a trustee.
Under the agreement, she will repay the foundation $2,088,000, pay owed taxes, and be treated for her gambling addiction, prosecutors said.
And it gets worse:O’Connor, however, is bankrupt and unable to work, court papers say. Her ability to repay the foundation is “limited,” they say.
In 2011, surgeons removed a large tumor from O’Connor’s brain, and she suffered complications that included cognitive impairment and a pulmonary embolism, prosecutors said. Magistrate Judge David Bartick found that her continuing health problems made it highly improbable she could be brought to trial, prosecutors said.
If O’Connor repays the foundation and satisfies the conditions of her deferred prosecution, the government will dismiss its prosecution in two years, prosecutors said.
She faces an unlawful monetary transaction charge carrying a maximum prison sentence of 10 years, documents say.
You can tell by the prosecutor’s statement the high regard in which O’Connor was held by MANY here — and which makes what has happened even sadder:
“Maureen O’Connor was a selfless public official who contributed much to the well-being of San Diego,” U.S. Attorney Laura Duffy of San Diego said in a prepared statement. “However, no figure, regardless of how much good they’ve done or how much they’ve given to charity, can escape criminal liability with impunity.”
O’Connor told reporters Thursday that for a while, she didn’t know she had a brain tumor.
“There were two Maureens — Maureen No. 1 and Maureen No. 2,” she said. “Maureen No. 2 is the woman that did not know she had a tumor growing in her head.”
She described that era as “the last chapter of my life where I lost my husband, I lost three of my siblings, I lost my two best friends and I had a difficult time.
“I think most of you who know me here would know that I never meant to hurt the city,” she told reporters. She began to choke up and cry.
And many San Diegians who are shocked over the money she inhaled until it was gone like a vacuum cleaner from her own fortune and the charity, will likely agree with her on that. If anything, it was always understood how much she loved the city and all of its people.
CNN’s report:
UPDATE: Time Magazine asks: Can a Brain Tumor Turn You Into a Gambler?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.