Crimes by L.A. Airport Security Unit Reported

A nine-month investigation has revealed evidence of grand theft, embezzlement, extortion, conspiracy to commit bribery “and other felony criminal conduct” by officers of Los Angeles International Airport’s independent police force, spokesmen for the Los Angeles Police Department announced Tuesday.

The identities of those under investigation in the 206-officer Airport Security Bureau were not revealed. Last October, however, when the probe was begun by the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division in response to a series of anonymous letters to city officials, Security Bureau officers said at least nine of their colleagues had been accused in the letters. Neither Los Angeles Police Cmdr. William Booth, who made the announcement Tuesday, nor Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Steve Sowders, whose office will begin reviewing the evidence today for possible prosecutions, would discuss the circumstances under which the alleged crimes are believed to have occurred.

Search warrants executed at the Airport Security Bureau headquarters when the probe began indicated, however, that investigators were looking for payroll records, overtime payment reports, work schedules and any evidence of missing property, according to an officer from the bureau who witnessed the search.

Booth said that besides the evidence of theft, embezzlement, extortion and conspiracy to bribe, there is data indicating misappropriation of public funds, falsification of public records, unauthorized release of computer information and unauthorized release of police information.

Booth said there have been no arrests.

The airport’s general manager, Clifton Moore, said the Internal Affairs investigative report will be presented to the city Airport Commission at a 10 a.m. executive session today. Board members are scheduled to meet with police at a luncheon two hours later.

“The commission will review the report and, hopefully, give me further direction,” Moore said.

The investigation was begun last October at Moore’s request. Moore said the anonymous letters forwarded to him several weeks before that had made “rather severe allegations” against the Security Bureau, which is independent of both the Police Department as a whole and the department’s two-dozen-member contingent at the airport.

The Security Bureau’s 206 officers make it one of Southern California’s largest police agencies, comparable in size to the departments of Bakersfield, Pasadena and Torrance, according to figures compiled 18 months ago. In Los Angeles County, only the Sheriff’s Department, the Los Angeles Police Department and the Long Beach Police Department were substantially larger, according to those figures.

Frank Costigan, 44, who had been appointed bureau chief on a probationary basis in November, 1983, resigned the post last October, a month before he had been scheduled to receive the appointment on a permanent basis. He now works as a security guard at Ontario International Airport, a position he held before his promotion.

Costigan could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.

‘Clean Out Favoritism’

He said last October that he had been ordered by Department of Airports officials not to discuss the investigation. In an interview several months before the probe was launched, however, he said he had been appointed chief to “clean out the favoritism” and end complaints about poor police work at the airport.

“In doing so,” he said, “I had to step on some toes or deflate some egos.”

As a result, he said, he received anonymous warnings that he would lose his job.