City Engineer Fired Over Falsified Building Permits

A Los Angeles city engineer has been fired on charges that he willfully falsified information on official permits enabling him to build an apartment house on his own property.

Oscar C. Hwang, 59, also the subject of a district attorney’s investigation, was sent a notice of termination last month. A veteran Department of Building and Safety engineer, Hwang was already under investigation in connection with the alleged forgery of a permit allowing construction of an apartment complex on future park land.

“You used your official position with this department for your own personal and financial benefit,” his dismissal notice charged.

The focus on Hwang began a year ago with suspicions about permits he issued for his own property. Thereafter, the focus widened to include the apparent forgery. Now, it includes favored treatment that Hwang is suspected of meting out for a business associate, according to sources in the district attorney’s office and Building Department officials. In all, permits that Hwang issued for 16 pieces of property during the last two years are under investigation by the district attorney, The Times has learned.

In his notice of dismissal from Building Department General Manager Frank Kroeger, Hwang was accused of intentionally concealing the ownership of his property, issuing building permits for his property in violation of a building moratorium and defrauding the city of about $400 in permit fees.

Hwang’s “conflict-of-interest” arose from acting in his official city capacity to approve his private building plans for an apartment complex on property he owns at 1144 N. Edgemont St. in Hollywood, Department of Building and Safety officials said.

They said he issued permits on the property twice, first listing the property owner as his wife and then a year later listing it under the name of a business associate.

The officials said that the second permit, issued by Hwang last November, was also “in violation of the Hollywood (building) moratorium ordinance,” passed last July, restricting construction to no more than five units, according to Robert Harder, assistant chief of the building bureau.

Hwang, a 20-year city employee with an annual salary of $43,535, did not file an appeal of his discharge. Asked about his dismissal, Hwang said in an interview, “I really retired myself first. . . . I’m still getting a retirement check.” His pension amounts to about $20,000 a year, according to city retirement records.

Hwang, who owns five pieces of property including four apartment houses, is also being allowed by the building department to complete construction of an eight-unit apartment complex on his Edgemont property. Work was temporarily stopped Dec. 23 by an order from the building department, charging that one of Hwang’s permits had expired and that two others had been issued “in error.”

“At one time, we were thinking of revoking the whole thing, but we felt we couldn’t legally,” Harder, of the building department, told The Times. Though he said he had not checked with the city attorney, Harder said he believed the city was too late to stop Hwang from building.

Meanwhile, the building department is also taking a second look at a controversial permit that Hwang approved last summer for some property on North Cherokee Avenue in Hollywood. The permit allegedly contains the forged signature of a key city planning official, Richard Gervais. It allows property owner Joseph Su to build a 54-unit apartment complex on land previously set aside for expansion of an adjoining public park.

Hwang said that he has been interviewed twice by the district attorney about the Cherokee Avenue permit that he approved. He told The Times that he did not know when he issued the permit that it contained a possible forgery.

“If I knew that,” Hwang said, “I wouldn’t issue the permit.”

Su, the property owner, whose attorney is former City Councilman Arthur K. Snyder, has petitioned the Building and Safety Commission to validate the permit, which was canceled when the alleged forgery was publicized in The Times last December. A hearing is scheduled for March 3.

The building department began an internal investigation of Hwang about a year ago, according to the department’s principal investigator, Mike Claessens. He said the probe was sparked by a complaint about Hwang from a private citizen.

Although he would not describe the complaint, records show that it was made after Hwang had issued the first of a series of permits--to his wife, in December, 1985--allowing construction of the planned eight-unit apartment complex on his Edgemont Street property.

Harder said suspicions were aroused when Hwang submitted to the department’s grading division a soils report indicating that he had an interest in the property. Harder said that Hwang was then informed by his supervisor of a department policy requiring all employees with outside businesses to get formal clearance from the department’s executive office. The policy is designed to prevent conflicts of interest.

Thereafter, Harder said, Hwang withdrew the soils report and later resubmitted it “under another name.” On this document and on additional building permits that he issued, Hwang listed the property owner as Frank Liu.

These permits, too, have become part of the probe by the district attorney’s office. Fourteen permits that Hwang approved for Liu or for a company doing business with Liu have been forwarded to the district attorney by building department investigators.

Liu, a Santa Monica developer, is Hwang’s business partner in the apartment complex and a longtime friend. Hwang said that he and Liu hail from the same village in Canton, China, and are as close as brothers.

Liu acknowledged in an interview that he is Hwang’s friend and business partner in the development of the Edgemont Street apartment complex--although he said that their “business arrangement has yet to be formalized.”

While Hwang maintained that Liu was planning to buy the land from him, Liu described their pact as a joint venture in which “he (Hwang) put up the land. . . . I put out the money to do the construction and we split the profit.”

Last November, Hwang issued permits for the Edgemont property allowing grading and construction of a retaining wall and of another full unit. All three permits list Liu as the owner of the property and carry his signature. But Liu said that Hwang signed for him. “I am aware,” Liu said, “of the fact he signed the building permit on my behalf.”

Liu is vice president of Westgate Development, a company that is an active builder in Los Angeles. Liu said his company has been issued permits not just by Hwang but by “a whole spectrum of plan checkers” and that all of his projects “comply with the building code to the nth degree.”

A chart summarizing the permits that Hwang issued for Liu and for associates of Liu has been forwarded by the building department to the district attorney’s office for investigation.

A review by The Times of some of these permits showed that many were issued for apartment complexes built on the Westside during the last two years. Common to at least four of the projects was the use of the same architectural firm. Another similarity among several of the cases is that Hwang entered the wrong address for the property next to the project’s plan check number in the department’s main log book.

Building department officials said that errors in the log book prevent the accurate tracking of plans and can cause their misfiling and loss. A department policy tightening procedures was recently enacted.

Of the errors he made in the log book, Hwang said, “A lot of people make mistakes. A lot of them.”

Harder said that in addition to discovering mismatched entries in the log book, department investigators found that some of the projects that Hwang acted on had not been properly “routed around to different city departments . . . and assigned to a plan checker.” Instead, Harder said, “He (Hwang) would intercept the plan or he would issue a tag to a project and then assign it to himself . . . which is not proper.”

Harder said Hwang intercepted “quite a few” plans, “especially toward the last part of his career here with the city. It would seem like we got a rush of them almost in anticipation that we would catch him, I guess. It seemed like the last few days there, we were hot on his trail, he was trying everything he could. We even found one or two on his desk that he had all lined up to check.”

What advantage, if any, was derived by builders as a result of Hwang’s activities is under investigation.

As one of 21 structural engineering associates in the building bureau, Hwang performed the “very vital function” of checking proposed building plans for conformance with the city’s building and zoning codes and ensuring “that the building is not over-stressed, that the materials are appropriate . . . that the buildings will stand up and not fall down,” said investigator Claessens.