Struiksma Was Warned Not to Enter Mayor’s Race

Several prominent Republicans warned acting Mayor Ed Struiksma through an intermediary in December that embarrassing stories about his council business expenses and his 1980 divorce would surface if he campaigned for mayor against their candidate of choice, Councilman Bill Cleator, The Times has learned.

That warning was delivered by Councilman Uvaldo Martinez when he met with Struiksma and his two political consultants--Dave Lewis and Jim Johnston--on Dec. 23 for lunch at a Horton Plaza restaurant, the four men have said.

Struiksma said that hours after the meeting, he received yet another warning, this one in a telephone call from local businessman Malin Burnham, a prominent Republican who is a Cleator backer in the mayor’s race. Struiksma said Burnham told him matter-of-factly that he would be “politically dead in this town” if he challenged Cleator, split the Republican vote and allowed popular Democrat Maureen O’Connor to win the city’s top elective office outright in the Feb. 25 primary.

The warnings add to the escalating political intrigue in the mayoral race, especially the increasingly bitter conflict between Cleator and Struiksma, one-time close associates who are opponents in the mayoral campaign. It may also help explain the timing of allegations against Struiksma that he claimed a 1984 meal on a city expense form that actually was paid for by a city redevelopment official who is a Cleator supporter.

City officials last week referred Struiksma’s expenses for a $2,400 trip to New York and Boston to the district attorney’s office to see if a formal criminal investigation is warranted. A district attorney’s spokesman said late Friday that no determination had been made in the matter, but one is expected well before the primary vote.

Struiksma has admitted he did not pay for the $65 meal, and that many of the charges he listed on a city expense form were false. But he said the city auditor’s office knew the numbers had “no basis in fact” because it advised him and his aide to “reconstruct” the charges after Struiksma lost an envelope containing all his receipts for the trip.

City Auditor Ed Ryan, however, disputes Struiksma’s claim and says he’s found none of his employees who gave such advice.

Seizing on the controversy, Cleator has asked his colleagues to convene a special closed-door meeting this week to question Ryan about the incident, a move City Hall insiders say is designed to exploit Struiksma’s woes. Struiksma has countered by calling the special session a “kangaroo court” run by “Judge Cleator.”

That a controversy over the trip would flare during the campaign came as no surprise to Struiksma and his consultants, because they were warned about the possibility more than a month ago by Martinez.

“He told me I better not run,” Struiksma said. He said Martinez warned him to “think long and hard about it. He just indicated that there were certain things out there that were going to come up and he had been instructed to tell me that.”

“The whole luncheon and the nature of what was being talked about centered around my potential campaign,” Struiksma said. “And the clear intent of Uvaldo was there were these things that would happen to me and ‘You better stay out (of the race). And you would better stay out because it would just make it more difficult for Bill.’ ”

Cleator said he did not know about the warnings. “Did I send Uvaldo on a trip to give them a message? No,” he said. “Did somebody that was a supporter send Uvaldo? If they did, I don’t know who it is or why they did it.”

Repeated telephone calls to Burnham’s home were unanswered Friday and Saturday, and he could not be reached for comment.

The first warning came during a Dec. 23 lunch, at Martinez’s request, at the Third Avenue Restaurant, which is on the top level of Horton Plaza. Along with Struiksma, Martinez invited Lewis and Johnston, who served as his political consultants in his past campaign.

“I was asked to talk to him (Struiksma) on the issue of not running” in the mayoral race, Martinez said.

Martinez said that “two or three” prominent Republicans asked him to approach Struiksma, but he declined to identify them. He said they were upset that Struiksma would be considering a run for the mayoral vacancy, created by the ouster of Roger Hedgecock, because Cleator was the candidate favored by conservative stalwarts.

Martinez said that before he met with Struiksma, Lewis and Johnston, he was “made aware” of two “issues” that could be potentially damaging to Struiksma in a heated campaign--an allegation of physical abuse against Struiksma by his former wife, and questions about the trip Struiksma took between Oct. 15 and 21, 1984, to New York and then to Boston for an Urban Land Institute.

Martinez, who is himself embroiled in a scandal and faces a grand jury investigation into possible fraud for his use of a city credit card, declined to say who told him about the subjects, except to characterize his information as “very serious talk.”

“There is an element in the community that is aware (of the two issues) and not only wants you out of the race, but wants to hurt you,” Martinez said he told Struiksma at the meeting. “I’m going through the same thing, and you won’t like it.”

