Spaccia was making $376,288, and four of the five City Council members were paying themselves nearly $100,000 a year.

“I seen them take out Mirabal in handcuffs,” longtime resident Hassan Mourad said after the arrests. “I seen them drag him out.”

At the mayor’s house, police briefly used a battering ram when Hernandez didn’t immediately come to the door.

Former Police Chief Randy Adams, who was also scrutinized in the salary scandal, was not arrested.

Cooley, who knew Adams when he was the police chief in Glendale, said there was no evidence Adams illegally obtained his $457,000 annual salary. The figure was $150,000 more than the Los Angeles chief of police gets paid.

“Being paid excessive salaries is not a crime,” Cooley said. “Illegally obtaining those salaries is a crime.”

Authorities said Rizzo made $4.3 million by paying himself through different employment contracts that were not approved by the City Council. Meanwhile, council members paid themselves a combined $1.25 million for what Cooley called “phantom meetings” of various city boards and agencies.

Rizzo also was accused of giving $1.9 million in loans to himself, Spaccia, Hernandez, Artiga and dozens of others.

Cooley said his investigators have pored over more than 60,000 pages of documents and more people could be arrested.

His office began investigating last March, Cooley said, four months before the Los Angeles Times reported the salaries, which brought national attention to the small city of 40,000 people.

Since the scandal broke, public officials, city managers and others have said the situation in Bell showed why people must insist that elected officials communicate honestly and openly with them.

“One of the problems that was obvious with Bell was the lack of transparency and the lack of involvement on the part of the public,” Dave Mora, West Coast regional director of the International City/County Management Association, said recently.