Former Partner of Moriarty : Contractor’s Lobbying Gets Results, Draws Fire

Rolla E. Wolfe is a big-time Kansas City highway contractor accustomed to getting what he wants.

When he reached out for business in Southern California, he got what he wanted here too.

He teamed up with the controversial W. Patrick Moriarty and proceeded to win both a lucrative landfill contract and the state’s first Superfund toxic-waste cleanup job.

Moriarty recently pleaded guilty to federal racketeering charges and pledged to cooperate with federal agents investigating politicians who allegedly received bribes from him in the form of money, prostitutes, vehicles, vacation housing and the hiring of relatives.

Moriarty’s conviction was unrelated to any of his business ventures with Wolfe.

But Wolfe has come in for criticism of his own for his dealings with politicians. He has made a practice in California and the Midwest of hiring high-priced lobbyists, befriending influential politicians, giving generously to political campaigns and even putting politicians or their relatives on his payroll.

After setting his sights on new business in California, he “came out of nowhere,” as one retired Los Angeles city engineer put it, and beat out competitors who state and local experts said were either less expensive or more qualified.

In San Bernardino, a grand jury committee probing county mismanagement blasted Wolfe’s lobbying and said it appeared that the landfill contract he was awarded is not in the public’s best interest.

In Los Angeles, prosecutor Barry Groveman said he tried to open an investigation of the Public Works Board’s award of the Capri dump cleanup contract to R. E. Wolfe Enterprises. But in the press of other business, he said the probe never got off the ground.

Wolfe, Moriarty and their associates contributed $14,399 to key politicians about the time the two contracts were awarded--$10,899 to three San Bernardino County supervisors, $1,000 to the San Bernardino sheriff who investigated Wolfe’s alleged organized crime ties, and $2,500 to Los Angeles Councilman Arthur K. Snyder, who contacted city staff on Wolfe’s behalf.

While seeking the contracts, Wolfe also hired state Sen. Daniel E. Boatwright (D-Concord) and his then-girlfriend, Christine Del George, paying them more than $44,000 for their legal and lobbying services. Although Del George is not registered as a lobbyist with the secretary of state, Wolfe said he has paid her more than $30,000 in lobbying fees.

Wolfe said he spent another $24,708 hiring local lobbyists--$16,613 for Frank Michelena of Orange County, $5,095 for Cerrell & Associates of Los Angeles and $2,000 for Peter A. Lynch of Monterey Park. Neither Cerrell nor Lynch has included Wolfe or Moriarty as clients on their city lobbyist-disclosure forms.

Another consultant, who Lynch said received $1,000 for his efforts on Wolfe’s behalf, was Warren A. Hollier, the former Board of Public Works president who resigned in 1980 amid charges of irregularities in the board’s spending practices.

In San Bernardino, Wolfe hired the son of Supervisor Cal McElwain while trying to win the supervisor’s vote on a multimillion-dollar contract to run five county landfills.

About the same time, Wolfe said, he had a “minor” business relationship with a bank headed by a member of a task force evaluating Wolfe’s landfill contract proposal. Wolfe said he has deposited something “less than $100,000” in the Foothill Independent Bank.

Wolfe’s attorney, Robert F. Schauer of Ontario, contends that Wolfe’s lobbying, though criticized, is perfectly legal. And he defended Wolfe’s campaign contributions as being “as American as apple pie.”

Wolfe said flatly: “Some people think I try to buy people, and I don’t.”

He added that he ended his partnership with Moriarty more than a year ago.

Wolfe hooked up with Moriarty in August, 1982, a few months after he was recruited by a Moriarty aide over drinks at a waste-hauler’s convention in Palm Springs. The aide, Richard Raymond Keith, initially tapped Wolfe to run prospective landfills on Moriarty’s property in the La Tuna Canyon section of the San Fernando Valley and in the San Francisco suburb of Pleasanton. The landfills were never opened.

Wolfe, who built roads and ran landfills in the Midwest, was at the convention scouting new business in California, where more and more counties are seeking private contractors to run landfills as a post-Proposition 13 cost-cutting measure. A gregarious, self-described graduate of the “school of hard knocks,” Wolfe impressed the rubbish men, as he does most people, with his folksy, good-ol’-boy charm.

Self-Made Millionaire

A self-made millionaire, Wolfe started in the construction business 30 years ago with two bulldozers and a truck, and has since built seven companies that did about $65 million in business throughout the United States during the early 1980s.

