Roth Chides Election Opponent Beam About Sealing Records of Lawsuit

Anaheim Mayor Donald R. Roth on Thursday attacked his opponent in the race for 4th District supervisor for obtaining a court order sealing records in a lawsuit. Roth contrasted that move with his own release of income tax returns for the last two years.

Roth said that City of Orange Mayor James H. Beam’s maneuvering in a court fight stemming from a real estate development “makes us all wonder just what Jim Beam is trying to hide.”

Beam retorted that he had “nothing to hide” and repeated his charge that the lawsuit, filed eight months ago by a member of Roth’s executive campaign committee, was politically motivated and “will be dropped the day after the election.”

Roth also released a list of company names that Beam has used in his business career and a separate list of approximately 20 lawsuits in which Beam or his company was named as a defendant.

But the Anaheim mayor conceded that “I guess it’s not unusual” and is not illegal for a business to use different names on different projects. Roth also said he was not personally familiar with any of the lawsuits involving Beam.

Beam said that several of the lawsuits listed by Roth involved Beam as a councilman or mayor of the city, not as a businessman. After checking the files, Beam’s campaign manager said that other lawsuits listed by Roth related either to projects in which Beam was not involved or in which his involvement had ended before the lawsuit was filed.

Beam said that one court action mentioned, listing the “Roman Catholic Bishop of Orange” as plaintiff, was a routine land condemnation in which the city obtained land for a water tower.

“There’s not a lawsuit on there that’s been successfully prosecuted and I’ve lost,” Beam said. “That’s the society we live in today, folks . . . anyone who’s in business today is going to get sued.”

One lawsuit in which Beam is a defendant, and which was the centerpiece of Roth’s press conference, was filed Jan. 28 by Continental Commercial Finance Corp., which is owned by William Cooper.

The lawsuit charged Beam and his company with misappropriating funds and said that Continental invested $100,000 with Beam in a planned condominium development but recouped only $66,000 of the investment.

The lawsuit was filed more than four years after Cooper’s company received the $66,000 and, according to Beam, only a few days before Roth’s campaign began a telephone poll in which respondents were asked if they would be “more or less likely” to vote for Beam if “you knew that he was being sued by a former business partner.”

Cooper, a prominent Republican who is county co-chairman of Gov. George Deukmejian’s reelection campaign, said earlier this year that the lawsuit was purely business-related and had nothing to do with politics.

Last week, Beam’s attorneys won a court order sealing until after the election financial records that they may be required to produce in connection with the lawsuit.

Beam said the Roth campaign was using the court action as “an unlimited fishing license for my business records.” He said that asking the court to bar public scrutiny of the documents until after the election was “simply a precaution against what we think is a political action.”

He also said he would release his own tax returns, probably in the next few weeks.

Roth’s tax returns, filed jointly with his wife, Jacquelene, and distributed to reporters Thursday, listed $13,484 in wages for 1985, $7,123 in interest income, $9,416 in pensions and annuities and a total income of $36,549.

Roth said the pension comes from his 20-year U.S. Navy career. He said that as mayor of Anaheim he is paid $800 a month, or $9,600 a year. The county supervisor’s job he is seeking pays $55,000 a year.

On Thursday, Beam picked up the endorsement of Manuel P. Mendez, an Anaheim architect and lay minister who finished last in a field of four candidates in the June 3 primary for the supervisor’s seat currently held by Ralph B. Clark, who is retiring.