Mike Carona’s Curse: Two of the Dirty Ex-OC Sheriff’s Tainted Benefactors Die Within Weeks At The Age Of 61

Asher liked the Bible-thumping Carona–once a rising star in the California Republican Party, an Arnold Schwarzenegger confidant and a sheriff who eagerly accept bribes (cash, fine suits, casino chips, hotel rooms, illegal campaign contributions, booze–lots of booze, private jet rides and, yes, a boat).

Carona, who is serving a 66-month sentence in a Colorado federal prison, once arrogantly declared (before his arrest and while he served on a top-secret George W. Bush national security task force) that investigating FBI and IRS agents had only found evidence of “the nigger money“–smaller sized bribes.

Carona didn’t know that his statements were secretly recorded by Don Haidl, a Rancho Cucamonga used car salesman, who illegally gave Carona more than $200,000 in 1998 to defeat Santa Ana Police Chief Paul Walters for the county’s top cop job.

Haidl–a notorious chain smoker and booze guzzler with a penchant for communicating in streams of cuss words–was rewarded for the illegal contributions with a powerful assistant sheriff’s job and, though he’d never taken a single police training class, full police powers in California.

He also got a county patrol car, one he later admitted in court that he used to impress his neighbors and friends.

Ironically, like Asher, Haidl–who ruthlessly tried to use his unearned sheriff’s position to try to rob justice from a 16-year-old girl who was gang raped by his son–died at the age of 61 in December.

Curse?

Karma?

(Jeffrey Rawitz, one of Carona’s colorful, high-priced defense lawyers, died at the age of 46 shortly after enthusiastically attempting to discredit the case brought by Assistant United States Attorney Brett Sagel and his office partner, Ken Julian, who is now in private practice.)

While Carona sat atop California’s second largest sheriff’s department, Asher–who’d earlier in his life flown cocaine loaded planes from Central America to Florida–secretly bought dinner for him and Assistant Sheriff George Jaramillo and gave their wives diamond-studded gold Cartier watches worth more than $30,000.

During Carona’s corruption trial inside the Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse in Santa Ana, two sources told me that Asher also paid for the dirty sheriff’s massive legal defense team. Confronted with the allegation, one the lawyers smiled, paused and said he couldn’t speak on the record about the topic.

U.S. District Court Judge Andrew J. Guilford allowed Carona–who, as the OC Weekly proved with photographic evidence, liked to party with Las Vegas organized crime associates–to fly to Florida to visit Asher after his conviction but before he was ordered to surrender to U.S. marshals and the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.

Though he used his public office for corruption, Carona remains the recipient of a lucrative-taxpayer funded pension that deposits into his bank account more than $21,000 a month–even while he’s in prison and for the rest of his life.