The Strange Saga of Harry Baker

Harry Baker, 81, one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in Madera County, California, has been arrested on charges of child molestation after it emerged that a video of him was taken in which he is naked and engaging in sex acts with a 13 Year Old Girl. The affidavit for the search warrant in the Harry Baker case is here. It runs to 67 pages, but the good stuff is on pages 26-37.

The incident occurred in a Fresno motel room two years ago. Baker apparently did not know he was being videotaped.

There was a woman in her twenties present, this woman is named Lisa Marshall, age 27. She apparently cannot be located. The girl’s mother is a Gypsy named Tillie Steve. She cannot be located either. Baker had a 5-year relationship with the Gypsy mother, Ms. Steve.

A woman and her husband and two others have been arrested on Child Pornography and Extortion charges. They are apparently Gypsies. The incident occurred in May 2007. The girl, now 15, is now claiming that Baker molested her. After the video was made, the Gypsies presented it to Baker and demanded blackmail money.

Over a two year period, the Gypsies collected $250,000 from Baker, who is a very wealthy man.

Baker owns Sierra Telephone, which has, in my opinion, an illegal monopoly on phone and Internet service in Eastern Madera County that has been, in my opinion, illegally abusing phone and Internet customers and competing business, such as Internet providers, for many years. Internet service through Sierratel is very expensive for slow service. They do this because they have a monopoly up here and can afford to shaft the consumer.

If you know anything about blackmail, the problem with it is that it never ends. They don’t just come for money once, take the money and say thanks and go away. The keep coming back asking for more and more money all the time. This is what happened with Baker. As noted, he paid out $200,000 over a 2-year period with no end in sight.

Baker wanted to put a stop to it, so he went to an attorney, Richard Berman of Fresno (I don’t know this guy) and told him about the blackmailing. Apparently due to mandatory reporting laws, Berman was obligated to report Baker’s having sex with the 13 year old girl to the police.

After an investigation, Baker was arrested by Fresno police on charges of Having Sex with a Child under the Age of 14 (otherwise known as Child Molestation). His bail was set at $500,000. Baker easily posted $50,000 of that and was released eight days ago.

Baker is a former Madera County Supervisor who served on the Board of Supervisors for 12 years. He bought Sierra Telephone from his parents in 1950 and turned it into a very lucrative business. He was a well-known philanthropist in the area and spread his money far and wide.

Baker has now been suspected in another child molestation case. This time the Las Vegas Police are involved. The girl in this case, I believe, was also 13 year old girl. She resides in the Bay Area in California, and she is saying that Harry Baker had sex with her in Las Vegas.

I’m not sure if having sex with a 13 year old girl is child molesting. The law claims it is, but the law is calling all kinds of bullshit child molesting lately, including adult males having sex with 17 year old girls and female school teachers having sex with high school boys. Obviously, none of that is pedophilia. The medical definition of pedophilia would be a man who has a very strong attraction to prepubescent children or little or none to mature persons.

Nowadays, such a person would be 11-12 years old. So medically speaking (as per the DSM-IV) this is not Pedophilia, as 13 year old girls are already going through puberty. Legally speaking, it is considered child molesting, as the law usually defines sex with minors 13 and under as Child Molestation. So you can pick your definition here.

My opinion is that any man over age, say, 18, having sex with a 13 year old girl is just flat out wrong. At that age, they still look like little girls. It looks like a little girl with boobs and starting to get some woman curves. I can’t see messing with a young girl like that at all, and I’ve been propositioned by them before, more than once. Unlike Harry Baker, I turned them down.

13 year olds are no longer children, but they are not yet adults either. They are “girl-women.” That’s what teenage girls, aged 13-17 are, girl-women. They are neither girls nor women, neither children nor adults. They are adolescents. Conflating sex with a girl 17 years and 11 months old with sex with a 7 year old girl is just nuts and wrong.

However, it is just wrong for middle aged and older men, certainly, to go after young girls, especially if the girls are 13, 14, 15. It may be ok for a primitive society, but we live in a civilized society. I doubt if the girls are harmed if the sex is consensual, but you should not allow it. It does damage to society, so society has a right to ban it.

