Thefts From Estates Under Trustee Care Investigated

A rash of thefts of jewelry and money from estates of the dead has been linked to current and former employees in Los Angeles County’s troubled trustee system, officials say.

Two current employees and one ex-employee in the Public Administrator-Public Guardian’s Office are under investigation for working in collusion in up to a dozen such incidents, county Auditor Rose Pigneri said.

The Sheriff’s Department is now investigating the incidents, which occurred between June, 1985, and March, 1986, for possible fraud, she said.

County auditors discovered evidence of possible theft earlier this year during an audit of the department, which handles the estates of nearly 1,300 deceased people each year when an executor or heir cannot be found.

In a June 1 report to the Board of Supervisors, auditors cited 11 cases in which jewelry and cash and checks totaling $6,400 inexplicably disappeared from the estates of deceased persons whose cases were handled by the county agency.

Worked in Same Unit

Another case of suspected stealing later discovered by the department has since been included in the probe.

Pigneri said the employees being investigated for possible theft worked in the same unit at the time of the incidents. One of them is a clerk, Sandra Frazier, who left the department last summer after being convicted of stealing $6,000 from the estate of a deceased person.

Before Frazier left her county job, however, auditors involved in the current investigation allege that she stole another $1,500 from the accounts of deceased persons.

Pigneri said Frazier spent “a short time in custody” after her conviction and is now on parole.

Asked if Frazier and her two co-workers operated in collusion, Pigneri said, “We would suspect that . . . particularly when there was fraud (by Frazier) in the unit.”

Investigators with the Sheriff’s Department had no comment on the probe.

However, a Public Administrator-Public Guardian official said he doubted that the employees involved worked in collusion, and said that, based on a preliminary review by the department of the cases, they appear to be “individual situations.”

He said it “may be coincidental” that the suspects were from the same unit, and that safeguards built into the system would have made collusion difficult.

Nevertheless, audits in recent years indicate that the department--which is the nation’s largest such agency--has had difficulty installing safeguards against fraud.

In 1986, auditors found few regulations that protected estates of the deceased from theft and cover-ups. Although department officials vowed to improve operations, an audit conducted the next year uncovered a wide variety of weaknesses “exposing the department to increased risk of fraud and abuses.”

Auditors also found the department was failing to supervise the county warehouse used to store valuables, such as cars and television sets, collected from the estates of the deceased.

Additionally, items appeared to be missing from a vault used to store jewelry, furs, cash, traveler’s checks and savings bonds, the report said.

Pigneri said she is sympathetic to the department’s problems--particularly those involving potential theft. Because its employees handle so much cash and so many items of value, the department “is high risk” and likely will always have trouble stopping abuses.