The job was easier to pull off at odd hours. Early in the morning, before sunrise; or 7 in the evening, after everyone else had left work. There weren’t many prying eyes here on the edge of a secluded farm in California’s rural San Joaquin Valley. But there were some.

Watch out for the white trucks, the canalmen, whose job it was to move water from farm to farm, had been warned.

It’s been two decades, but Imani Percoats, a former canalman, can still remember how it would all go down. He usually made the journey at dawn, when the sky was just orange and no one was around to witness what he’d do. His destination had no address, but he knew how to get there, to that deep ditch dug out of the brown earth.

Around him, farmland stretched as far as the eye could see. Parallel rows of evenly tilled soil converged on the horizon, where the foothills of California’s coastal mountain ranges might appear later in the day as the sun warmed the ground and the morning mist lifted. A few trees and utility poles broke up the vast, empty horizon.

Near where Percoats stood, gravel crunching underneath, was a dirty cement cylinder rising five feet from the ground and measuring about two feet in diameter. Known as a standpipe, this old beige structure was a critical piece of equipment that controlled the movement of water. And in this arid farmland, water was everything.

Once at the standpipe, he would lift the lid and reach inside. A former professional football player standing six foot three, Percoats didn’t need a ladder to get his hands on the rusty valve nestled within. Gripping it tight, he would give the valve a few quick rotations to the left. This lifted a gate inside the standpipe, allowing water to flow through, fast and cool.

The water came from an enormous canal owned by the federal government, and it ran into a narrow trench located within the Panoche Water District. Local utilities transfer water from federal sources into their own networks all the time. To an outsider, Percoats’s activities might not have raised any eyebrows. But this time, the diversion of water flowing from this particular location was happening off the books.

The water would later make its way, coursing and vital as blood, through a network of local channels connecting the farms in the Panoche Water District. Once it irrigated the land, the precious resource would make the land bloom.

Percoats felt uneasy about the task he had been ordered to do. Multiple times he asked his bosses at the water district whether diverting water from the old standpipe was legal. He didn’t like watching over his shoulder. He was uncomfortable skirting detection by the ominous white Ford F-250 trucks that drove past daily, monitoring the federal canal. “Stuff like that kind of made my hair stand up,” he says now. But Percoats also had a son to take care of, and he needed the paycheck. After he’d pressed the matter one too many times, his bosses reassigned him to a different area.

Percoats’s suspicions would prove prescient. Panoche Water District staff had, in fact, been diverting massive volumes of water illegally, as the federal government would later allege in a criminal indictment filed in April 2022. The scale of the purported theft was mind-boggling: Though the Panoche Water District is small, comprising around 38,000 acres of land, the quantity of water the staff allegedly stole over at least two decades, beginning in 1992, was enough to submerge that area in nearly three and a half feet of water. The feds estimated that the swindled water was worth more than $25 million.

Behind the scheme was one accused mastermind: a domineering, cowboy-boot-wearing figure named Dennis Falaschi. Under his decades-long tenure as the water district’s general manager, the staff did more than steal water, federal and state prosecutors and officials would later allege. Employees there became entangled in a web of wide-ranging misdeeds, from inappropriately burying barrels of toxic waste to spending public money on personal shopping sprees, racking up bills for vacations, concerts, sporting tickets, and even slot machines. According to the federal indictment, it all began with a little skim taken from one of the most extensive irrigation systems ever built.

Early In the twentieth century, California embarked on an ambitious effort to impose order on its volatile water systems. Since the mid-1800s, the state had swelled in population, first during the Gold Rush and then by the draw of farming its fertile Central Valley. The region’s unpredictable water cycles presented a formidable obstacle to the dream of agricultural abundance. The semiarid landscape saw little precipitation, and the scant rain that did fall usually came in fall or winter, after the growing season, as historian Norris Hundley, Jr. documented in his book The Great Thirst.

The Central Valley presented a particular frustration: Though the most potentially productive acreage was located at its south, in the San Joaquin Valley, the bulk of its water came from the Sacramento Valley up north. The region toggled between weather extremes, enduring prolonged periods of drought and then suffering from devastating floods. In 1862, the Central Valley was inundated during the Great Flood that slammed the West Coast. The disaster was so powerful that it formed an “inland sea” and killed at least 4,000 people.

In 1920, the former chief geographer for the U.S. Geological Survey, Robert B. Marshall, devised an ambitious $800 million plan (more than $12 billion today) for water storage and transportation. He proposed to dam natural waterways and distribute water to people, cities, and farms across the state through massive, miles-long aqueducts.