Before going into business with Moriarty, Wolfe said he checked out the Anaheim fireworks magnate, “and everybody thought he was the greatest thing since sliced bread. And that’s the truth. Every political person or banker I talked to about him said, ‘Boy, you couldn’t have a better guy to be associated with than Pat Moriarty.’ That’s what was said.”

Together, they established R. E. Wolfe Enterprises, in which each had a 50% interest. In addition, Wolfe said he put up $100,000 to invest in a City of Commerce card club that Moriarty was forming.

(The club was the focus of recent federal corruption charges against Moriarty; Frank Sansone, a Las Vegas gambling figure with reported ties to organized crime, and four former Commerce city officials. Moriarty and the four city officials pleaded guilty; Sansone was tried and found guilty of four bribery-related counts.)

Wolfe said he backed out of the club very soon after he put up his money and long before federal indictments were handed down in November, 1984. He said he was warned of impending trouble by Orange County Supervisor Bruce Nestande, whose campaign had received $18,000 in laundered funds from Moriarty.

Wolfe said Nestande told him: “If you want to do business in Orange County or in California, you better sever your relationship with him (Moriarty). . . . He said, ‘For God’s sake, get out of the card club!’ ”

Wolfe said he filed documents to buy Moriarty’s share of R. E. Wolfe Enterprises on Aug. 6, 1983.

“It appeared that maybe he (Moriarty) was doing something that I didn’t want to be involved in,” Wolfe said at the time.

They had been partners for about a full year by then, sharing offices and a bookkeeper at Moriarty’s Solid M Corp. headquarters in Anaheim. It was during this period that they together pursued the California contracts.

Wolfe minimized Moriarty’s role in their partnership, saying that Moriarty merely suggested the most effective political lobbyists and middlemen to hire. But Moriarty also did some personal lobbying, and his employees made campaign contributions.

Lobbied Supervisors Personally

During the 1983 lobbying blitz in San Bernardino, Moriarty and Wolfe personally lobbied the supervisors.

Wolfe also presented county officials with a stack of glowing letters of recommendation from some of the top politicians, judges, police officials and businessmen in Kansas and Missouri.

Shortly after many of the recommendations were written, however, Wolfe came under fire from government officials and newspapers in the Midwest for his political dealings.

For example, in Independence, Mo., Wolfe had the daughter of a top official on his payroll while the official was negotiating $100,000 in disputed claims with one of Wolfe’s companies. Wolfe also had on his payroll a Kansas City councilman who was voting on a contract that indirectly benefited another of Wolfe’s companies. In addition, Wolfe was criticized for winning a permit to open a Kansas landfill without revealing a secret option with another firm to actually operate the facility.

Wolfe told The Times that he got no special consideration from the official who negotiated the disputed claims. As for the councilman, Wolfe acknowledged hiring him, but denied controlling his vote. He conceded he made “a mistake” in not disclosing the secret landfill option.

Organized-Crime Ties Alleged

Long before these troubles, Wolfe’s reputation in Kansas City had been marred by newspaper allegations in the late 1970s of his business dealings with organized crime figures.

Wolfe has acknowledged hiring one mobster, Carl Spero, as a manual laborer. But Wolfe said he did not know that Spero, killed last year in a bomb attack, was a prominent underworld figure. Wolfe said he was similarly unaware of the mob ties of a man to whom he once sold property.

He said that he has never been involved in any organized-crime activity, and produced a 1978 letter from former FBI Director Clarence Kelley stating that there was no record he had been under investigation.

Nevertheless, the newspaper allegations resurfaced in 1983, when Wolfe applied for the landfill contract in San Bernardino. Sheriff Floyd Tidwell pointed to the old newspaper charges in a report he prepared for the Board of Supervisors, who had asked him to investigate whether any of the bidders were tied to organized crime.

Although his probe was inconclusive, Tidwell advised the supervisors of an “open” federal organized-crime strike force investigation of Wolfe in the Kansas City area.

Wolfe’s attorney, Thomas Cox of Kansas City, said the strike force was interested in some dredging equipment Wolfe had loaned to a Teamsters business agent in 1980. Wolfe, who also constructed an office building for the frequently investigated union, voluntarily talked to the FBI “seven or eight months ago” because he had nothing to hide, Cox said. He added that he has not heard from the FBI since.

Report Critical of Contract

Despite the then-open investigation, Wolfe in December, 1983, won the $2.7-million-a-year contract to operate five San Bernardino county landfills for five years. Six months later, the county grand jury issued a scathing report on the way the contract was let.