According to Martinez, Struiksma shrugged off the warning. “ ‘If that’s all they can find after one term, four years on the council, that doesn’t sound too bad to me,’ ” Martinez quoted Struiksma as saying. “I took that as a sign he was leaning toward running.”

Johnston said Martinez issued the warning in a “gentlemanly” way and said he wanted to talk to Struiksma “as a friend.” But Lewis said he considered the episode an unusual display of “hard-ball politics.”

“As you know, I’ve been around this business for a long time, and I’ve never had a meeting like that before,” Lewis said.

Struiksma said he “got a little upset, as you can imagine” during the conversation with Martinez.

“As we were leaving the restaurant, I told Uvaldo that I didn’t appreciate being talked to by a messenger and that he should get back to the people who had sent him, and if they had a problem with me getting in the race, have them call me,” Struiksma said.

“Later that afternoon, I received a phone call from Malin Burnham, who told me I should give it a lot of thought before entering the race, but if I entered the race and it caused Maureen (O’Connor) to win the primary, I would be politically dead in this town,” Struiksma said.

“He was not mad. He was not pushy. It was a matter-of-fact conversation,” he said.

Struiksma said Burnham did not mention having talked to Martinez nor did he specifically mention the two issues raised by Martinez at the lunch.

Struiksma said that Burnham, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of John Burnham & Co., the downtown insurance and real estate firm, had been one of his political supporters and contributors in his two council campaigns.

Even before Hedgecock was expelled for felony conspiracy and perjury convictions in December, Burnham was testing the political waters by talking to other conservative heavyweights like Gordon Luce, chairman and chief executive officer of Great American First Savings Bank, to see if Cleator could be appointed to fill the mayoral post, an option that Cleator himself vetoed.

Just a few weeks after the warnings, San Diego Newsline, a weekly newspaper, published a cover story titled, “The seamy side of Ed Struiksma.” Among other things, the Jan. 14 article detailed charges made by Struiksma’s former wife in divorce proceedings that he assaulted her on Christmas Day, 1978. The divorce was initiated in October, 1978, and a final judgment entered in January, 1980.

The allegation was never pursued in the divorce proceedings, and Struiksma’s ex-wife never filed any criminal charges against him. The Times, along with other San Diego newspapers, knew about the allegation but declined to run stories after the former wife, Jacqueline Tomhave of Tucson, Ariz., recanted her story.

“A lot of anger was involved, a lot of people were upset and I probably would not agree with what I wrote at the time,” she said. Struiksma also denies the assault took place.

On Jan. 27, the San Diego Daily Transcript published a story about Struiksma and the expenses he incurred during the 1984 trip to New York and Boston. Questions about the trip had been reported late last year by The Reader, another weekly publication, but the Transcript article contained a new twist.

The article quoted Jan Anton, senior marketing representative for Iliff Thorn & Co., a director of the Centre City Development Corp., and a member of Cleator’s mayoral finance committee, as saying that Struiksma joined him, his wife and a Great American First Savings Bank executive for dinner Oct. 16 in New York. The bill came to over $200, and Anton said he paid it.

But Struiksma claimed a $65 meal the same night on city expense forms. He admits that Anton paid for the dinner, but blamed the discrepancy on instructions from the auditor’s office to “reconstruct” expenses for the trip because Struiksma had lost all his receipts for the trip.

Struiksma aide Ellen Capozzoli said that when she informed the auditor’s office of the missing receipts, she was told to fill in the meals and other miscellaneous charges until they added up to the $600. Struiksma said he did not realize Capozzoli had filled in a $65 claim for the Anton meal, because he did not examine the full form before he signed it.

The city auditor’s office processed the claim and paid Struiksma. Questions about the charges came up again in late 1985 when Ryan reexamined council expenses in the wake of the Martinez scandal. He said he asked Struiksma for additional documentation, but stopped his inquiry after learning that the district attorney’s office was also looking into the New York-Boston expenses.

The district attorney’s office dropped the matter when nothing seemed amiss in the paper work, a spokesman said last week. But Ryan asked for a second opinion after the Transcript article.

Anton could not be reached this week for comment. His secretary said he was out of town.

Cleator declared his candidacy for mayor on Dec. 19. Despite the warnings from Martinez and Burnham, Struiksma declared his candidacy on Jan. 2, saying his decision to oppose Cleator was based on a poll of 400 voters that showed that he, not Cleator, had the best chance to defeat O’Connor.