They've Got A Ticket To Ride, And They Don't Care

What are the odds somebody's going to ask British PM David Cameron today about Josh Harkinson's big MoJo story this morning about BP's top-secret ticket giveaway hotline?

For more than a decade, BP has operated a hush-hush phone line that California lawmakers can call to request box seats to NBA games and concerts at the Sacramento stadium named after its West Coast subsidiary.

In the past five years, BP has given state officials more than 1,200 complimentary tickets to the Arco Arena, hosting them in its corporate suite to see Sacramento Kings games, World Extreme Cagefighting matches, and Britney Spears and Lil Wayne concerts. Getting the tickets is as easy as calling the BP ticket request line, an exclusive, unpublished phone number that appears to exist for the sole purpose of granting freebies to lawmakers, regulators, and their staffs.

"You make a request, leave it on the voicemail, and at some date the tickets either magically appear or they don't," says a legislative consultant who gave me the ticket line's number and spoke on condition of anonymity. "They don't talk to you; you just see 'em or you don't." The ticket line's message was taken down sometime in the past week, shortly after I began my reporting. You can still listen to the original recording below.

BP has given away roughly $300,000 worth of tickets over the past 10 years, handing them out to everyone from lowly assembly clerks to top lawmakers. In March 2002, when the Sacramento Kings were locked in a playoff battle with the Los Angeles Lakers, 9 state senators and 12 state assembly members, including the speaker, pumped BP for the coveted seats. While serving as assembly speaker in 2006, Los Angeles Democrat Fabian Núñez and his family watched the Kings beat the Chicago Bulls on BP's dime. During Democrat Karen Bass' tenure as speaker between 2008 and 2010, 13 members of her staff tapped BP for tickets to see Disney on Ice, Tina Turner, and Madea's Big Happy Family. Núñez and Bass did not accept requests for interviews.

This is shaping up to be a very, very big story covering a large number of California pols in both parties, but it's the high ranking Dems in the state machine who will suffer the most blowback here.  Hanging BP around their necks is not going to help them come November.

The bigger problem is of course how easy it is to bribe our politicians off the books like this.  BP ran this little game for a decade and the Supreme Court this year made it even easier to pump corporate money into races at all levels, especially down the stretch towards October and November.  If you think BP's the only outfit giving out freebies like this, you're crazy.