“The people of California, indifferent to the bountiful gifts that Nature has given them, sit idly by waiting for rain, indefinitely postponing irrigation, and allowing every year millions and millions of dollars in water to pour unused into the sea, when there are hungry thousands in this and in other countries pleading for food and when San Francisco and the Bay Cities, the metropolitan district of California, are begging for water,” Marshall wrote in his proposal.

Multiple times over the next decade, Californians rejected the plan through ballot initiatives. Then, in 1931, a state engineer named Edward Hyatt released a version of Marshall’s proposal that cost less and was better engineered. By that time the nation had plunged into the Great Depression and California had entered a severe drought. Against this backdrop, the large-scale infrastructure project began to glisten with the promise of jobs, reliable water, and hydropower—and in 1933, voters approved the Central Valley elements of Hyatt’s plan.

Shortly thereafter, the federal government adopted the Central Valley Project, placing it under the purview of the Bureau of Reclamation. Construction began in 1935. To this day, it’s one of the largest water conveyance systems in the world.

With so many miles of canals, it’s hard to fathom that anyone would suspect a trickle leaking from their Sturdy walls.

One of the system’s key components is the Delta-Mendota Canal, which begins at the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, a massive estuary connected to San Francisco Bay that runs southward until its final destination, a reservoir called the Mendota Pool, about 35 miles west of Fresno. Construction on the canal began in 1946, having been delayed by resource allocations for World War II. Contractors used massive excavating equipment called draglines, which were attached with jumbo scooping buckets to dredge up the earth. The biggest one of these draglines had a boom that could extend 208 feet and a scooper with a capacity of 17 cubic yards; it required 34 freight cars to transport. Most of the canal was then lined with concrete.

Once built, the canal began taking in water from a pumping plant near the southern end of the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta. Still in operation today, the plant lifts water from the Sacramento River up an elevation of nearly 200 feet to deposit it into its pipes. According to the Bureau of Reclamation, the motors involved can pump more than 9,200 acre-feet of water into the canal each day. (An acre-foot is equal to the volume of water needed to submerge an acre of land in a foot of water.)

The Central Valley Project had significant implications for food production. With water supplies more assured, farmers brought more land under irrigation. By 1950, irrigated acreage had increased nearly one hundredfold what it was in 1870, according to a report prepared by the California Department of Transport Environmental Program. The Central Valley represented two-thirds of the state’s total irrigated acreage by then, and that area would only continue to grow as the Central Valley Project began making water deliveries. Today the area produces a quarter of the nation’s food, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. If you buy tomatoes in a New York City bodega, or pistachios from a grocery in Chicago, there’s a good chance they were grown in California’s Central Valley, possibly on a farm irrigated with the area’s 500 miles of canals.

With so much water coursing through so many miles of canals, it’s hard to fathom that anyone would be suspicious of a trickle leaking from their sturdy walls. Up close, the way Percoats saw it on those early-morning visits, the canal looked like a thick ribbon of indigo running through indistinguishable acres of farmland.

While the canal system is federally owned, it carries water to smaller irrigation districts, which are local government entities responsible for facilitating water delivery. In the case of Panoche, the water district serves the local agricultural community by distributing federal water allotments to farms via an internal network of smaller pipes and canals. It’s governed by a five-person board made up of local landowners, while its day-to-day administration is handled by its general manager.

Composed of around 60 farms, the Panoche Water District is small relative to most neighbors. But for decades, Dennis Falaschi ran it with outsized confidence.

Often sporting jeans and boots, Falaschi was well known in the San Joaquin Valley, and beloved by some for his warmth and charisma. “He was real friendly,” Percoats says. “He looked out for people. He helped people out.” Percoats himself had been on the receiving end of Falaschi’s generosity. Falaschi had coached his childhood football team. Percoats’s father wasn’t in his life, and at times he felt like Falaschi stepped in as a paternal role model.

At the same time, Falaschi could be controlling, other former staff said. “He didn’t take real well to questioning,” recalls Hercules Gonsalves Jr., who worked as an auto mechanic for the district. “If he asked you or told you to do something, you did it.”

One of the things Falaschi appeared keen to control was water. In 2014, a New York Times story featured Panoche’s efforts to harness the sun’s heat and use it to purify contaminated water. The project’s conceit was simple: Use a solar-powered thermal system to evaporate and condense water, thereby separating out the minerals and salts that make it otherwise toxic to crops. What remained would be desalinated water, clean enough for farms. In a photo that ran with the story, Falaschi wore a black vest bearing the district’s logo. He warned of the devastating consequences of shrinking water availability: “Food prices are going to go up, absolutely,” he told the Times reporter.