Men over age 40 going after girls 13-15 are usually pursuing them. Young girls that age will only rarely voluntarily approach a man that age and try to seduce him. If they do it would be a 15 year old. 13 and 14 year old girls will not chase men over 40.

To those of us old-timers who have been in the mountains for a long time, there is nothing surprising about any of this. I have been hearing stories about Baker ever since I came to the mountains in 1990.

Here are some of the stories that have been told to me over the years. All of the informants wish to remain anonymous, and of course all of the stories are unverified rumors. But at some point, rumors are a flood that can’t be denied anymore.

1991: An Oakhurst “hippie woman,” about 35 years old. She had been to Harry Baker’s parties in the recent past, when Baker was 62 years old. After about 15 minutes, she took off running out the door. It was the worst and most outrageous party she had ever been too, with underage girls, drugs, and drinking.

1992: A 20 year old Oakhurst girl, now married, said she had been one of Harry Baker’s girlfriends at age 15-16, in 1987 and 1988, when Baker was 59-60 years old. She supposedly had photos of her naked with him, but I never saw them.

Early 1990’s: My father went to see Harry Baker in his office to discuss a community issue. They kept getting interrupted by a very young girl knocking on the door, “Harrrrrry…Harrrrrrry…..” The man who told me had taught school for many years, including junior high and high school.

He said that the girl sounded very young. He estimated by the sound of her voice that she was 13-14 years old, junior high age. My father was quite shaken up by the incident due to the fact that the girl seemed so young. At this time, Baker was about 66 years old.

2009: A 45 year old Oakhurst woman said that when she was in junior high and high school in Oakhurst 27-33 years before, Harry Baker used to appear at the schools quite regularly. In particular, he liked to show up whenever there was a birthday party for a student, especially if the student was an attractive girl aged 12-18. He would appear at the parties and smooch around with the young girls.

It was well-known at both the junior high and the high school that Harry Baker had a standing offer to any young girl to provide them with pot if they would go out into the bushes on school grounds with him and let him cop a feel. She said most of the girls did not do it, but some of them went for it and messed around with him.

In general, these girls were from broken homes. This would have occurred between 1976 and 1981, when Baker was 48-53 years old and the girls were age 12-18. The implication here is that the teaching staff and administration at Oakhurst-area schools during this time was aware of what Baker was doing and went along with it. Therefore, they were complicit.

2009: An Oakhurst woman, aged 71, said that the word from Madera County Victim Services is that they have worked with a number of teenage girls who had sex with Harry Baker over the years. In fact, case workers say that there is more than one “little Harry Baker” in Madera County as a result of these liaisons. In other words, some of the girls that Baker had sex with got pregnant and bore his children. It’s probable that if this is true, Baker has been supporting these women over the years.

1991-2009: During this period, I have heard many stories about Harry Baker. The word on the street is that he likes “young girls,” as in underage girls. Asked for further clarification, they said it meant teenage girls, either underage or right around the age of consent. Baker has also had a reputation as a womanizer, who had many affairs with females over 18. I don’t have much information on that.

In addition, I have heard many stories about the parties at his house. For 19 years, I have heard that marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamine are used at these parties. Pot is smoked, cocaine is snorted or smoked as crack, and sometimes speed is sniffed. There is also quite a bit of drinking going on at these parties. These parties reportedly occur at his ranch in Ahwahnee. The young girls are all apparently quite willing. In return for sex, Baker gives them money, drugs, etc.

In the course of their investigation, Fresno police interviewed motel and hotel owners in Fresno. They reported that Baker had been checking into rooms there for the past several years. Often young girls would show up later asking for his room. They always claimed they were his “nieces,” but they often did not even know his last name. Lodgers had begun to grow suspicious over the years because the girls seemed so young.

To us, this arrest is nothing new . We are just amazed that he finally got caught.

Harry Baker is one of the richest men in the county. He basically owns Eastern Madera County, along with a few other powerful men. The political structure is very backwards, almost semi-feudal, Southern, banana republic, or Third World.

