NFL Failures, EDM Greed and Massive Corruption: The Inside Story of the L.A. Coliseum Scandal

The fliers for Electric Daisy Carnival 2010 were all over Eagle Rock High School. To Ebony Diaz, it seemed like everybody she knew was going. She got her mom to drive her and a friend. The ticket taker checked her school ID to make sure she was 16. She paid the $101 entry fee, submitted to a search, and she was inside.

She and her friend wandered around for a while, listened to the music and painted on a big wall set up for that purpose. Then she met up with another friend, Sasha Rodriguez. Rodriguez was a year behind her in school, and said she had to sneak in because she was just 15. She was wearing boots, a pink tutu, a black top and a pink bra.

PHOTO BY NANETTE GONZALES

Todd DeStefano and his wife after a recent court appearance

PHOTO BY NANETTE GONZALES

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More About

• Tony Estrada
• Todd DeStefano
• Pat Lynch
• College Basketball
• College Football

They sat on the bleachers for a while, and then Rodriguez went off with an older guy who was wearing neon gloves. Diaz only got his nickname: Menace.

When they couldn't reach Rodriguez on her cellphone, they started to worry. When they finally met up with her again, she looked pale.

"Her face completely changed," Diaz would later testify in a deposition. "Like, she looked like she wanted to be happy, but she wasn't."

Rodriguez said she had taken a pill, and then went off with another friend scavenging for half-empty water bottles. "I'm thirsty," she said, and then fell to the ground.

Rodriguez had seizures in the ambulance and was in a coma by the time she arrived at the hospital. Two days later, she was taken off life support. An autopsy would show that she died of an ecstasy overdose.

The reaction was swift and severe. The next day, Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who sits on the Coliseum Commission, called for a rave moratorium. The L.A. City Council vowed to tighten security. An investigation was launched, and there was talk of canceling events.

His livelihood on the line, DeStefano swung into action. First, he sought to reassure the promoters. "Everything you are reading in the paper is politics being played at the highest level," he wrote in an email. "I'm working the politics big-time behind the scenes."

DeStefano knew he needed an ally. And on July 8, about a week after Sasha Rodriguez's death, Bernard Parks Jr. sent DeStefano a contribution form for his father's re-election campaign.

DeStefano forwarded it to promoters Rotella and Gerami and encouraged them to donate. He also told them to pony up $10,000 apiece for a Fourth of July fireworks show, which was important to Councilman Parks. Parks would prove to be a strong supporter.

And while Rotella had a lobbyist, DeStefano decided to hire one of his own — a truly bizarre move for a person who was still a public employee. He urged Gerami to launch a "Save Our Music" email campaign and get his "1.4 million supporters into this fight."

"They need to be focused on one individual and that's Zev," DeStefano wrote. "We should address all of our concerns on this attack on our freedoms to him. ... Make sure to have your people remind Zev that they are registered voters and a ban on our music cannot be tolerated."

But no campaign materialized. It likely would have had little effect anyway.

"He was obviously devastated that the girl died. That just crushed him," Irving says. "Then everything started heating up so fast. I don't think he had time to register how that impacted his world. ... The wind blew really fast — really fast."

At a meeting with the LAPD, Officer Alberto Martinez complained that DeStefano had promised security cameras for EDC but never delivered. Martinez also noted that extra fencing might have prevented gate-crashing. To drive home the point, he showed DeStefano a picture of a girl who had been trampled and had a bloody nose.

"He just got real angry and said ... 'You have to bring that up again,' " Martinez would later tell the grand jury.

At that point, Martinez said, "My chief chimed in and really gave him a shellacking."

As the months went on, though, the furor abated. DeStefano began to plan for EDC 2011. Working with the promoters, he put together an elaborate presentation for the commissioners. He pledged that promoters would bring in state-of-the-art medical equipment — and argued that the concerts were no more dangerous than marathons.

The commissioners pushed back on two points: They wanted more safety measures, which would drive up costs, and they wanted more rent for their trouble.

At a January 2011 subcommittee meeting, Commissioner David Israel argued that since Electric Daisy Carnival was generating more than $12 million in ticket sales, the Coliseum should be getting more than just $40,000 in rent and $600,000 for concessions. But DeStefano warned that if the rent went up, the promoters would take the show to Las Vegas.

The following week, Lynch phoned Israel to prepare him for the February commission meeting, where the EDC's fate would be decided.

As Lynch would later relate it to a Coliseum investigator, he told Israel that he would take the lead in the meeting. As for DeStefano, Lynch said, "Todd would be my backup because Todd was working for both sides."