Gallegos hires Mandrake the Magician to erase memories of alleged rape victims’ names

Humboldt County District Attorney Paul Gallegos has hired a magician to disappear from the public’s memory the names he illegally disclosed to the public of two women who accused Blue Lake Police Chief David Gundersen of raping them.

Gallegos revealed the names when he placed in files available to the public a series of confidential documents identifying the alleged victims by name.

“I hired this guy, Mandrake the Magician, during the 2006 campaign, and he really helped voters forget what a knob I’d been in the previous four years,” Gallegos said Tuesday.

“So after I threw all those confidential documents into Gundersen’s file and the newspaper called me on it, I thought—hey, a little magic could come in handy here as well.”

Gundersen’s wife, a Blue Lake police sergeant, and his ex-wife, who works at the Sheriff’s sub-station in McKinleyville, both reported to authorities that they were drugged and raped by Gundersen, who remains in custody awaiting trial.

Among the documents Gallegos released was a formal request for confidentiality submitted by one of the alleged victims.

Mandrake, who boasts among his other tricks the “illusion of competence” he created to help Gallegos pull the last election out of a rabbit’s ass, said his “magic” is actually a high-tech application based on space-time continuum gaps discovered during research on time machines.

“Basically I can take any finite moment—of stupidity, duplicity, infidelity, you name it—and cause the human psyche to sort of skip over it like it never occurred,” he said.

But his powers of illusion have limitations.

“’Finite moment’ is the key phrase here. For example, I can’t just wave a wand and get Paul’s original hairline or integrity back,” he said. “For that I’d have to eliminate more than a decade of human history, which would take us back to the dark ages of DOS-based operating systems and cell phones the size of toasters.”

Mandrake said he enjoys working for the DA but is also available for bar mitzvahs and children’s birthday parties.

For additional information, phone 268-2571.