The grand jury criticized the supervisors for ignoring their own blue-ribbon management task force, which had recommended giving the contract to the lowest bidder instead of negotiating a contract with R. E. Wolfe. The panel also questioned a gap in the schedule of the oral interviews of three finalists. After two back-to-back interviews, two hours elapsed before Wolfe was called in, raising the grand jury’s concern that Wolfe “could have been the recipient of information beneficial to their efforts” during the time lag.

Similar questions have been raised by several city and state officials about the Capri toxic-cleanup contract in Los Angeles, which Wolfe won without undergoing a formal or extensive background check.

Maureen A. Kindel, president of the Public Works Board, said she did not know until recently about Wolfe’s record in the Midwest and conceded in an interview that “ultimately the process wasn’t so great” because of that.

She said she knew of Wolfe’s partnership with Moriarty before the contract award and had begun to read about Moriarty’s influence-peddling in The Times. But she pointed out that Moriarty backed out of Wolfe’s company about a week before the Capri contract was actually signed.

1st State Superfund Cleanup

Because it was the first Superfund cleanup in California, the Capri job was important to Wolfe, as it was to everyone who pursued the contract to clean up the one-acre lot in Boyle Heights where more than 2.4 million gallons of noxious and hazardous chemical waste were improperly disposed in the 1970s.

“We felt that if we could get the Capri contract, we could prove ourselves in California as qualified, efficient hazardous waste-removal contractors,” Wolfe said. “So did every other contractor in the country.”

But R. E. Wolfe was the only contractor with the support of City Councilman Snyder, whose Eastside district includes the Capri dump.

Snyder has received $12,950 in campaign contributions from Wolfe, Moriarty and their associates since 1978, including $2,500 that arrived 10 to 18 days after the city signed its contract with Wolfe.

Snyder said in an interview that his only interest in the Capri project was to assure the health and safety of the surrounding community.

“I don’t know who it was, but somebody called me . . . (and) told me that they (public works commissioners) were about to issue a contract to a company with no experience,” Snyder said. (Actually, the front-runner had extensive toxic-cleanup experience.)

That day, Snyder said he summoned Sanitation Director Tadao Isomoto, the engineer overseeing the selection process, to the council floor for a private chat.

‘Non-Routine’ Contact

Isomoto recalled that Snyder said: “I got a call and spoke to people from R. E. Wolfe. I just want to make sure they get a fair interview.”

Isomoto reported the “non-routine” contact to Public Works President Kindel, who said that she instructed him to ignore it.

On June 17, Isomoto drafted a report naming D’Appolonia Consulting Engineers of San Francisco as his staff’s top choice for the contract.

But the Public Works Board rejected that recommendation and eventually awarded the contract to R. E. Wolfe Enterprises.

The turnaround has sparked questions by city and state officials.

“We were curious as the dickens” about the switch, said Joel Moskowitz, a top state health department administrator, “but we had no legal way to find out.”

Christopher E. Koerner, the health department’s on-site engineer, sent a memorandum to the department’s top legal adviser advising him that “the contract award was very improper and . . . you should investigate it.” But the legal counselor, Joe Symkowick, said he did not refer Koerner’s charges to the state Department of Justice because he believed the attorney general had already launched an investigation.

‘Appearance of Improprieties’

Groveman, a former deputy city attorney and now the top environmental prosecutor for the district attorney, told The Times that he was concerned about “what appeared to me to be incongruities and the appearance of improprieties” in the city’s contract award process. He said he had received “information relating to the fact the contract was not being awarded above board.”

About a year ago, Groveman said, he advised then-City Atty. Ira Reiner to assign a lawyer and an investigator to probe the contract award. Board President Kindel said she also asked Reiner to look into the matter.

Specifically, Groveman said he told Reiner he was concerned about the role played by former Public Works Commissioner Louis F. Moret, who oversaw the Capri cleanup before leaving the board last year to run unsuccessfully for a seat on the Los Angeles City Council.

Groveman said the investigation never got off the ground, but Reiner said his office conducted a limited “inquiry” that produced “nothing conclusive.”

Reiner later endorsed Moret in his council bid.

Before Moret left office, Kindel said she personally asked him whether he was predisposed to Wolfe or any other bidder.

“I questioned Lou (Moret) very carefully about that,” Kindel said in an interview, “and he said, ‘Absolutely not.’ ”

Denied Impropriety

Moret told The Times he could not remember Kindel questioning him and denied any impropriety on his part.

“People can ask whatever questions they want,” Moret said. “There’s nothing to it.”

Wolfe said his lobbyist, Joe Cerrell, set up a meeting with Moret before the contract award to persuade the commissioner to add oral interviews to the selection process. Wolfe said Moret “was receptive.”