The Panoche Water District funded a trial run of the technology using $1 million in state money, working with a startup to purify the water. But the project was abandoned in 2018 due to a lack of long-term funding, and the startup is no longer in business.

Still, the idea underscores just how desperate the region is for a reliable source of water. That’s partly a matter of geography: Panoche is located on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley in what’s called a rain shadow, cut off from moisture and precipitation from the Pacific Ocean by California’s coastal ranges. Like the rest of the Valley, it’s flat and vast, the horizon occasionally hazy with dust and smog, notably in the summer. The landscape appears like alternating stretches of beige and vibrant green, depending on whether water is running through. But the thirst is also a matter of industry: Farming is a behemoth in the San Joaquin Valley, responsible for hundreds of thousands of jobs and producing $36 billion worth of crops in 2019.

All of this means that farmers are heavily reliant on water. And one of the most critical sources for farmers in Panoche specifically is the Delta-Mendota Canal. At numerous points along the canal, the district has pumps that lift water out and transport it to farmers via a local network of conduits, explains Charles Burt, chairman of the Irrigation Training and Research Center at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Burt has consulted the Panoche Water District on its water infrastructure in the past.

Because water is such a critical resource, every drop that enters the district from the Delta-Mendota Canal is supposed to be accounted for. “Every one of these pipes is metered,” Burt says.

Not every pipe, as it turns out.

One of the farms located in the Panoche Water District is a ranch owned by the Linneman family, a local dynasty that has farmed in the Valley for generations. Various Linneman family members have served on the water district’s board of directors; another one was an attorney at a law firm previously retained by the district; yet another Linneman worked as a principal at an engineering company that the district occasionally hires.

The Linneman farm is also known for its proximity to the site where Falaschi allegedly ordered district employees to steal water; the very ditch where Imani Percoats stood 20 years prior runs along the farm. The channel runs parallel to the mighty Delta-Mendota, separated by a strip of earth about 90 feet wide.

And beneath this swath of land, there is a big old pipe connecting the two waterways. The giant rusty standpipe that Percoats used to operate rises above it. All of this equipment should have been inactive. The piping is a relic of an antiquated drainage system that moved water over and across the canal like an overpass atop a busy freeway. The original gate inside the standpipe was cemented shut long ago.

But around 1992, that cement sealing began to crack, according to federal investigators, and water started leaking through once again. There are valid reasons why this might have happened. Maybe the cement seal was shoddy. In a later testimony, one district employee said he’d had to reapply cement every few years to keep it watertight. Or maybe it had cracked due to land subsidence, a persistent phenomenon in the Central Valley, where the pumping of groundwater causes the region to steadily sink and warp, like a shriveling sponge, leading to infrastructure crumbling.

Some have doubts that the leak could be attributed entirely to natural causes. One such skeptic is Mark Walsh, senior hydrographer for the Delta-Mendota Water Authority, which oversees the canal on behalf of the federal government. When Walsh inspected the leak, he noticed that the headwall—a concrete wall that holds the standpipe in place—seemed to have been deformed by blunt force at some point.

“There’s a mark there on the headwall of that area where equipment had been rubbing on it,” he says. “It’s old. But you can tell.”

In 1992, after learning about the crack, federal authorities assert that Falaschi ordered a district employee to install a new gate inside the standpipe. This new gate could then be opened and closed by turning the standpipe’s valve, rendering it operational again.

Falaschi also allegedly insisted on the installation of a lid on the standpipe, one that would hide the valve from curious onlookers, and most importantly, the white F-250s driven by Delta-Mendota Water Authority employees, who often cruised past to monitor the water. Percoats, the former employee, says Falaschi even insisted on attaching a lock to the lid. This was more performance than practicality. “It was a fake lock,” he says.

As long as the Panoche Water District’s ditch was full of water, the old piping used to allegedly steal water remained submerged—a purported crime covered up by its own spoils. Because of its location, the apparatus was donned the “Linneman Lift” by district employees.

Falaschi regularly instructed canalmen to use the Linneman Lift to release water from the Delta-Mendota Canal into the district’s supply without paying for it, the federal indictment says. As part of the job, canalmen traveled around the district adjusting pumping to keep water flowing from farm to farm according to demand and direction from supervisors. Percoats remembers standing at the Linneman Lift, rotating its valve to hasten or slow the release of water.

