>Is that actual mayor someone that was rich before he became a
>public official like Bloomberg or Schwarzenegger or is he
>actually dirty? Interesting that Pizzolatto did his research
>into a small town Cali mayor like that since I'm fairly
>certain dude comes from the South.

Vernon is this small ass area about 5 miles out from downtown LA and it's all industrialized. Just like in True Detective the mayor is the great grandson of one of the town's founders. They basically did like in the show when the railroads came it the Furlong's along with Leonis moved to make the town industrial and got the railroads to move lines closer to them in order to bank off of the income.Then in the 20's they moved folks out again for big industry that keep going well in to WWII and after, funny enough their used to be a studebaker factory in Vernon. They kept raking in the dough through corruption and back end deals. The last two mayors were the relatives of the towns founders and it just keeps the cycle going

PIzzolatto took the whole back drop of this season from some real shit that happened. Vernon, Bell, and SouthGate (to a lesser extent) are all connected cities and feed off of each other. Just read these articles about Vernon from back in 2010, you'll see the salaries these city officials were making in a town of 91 residents.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/24/us/24vernon.html
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/aug/30/local/la-me-ln-vernon-malkenhorst-20130830
http://abcnews.go.com/WN/california-payroll-corruption-scandal-spreads-city-vernon/story?id=11597835

Here's a wiki article on Leonis C. Malburg the former mayor, I'm sure this season is mirroring: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonis_C._Malburg
Here's a wiki on Vernon itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon,_California#History

The city Manager in Bell was making $800,000.00 taking his notes from the way Vernon was running.

Vernon is a husk of a city and is scary as shit at night to drive through, the neighboring city of Bell used to have a high rate of prostitution and drug related crime that was driven from the workers and truck drivers in Vernon.

People rarely hear about the seedy underbelly of the Eastside of L.A.