“It was Joe Cerrell who talked to Lou Moret,” said Schauer, Wolfe’s California attorney. He recalled that a meeting with Moret took place “before the contract was signed.”

While not addressing lobbyists, city contract rules prohibit city personnel other than designated city sanitation engineers from “holding any meetings . . . with any bidder” before the contract award.

Moret denied meeting with Wolfe representatives before the contract award.

Both Cerrell and his aide, Hal Dash, declined to be interviewed by The Times.

When staff engineers formally recommended D’Appolonia for the job at a board meeting June 29, Moret “expressed his displeasure” with the selection process. He highlighted an attractive feature of R. E. Wolfe’s proposal and, with Kindel’s backing, successfully urged that oral interviews be held, board minutes show.

Called Unnecessary

Oral interviews are often part of the city’s contractor selection process--but in this case they had not been planned, were not listed in the contract specifications and were opposed as unnecessary by Isomoto, the sanitation director.

“The process was proceeding very systematically until the board got involved,” Isomoto recalled.

In what Isomoto called a “rare” move, Moret asked to sit in on the interviews. He attended only the first one, Moret recalled, and “just sat in the background and listened.”

Moret said he received a copy of the questions during the interview, but said he left them behind and did not pass them along to Wolfe. “I have never passed on anything,” he said.

In their interview the next day, Wolfe and his employees were asked the same questions as the earlier applicants. Isomoto recalled that the Wolfe team was surprisingly well prepared, showing more aptitude than its written proposal indicated.

“My engineers were really surprised at how well R. E. Wolfe did in their oral presentation,” said Isomoto, who has since retired. “They just came out and said . . . they (Wolfe staff) covered all the details. That’s the first time I ever heard them be surprised after an oral interview in all my years.”

Asked About Leaks

Louis Kneiper, a former Wolfe vice president who fielded most of the questions for the company, said he has been asked several times by law enforcement officials whether Wolfe was leaked the questions in advance of the interview.

Kneiper said a representative of the attorney general’s office (whose name he could not remember) phoned in December and said “there was a list (of questions) that was provided to Wolfe” before the interview. “And I said I had never seen any questions.”

Wolfe told The Times: “We didn’t have any list.”

(The attorney general’s office has no investigative file on Wolfe or Capri, said Chief Assistant Atty. Gen. Andrea S. Ordin.)

Kneiper attributed his success at the city interview to his personal “pizazz” and a comprehensive mock interview the day before. During the preparatory “role-playing” session, Kneiper said that Wolfe and others shot him a series of tough questions.

Wolfe said he has no recollection of the role playing: “They (his employees) knew every letter in the proposal. So they didn’t have to prepare.”

Bidders Re-Ranked

Following the oral interviews, the city staff re-ranked the bidders, with R. E. Wolfe edging past D’Appolonia into first place by one point. When the staff recommendation was sent to the board this time, on July 6, it was unanimously approved.

At that point, an executive for D’Appolonia, the original choice of both the city and state staffs, met privately with Wolfe in Sacramento and agreed to settle for a subcontract on the project.

The agreement was described as “highly unusual” in one state memo, and Kindel called it “very surprising.”

Even with the city’s approval, Wolfe faced one more hurdle. The state Department of Health Services, which was paying for the job with its toxic cleanup Superfund, had to ratify the choice of Wolfe.

State approval was far from certain because Koerner, the department’s strong-willed project manager, was convinced that Wolfe had misleadingly “low-balled” his bid, and that D’Appolonia was “by far the best qualified,” memos show.

Again, Wolfe turned to one of his lobbyists: Christine Del George, former aide to state Sen. Robert Presley (D-Riverside). Wolfe said he was paying her $2,000 a month.

Del George, who did not return reporters’ phone calls, asked Presley to arrange a meeting for her with top state health officials, the senator recalled. When the meeting went poorly, she went to Boatwright, whom she was then dating.

Del George tearfully complained that Koerner had rebuffed her lobbying efforts, said Boatwright, who then swung into action. The senator, who was receiving a $3,000 monthly retainer as one of Wolfe’s lawyers, said he called Koerner’s boss to complain.

Removed From Review Panel

Nobody agrees on exactly what was said during that call. But that same day, Koerner--the engineer most familiar with both the task and the firms competing for the job--was bounced from the review panel that subsequently approved Wolfe on July 18. (The contract with Wolfe was signed Aug. 15.)

Wolfe said he only recently learned of Boatwright’s call and said he never asked him to make it. He said he had hired Boatwright for another matter--the preparation of a proposal to run Orange County landfills.