Law enforcement are said to be in cahoots with powerful figures, who are protected. Good old boys are let go or allowed to file fake charges against “newcomers” or “city people” who are often disliked for not being rednecks. In other words, my experience with Eastern Madera County Sheriff’s Department is that they are corrupt (and yes, unfortunately, I have had some often unpleasant experiences with them).

The Madera County District Attorney’s office has long been corrupt, in my opinion. And yes, unfortunately, I have had some unpleasant experiences with those crooks too, in particular Ernest LiCalsi, who I always felt was corrupt and a crook. LiCalsi wanted to bat 1.000 as a prosecutor and tended to prosecute cases, even where it was obvious that the defendant was innocent or even that no crime, or certainly not that stated crime, had even occurred.

He was a sleazy, slimy prosecutor who cared nothing about whether defendants were guilty or innocent or even the facts of the case. He just wanted to get his damned convictions. Recently, as I assumed, he was charged with ethical violations by the State Bar. I am sorry they did not pull this crook lawyer’s license.

LiCalsi’s son was involved in an accident with an illegal alien in Madera. In lieu of prosecution, LiCalsi accepted a bribe from the illegal whereby the illegal paid LiCalsi’s car insurance. Later the illegal filed a $2.5 million bribery suit against scumbag LiCalsi, accusing him of extortion for threatening to deport the illegal and prosecute him unless he paid the bribe to LiCalsi.

The illegal’s attorney, Stephen Geiringer, is suing LiCalsi and Madera County. He accuses LiCalsi of running a “Wild West, anything goes operation in Madera County.” I concur with that assessment completely. The trial was due to start this January. LiCalsi retired from the DA’s office after a long and sordid career of ethical lapses and abuse of the public trust. As is characteristic in this sleazy county, the scum also rises. Like in a summer pond, the scum floats to the top. I believe that LiCalsi is now a Madera County judge. I really wonder if you can get a fair trial from this former DA.

Harry Baker, as noted, ran Eastern Madera County, along with a man named Jamison and a few other guys. Jamison was an attorney, and he was one Hell of a scumbag. This guy was one of the lowest people in the county. I know someone who clashed with him on a civic issue. The man clashing with him was a substitute teacher in the local schools.

Jamison said the man would not work as a sub in local schools anymore unless he dropped his civic conflict with Jamison. I know others who clashed with him. Usually the threat was, “You will never work in this county again.” Thank God this Jamison POS is finally dead. I’d like to know where he is buried so I can go dance on his grave. Now Baker is down too. There are a few others remaining standing.

Baker, like Jamison, was not a man to be crossed. It was well-known in Madera County that you did not mess with Harry Baker. It’s clear to me that Madera County LE and the DA have known what Harry has been doing for at least 30 years now and have done nothing about it. He has been left alone due to his power. It’s notable that he was arrested in Fresno County, not Madera County. Also, he has spread money all over Eastern Madera County, possibly in an attempt to pay everyone off.

I dislike Harry Baker. He is an extremely conservative Republican, like most of the idiots up here, but he’s a hypocrite. He’s a family values guy, but he’s been screwing teenage girls for 30 years. He refuses to hire smokers at the phone company, and he makes you sign some stupid illegal form stating that you are not a Communist. I have seen his job applications. I would estimate that 50% of the questions on there are illegal to ask on that form.

It has long been known that Harry Baker will never tolerate a union at his precious phone company. Employees felt terrorized by Baker and told me that if any efforts were made to form a union, Baker would fire everyone involved. Hence, Sierra Telephone is non-union.

With Jamison dead and Baker looking at what looks like hard-time, the Little El Salvador or Little Pakistan in Eastern Madera County may finally be collapsing. I think the Feds might want to poke around in this sleaze of a county and maybe clean this place up for once.

In writing this article, I am taking considerable risks. Harry Baker is very powerful in Madera County, and as I said, he threatens to destroy anyone who messes with him. He also has tons of buddies all, paid off and otherwise, all over the mountains. No doubt they go to bat for him in a pinch. It’s notable that most critics of Mr. Baker refused to be quoted on the record.

It’s quite possible that the friends of these men I mentioned here, or the men themselves, could retaliate against me, possibly by publishing scurrilous stuff online.

I basically have nothing to lose, so I’m going to let it all hang out here and write this piece.