But other city officials such as Chun, the Garcetti deputy, were hopeful. The meeting, he wrote in an email to the city’s planning director, stemmed “from Michael Weinstein complaining to [De León] that city departments are holding up his redevelopments in downtown.” This was a chance to set the record straight, Chun added.
The discussion wasn’t particularly memorable. One city official who requested anonymity to avoid alienating a council member said that De León did not have specific demands and mostly just listened to a presentation about the status of the foundation’s properties.
Ann Sewill, the head of the city housing department, was invited and had asked her staff to provide information about building conditions beforehand, city emails show. She told The Times she doesn’t recall any details from the briefing or even attending, but she said she did not know about De León’s financial ties to the nonprofit at that time.
“I wasn’t aware he was being paid,” Sewill said. “I would’ve assumed I was dealing with the councilmember-elect.”
Besides Chun and Sewill, three others who were in attendance or involved in planning for it told The Times on condition of anonymity that they didn’t know De León was being paid by the foundation.
Even if De León didn’t make any requests of city employees, the circumstances would still be concerning, said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School and former president of the city’s Ethics Commission. Aside from the uncommon access to high-level officials he received, De León put city staff at risk of disclosing information that could have harmed their litigation or code enforcement strategies to the benefit of his employer, she said.
“We’re worried that Kevin de León is making decisions that are helpful for AHF and not for his constituents and not for the city,” Levinson said. “Conflicts of interest always come down to you have divided loyalty. Are you in a position where you’re serving two masters and one of them is not the public?”
At the time of the meeting, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation was funding another statewide initiative to expand rent control, ultimately spending $40 million on the losing effort. De León appeared in video advertisements supporting the initiative and accompanied campaign officials to a meeting with The Times’ editorial board.
But the public wouldn’t have known about his paid advocacy from looking at the initiative’s campaign disclosure forms, which are filed regularly in advance of election day.
Instead, the foundation reported De León’s work only in footnotes of another batch of filings unrelated to the initiative. That had the effect of delaying any public disclosure of De León’s paid involvement with the foundation until the week before he took office and not revealing the full amount of his work on the initiative — reported as $89,231 — until months after the election.
Whether the campaign adequately reported De León’s payments is part of an ongoing investigation into the 2020 rent control initiative campaign by the California Fair Political Practices Commission, which enforces the state’s campaign finance laws, the agency confirmed to The Times.
Ravel said a key purpose of the laws is to require transparency surrounding who is being paid so that voters can be aware prior to casting their ballots, calling the circuitous disclosure of De León’s payments “clearly problematic.”
Weinstein said that executives “considered his work to be for the foundation and for renters’ rights in general” and that all campaign disclosures were proper.
Upon taking office, De León maintained close relations with the foundation, speaking at its housing events and inviting foundation officials to his news conferences.
A month after his inauguration, De León praised the organization after one of its buildings was designated a historic property. He said the city and other nonprofits should follow its lead.
“Our approach to reducing homelessness must be all hands on deck, so AHF and the Healthy Housing Foundation are to be commended for their innovative and cost-effective approach,” the council member said in a foundation news release.
But in October 2021, tension over De León’s coziness with the AIDS Healthcare Foundation surfaced. A former foundation employee turned critic named Karla Leiva contacted De León’s staff about plumbing, mold, vermin and elevator problems at multiple foundation properties. Ultimately, Antonelli, De León’s downtown-area director, agreed to meet Leiva at the Madison the afternoon of Dec. 1 and speak to tenants directly.
When they arrived, chaos erupted.
Foundation staff members wouldn’t let Antonelli and Leiva sign in to the building, Antonelli recounted in a February 2022 deposition obtained by The Times.
As Antonelli and Leiva started speaking with tenants, staffers called the police and began taping the two on their cellphones.
Despite this interference, Antonelli recorded a video of cockroaches and other insects crawling all over one tenant’s dresser drawer. He witnessed residents with obvious disabilities struggling to climb the stairs because the elevator was broken. Tenants shared concerns about mold and their safety. Antonelli concluded that the Madison had “serious habitability issues,” he said in the deposition.
But after about 40 minutes, two Los Angeles Police Department officers arrived and asked what Antonelli was doing there.
Frustrated, Antonelli explained who he was and told the officers the foundation was hindering his work.
“Our visit was impeded by not only the AIDS Healthcare Foundation staff following us around with a camera, but also impeded by AIDS Healthcare Foundation staff calling the police on us to do precisely what happened. And that was to kick us out,” Antonelli said in the deposition.
Four days after the episode, he received a text from De León.
“I’m getting a lot of angry calls and texts about your visit to one [of] the AHF hotels,” De León wrote. “What happened?”
Antonelli summarized his experience and asked whether it was people at the foundation who were angry.
“Yes,” De León replied. “It’s coming from the top.” De León added that he was receiving reports from the police about the incident.
“Yikes,” Antonelli wrote. He added: “If the AHF folks continue to call and text, I can certainly provide more context.”
“We are not looking to harm AHF,” Antonelli continued. “We are trying to find out what’s going on and how to help mitigate concerns.”
De León didn’t respond, according to text message records the city provided to The Times.
Initially, De León’s office did not disclose this exchange. In September, De León’s spokesperson, Pete Brown, said that the council office had turned over all internal and external written communications about the foundation’s residential hotels.
“No documents have been withheld or redacted,” Brown told The Times in response to a public records request.
Only after a Times attorney sent a legal demand letter noting that Antonelli had mentioned texting with his boss in his deposition did the city turn over that exchange and other previously undisclosed messages. De León’s office continues to maintain that the council member hasn’t texted or emailed with Weinstein or any foundation employee about the Madison incident or any of its properties. Brown confirmed that a foundation staff member called De León to complain about Antonelli’s visit but declined to name them. Weinstein said it wasn’t him.
The morning after their visit, Leiva emailed Antonelli a petition signed by more than 50 tenants from the Madison and two other foundation residential hotels nearby, the King Edward and the Baltimore.
Antonelli followed up with King Edward tenants but said in his deposition that he spoke with them only by phone so as to avoid a repeat of what had happened at the Madison. Residents told him that this building’s elevator also failed regularly, they often lacked hot water, and urine and feces were spread on the floor, according to his notes from the conversations.
Antonelli believed the circumstances were fraught no matter what. People at risk of homelessness lived in the properties, and he said in the deposition that he and De León’s chief of staff, Jennifer Barraza, discussed how closing the buildings could force people onto the streets.
Nevertheless, Antonelli said in the deposition that he was planning to contact the foundation about resolving the problems in its buildings. He prepared a letter to the foundation outlining what he had found and requested that management address the habitability issues, according to a draft provided to The Times by De León’s office.
But the city attorney advised against the communication since foundation attorneys had subpoenaed Antonelli for the deposition in the Madison class-action case, De León’s spokesman said, and the letter was never sent.
“Communications between myself, my office, and the AIDS Healthcare Foundation is extremely precarious, and I’m very cautious,” Antonelli said in the deposition.
Just six weeks after foundation employees called police on his staff member, De León stood beside the AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s leadership.
On the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend in 2022, Weinstein held a groundbreaking for a 216-unit low-income housing development next to the Madison called Renaissance Center.
De León spoke at the event, and photos show the council member celebrating alongside Weinstein, shovels in hand.