Associates Review Charity, Greed of Convicted Builder
The story of developer Jerry Y. Oren’s rise to prominence resembles a Horatio Alger saga: A young man, newly immigrated from Israel, travels west in the 1950s to seek his fortune.
He supports himself in college by selling shoes and later prospers as a tract-house salesman in the San Fernando Valley.
Sensing opportunity, he begins acquiring property. When the 1971 Sylmar earthquake strikes, he quickly buys properties at depressed prices.
Before long, he is a major Southern California developer, overseeing holdings worth many millions from opulent offices in Encino.
He begins contributing generously to political campaigns, and soon top Reagan Administration officials are guests at his posh Beverly Hills home. A leader in Southern California’s Jewish community, Oren is honored and feted here and in Israel for financial contributions and fund raising for his native land.
Convicted in Land Sale
But the 61-year-old Oren’s upward climb took a decidedly different turn Wednesday in U.S. District Court when a jury, after deliberating less than two hours, convicted the developer of defrauding the National Park Service in a land sale in Agoura.
Balding and ashen-faced Oren, who remained impassive throughout the weeklong trial in Los Angeles, faces up to 10 years in prison and $11,000 in fines when he is sentenced Sept. 14.
He was convicted of one count of wire fraud and one count of making a false statement in a matter within Park Service jurisdiction.
The conviction shocked local Jewish leaders. In interviews last week, they depicted Oren as a generous fund-raiser, a good father and a man widely respected within the Southland’s Jewish community.
But the picture of him that emerged in interviews with business associates, law enforcement investigators and other Jewish leaders is of a brusque, hard-driving businessman who used every means at his disposal to expand his real-estate empire.
“He appears to have been obsessed with acquiring wealth,” said one federal investigator who asked not to be identified. “And he left behind a lot of unhappy associates.”
Oren was depicted by Rabbi Isaiah Zeldin of Stephen S. Wise Temple as a “very pleasant individual” who, with his wife, Harlene, raised a “fine family” of three sons, who are now in their 20s.
“It’s nice to be in his company,” Zeldin said. “That’s why the surprise about the whole incident.”
Oren and his attorney, Bruce I. Hochman, declined to be interviewed because the case is pending until sentencing.
Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky said he met Oren nearly two decades ago while they both were active on behalf of Soviet Jews seeking to emigrate to Israel.
‘Just a Regular Guy’
Oren, who then lived in Beverly Glen, regularly held meetings at his home of the Southern California Council for Soviet Jewry, Yaroslavsky, then a UCLA student, recalled.
Oren was “just a regular guy who wanted to help,” the councilman said. At the time, Oren “hadn’t become the success story he was in the ‘70s. He was just getting started in business.”
By the time Yaroslavsky was elected to the council in 1975, Oren was a major developer and “was not shy about letting his feelings be known to me and others,” the councilman said, adding that “it never affected our friendship.”
Jerry Daniel, past president of the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Assns., a homeowner group that has opposed Oren on many development issues, said the developer is “known in Jewish circles as a tremendous giver of money and a contributor to good causes.”
He called Oren “a hard person in business” but “a very soft person when it comes to philanthropy.”
A measure of Oren’s combative business practices is the filing since 1976 of 70 civil lawsuits in which he is plaintiff or defendant, in Los Angeles County Superior Court alone.
The suits include ones in which former business associates charged that he failed to make good on contractual promises or schemed to cheat them out of money or land.
Threat to Kill Alleged
In one suit, a tenant alleged that Oren attacked and threatened to kill him in order to get him to leave the residence. In another, a business partner charged that Oren forged his name on a $400,000 promissory note. The court record did not indicate how the cases were settled.
While accumulating adversaries, Oren also amassed great wealth, records show.
Los Angeles County assessor records list him as owner of 67 properties with a total value of $21.1 million. Oren’s holdings include condominiums and other residential units, a department store, a supermarket and office buildings for lease.
He also has extensive real estate holdings in Israel, several associates said.
As his wealth increased, Oren began contributing regularly to federal, state, county and city elected officials.
