BP’s Secret Ticket Request Line
Business loves to buy off the government—it’s what they do. Josh Harkinson reports at Mother Jones:
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 Getting the tickets is as easy as calling the BP ticket request line, an exclusive, unpublished phone number that appears to exist for the sole purpose of granting freebies to lawmakers, regulators, and their staffs.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.
The only official I contacted who would speak on the record about the ticket line was Assemblyman Bill Berryhill, a Republican from the Central Valley, who confirms that he asked for four passes to see Britney Spears last April. Her music is "tough to listen to," he concedes, but the show "was all about the kids, man. It was for my daughters." Berryhill says that he didn’t realize that his secretary had gotten the tickets from BP. Even so, Berryhill’s chief of staff, Evan Oneto, said his boss wouldn’t rule out taking tickets from the company in the future. Whether BP’s money is spent on free concert tickets or cleaning up the Gulf, he says, "is BP’s decision to make, not Bill’s." …
