Supervisors Want Some Light Cast on Shady Calls From Their Phones

Telephone calls from the offices of three Orange County supervisors to pornographic tape recording services cost taxpayers a total of $221.50 during the first half of 1986--and the lawmakers want to know who did it.

Especially Supervisor Bruce Nestande. . . .

According to county telephone records, 182 of the calls to sexually explicit numbers during the six months ending June 16 were made from Nestande’s office--many of them on his private line--and the supervisor, who is the Republican nominee for California secretary of state, called for an investigation.

“I can’t believe it,” he said when told last week what the county billing records showed. “I know it wasn’t me. You know what you should do. . . . You should call the district attorney’s office right now and tell them what you just told me, because I want to get to the bottom of this.”

Supervisor Roger R. Stanton was angry, too.

Like Nestande, he denied making any of the sex line calls--six were billed to his office for the month of February--and he, too, called for an investigation.

Supervisors Chairman Ralph B. Clark was away on vacation. But Clark aide Dan Wooldridge said he was sure neither Clark nor anyone else on the staff made the four sex-line calls billed to the supervisor’s office for the month of June.

County officials offered various explanations of how such a thing could happen.

They pointed out that many current and former county employees have access to the supervisors telephone lines.

Many of the calls, they said, were made on phone lines that are easily accessible from a master console in the public lobby that is shared by all the supervisors--and many were made between 5 p.m. and midnight, after normal business hours, when offices would be empty and relatively unguarded.

Currently, according to Wooldridge, none of the phones is locked at night.

“That may have been our big mistake,” he said.

But some of the nearly 200 calls billed to Nestande’s office were made during regular business hours, and some were on his private line or on lines assigned to his office that cannot be reached from the lobby console.

Nestande said he could not even venture a guess as to how that happened.

“Those are a real mystery,” the supervisor said. “I know that sometimes there is nobody here during the noon hour, or when all of the aides and secretaries are out running around, doing things, but it’s impossible to predict when those moments are going to occur around here.”

He said he is not sure he will reimburse the county for those calls, either.

“I guess if it’s proven that somebody on my staff did it, then I’ll confront them and then they’ll have to pay it back,” Nestande said.

But he insisted that his staff would not make such calls.

Telephone company officials said the telephone numbers on Nestande’s phone bills were all valid numbers at the time the calls were made, but added that it is impossible to determine now what kinds of messages were provided on any specific date.

The numbers utilize the 976 prefix reserved for tape-recorded messages. The phone records reveal a wide variety of calls to various numbers with 976 prefixes, some of which are no longer in service. But a Times reporter called the numbers during the past week and, except for a few numbers that had been disconnected, all were sexually explicit tape recordings.

One number provided a message stating that the material to follow was sexually explicit and intended for adults only. Several female voices using different names described several hard-core sexual fantasies, each one accessed by pressing a single digit on a touch-tone phone while still connected with the recording.

The calls cost $2 each, although on the phone bills some appear to have been terminated after only a few minutes, at costs ranging from 22 cents to 78 cents.

Since the 1960s, controversy has surrounded so-called dial-a-porn calls, which are legal and have been offered by dozens of companies nationwide. Officials at Pacific Bell said Tuesday that they hope to offer a new service next month that involves using computer software to screen out calls to recorded messages at customers’ requests. Until now, the technology to do this had not been developed, they said.

Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission has authorized phone companies to issue personal identification codes to customers who want access to recorded messages, excluding people who have not requested a so-called “PIN” code.

No Way of Policing Calls

Telephone company officials said they have no way of policing the messages, which often are offered by companies that claim in purchasing rights to the service that they will provide baseball scores or horoscopes, but then switch to sexually explicit material afterward.

National attention on the problem intensified three years ago when it was discovered that hundreds of thousands of calls were being made to a New York recording service operated by the adult-oriented High Society magazine and Car-Bon Publishers, which raked in $10,000 a day from the calls. Many complaints were made to the FCC by parents who received unusually large telephone bills and discovered that such calls had been made by their children.

In any case, Orange County General Services Agency Director R. A. (Bert) Scott said he was sure of one thing:

“There’s a general county phone policy,” he said, “that the telephones are to be used only for county business. We recognize that, just like at any big corporation, people are going to make some private calls.

“However, we expect people to reimburse the county for the calls whenever possible . . . and clearly, these calls were not an authorized use of the county’s telephone system.”