No Charges Made In Probe Involving Chula Vista Official

The San Diego County district attorney’s office announced Thursday that it won’t prosecute anyone on criminal charges of arson and extortion involving a Mission Hills mansion and Chula Vista City Councilman David Malcolm.

Four secretly recorded tapes of conversations about the arson plot were at the center of the district attorney’s investigation. One tape was found to be doctored and another, containing a discussion by Malcolm about how the house could be destroyed, was undoctored, investigators said.

Malcolm, however, said Thursday that the he feels “vindicated” by the district attorney’s findings and plans to sue William M. Hirsch, who, Malcolm claims, hatched an arson plot to burn down or blow up the Mediterranean-style villa and later tried to blackmail Malcolm and his business partner, Dennis Schmucker.

‘No Prosecutable Case’

In a brief letter to the three principals--Malcolm, Schmucker and Hirsch--Deputy Dist. Atty. Allan Preckel said there was “no prosecutable case” against anyone.

The tape recordings involved conversations between Malcolm and Hirsch and between Hirsch and Schmucker concerning financial woes the men had encountered in trying to rehabilitate the old mansion and about the possibility of burning down the house to obtain $1 million in insurance money.

Malcolm claims that Hirsch, who was advising Malcolm and Schmucker on rehabilitation of the house, first suggested the arson plot, then tried to extort money from Malcolm on the basis of the secretly taped conversations.

Hirsch, 45, turned the tape recordings over to the district attorney’s office last November, claiming that they contained evidence that Malcolm had plotted to blow up the mansion to collect the insurance money and had urged Hirsch to work quickly to find an arsonist, saying: “We got to get that to burn.”

Hirsch and his attorney, Michael Aguirre, could not be reached for comment Thursday. Both Schmucker and his attorney, Michael Pancer, were out of town and unavailable for comment.

No Comment on Tape

The district attorney’s office would not comment about what alterations were discovered in a taped conversation between Hirsch and Schmucker or why only two of the four tapes given to them by Hirsch were sent to FBI laboratories for analysis.

Preckel said that the FBI laboratory found “at least three over-recordings which were produced after the original recording had been made” in a taped conversation between Hirsch and Schmucker. A second taped conversation between Hirsch and Malcolm contained “no indications of editing, over-recording, deletions or other alterations,” the FBI analyst reported.

The tape recording that the FBI indicated was not doctored and which The Times had obtained last fall contained the following conversation between a man who identified himself as David Malcolm and Hirsch about the financial loss they faced and the possibility of blowing up or burning down the Mission Hills mansion:

Hirsch: “You don’t want to take a bath and certainly I don’t want to take a bath. And the place has to go sayonara. We all know that.” Hirsch later suggested filling the house with natural gas, commenting: “I mean it would go boom.”

Malcolm: “Bill, I know it. If it goes boom, it blows the windows but . . . We need to get it to burn.”

A few minutes later, Malcolm asked Hirsch:

“Why couldn’t somebody just go in and turn on the gas downstairs, leave the burner on upstairs with a candle burning and when the gas gets to that, it would just blow up?”

No attempt was ever made to blow up or burn down the Presidio Drive home. It was sold by Malcolm and Schmucker for about $900,000--or about half of what they had invested in it.

“Apart from the integrity of the tapes, a review of the statements by the participants in the respective conversations is subject to different interpretations as to who is the principal promoter of the alleged criminal enterprises being discussed,” Preckel said in the letter to the three men and their attorneys.

Hired Law Firm

Malcolm said Thursday that he has hired the law firm of Gray Cary Ames & Frye to handle his civil suit for damages against Hirsch.

“I intend to fully exercise my civil remedies as suggested by the district attorney,” Malcolm said. He also repeated an earlier statement:

“I am a victim of threats of violence by an extortionist with a past history of bizarre behavior. I was and am afraid of him. I tried to ignore him, I tried to humor him and then I tried to capture him. (Malcolm, wired by the district attorney’s office, taped two conversations with Hirsch but neither proved the guilt or innocence of either party, investigators said.)

Malcolm said he was pleased that Hirsch’s “effort to portray me as the bad guy failed” but said he “would have preferred that our effort to catch the real bad guy had been a success.”