Part 3 of Marin County’s Sham Sheriff Oversight:
Wherein We Stumble Upon the Mighty Ragghianti Freitas LLP
During a brief sunny break in last winter’s storms, I rode over to San Rafael to try to locate an elderly Black USMC veteran. The old man managed to survive his military service, but he'd barely survived the City of San Rafael’s police-run "Safe Services Site" under the 101 freeway, into which he’d been remanded after the police seized his RV.
As a result of the camp’s conditions (which the local Pacific Sun had bizarrely described as "kinder, gentler", but which The New Yorker Magazine had more accurately described as “abject”), the veteran ended up in the cardiac ICU of a local hospital for several weeks. Once the frail veteran was cleared from ICU, the City of San Rafael honored their commitment to the Stars and Stripes by placing the veteran back in the filthy, sub-freeway camp, which the City later dismantled. Intermittently, I would find him in various spots throughout the city, and I always considered it a miracle he was still alive.
Before locating him this time in yet another soggy location, I stopped by the Mission San Rafael Arcángel, the former 18th-century Catholic sanatorium established to "treat" (one must use the term loosely) indigenous workers who had been sickened at San Francisco’s Mission Dolores. Walking down the steps of the Mission, I could see straight down the rise of “A” Street to the edge of Albert Park, where so many unhoused people had congregated together to survive the winters’ storms.
Just then the sunlight glinted off a metallic surface on the building across 5th Street from the Mission, and I finally noticed the large, gold-colored block letters that clung to the circular arch above the entry of the building at the corner of 5th and "A".
There, the block letters spelled out: “Ragghianti Freitas LLP”
RF! If anything in Marin was more “connected” than the legacy of the cruel Mission San Rafael Arcángel – if anyone knew where more metaphorical bodies had been buried, or simply dropped in the bay for the tides to wash out – was it not the law firm of Ragghianti Freitas? And what was the powerful firm's connection to the County's conflict-of-interest-laden "Sheriff Civilian Oversight Working Group" (the "SCOWG")?
Meet Ragghianti Freitas:
The “Freitas” in Ragghianti Freitas (RF) was once David Freitas, the now-deceased heir to one of the oldest and wealthiest families in Marin, whose roots in the Azores are barely distinguishable 125 years after their arrival. The Freitas name is so solid-gold that the firm is still not retiring it, years after his death.
David Freitas was a man who, if you believe his archived oral history, was primarily interested in shooting various wild animals with his other powerful and connected friends just outside San Rafael’s city limits. (Freitas’ bird-like widow, Patty Garbarino, the heiress to a separate, smaller, old Marin fortune based on garbage collection, survives him on various local and regional boards, and her business, Marin Sanitary, was the happy recipient of a $4.575 million PPP loan that was entirely forgiven as of January 28, 2022.)
The “Ragghianti” of RF is Gary Ragghianti, the son of the wealthy and only-occasionally- bootlegging Nello Ragghianti, a Greenbrae homeowner and manager of San Francisco’s popular San Remo Restaurant. Gary graduated from Marin Catholic, and after undergrad and law school at the (Jesuit) University of San Francisco, he took a job in 1969 in the Marin District Attoney’s office as a deputy prosecutor.
As luck would have it, the following year, in 1970, "Soledad Brother" George Jackson’s 17-year- old brother staged a deadly hostage-taking at Marin Civic Center, during which a judge and three kidnappers were killed, and a deputy prosecutor was partially paralyzed by gunfire. Within six months, young Ragghianti fled the Marin DA office for the more staid business at Conn, Breiner & Birkie. (Another six months after Ragghianti’s departure from the DA office, George Jackson was killed in an attempted prison breakout.)
Rescued by Conn, Breiner & Birkie from the mess and tumult of actual poor peoples' lives at the DA office, Ragghianti flourished in private practice. Amazingly, he later simultaneously served as the City Attorney for Tiburon, Belvedere, Corte Madera and San Rafael. It's hard not to marvel at the vast amount of proprietary information you could accrue in those simultaneous roles at a time when real estate was still somewhat moderately priced, and in a County where housing would remain so scarce that any existing properties would balloon in value.
