Criminal charges against recall proponents reveal underside of Buena Park politics

It was the day before the recall petitions against Buena Park City Councilmember Sunny Park were due.

Michael Mahony, a longtime Buena Park resident and owner of a web consulting business, assembled a group of recall workers at a pizza restaurant in Fullerton, including his daughter Ashley Mahony and wife Victoria Primrose.

Before them at the Oct. 8, 2019, gathering were stacks of petitions, including some containing invalid signatures and some that had not been certified by the signature gatherer.

The Mahonys and Primrose then falsely certified that they had collected some of the signatures, according to Orange County prosecutors, who have charged the three with multiple counts of perjury and conspiring to falsify affidavits.

The criminal charges against the recall proponents have added to the political turmoil in Buena Park, which has intensified in recent years as the city’s Republican establishment was overtaken by Democratic challengers and white residents became a minority.

The website Voice of OC was the first to report the charges, which prosecutors filed last October but did not publicly announce.

Park, an attorney and Korean immigrant, is a central figure in the city’s political dramas. In November 2018, she defeated incumbent Virginia Vaughn, a Republican, by 16 votes, cementing a Democratic majority on the City Council for the first time.

Organizers of the recall, which failed to make the ballot after county election officials found that nearly half of the signatures were invalid, have pointed to allegations that during Park’s campaign, she stole lawn signs labeling her a “carpetbagger.”

Prosecutors filed a misdemeanor petty theft charge against Park. A trial ended in a hung jury in December 2019 after Park testified that the property owner gave her permission to remove the signs.

“You were caught stealing lawn signs,” Mahony told Park at a July 2019 City Council meeting. “You will be recalled. The sentiment in the community is that you need to go.”

Through his attorney David Stein, Mahony declined to comment. An attorney representing Primrose also declined to comment, and Ashley Mahony's attorney did not respond to requests for comment.

Together and individually, the Mahonys and Primrose face 33 felony counts and have pleaded not guilty. All three are scheduled to appear at a hearing on Feb. 27.

Michael Mahony and Primrose face up to five years and eight months in prison if convicted of all counts, and Ashley Mahony faces up to four years and eight months.

Buena Park, a city of 83,000 best known as the home of Knott’s Berry Farm, is 39% Latino, 33% Asian and 23% white, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

As the city became more ethnically diverse, the council switched from at-large to district elections in 2018, to increase the odds of electing nonwhite candidates.

Park ran against Vaughn in an affluent district where Asian Americans are 41% of the population.

In an interview, Park said she encountered anti-Asian racism while knocking on doors, with one resident telling her that Koreans were ruining the city.

She believes the recall effort was motivated in part by racism.

"They were thinking that I was an immigrant woman who couldn't defend myself," she said. "When I later learned of the charges, I was shocked to see that extent of election fraud at the local level."

After the 2018 election, Vaughn and Mahony filed Fair Political Practices Commission complaints against Park. Vaughn alleged that Park's campaign literature was published only in Korean and that she inappropriately spent campaign funds on Saks Fifth Avenue shopping excursions and expensive Uber rides.

In a response to the FPPC, Park showed that Vaughn had also run advertisements and articles in Korean.

Mahony's complaint, filed during the recall effort, accused Park of improper use of campaign funds.

The commission later closed the cases with a warning letter to Park about failing to notify a major donor of reporting requirements.

“What I said was her articles in the newspaper were in Korean only,” Vaughn told The Times. “How do you run against a candidate when you don't even know what they're saying? I can’t defend myself.”

Vaughn said in interviews that she was not a leader of the recall but agreed to a request from Mahony and recall organizer Marvin Aceves that she would step up to replace Park if the recall was successful. Volunteers dropped off petitions at her home through the summer of 2019, and she personally collected about a dozen signatures, she said.

She cited Park's "blanket lack of integrity" on the campaign trail.

"I didn't really care if I got my seat back," Vaughn said. "I just wanted somebody that cared about my city on council."

