Figure in Phone Case Pleads Guilty to Fraud

Robert St. Pierre, a principal defendant in a federal suit charging racketeering and fraud in the 1982 awarding of a multimillion-dollar San Diego County contract for a telephone system, pleaded guilty Wednesday to one count of fraud and agreed to cooperate in the prosecution of 10 other defendants awaiting trial.

St. Pierre, in entering his guilty plea before U.S. District Judge Earl Gilliam late Wednesday, admitted his part in the scheme to rig bids on the $24.5-million phone system contract to allow an Orange County telecommunications firm to win the bid.

The rigged-bid scandal rocked county government, forcing the resignations of half a dozen top officials and resulting in federal indictments in October, 1984, against 13 men and two corporations. The indictments described the use of cocaine, prostitutes and bribes of money in a successful attempt to influence the contract award. Dist. Atty. Edwin Miller, in a statement following the indictments, called the Telink case “the most massive fraud and public corruption scheme ever perpetrated against the County of San Diego.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Lantz Lewis said St. Pierre, 45, also had received and had participated in giving kickbacks to assure that Anaheim-based Telink received the lucrative county contract. St. Pierre was vice president of Telecommunications Design Corp. of Orange, a consulting firm hired by the county to evaluate the bids for the sophisticated microwave telephone system.

St. Pierre, Lewis said, “participated in the secret transfer of $7,000 to Abraham Stein, then the county’s chief of communications, as payment for Stein exercising his influence to get certain county consulting work for TDC,” and later paid Stein several thousand dollars more to secure additional consulting work for his firm.

Lewis said St. Pierre, while a consultant for the county, “joined in a scheme aimed at insuring that Telink Inc. would be awarded” the phone system contract, and helped Robert Dillon, an associate of Stein’s, win appointment as Stein’s successor in the county communications post.

St. Pierre also helped prepare a bid by another telecommunications firm for the county contract so that the Telink bid would appear to be competitive, sold TDC assets to Telink and received several hundred thousand dollars in kickbacks from Telink and other telecommunications firms, Lewis said.

The former telecommunications official, who now sells used cars in Orange County, admitted guilt to one count of wire fraud and affirmed the incidents that Lewis detailed at Wednesday’s hearing.

In return for his guilty plea and pledge to testify for the prosecution, other charges of fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit racketeering against St. Pierre will be dismissed at the time of his sentencing, Lewis said.

Gilliam accepted St. Pierre’s plea and continued his $100,000 bail until a sentencing hearing set for March 2. St. Pierre faces a maximum five-year jail sentence and $1,000 fine.

Felony charges are still pending against 10 other defendants, including two former San Diego County officials--Stein and H. Larry Gonzales, who was fired as director of general services. The two corporations involved, Telink and its parent company Burnup & Sims Inc. of Plantation, Fla., pleaded no contest to federal fraud and racketeering charges in June and agreed to pay $4.8 million to various government entities.

A Friday court hearing is scheduled for Gilliam to rule on defense motions and to set a trial date for 5 of the 10 remaining defendants, but Lewis said Wednesday that a trial delay may be requested as a result of St. Pierre’s plea.

Scheduled to be the first to go to trial are Stein, now in the Metropolitan Correctional Center after conviction on an unrelated charge of conspiring to import heroin from Nepal; Gonzales; Don Woodaman, former president of the bankrupt TDC consulting firm; James Linder, a former marketing executive with the defunct Telink firm, and Robert Schreiber, an official of Telecomm Consultants Inc., another county-hired consulting company involved with the Telink contract.

David Stein, 65-year-old brother of Abraham Stein, pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud and was sentenced in February to 90 days in jail for his part in the scheme. Earlier, Tom Bell, a salesman for the UCS telecommunications firm, received a three-year sentence for perjury in testimony before the federal grand jury investigating the Telink contract.

Since the Telink contract was canceled by the county in 1983, county supervisors have awarded a $12.5-million contract to a Virginia-based company to install an 8,000-telephone microwave system in 49 county departments.