In agriculture, water is measured by the acre-foot. One acre-foot is equal to 325,851 gallons, twice as much as the average California household uses per year. According to the federal indictment, the former general manager ordered employees to steal more than 130,000 acre-feet of water from the Delta-Mendota Canal via the Linneman Lift over two decades. He then either sold it to farmers within the district, or pumped it back to the government for credit, the indictment alleges.

Falaschi’s lawyer, Marc Days, disputes the charges and the government’s characterization of his client’s actions. In a press release, Days wrote that responsibility for water lost from the Delta-Mendota Canal lay at the feet of the government, which knew of a leak in “rotted” water piping but did not fix it. On occasion, neighboring fields had even been flooded as a result, Days noted in the release. He also insisted that Falaschi never financially benefited from water coming from the leak.

Days has concurred that the standpipe at the site of the leak was modified so that a small, controlled amount of water could pass through and be used, but only for good reason: Because of its topography, the Panoche Water District has to contend with large amounts of shallow salty groundwater encroaching into its boundaries from other areas every year. This water can contaminate soil and kill crops. The Bureau of Reclamation is supposed to provide drainage services for this water, but has yet to do so. For the district, blending this salty water down with other sources—like water from a canal leak—was simply a way to dilute that salinity and protect the area’s farms from harm. Beyond this minor amount aimed at preventing damage to farmland, however, Falaschi did not authorize any taking of water from the leak, Days said.

Days also disagreed with the government’s estimate of the volume of water taken. He wrote that the indictment’s estimate is “grossly excessive.” At most, he claimed, 9,800 acre-feet of water may have been diverted from the Delta-Mendota Canal via the Linneman Lift, though it was likely much less. In a motion to dismiss, Days also argued that the district’s contract with the federal government allowed it to make use of “seepage,” water that leaked into its boundaries. How well Days’ defense holds in court remains to be seen. A date for the federal trial has been set for March 2024.

Under normal circumstances, districts in the Central Valley Project buy water from the federal government at a price that’s set each year, then sell it to their constituents at a slight markup, which covers administrative and delivery costs. (The contract price this year is around $35 per acre-foot.) According to federal prosecutors, stealing water via the Linneman Lift contorted the economics of running the Panoche Water District significantly in its own favor, by slashing the amount it spent on buying water while continuing to reap lavish sales revenues. Falaschi then used those illicit proceeds to enrich himself, the indictment alleges.

“Falaschi used proceeds from the theft for his own benefit and the benefit of his coconspirators, none of whom were entitled to such proceeds,” prosecutors claimed. This included paying “himself and other coconspirators exorbitant salaries, fringe benefits, and personal expense reimbursements, including for the purpose of incentivizing coconspirators to participate in and continue with the conspiracy.” (Falaschi is the only person charged in the federal indictment; no coconspirators are named.)

Falaschi’s lawyer has denied those allegations, and claims Falaschi gained no financial benefit from the water at the heart of the indictment. Compared with other general managers of water districts, he says, Falaschi earned a modest salary.

Federal investigators weren’t alone in suspecting that something was amiss at the Panoche Water District. Around 2016, the California State Controller reviewed the district’s finances. In a report published in January 2017, the agency found that the water district had given out thousands in interest-free loans, offered free housing for some employees without justifying a need for it, provided 50 vehicles for commuting, and permitted staff to use district credit cards for personal expenses.

Panoche Water District employees had apparently been using agency credit cards to do personal shopping, racking up exorbitant bills. They bought clothing from Ralph Lauren, Nike, and Levi’s; paid for tickets to Oakland A’s and Oakland Raiders games; booked flights to Maui and Las Vegas and even a room at a luxury oceanfront resort in San Diego.

Even more egregious may have been the instances when the Panoche Water District straight-up gave employees money. The auditors found that from 2012 to 2016 the district gave more than $86,000 in interest-free loans to employees on incredibly generous repayment terms, some extending as long as 23 years. Auditors also discovered a suspicious quirk: In some instances when the water district issued loans to employees, it also increased their compensation, bumping up their take-home pay to cover their new loan payments.

In its responses to the report, the district asserted that it had implemented numerous changes to put an end to flagged practices. Personal use of district credit cards had ceased, and past spending by employees had been reimbursed. The board had also adopted a policy prohibiting the issuance of loans to employees, and the large majority of outstanding loans had been repaid.