Vaughn, who now lives in Idaho, said she met with district attorney investigators as they built their case against Mahony and the others. Mahony was a supporter when she first ran for the City Council in 2014 and later became a friend, she said.

“I do not believe that he did anything illegal, on purpose and with any intent,” she said.

She said she knew nothing about false certifications or the other allegations in the criminal complaint. A canvasser from a consulting firm, Graystone Public Affairs, had submitted duplicate signatures, she said.

When he ran for Orange County supervisor in 2018, Mahony called himself “fiscally conservative and socially liberal” in a candidate statement on the Voter’s Edge voter guide.

“Michael Mahony believes in smaller government, spending money wisely and society taking care of its own,” the statement read. “As a child growing up with only a single mother as his role model, Michael understands the struggles that face people in today's society. He feels that often times government overreaches when attempting to care for its citizens.”

In the June primary, Mahony, who was supported by the Libertarian Party of Orange County, came in a distant third to incumbent Michelle Steel.

Mahony, 58, who now lives in Nevada, has been married to Primrose since December 2015. Both Primrose and his daughter Ashley Mahony are 31 years old.

On several dates leading up to the pizza parlor meeting, the Mahonys and Primrose submitted false affidavits or false certifications that they had circulated a recall petition and witnessed the signatures, according to the felony complaint filed on Oct. 17, 2022, by Orange County prosecutors.

Michael Mahony did so four times on Sept. 27, 2019, and four times on Oct. 1, the complaint said. Primrose did so twice on Aug. 25, twice on Sept. 17, twice on Sept. 18 and four times on Aug. 31. For Ashley Mahony, it was twice on Aug. 2, twice on Sept. 5, twice on Sept. 15, twice on Sept. 27 and twice on Sept. 28, according to the complaint.

As the deadline loomed to submit certified recall petitions, the Mahonys and Primrose arrived together to Top Class Pizza on Oct. 8, the complaint said. Also present at the meeting were recall committee members, volunteers and employees of Graystone Public Affairs, according to the complaint.

Mahony told the employees that they would not be paid for their canvassing work until all the petitions were completed, the complaint said.

At the meeting, in addition to making a false affidavit and false certification himself, Mahony enlisted a Graystone employee, identified by prosecutors as George B., to certify to personally collecting signatures on the petitions, when both knew that was false, the complaint said.

Primrose also enlisted a Graystone employee, identified by prosecutors as Chad S., to make a similar false certification, according to the complaint.

The county registrar did not allow The Times to review the recall petitions, saying the district attorney’s office has withheld them as evidence in an ongoing investigation.

Graystone is based in Beaumont and headed by Chad Schnitger, according to the California secretary of state. In 2022, Rick Caruso’s campaign for Los Angeles mayor paid the company more than $382,000 for canvassing work, according to campaign records.

Schnitger declined to comment. Representatives of the Caruso campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

On Oct. 9, the day after the pizza parlor meeting, Aceves filed the petitions to the Buena Park city clerk, the complaint said.

Aceves, a former Buena Park cultural and fine arts commissioner who now lives in Arizona, declined to comment.

A few weeks later, the Orange County registrar of voters determined that about 1,000 of the 2,106 signatures on the recall petitions were invalid. The registrar, Neal Kelly, alerted prosecutors, who began investigating.

Prosecutors filed the charges against the Mahonys and Primrose as the three-year statute of limitation on perjury charges was about to expire.

A spokeswoman for Orange County Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer would not comment on why prosecutors took so long to file charges or why they made no public announcement about the charges.

As a council member, Park helped establish Buena Park’s first human relations committee to celebrate cultural diversity and handle discrimination complaints. She rotated into the mayor’s position in 2021, becoming the city’s first Asian American female mayor.

Last year, she ran for the Orange County Board of Supervisors instead of seeking reelection to the council, losing to incumbent Doug Chaffee.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.