Cunliffe Used Her Own General Services ‘Police’

Sylvia Cunliffe, embattled head of the Los Angeles General Services Department, used her agency’s internal police force to gather confidential arrest records on a number of employees suspected of various crimes against the city, documents revealed Wednesday.

Cunliffe’s police, led by former Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective Carl Kundert, were trained at the Police Academy and, Kundert said recently, investigated “bank robbery, rape, drugs, theft of city property . . . and other illegal activities” that department employees were suspected of committing. He added that in order to help his investigations, criminal arrest and conviction records were routinely obtained.

The use of those criminal records has figured prominently in Mayor Tom Bradley’s recent move to oust Cunliffe as general manager of the city’s fourth-largest department. Bradley said Cunliffe wanted to use sensitive criminal files to harass and discredit one employee who had been critical of her. The employee had been convicted of misdemeanors more than two decades earlier. Bradley also claims that her mere possession of the files, obtained through “lies and subterfuges,” was illegal and came despite repeated warnings that the files were off limits to her.

LAPD spokesman Cmdr. William Booth said the department has asked the district attorney to determine if General Services and Police Department employees were illegally involved in the dissemination of arrest information. Booth said the California Penal Code does not authorize such distribution of criminal records beyond law enforcement agencies.

In papers she presented to Bradley to save her job, Cunliffe said she was legally entitled to receive the sensitive “rap sheets” and that Bradley and other top city officials knew she was obtaining them and did not object. She also denied ever using any criminal information to harass employees.

Bradley has flatly rejected her defense as a “smoke screen.”

It is up to the City Council to try to sort out the Cunliffe-Bradley differences when it meets behind closed doors Friday to consider her ouster. Cunliffe has the option of demanding that the hearing be open, but for months she has been unwilling to publicly discuss the allegations against her. This week, according to City Hall sources, Cunliffe has contacted a number of council members to declare her innocence and plead her case. Her main defense has been a 54-page rebuttal denying Bradley’s accusations of favoritism, nepotism and illegal receipt of criminal records.

Prepared by her former attorney, Godfrey Isaac, Cunliffe’s rebuttal declared that Bradley not only knew what she was doing but gave tacit approval by not telling her to stop. Her explanation could become a key factor in the council’s deliberations.

Cunliffe’s formal rebuttal was among more than 125 documents that Bradley submitted to the City Council this week.

In rebutting the other allegations against her, Cunliffe insisted that she hired her mother as a secretary only after consulting the city attorney’s office, that she rented city property to friends at below market rates because they had produced the best offers and that she had not destroyed a public document to cover her tracks. As for charges that she improperly hired former Street Scene employee James Eric Neiswonger, Cunliffe said that she hired him as an electrician--despite his limited background--on the advice of subordinates.

In addition to these allegations, her alleged reprisals against one internal critic, Robert O’Neill, have been cited by some Cunliffe critics as the most serious charge against her.

O’Neill, a departmental real estate officer now on a leave of absence, had made several anonymous telephone calls on a city hot line for reporting official corruption in which he accused Cunliffe of improprieties, including her renting of a city-owned house to Milt Petty. Petty was an employee of Street Scene, the downtown festival that Cunliffe helped organize. Cunliffe learned O’Neill’s identity and ordered her police force to investigate. Criminal records obtained for Cunliffe showed that O’Neill, now 46, was convicted of misdemeanors as a youth in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Connecticut and had had an alcohol problem. In a memo to Bradley and the City Council detailing O’Neill’s record, Cunliffe said O’Neill was “a known gambler . . . (who) regularly left the office after working on the horse racing form in the morning to place his bets.”

Bradley charged that O’Neill’s privacy had been violated and the disclosures exposed the city to potential litigation. He added that “Ms. Cunliffe falsely implied that Mr. O’Neill was presently dishonest and had never rehabilitated himself.” O’Neill has explained previously that he has been in an alcoholic recovery program for 20 years and that city officials knew it.

“It was quite clear that her purpose in sending the memoranda was as an act of reprisal against Mr. O’Neill,” Bradley said.

In her defense, Cunliffe said she never intended that her memos be made public and that she ordered the criminal probe because she “has a statutory obligation to provide security to the city.” She added that O’Neill’s past had been well known to fellow employees.

Cunliffe said she beefed up her internal security force after it became apparent that crimes were being committed against the city by employees whose pasts had not been thoroughly checked out by the Personnel Department.

Citing specifics, Cunliffe said one employee stole and cashed city checks, while another on-duty worker with a drug history had ruined a city car while under the influence of PCP. The check casher was found to have served nearly nine years in prison, while the second worker had been convicted of burglary and grand theft auto, Cunliffe said.

“In addition, the (department) has a list of approximately 29 persons employed by the department in the recent past who have committed crimes during their tenure. . . . Most of these had prior criminal records,” Cunliffe told Driscoll.

Departmental security chief Kundert, in a sworn declaration dated Oct. 20, said that “to properly conduct these investigations, it was necessary to obtain criminal arrest and conviction records of the alleged suspects. I frequently requested and received this information from the LAPD.”

“No one from the LAPD ever advised me that I was not authorized to receive this information and no one from the LAPD ever refused to give me this information,” Kundert said. “I have further advised Ms. Cunliffe that it is my belief that she is also authorized to receive this information.”

Neither the size of Cunliffe’s special police unit nor the amount of time its officers spent on criminal investigations could be immediately established.

Kundert is also a central figure in another charge against Cunliffe. This one involves the department’s granting of a lease in 1985 to Valencia Management for a City Hall Mall video rental storefront. Kundert is a 25% partner with three other former Police Department officers in Valencia Management and Bradley said that connection should have been noted before the lease was granted.