“The district has made great strides to move forward in the arenas where potentially they had some issues of concern,” says Chase Hurley, former interim general manager of the district. “We’re still working with the state of California and we’re on the right track.”

But amid the state’s probe into the district’s internal affairs, an outsider noticed something even more unusual.

One morning in April 2015, Mark Walsh, the hydrographer with the Delta-Mendota Water Authority, was making his rounds along the canal in his Ford F-250. He kept an eye out for trouble, as he’d been trained to do since he joined the Authority in 1996. Staff regularly drive 100 to 150 miles a day looking for anything that might disrupt operations, from cracks in the canal cement to broken equipment, obstructions, and vandalism.

That afternoon, Walsh spotted something bizarre. A straw hat had fallen into the canal. But instead of floating along its surface, it was spinning in a vigorous circle. Walsh hopped out of the driver’s seat to inspect the scene up close and discovered that the hat was caught in a whirlpool—it looked the way a bathtub does when it’s getting drained.

“I knew in the back of my mind what it could be,” he says.

For years, the Water Authority had struggled with mysterious and inexplicable water losses. It monitored water elevation along the canal at 21 different checkpoints, from its beginning in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta to its conclusion at the Mendota Pool, 117 miles away. But somewhere between checkpoint 17 and checkpoint 18, where the Panoche Water District is situated, more water seemed to disappear from the canal than what the district took on the books.

The quantity of missing water was mildly bewildering and required the Water Authority to release extra water from the Delta into the canal to make up for the losses. But it was also still relatively minuscule, considering all the water flowing through the canals. According to federal investigators’ numbers, an average of 6,000 acre-feet of water was passing through the leak each year—just a fraction of the 2 million acre-feet that pass through the Delta-Mendota Canal annually. Such volume is just small enough to be plausibly written off as a result of evaporation or ground seepage. After all, the weather in California, like that of so much of the planet, was getting more extreme by the year, making it harder to predict water levels. “Whereas losses are considered in all irrigation canal infrastructure, a loss of this kind is hard to detect,” Josué Medellin-Azuara, an associate professor at the University of California, Merced, who specializes in irrigation engineering, wrote in an email.

For years, Walsh had driven past the rusty old standpipe where he was now standing. It was supposed to be defunct, and he never thought that someone might have covertly put it back in operation. But on that day in 2015, walking right up to it, he lifted its lid. Before looking inside, he could already hear a faint whoosh of water rushing below it. Still, he leaned his head into the pipe to get a closer look.

What the heck is this? he thought to himself. The sound of water gushing at 60 cubic feet per second roared back.

At the time, Walsh had no idea the scale of the scandal that his discovery would unravel.

That day he simply went home and contemplated who he could tell about what he’d seen. Although the Delta-Mendota Water Authority is a separate entity from the Panoche Water District, many board members and upper management in both organizations lived in the same small towns and ate at the same restaurants; in some instances they were even related.

“I knew that if I gave the information to the wrong person, it would get squashed,” he says. At the same time, Walsh didn’t want to draw too much attention to himself. He eventually told a small group of staff about his discovery, hoping the issue could be scrutinized prudently. But word quickly spread that Walsh had located the site of Panoche Water District’s illicit water diversions. By the time he got off work, his phone was blowing up with messages about his discovery.

The attention made him uneasy. Rumors swirled that Walsh was the man whose discovery unraveled Falaschi’s alleged lucrative water scheme. His ex-wife, who worked as a hairdresser at the time, began to lose clients, which Walsh suspected was due to resentment from locals who were unhappy with his discovery of the Linneman Lift. Strange numbers rang at his home. Then federal agents began pulling up to his house to question him about what he’d seen. He cooperated, but he also worried about whether he might be targeted if word spread that he was talking to government authorities.

“I was scared, you know?” he says. “Knowing that somebody could be watching me from across the street and seeing a federal agent come to my house.”

As in most farming towns, locals tend to be suspicious and distrustful of what they perceive as outside regulation or scrutiny. Eventually Walsh gathered his family and showed them a folder of documents he’d been keeping over the course of those fraught months. “If something was to happen to me,” he told them at the time. “This file right here is the reason.”

As it turns out, the alleged water diversion was the first domino to fall in a long line of purported misdeeds at the District. A few months later, a local farmer, skeptical of his water charges, hired a private investigator to look into the agency’s finances. The investigator gathered a mountain of evidence pointing to a potential misuse of funds, which he turned over to the FBI, according to legal filings. In 2016, the California State Controller’s Office launched its audit of the water district’s spending, uncovering those seemingly misspent public funds.

