When John Noguez ran for Los Angeles County assessor in 2010, large donations started pouring into his City Councilaccount in Huntington Park, where Noguez served as a councilman.

More than $100,000 flowed through the account that year, mostly from downtown Los Angeles business owners. Only one $250 donation came from a Huntington Park address, records show.

Within months of Noguez's election, he and his top aides knocked at least $36 million off the assessed values of properties owned by donors to that Huntington Park fund, a Times investigation has found. Those reductions lowered the donors' property taxes and prompted the county to write tax refund checks worth more than $557,000 to them in the first year of Noguez's term.

Read more at the LA Times