Political consultant and high school coach John Fickas pleads to drugging, raping students.

John Fickas, the former North Salinas High athletic coach and consultant valued by local politicians for his ability to rally large groups of students for phone banks and precinct walking during campaign season, pleaded no contest Friday, Jan. 22, to drugging and raping students and former students who volunteered for various campaigns.

Fickas was alone in court, with no family present, when he entered the no contest pleas—which have the same effect as a guilty plea—to five counts of raping and sodomizing four girls or women. In a sixth count, he pleaded no contest to oral copulation on a teenage boy he coached; in that instance, he rented a motel room and furnished the boy with a sex worker.

In exchange for the plea, Fickas will be sentenced to 28 years and eight months in prison. He pled to three counts of rape by use of drugs involving three separate victims, two charges of sex assault on a girl under the age of 18 and the charge involving the boy.

Fickas spoke little during the 10-minute hearing, saying "I do" when Monterey Superior Court Judge Pamela Butler asked him if he understood the nature of his conviction. He has waived his right to appear at his Feb. 26 sentencing. 

Deputy District Attorney Elaine McCleaf says the deal came together quickly. Fickas' attorney, Deputy Public Defender Jennifer Davenport, contacted her Jan. 21 and said Fickas was interested in resolving the case.

The pleas represent an act committed on every victim connected to the case.

Fickas coached the girls' junior varsity field hockey team and also acted as the varsity shot put coach for the track and field team at North Salinas High School; a school district spokesman described him as a "walk on, off-campus" coach, meaning he wasn't directly employed by the school or the district. 

But he used his position as a coach to recruit students eager for community service hours to work on various campaigns. According to testimony during his 2019 preliminary hearing, Fickas used his position at North Salinas High to groom victims, ply them with alcohol and then drug them without their knowledge before raping or sodomizing them.

During the preliminary hearing in September 2019, Salinas Police Det. Gabriel Gonzales said one of the victims, referred to as Jane Doe 1 in court, was with Fickas in November 2015 at an election night event. Fickas was running for a seat on the Salinas Union High School District board, and there was a party at Hacienda Mexican Grill that included former Salinas City Council members Jose Castañeda and Sergio Sanchez. After the group left Hacienda, they went to Banker's Casino and continued drinking, then several of the group went to Sanchez's house.

It was there, Gonzales testified, that the then-22-year-old victim, who Fickas had previously coached, drank a glass of wine and began feeling ill. Fickas escorted her to a bathroom and performed a sex act on her while she was unconscious. The detective testified she woke up at one point on the floor of the bathroom, with her head banging off the edge of the bathtub. She asked him to stop, but fell unconscious again. The incident ended when Sanchez's wife, Lupe, who serves on the board of the Monterey County Office of Education, heard the activity in the bathroom and told her husband to ask them to leave. She didn't call the police that night on the belief that what she heard was consensual activity.

In a second incident, Fickas hired a girl—a student in his wife's algebra class—to work on the Measure K campaign, a sales tax measure championed by then-mayor Dennis Donohue of Salinas. 

In November 2009, Fickas picked her up at her rural home and drove her to his residence. Monterey County Sheriff's Det. Bryan Hoskins said the girl, who was 15 at the time of the incident, told investigators he prepared her a drink of a clear soda and tequila and that when she drank a small amount, she began to feel tired and dizzy.

She woke up about seven hours later with Fickas lying next to her on the couch; the zipper on his pants was undone and her pants and underpants were pulled down below her hips.

After his July 2019 arrest, Fickas posted $40,000 bail and remained out of custody for some time. After prosecutors filed a second round of charges that totaled 24 in all, his bail was reset to $1.5 million and he's been in custody ever since he was arraigned on July 22, 2019. 

Just after his arrest, a pair of FBI agents came to town to question several people about Fickas' finances and investigate whether Fickas had been involved in laundering campaign contributions tied to cannabis interests. Local detectives found Fickas had a large—and as yet unexplained—amount of cash during the rape investigation. 

So far, nobody has been charged in federal court in relation to that investigation, and it's not clear whether or not that the investigation remains ongoing.

After his arrest, those same electeds who valued Fickas for his ability to rally large numbers of students to volunteer on campaigns moved quickly to distance themselves from him. Salinas City Councilmember Steve McShane returned a cash donation Fickas made to him. Fickas also brought student volunteers to work on Sheriff Steve Bernal's 2018 campaign, and was listed on a campaign manager for a successful tax measure campaign in the city of Salinas.

Fickas also sat for a time on the Santa Rita Union School Board and ran in 2015 for the Salinas Union High School District board, losing to incumbent Carlos Rubio 51.3 percent to 48.7 percent.

The website Ballotpedia, which tracks campaigns, noted that Fickas was endorsed by the Salinas Valley Leadership Group for that race.

In addition, according to SmartVoter.org, Fickas also worked on the campaigns of Mike Kanalakis for sheriff, Butch Lindley for Monterey County supervisor, Abel Maldonado for State Senate and Jeff Denham for State Senate, as well as a number of local school board races. 

Fickas had been listed on the website of PJF Communications, a Salinas-based political consultancy co-founded by his brother, Paul, as a project manager and consultant who provides clients with precinct walkers, phone bankers and strategy to target absentee voters during election seasons. "During a campaign in Salinas in 2010, John Fickas organized over 100 walkers and phone bankers in less than 48 hours," the website stated. 

Shortly after his arrest, his bio was scrubbed from the PJF website.