Moorpark Abuzz With Talk of Cocaine and Corruption

Moorpark is the sort of town where residents elected to the City Council a man whose campaign literature identified him as “the guy at the post office who sells you stamps and mails your letters and packages.”

The small-town atmosphere lingering in this fast-growing eastern Ventura County city made it easy for Danny Allen Woolard to win his campaign two years ago.

“Everybody knew me in town,” said Woolard, 39. “I grew up here, and I worked at the post office.”

It is Woolard’s reputation as a local boy, a Vietnam veteran, a father and the husband of his Moorpark High School sweetheart that has sustained sizable community support for him in the wake of his fall from councilman to convicted felon and self-described cocaine addict.

Joke Reflects Sentiment

A number of people who have known Woolard for years say there must be some truth to his allegations in the past two weeks of political corruption and vote-buying in the city. That sentiment is reflected in a joke being told around town:

Why has it been so cold in Moorpark?

Because it’s the tip of the iceberg.

Woolard resigned from the City Council on Jan. 12 and pleaded guilty the next day to embezzling $5,500 from his cash drawer at the Moorpark Post Office.

Since then he has accused Mayor Thomas C. (Bud) Ferguson of attempting to influence his vote on the City Council by lending him as much as $30,000 over the last 18 months.

Woolard has said he will not reveal publicly which city votes were affected until Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury concludes his investigation into the matter. The district attorney’s office has granted him immunity in exchange for his testimony on political corruption.

Ferguson Denies It

Ferguson, 67, who moved to Moorpark 12 years ago and was also elected to the City Council in 1984, has denied any wrongdoing. On Thursday, he broke a vow he made the day before not to comment further on the controversy, and was quoted in a local newspaper as stating, “I’m not on the take.”

For the last two weeks, Ferguson and Woolard have engaged in a battle of headlines over who is telling the truth. And residents are lining up behind their favorites.

“I believe Dan,” said Moorpark City Councilman John Galloway, 33, who also grew up in Moorpark. “I don’t believe that Dan would say it if it wasn’t true.”

City Councilwoman Eloise Brown, whom council colleagues describe as a frequent social companion of Ferguson and his political ally, said she does not believe Woolard’s allegations. “I have a hard time understanding why so much veracity is attached to a confessed felon,” she said.

Riley Spencer, who opened his local market 39 years ago, is a friend of Ferguson’s and has known Woolard since Woolard was a boy, voiced the puzzlement of some residents: “With something like this, you just don’t know.”

The controversy dominates conversation in Moorpark.

City Councilman Clint Harper said he has found little time to perform any city business because “my answering machine each evening is virtually lined up with calls from reporters, and each discussion requires about a half hour.

“I just don’t know who to believe at this point,” Harper said. “It would help if the mayor would clarify his financial dealings.”

Ferguson, a retired machine shop owner, has acknowledged lending $10,000 to Woolard over the last 18 months to cover what he said he believed were Woolard’s gambling debts.

Other Loans Cited

Last week Ferguson said at a news conference that he never asked Woolard to vote any particular way. He said he has provided interest-free loans to as many as 20 people in Moorpark because they, like Woolard, were friends who needed help.

Ferguson said at the press conference that he will comment no more on the matter until the district attorney’s office finishes its investigation.

Woolard acknowledges that so far there has been no evidence of wrongdoing by Ferguson. And Woolard, who faces a maximum 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine when he is sentenced Feb. 23, also concedes that he hopes his cooperation with authorities on alleged city corruption will mean a lighter sentence.

The relationship between the two men began during the campaign for Moorpark cityhood in the spring of 1983. Both men ran in the March election that resulted in incorporation for Moorpark and six City Council members.

Recalling his first try at public office, Woolard recalled, “I threw my hat in the ring after seeing who else was going to run and knowing that I knew 10 times as much about Moorpark as they did.

“I never went out and talked to one person during that election. I just told people, ‘Go with who you know.”’

Woolard and Ferguson finished seventh and eighth in the election, with Woolard losing by only 57 votes.

When three of the City Council seats again went up for grabs in November, 1984, Woolard said, he got serious about winning, campaigning heavily in new tract neighborhoods with the knowledge that he would draw a large number of votes from longtime residents in older parts of town.

Job Proved Advantageous

“The advantage of my job was that all the new people in town had to come to me at the post office to get their mail before there was regular service in their tracts,” he said.

It was during that campaign, Woolard said, that he and Ferguson became friends. The two men, although not running on a platform, would recommend each other to their supporters, Woolard said. “It was all on the up and up,” he said.

