In Los Angeles, Curren Price’s unraveling shows how corruption rarely looks cinematic in real time. It looks like routine votes, standard memos, and consent calendars nobody reads. Only later do investigators trace how those votes aligned with payments to his wife’s firm, how conflict-of-interest warnings were ignored, and how public duty blurred into private enrichment. The alleged extra benefits, routed through a marriage already broken on paper, reveal how personal deception can mirror public fraud.

Across the country, whispers of grand juries circling Letitia James and Adam Schiff suggest a different kind of manipulation: not bags of cash, but signatures on loan forms and property filings. If those signatures are proven false, they will show that the system’s guardians knew exactly where its seams were weakest. The real horror isn’t that a few were caught—it’s realizing how many learned from them, and stayed just out of reach.