Chief among recipients were City Council President John Ferraro, who got $2,750 from Oren during his unsuccessful 1982 mayoral race; County Supervisors Deane Dana and Mike Antonovich, who got $6,750 and $2,698 respectively, and Mike Curb, Republican candidate for lieutenant governor in 1986, who received $5,000.
As an outgrowth of Oren’s massive campaign contributions, he developed close ties with local politicians and, after 1980, with key Reagan Administration officials.
The Oren home on Palm Drive in Beverly Hills was the scene of separate receptions for then-Secretary of the Interior James G. Watt and Lawrence Eagleburger, then undersecretary of state for political affairs, as well as a host of lesser political luminaries, associates report.
Well-Regarded Philanthropist
Within the Jewish community, his status also mushroomed in the past decade, and community leaders said that Oren began to give freely to a wide variety of Jewish organizations and causes. By all accounts, his favorite was Tel Aviv University.
Oren has served as chairman of American Friends of Tel Aviv University and endowed a chair in solid-state physics at the university.
According to Alfred Balitzer, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and one of Oren’s longtime friends, the developer grew up in a Tel Aviv slum “in the shadow of what was to become Tel Aviv University.”
For someone “who does not have a great deal of formal education,” Balitzer said, “he has devoted a large amount of time in the cause of education.”
Oren also underwrote development of a park in an impoverished Tel Aviv neighborhood, said Rosalie Lurie, director of American Friends of Tel Aviv University.
“The university, as well as the city of Tel Aviv, owe him a very deep debt,” Moshe Many, the university’s president, said during a telephone interview last week.
The transaction that halted Oren’s upward spiral was the 1985 sale of 336 acres of oak-studded land in Agoura’s Cheeseboro Canyon to the Park Service for inclusion in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.
The case revolved around a fictitious letter that prosecutors charged Oren used to inflate the appraised value of his property before its sale.
Letter’s Content
In the letter, a New York real estate agent stated to Oren that Union Pacific Co. wanted to buy the property for $9.3 million. A Union Pacific vice president testified that, although they were solicited to buy the land, the company was not interested, and there was no offer.
Appraiser Thomas W. Erickson said he relied on the fictitious letter in setting the appraisal value of $8.4 million. An earlier appraisal put the land’s value at $5.8 million.
The tract was sold by Oren to the San Francisco-based Trust for Public Land for $7.5 million, then promptly resold to the Park Service for $8 million.
A U. S. Interior Department investigation that led to Oren’s indictment began after an article appeared in The Times in February, 1985, describing internal Park Service memos that sharply questioned the authenticity of the $9.3-million Union Pacific offer.
In court, Oren and Radoslav L. Sutnar, his consultant in the transaction, blamed each other for the fake-letter scheme.
Sutnar pleaded guilty in May to one felony count of aiding and abetting wire fraud for his role in the plan. He is to be sentenced July 27.
On the stand, the consultant said he overheard Oren and a New York real estate broker on a speaker phone, working out terms of the fake letter. Sutnar also said that after the letter arrived, he helped backdate it at Oren’s direction so it would coincide with the earliest date on which Oren had told trust officials he had a second offer.
Oren, on the other hand, said he had no idea the letter was fictitious when he repeatedly assured Erickson that the document was valid and when he asked the appraiser not to disclose Union Pacific’s identity to the Park Service or contact the would-be buyer.
Testimony Corroborated
Secretaries in Oren’s office and in the New York office where the letter was typed corroborated key portions of Sutnar’s testimony.
Among character witnesses for Oren were Nathan Shapell, one of California’s largest builders and chairman of the state’s Little Hoover Commission, and Rabbi David L. Lieber, president of the University of Judaism in Los Angeles.
Despite the conviction, many of Oren’s friends and associates are unwavering in their support.
“You can only hear good things about him from me,” said Jona Goldrich, a friend of Oren’s for more than three decades and a partner in Goldrich & Kest Inc., one of the state’s largest residential building firms.
“I don’t know the details,” said Goldrich, “but I think he got a wrong rap.”