Wolfe said he considered Boatwright “as being the kind of guy who was pretty knowledgeable. . . . I felt he knew a hell of a lot about California government at all levels. . . .”

Wolfe met Boatwright and Del George at the US Festival in San Bernardino in early June, 1983, when all three were guests of the Board of Supervisors. Wolfe said he hired Boatwright “on the spot” and hired Del George a short time later.

Wolfe met the couple through Cal McElwain, then chairman of the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors.

McElwain, Wolfe’s old friend and a fellow Shriner, was a prime mover in the county’s award of its landfill contract to Wolfe.

Wolfe and his employees have given $5,533 to McElwain’s campaign. And shortly before McElwain voted for Wolfe’s bid, Wolfe hired McElwain’s then-unemployed son, Mickey, 34.

‘I Had No Problem’

Wolfe explained: “What happened is that . . . he was out of a job . . . and he says, ‘You got anything I can do?’ . . . Because I knew him and knew the family and knew their character, I had no problem with hiring him.”

He said the supervisor “probably didn’t know (about the job) for two or three days or maybe even a week.”

Supervisor McElwain said he found out after Mickey appeared on Wolfe’s behalf at a board meeting where Wolfe’s landfill bid was being debated.

“I bristled because we were trying to do business with Wolfe, and I thought it would look bad,” the supervisor said. “It had no bearing on my decision (to vote for Wolfe) and that’s the thing that bothered me. But it would indicate that you would think it would.”

McElwain said he is convinced that Wolfe’s proposal was the most economical. “And I think he is doing a hell of a job,” he said. “There’s such an improvement over our dump sites in this valley, it’s not even funny.”

Supervisor Robert Hammock was another of Wolfe’s prime supporters. He has received $5,740 from Wolfe, his legal counsel and Ed Widtfeldt, the manager of Moriarty’s Rialto fireworks factory.

Hammock recalled that Widtfeldt, his long-time acquaintance, also arranged a 1983 luncheon where he was personally lobbied by Wolfe and Moriarty.

Supervisor John Joyner was a third recipient of Wolfe’s campaign largess. He received $2,376 in donations from Wolfe before the landfill contract vote, despite his outspoken criticism of Wolfe and his lobbying practices.

Personally Lobbied by Wolfe

He said Wolfe personally lobbied him on several occasions, once even buttonholing him at a Shriner’s meeting in the high desert.

“McElwain had invited me; Wolfe was there . . . (but) I got away from him,” Joyner said. “He (Wolfe) is personable and persistent as hell. He has no shame when he gets after you.”

Wolfe also lobbied county employees and members of independent advisory bodies, includingWallace Gott of the Business Consulting Council, a businessman’s group that helped the county choose its landfill operator.

Gott, chairman of the Independent Foothill Bank, said Wolfe met with him privately in July, 1982, to suggest that the county negotiate a landfill agreement directly with R. E. Wolfe Enterprises rather than ask for competitive bids from several firms.

During the meeting--held at Gott’s bank and attended by the bank president--Wolfe also suggested he do some business at the bank, Gott recalled. Ultimately, Wolfe said he deposited “less than $100,000.”

Grand Jury Report

The grand jury, in reviewing the landfill contract process, criticized Wolfe for “extensive” lobbying “at both the county staff level . . . and with certain members of the Board of Supervisors.”

County officials were criticized for their “appalling,” “alarming” and “irresponsible” dealings with Wolfe. They were accused of having “violated expected standards of good business practices and made data available to the R. E. Wolfe firm for the purpose of giving that company a competitive edge.”

Schauer, Wolfe’s local attorney, called the grand jury report “unfair” because his client was not allowed to respond to the charges. He said “90%” of the criticism was directed at county officials, rather than Wolfe.

“The true focus was that, procedurally, maybe they should have done it a little differently in the county,” Schauer said. “Wolfe has got to work within the system. He doesn’t invent the procedure (or) how it works.”

Schauer added: “It’s no secret R. E. Wolfe would like to do more state work, more hazardous cleanup work.” For this reason, he said he would like to see the controversy put to rest.

“We don’t want government officials looking over their shoulders, saying, ‘Does this guy smell bad?’ or something like that,” Schauer said, “because that doesn’t help his ability to get the next kind of job.”

Next: A look at why R.E. Wolfe’s cleanup of the Capri dump cost more and took longer than expected.

Times staff writers Tracy Wood, George Frank and Josh Getlin contributed to this story. KEY PLAYERS IN 2 CONTRACT AWARDS