City Attorney Goldsmith admits problematic desire for more “hardcore” targets

Gateway drug busts?

Author

By Walter Mencken

Publish Date

May 1, 2016

At an April press conference, a haggard, twitchy, and unkempt Goldsmith insisted that he didn’t have a problem, saying his desire for more hardcore operators was “nothing to worry about.” He claimed not to remember when he started wearing the orange safety vest, but said it aptly expressed his “insatiable craving for safe communities” before asking if anyone in the audience had a spare injunction he could use for a couple of days. “Just to tide me over. You know I’m good for it.” “Looking back,” says a source close to the City Attorney’s office, “we should have seen the signs."

UNDER THE PACIFIC HIGHWAY OVERPASS, OUTSKIRTS OF LITTLE ITALY — For several years, city attorney Jan Goldsmith contented himself with standard, low-level prosecution of the city’s medical marijuana dispensaries, which exist in a kind of legal no-man’s-land, thanks to conflicting drug policies at the city, state, and federal levels. “Just a couple of busts a month, nothing serious,” he explained during a confessional interview with SD on the QT. “We’d nail some guy down the street from a kickboxing facility for being too close to a school, that sort of thing. It helped keep me mellow amid all these legal tensions.”

But over time, he found that occasional pot pops just weren’t enough. “I needed more busts, with greater intensity. It wasn’t enough any more to get civil judgments against these pot purveyors. I needed the rush of criminal prosecution. Stronger penalties. I started developing a network of lawyers to act as suppliers for my habit. I’d pay them huge sums of money to give me what I wanted. And they delivered. Oh sweet mercy, how they delivered.”

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Miriam Milstein. She was so damaged by her experience with hardcore drug prosecution that she was forced to take a job from district attorney Bonnie Dumanis.

Eventually, his habit began affecting his work, and the work of those around him. Assistant city attorney Marlea Dell’Anno and deputy city attorney Miriam Milstein recently left the city attorney’s office after it was revealed that they had let the one-year statute of limitations lapse on nearly 100 cases between 2012 and 2015. Milstein, seen here in a 2014 file photo, blamed the lapse on “a kind of altered consciousness, where nothing, not even time, really mattered any more. All that mattered was the sweet high of bringing hardcore drug offenders to justice.

"Today, I feel bad for the domestic violence victims whose claims never got handled, but back then, it didn’t even register. That’s how bad it can get...” For his part, Goldsmith began behaving erratically in public, even going so far as to say that Democrats don’t value jobs, freedom, or security at a Ted Cruz rally in Mission Valley. There are even those who identify his paranoid crusade to unseat pro-pot Mayor Bob Filner as the first signs of a destructive addiction.

“I admit it: I’ve got a a problem,” concludes Goldsmith. “But I’ll be damned if I’m going to stop. That’s the game, and I’ll keep playing until they take me out at the polls."