How Do You Become City Attorney To Four Different Cities At The Same Time?
The role of San Rafael City Attorney was appointed to Gary Ragghianti only after City Attorney Peter Muzio went missing while hiking down from Mt. Shasta in 1984. Unlike Ragghianti, Peter Muzio had worked as a public defender, and had attended college on a merit scholarship.
The Siskiyou County Sheriff reported that Mr. Muzio was hiking with three other men "all from the the San Francisco area." But in fact, Mr. Muzio was hiking with three other men from Marin County, all of whom held positions of some influence in the county: John Coulteaux, Jerry Ackeret, and John Sharp. All four men worked together at the law firm of Ackeret, Colteaux, and Muzio (Sharp was only an associate), "a partnership with practice in areas of general civil litigation, including business and real estate law."
Coulteaux had been Mayor of San Anselmo and had unsucessfully run for Marin County Supervisor in the 1970s on an unusually regressive platform that proposed changing the tax code so that schools would be funded by income tax rather than property taxes.
Along similar lines, Ackeret remembered his own 1979 Marin County Bar Association leadership being devoted to a marked shift away from the County's exposure to the radical politics of the 1970s. But his published recollection conveniently omits the fact that his shift back to traditional values – wherein men would do manly, Teddy Roosevelt-ish things again like hike to the top of Mt. Shasta in February – proved deadly for his unfortunate law partner, Mr. Muzio. (Of course, in typical Marin County fashion, no one seems to have questioned why four such prominent men had decided to climb to the top of Mt. Shasta in February, with very few provisions, given how changeable the weather was, and given the long record of hikers who go missing on that particular mountain.)
"Modern-Day" Ragghianti Freitas
Today, Ragghianti Freitas is still mostly white and still mostly male, in stark contrast to many other law firms in the Bay Area, which may possess smarter attorneys but are, importantly, less connected. One of RF’s most prominent attorneys is defense attorney Charles Dresow, another local boy from an upper-middle-class home who got his start (as an intern) at the Marin County District Attorney’s office. Like Governor Newsom and “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh, Dresow attended Redwood High School, a departure from the Marin Catholic/USF/Santa Clara University background of many County players. His age-peer colleague at Ragghianti Freitas, the land-use attorney Riley Hurd, III, attended St. Ignatius, a recognized stand-in for Marin Catholic amongst Marin's prominent families. (A slight style difference: whereas Mr. Dresow's RF photo looks like he might leap out of the picture frame to bite you; Mr. Hurd III's photo exudes an almost unbearable smugness that in many ways defines today's Marin.)
But Dresow’s role as a criminal defense attorney has an illustrious if under-reported family past. His father was a prominent criminal defense attorney, and his grandfather, Abe Dresow, was a San Francisco Deputy Public Defender with a penchant for writing himself into Herb Caen columns.
Tellingly, Abe Dresow died in 1962 of a fatal heart attack at an anniversary party for a San Francisco Sheriff Captain. As The San Francisco Examiner described it, "...Dresow, genial chief deputy public defender, collapsed and died last night as he was presenting a gift to his friend of 25 years. The cigar-smoking Dresow handed 50 silver dollars to Sheriff's Capt. Michael McDonald with these words: 'This is befitting to your silver gray hairs.' At that point, he collapsed before the eyes of 50 guests at McDonald's 25th anniversary party at the Inn Justice, Harriet and Bryant Streets."
The Inn Justice was for decades the preferred watering hole, a place where police and public defenders often met and mingled. And the mingling apparently continues: Last year, Charlie Dresow was appointed by the County Administrator as the most prominent member of the County’s 15-member “Sheriff Civilian Oversight Working Group” (SCOWG).
Among the 14 others was Dresow’s client, Jeremy Portje, the photographer and plaintiff in a $21 million suit against the Sausalito Police Department, a suit that arose from a November 2021 incident of police abuse that went viral. (Mr. Dresow was listed as a supporter of DA Frugoli's most recent campaign, even though she ran entirely unopposed, largely as a result of Governor Newsom changing the election dates.)