Ferguson provided the organization with precinct maps and block captains, and Woolard provided the name recognition that came from growing up in town, Woolard said. The strategy worked, and both men won four-year terms. “Bud contacted me because he knew that I was the local guy,” Woolard said.

Woolard’s family moved to Moorpark from Chatsworth in 1956, when the town had about 3,000 residents, Woolard said.

His stepfather, who worked as a maintenance foreman at the General Motors plant in Van Nuys, moved out of the San Fernando Valley to find open spaces and inexpensive land, Woolard said. He said he shared a small house on four acres with his mother, stepfather, a brother, two sisters, a half brother and a half sister.

Woolard had a reputation as a wiseacre in high school, a bright, irreverent student who “knew when not to take something seriously,” said Mike Bison, who was a grade ahead of Woolard at Moorpark High School. Bison, now a professor of archeology at McGill University in Montreal, said Moorpark was at the time “the cliche of a small town.”

‘Highly Stratified’

“It was highly stratified, with the people with money, the big landowners, living up on various terraces overlooking the town, and the rest--the Dust Bowlers, illegals and other recent California immigrants--all living in the flatlands,” Bison said. “Dan didn’t really fit into any of the stereotypes, which is probably why he was so popular.”

The town was so small, Woolard said, that it was big news when two new families moved into the neighborhood known as Home Acres in 1965 and brought four daughters with them. One of the girls became his wife, Connie.

After graduating from Moorpark High School that year, Woolard said, he briefly attended Ventura College, where he spent most of his time “skipping classes and partying” before deciding to go to work. “My Dad got me a job at the GM plant, but I hated it,” he said.

In October, 1966, Woolard was drafted into the U.S. Army and spent the following year in Vietnam in a unit that worked to trace the sources of incoming enemy fire. Woolard, who said he had been introduced to marijuana by friends while still living in Moorpark, said he found “really good dope” in Vietnam.

‘Started Smoking Dope’

“I started smoking dope when I was 18,” Woolard said. “It was sort of the beginning of the hippie era.”

During his two years in the service, Woolard was married, and after his discharge, he said, he returned home to work and to attend college on the GI Bill. His son was born in 1970.

Woolard eventually received a bachelor’s degree in English from California State University, Northridge in 1974, after working part time as a security guard and as a liquor store employee. “A month or two before I graduated, I took the post office test and starting working at the post office in Oxnard,” he said.

He and his wife bought their home shortly afterward, and eventually, Woolard was transferred to the Moorpark Post Office. Until running for office in 1983, Woolard said, he lived a quiet life with his family and “never had anything to do with any of the local politics.”

His political inexperience later caused resentment among some Moorpark civic leaders because “they thought I should have worked my way up instead of just coming in off the street to the City Council,” Woolard said.

Woolard said he continued using marijuana after his return from Vietnam until last year, when he began a cocaine habit that quickly escalated into a $50-a-day addiction. Few people, “not even my wife,” knew of the seriousness of his addiction, Woolard said.

‘Dictating My Moves’

“For a while, I didn’t think it was causing any problems,” Woolard said. “But then it started dictating my moves.”

He said he started using cocaine before council meetings and then in the City Hall bathroom during council breaks. By the beginning of last year, Woolard said, he had lost all control over his cocaine use.

“I would tell myself that I’m not going to use it anymore, but then I’d be out driving and the car would make one turn and then another, and before you know it, I’m at my pusher’s house,” he said.

Woolard said he last used drugs in October because he cannot afford them since he lost his job in September, after confessing the embezzlement to postal inspectors.

He said his allegations against Ferguson are not to draw attention away from his own criminal activities. “I’m not playing down the seriousness of my own involvement,” he said.

There are those in town, such as Everett Braun, a real estate broker and former Moorpark school superintendent, who say that despite Woolard’s admitted criminal and drug activities, they still believe his allegations.

“I would say that most people are sympathetic to Danny,” said Braun, 71, who retired from the local school district in 1976 after serving 20 years as a teacher and administrator. “Apparently, the feeling is that he wants to do what is best for Moorpark and that there is corruption that he wants to expose.”

Fired as Student

Braun said he fired Woolard from the Moorpark High School newspaper after he discovered that Woolard copied one of his articles from an English textbook. Woolard recalled the incident in a separate interview.

“I was writing a column called ‘The Worst of Woolard,’ ” he said. “One week I didn’t have anything to write, so I copied a lesson on syntax and didn’t give the source.”

Braun said he gave the more severe punishment of firing Woolard from the Moorpark Blade rather than suspending him because Woolard tried to justify the plagiarism by saying, “Everybody does it.”

“It might be significant now that he’s not trying to justify things,” Braun said. “What I had hoped he would learn was that if you do something wrong and you get caught, that you don’t try to defend what you did.”