Unsuccessful Recount and Unlawful Cheval Blanc Flyers: Who is the Common Thread?

The Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder certified the results of the May 23 referendum on Cheval Blanc and it failed to pass by a margin of only 80 votes. Yet LVMH didn’t spend more than $3 million on the YES on Measures B & C campaign — more than $1,000 per vote! — to concede defeat to local yokels. So the Hail Mary play was to demand a recount. Now that has wrapped and the voters have the last word: Measure B & C fail and the proposed Cheval Blanc goes down to defeat.

When semi-final special election results were released in May we saw measures B & C trailing by 123 votes with only 135 ballots left uncounted. The odds of passage were steep and LVMH conditionally conceded to the Courier: “If the final vote count confirms the voters’ rejection of our project, we will respect the outcome and will not bring the hotel project back in any form.”

That was both a bold assertion and a hedge. After all, would LVMH really walk away from $400+ million already invested in the land for the hotel? And then there is the hedge: If the final vote count confirms it. The latter raised the question, Could the preliminary results be challenged? Only a voter could request a recount.

The Recount

Local residential landlord Sunny Sassoon stepped forward as a self-described representative for business triangle property owners. He told the Courier, “We’re going to send the message that we are going to take this to its bitter end, a recount, and send a message to the union that this committee will push back on things like this in the future.”

(The Unite Here Local 11 union gathered the necessary voter signatures to qualify the Cheval Blanc referendum for the ballot.)

Sassoon ponied-up nearly $30k on the recount. We expected a team of well-heeled attorneys in expensive suits taking a magnifying glass to each ballot. Remember the ‘hanging chads’ from the Florida Y2K presidential election recount? We braced for shenanigans. But we also trusted the registrar and found the state elections code provided few opportunities for mischief.

In the event, the recount was anticlimactic: a handful of ordinary folks gathered around cheap folding tables at registrar HQ to look at some ballots. And after days of recounting the Cheval Blanc supporters found only one additional vote. The official results stand.

The only message sent by Sassoon and his recount is that paid shills and slick marketing can’t beat shoe-leather community outreach…especially in a community that on balance didn’t want the hotel.

The Unlawful Flyer

One of the underhanded aspects of the Yes on Measures B & C campaign was a homemade-looking campaign flyer that appeared around town before election day. “So many reasons to VOTE YES on Cheval Blanc,” the flyer banner proclaimed. “Understand the immense economic benefits!” the flyer urged. Who circulated it? The flyer did not say as it was without the mandatory boilerplate that election law requires. It was unlawful campaign literature.

Likewise an email campaign repeatedly sent that same flyer to registered voters’ inboxes also without attribution. The email address associated with the campaign was connected to a domain (sdglob.com) that didn’t load a website. A search for that domain at Internet Archive showed that no website was ever hosted there. And the domain registration record hides the name of the owner.

Now it is not uncommon to ‘park’ a domain for email purposes only and to cloak the name of the domain owner. But it didn’t give us much to go on. Moreover, the email campaign’s address provided in the footer wasn’t helpful either: it was a post office box in zip code 90035 that is associated with a deceased couple who last resided in Texas. We couldn’t connect it to anybody locally.

What else did that email tell us? For one thing, the email address was valid; we sent a message and didn’t get a bounce (nor did we received a reply). We then googled further and found another email address that was associated with the same domain: sunvic@sdglob.com. That email address turned up in rental listings as a landlord contact with Debbie or Tracy identified as managers. More googling revealed ‘Debbie’ to be Debbie Sassoon. Now we were getting somewhere!

Secretary of State records suggested that ‘sunvic’ was associated with Sunvic Properties, Inc. That corporation is located at 9641 South Santa Monica Boulevard — just across the street from the Cheval Blanc project site. Sunny Sassoon is listed as a corporate officer. The same business address is the Sassoon Family Foundation, according to the IRS, and Sunny Sassoon is on that paperwork too.

We conclude that Sunny Sassoon is the culprit behind the unlawful flyer and email campaign and he also paid for the registrar’s vote recount. Incidentally sdglob.com is a reference to one of the Sunvic properties: SD Global Beverlywood Apartments.

The Common Thread: Sunny Sassoon

Why is Sassoon such a passionate supporter of Cheval Blanc? Because the “immense economic benefit” that he touted in his Cheval Blanc flyer was his own economic benefit: if Cheval Blanc were to be constructed his 9641 South Santa Monica Boulevard property across the street would appreciate handsomely. Sassoon had a horse in the Measure B & C race but he didn’t put his name on it!

Epilogue

What was the consequence for Sunny Sassoon of violating election law? No consequence at all. The organizer of the Residents Against Overdevelopment campaign, Darian Bojeaux, filed a complaint with the city attorney and forwarded our findings. The city attorney only recommended that Sassoon send a follow-up email to inform voters of his trickery. For the record we never received any such email. Sassoon paid no penalty for hoodwinking voters with an unlawful campaign flyer.