Mark Skeels was senior chief deputy city attorney for criminal division operations in 2017 when prosecutors at the City Attorney office were participants in one of the largest financial frauds in California history. After attorney Charles "Chuck" La Bella together with his client drafted and his client submitted fabricated allegations to the City Attorney in March 2017 demanding that I be criminally prosecuted for an alleged misdemeanor action, he and his co-counsel, Michael Kirby, asked to have a secret meeting in April 2017 where they offered to "put in a good word" with prosecutors as long as I paid a $6.5 million bribe disguised as a settlement. Shortly thereafter, a defense attorney contacted Assistant City Attorney Ryan E. Scott and made him aware of the egregious settlement demand prompting Ryan Scott to contact La Bella who then sent an email from his personal email account denying the settlement talks that he had requested and attended.
In October 2017, another defense attorney met in person with Assistant City Attorney/Chief Prosecutor, John Hemmerling, to make him personally aware that City officials were participating in a scam and that Michael Kirby was concealing his continued efforts to elicit a multimillion-dollar bribe from me. On the eve of trial in November 2017, Michael Kirby called my civil attorney and asked again to be paid a new demand of $5 million but that it had to be done secretly, and he needed to lie in his emails to conceal it. Defense attorneys presented this information the next day to prosecutor Ryan Scott as well as a copy of the $5 million settlement I was to sign for the City witness to drop charges. Knowing about the scam, Ryan Scott filed an in limine motion to prevent any evidence of the settlement talks or testimony from the attorneys involved from being heard by jurors.
The involvement of prosecutors in this massive financial crime and the inability to defend myself by exposing the efforts by La Bella and Kirby to elicit a bribe or call upon relevant witnesses to the scam made it impossible for me to testify in my own defense at that trial. In a subsequent San Diego Superior Court trial in March 2018, The Honorable Margo Lewis Hoy found that the city witness had committed perjury in both trials held in 2017 and 2018. That witness is currently on supervised release in the federal jurisdiction for an unrelated financial crime. Michael Kirby, the attorney who represented the City witness, committed perjury in a January 2019 sworn statement submitted to the court to conceal evidence of his and Chuck La Bella's breathtaking multimillion dollar fraud. read more