Then, a mere month after those findings were released, construction workers made an alarming discovery: 86 barrels of toxic waste had been disposed of unlawfully on district property. The finding prompted a state investigation by the Department of Toxic Substances Control, which found that toxic waste had been leaking into the ground.

In 2018, the state attorney general filed a lawsuit against Falaschi and four other employees. (A judge later dismissed all charges against one of the defendants.) Falaschi currently faces charges of embezzlement and disposal of hazardous material. The state indictment alleged that Falaschi used district funds to buy slot machines and auto repairs. A date for the trial has not been set.

Attorney Marc Days, who is also representing Falaschi against the state charges, said that Falaschi did use district funds for some personal expenses. However, he said, this was in accordance with a district policy that was in place before Falaschi even came into the picture. Days said that all funds used in this manner were approved by the board, recorded in the district ledger specifically as personal expenses, and were repaid in a timely manner. And he said Falaschi denies the allegation that he inappropriately disposed of hazardous material.

The probes into the agency had apparently prompted some upsetting revelations about pay disparity. Eventually, two employees, Imani Percoats and Chris Bettencourt, filed a civil suit demanding unpaid overtime wages. They later also alleged that the district had retaliated against them for cooperating with federal and state investigators. Earlier this year, a jury awarded the duo approximately $163,000 in their favor on the overtime claims, though they’re requesting more in damages. The jury rejected their retaliation claims.

Meanwhile, at the Water Authority, Walsh continues to feel like he was caught in the blast radius of Panoche Water District’s implosion. Since his discovery, Walsh has felt isolated at work and in his community, stuck in place, powerless to move on from the past. To this day, he gets approached by locals. A farmer recently came up to him and asked, “You’re the guy who found it right? The deal that sunk Dennis Falaschi.” He’s tired of talking about it.

Still, he wouldn’t have done anything differently. He continues to drive past the Linneman Lift every day. “I look at it to make sure nothing’s gonna happen there again.”

Falaschi stepped down from his role in 2017, and in the time since, the Panoche Water District insists that it’s cleaned house. It agreed to pay nearly $8 million to settle with the Bureau of Reclamation over civil claims of “unauthorized diversion of water” by the district, an agreement that didn’t require any admission of wrongdoing. (The settlement does not affect the federal criminal charges against Falaschi.) Its board also said that it would work to implement the long lists of recommendations it received following audits. Michael Linneman, a former board member, when deposed in the civil employee lawsuit, conceded that the board could have done a better job of overseeing Falaschi.

But many close to the situation are skeptical Falaschi deserves all the blame for the district’s legal troubles. In a motion filed in his federal criminal lawsuit, Falaschi pointed to grand jury testimony by former employee Chris Bettencourt alleging that Linneman not only knew about the diversion next to his property, but that his own employees had taken water from it for free. (Linneman has not been charged by federal or state authorities, and did not respond to requests for comment.)

“Dennis was the general manager. He answered to the board,” says Gonsalves, the former district employee. “It surprised me that he could do all this without the board knowing what was going on. It’s surprising that either they’re that blind or didn’t catch this before it got that far.”

In some versions of the story, Falaschi is less of a mastermind and more the man who was willing to get his hands dirty. Then, when the walls closed in, he was a convenient fall guy, a scapegoat for a culture of corruption that persists even in his absence.

On a cool spring morning last April, Dennis Falaschi, now in his 70s, surrendered to the FBI at the entrance of a federal courthouse in Fresno. A week prior, a grand jury indicted the former general manager of Panoche Water District on five charges: one count of conspiracy, one count of theft of government property, and three counts of filing false tax returns. If convicted, he could be sentenced to 10 years in prison, repayment of the value stolen, and hefty fines.

In the midst of all this, water has continued to flow through the Central Valley, unbothered.

This year, another 2 million acre-feet will run through the remarkable ribbon that courses from the Delta through the Central Valley. Its volumes will be monitored at two dozen checkpoints along the winding route. It will be allocated to thirsty constituents via precise metering systems that count every cubic foot that runs up their mighty pumps. It will be released carefully through drip irrigation systems that will coax farmland into lush fields of produce.

Along its path, canalmen and hydrologists will drive past daily, monitoring its flow, making sure the water is accounted for—though there are limits to human oversight. After all, the summer heat will take its share, and the thirsty ground gets its own cut. Inevitably, and even right now, some of it will escape through ruptures and fissures in the canal wall along the way. Despite the best of efforts, it’s hard to know where all the water will end up.