Former LA City Attorney’s Official Agrees to Plead Guilty to Extortion Charge

LOS ANGELES – A former senior official at the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office has agreed to plead guilty to a federal charge for threatening to fire a plaintiffs’ attorney from a lucrative special counsel job with the city unless the attorney paid a substantial extortion demand from a former employee who was threatening to expose the city’s collusive litigation over its faulty water-and-power billing system, the Justice Department announced Jan. 12.

Thomas H. Peters, 55, of Pacific Palisades, agreed to plead guilty to a one-count information charging him with aiding and abetting extortion, a crime that carries a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison.

The information and plea agreement were filed today in United States District Court. Peters is expected to make his initial court appearance Feb. 7. 

This is the fourth plea agreement federal prosecutors have filed in relation to the ongoing investigation concerning corruption and collusion involving the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) and the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office. Peters is cooperating with the investigation.

Peters served as the chief of the Civil Litigation Branch of the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office from February 2014 to March 2019. By December 2014, the city and LADWP were facing multiple class-action lawsuits over the flawed rollout of a new billing system during the previous year.

Also in December 2014, the City Attorney’s Office hired Paul O. Paradis, 58, a New York-based lawyer, and Paul R. Kiesel, a Beverly Hills plaintiffs’ attorney, as special counsel to represent the city in an anticipated lawsuit against PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the vendor the city blamed for the billing system debacle in which thousands of ratepayers were massively overcharged, while others were significantly undercharged, resulting in financial losses to the city and LADWP.

The city’s lawsuit, filed in March 2015, alleged that PwC caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damages due to the faulty billing system. The city agreed to pay Paradis and Kiesel 19.9 percent of any recovery in the litigation, meaning the two lawyers stood to gain tens of millions of dollars in attorneys’ fees from the case.

The FBI is investigating this matter. Any member of the public who has information related to this or any other public corruption matter in the City of Los Angeles is encouraged to send information to the FBI’s email tip line at pctips-losangeles@fbi.gov or to contact the FBI at 310-477-6565.