In Thursday's LA Weekly staff writer Gene Maddaus takes a look at how Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley, who's running as the Republican nominee for state Attorney General, took campaign contributions from a man about to do hard time for campaign fraud.

Although Cooley was once quick to declare that a billionaire developer, Alan Casden, was under investigation for allegedly funneling mostly Democratic campaign contributions through friends and associates, the D.A. appeared to have benefited from a man who was actually convicted of such a scheme: Gladwin Gill. Writes Maddaus:

Gill reimbursed his relatives and employees for contributions to George W. Bush's re-election campaign. In 2008, he pleaded guilty in federal court to one count of campaign-finance fraud and was sentenced to a year in prison.

But Gill and many of those same phony contributors also gave to Cooley's re-election effort in 2003 and 2004. Cooley's office would be responsible for investigating phony contributions to a local campaign. But the contributions to his own campaign were never investigated or prosecuted.

Read the whole story.

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