Dresow’s appointment to the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Working Group by the County Administrator came with no thought to any conflict of interest regarding his representation of Mr. Portje, or how the suit might soften either man's position on oversight, given that they were essentially in the position of an ongoing negotiation with a local law enforcement agency in a settlement. Notably, the County has insisted Dresow’s long directorship of the nonprofit “Alternate Defenders, Inc.” (ADI), which was awarded an additional $3.4 million, two-year contract by the County of Marin on (coincidentally!) the exact same day the County accepted the Sheriff Civilian Oversight working group proposals, is in no way a conflict of interest.
When queried, Marin’s unfailingly polite County Counsel Brian Washington assured me that he saw no conflict of interest between Dresow’s contract and Dresow's service on the working group. It cannot be a conflict, Mr. Washington reasoned, since Mr. Dresow is not paid by ADI.
Washington’s assertion would be difficult to verify given the opacity of local nonprofits, but it also requires us to believe that cash would be the only reward derived by a criminal defense attorney at an extremely powerful and connected law firm. The information and the networking obtained by Dresow (and thus by Ragghianti Freitas) via the ADI relationship could be far more valuable to Mr. Dresow and RF than any mere cash payment to him through ADI.
(Later communication from the County Administrator's office asserted that the SCOWG was only crafting proposals, and thus none of this mattered. But the proposals were themselves limited to what the unrepresentative working group chose, and the Supervisors will now choose between the working group's three toothless proposals.)
To be fair, it appears from the available record that Dresow only attended two of the 12 entirely non-public SCOWG meetings. Since Dresow is both a powerful man and a practical man, one can imagine he had said all he needed to say at those first two meetings he attended, and saw no need to belabor the point.
But what did he say at the two meetings he attended? We have little verifiable record of that. Despite a CPRA request for recordings of all twelve meetings, the County only delivered four recordings, each meeting approximately two hours long. None of those recordings are of meetings that Mr. Dresow attended, and there is only one sentence in any of the County’s notes regarding Mr. Dresow’s comments:
“Charlie mentioned the various impediments contained in the police officer bill of rights (POBR) in California and said he would cirulate some documents regarding these issues.”
That’s it?
Representation Matters
My first interaction with Dresow came as a result of his representation of several who were involved in the fight for "anchor-out" rights in Richardson Bay. But Mr. Dresow's representation is hardly focused on the poor (arguably, his nonprofit, ADI, "handles" that.) One of Dresow's most recent clients was Katie Sorenson, the blonde "influencer" who had falsely accused a Latino couple of attempting to kidnap her child. He has also represented "teenaged criminal mastermind" Max Wade, and a host of wealthy white men in the County. Mr. Dresow appears to select clients less based on principle, and more based on potential for media exposure.
Mr. Dresow's representation of of Mr. Portje, a Black resident of Novato, and Mr. Lopez, who is Latino, occurred in the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd, and both cases involve municipal police departments, not the County Sheriff. In the intense media coverage that followed (it is hard to imagine that the influence of Ragghianti Freitas did not drive much of that media coverage) the public's attention was taken off the Marin County Sheriff Office, which managed to snag an additional $2.86 million in funding on June 20, 2023, just a week after the paper-thin SCOWG proposals were accepted by the Marin Board of Supervisors.
The two client groups that Mr. Dresow seems to have studiously avoided in his many years as a criminal defense attorney, with the exception of the Lopez case, are the principal targets of the Sheriff: the chronically under-represented Black residents of Marin City, and the similarly under-represented Latino residents of the Canal. In this regard, Mr. Dresow is not unusual. It is a constant refrain from community leaders and residents in Marin City that they cannot rely on attorneys in Marin County, as those attorneys either express no interest or their entanglements with the powers that be make them untrustworthy counsel.
What does Charlie Dresow have to say about conditions in the Marin County jail? What has he had to say about the Marin Sheriff's 32-year record of arresting Black individuals at a rate over eight times their demographic presence in the County?
And, as Marin City's remaining Black residents fight for their right to remain in what remains of affordable public housing, what has R-F's celebrated land-use attorney, Riley Hurd, III, had to say on their behalf?
The answer to all of those questions might be: "As little as possible." These peoples' struggles are not the concern of Ragghianti Freitas; they never were.