Safari Club’s Mysteries May Be Unsolvable

A stately, red brick building stands behind a large courtyard in Seoul’s posh Oksudong neighborhood, haunted with the secrets of an extraordinary man who juggled the public affairs of the Olympic Games with a clandestine job selling American war planes to South Korea.

The building is the Safari Club, owned by the late Park Chong Kyu, former chief body guard to a dictator, shooting enthusiast and prime mover behind the Seoul Olympics. Park also was a political power broker, accused after his death of swindling Northrop Corp. out of a $6.25-million hotel investment.

Northrop characterizes the hotel venture as a good-will gesture to be developed jointly with a South Korean company controlled by Park, who worked as a behind-the-scenes lobbyist trying to sell Northrop’s F-20 jet fighter.

Gaudy Interior

But a former Northrop consultant has alleged that Park used the disputed money, with Northrop’s knowledge, as an off-the-books “sales promotion fund,” raising suspicions that he was in a position to wine, dine and bribe South Korean government officials.

The truth about how Park spent the Northrop money may have been lost when he died of liver cancer, at age 55, in late 1985. The only clues remaining are a few shady characters, a hidden box of documents and a two-story building with a grand marble entryway and a disheveled, gaudy interior of chandeliers, dark wood and red felt-covered walls.

If the Safari Club could talk, it might tell an intriguing tale about the demimonde of cronyism in South Korea’s business and military circles, or perhaps shed some light on how Northrop, frantically trying to sell its F-20 fighter, got mixed up with the kind of people its internal rules expressly forbid doing business with.

“Those were desperate days,” a former Northrop executive said. “We were pulling out every last stop to get a sale.”

Northrop invested $1.2 billion of its shareholder funds into the ill-fated F-20 program, the largest privately funded weapon in U.S. history. Initially, Northrop intended to export the single-engine jet fighter to U.S. allies in the Middle East, Asia and South America, but the company was defeated by a combination of U.S. foreign policy and the preference of potential customers for the General Dynamics F-16.

The company made a last-ditch sales pitch to the U.S. Air Force in 1986 but was unsuccessful again. Shortly after, it ended the program without selling a single aircraft.

A Private Salon

Irregularities in Northrop’s marketing activities in South Korea are the subject of a criminal investigation by a federal grand jury convened in Los Angeles and of a probe by the House Energy and Commerce Committee in Congress.

A panel in South Korea’s National Assembly is also looking into the affair. U.S. investigators are asking whether Northrop’s payment to Park merely constituted an embarrassing breach of corporate ethics, or violated the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bars bribery of foreign officials.

The Safari Club, in its heyday from the time Park bought it in June, 1983, until shortly after police raided the place for illegal gambling in 1985, was Park’s private salon. He held court here and lavishly entertained guests from the aerospace and weapons industries, including at least one top Northrop executive.

There was a teppan-yaki (open grill) restaurant, a private room with blackjack tables and a special lounge where young women were available as hostesses.

The club doubled as American Legion Post K-6, frequented by Americans associated with the U.S. Eighth Army base in Seoul, and it was managed by an elusive businessman with a checkered past named Ma Myong Dok.

Ma, 42, may be the only person alive with personal knowledge of how the Northrop money was spent, in that he was a trusted aide to Park. But he is not talking either.

A naturalized U.S. citizen of Korean and Chinese descent, Ma was fired from his job as a loan interviewer at the U.S.A. Federal Credit Union at the Eighth Army base in 1985 because he had been drawing pay and enjoying military base privileges without showing up for work, said Herb Parker, the branch manager.

“I was invited to the Safari Club, but I declined,” Parker said. “Ma was not the sort of person I cared to associate with.”

Ma’s cousin, an officer with the Seoul Metropolitan Police, said Ma was arrested on gambling charges related to the raid on the Safari Club and held in prison for several months but released without standing trial.

Quiet, Low Key

Charges apparently were dropped even before U.S. Sen. Frank H. Murkowski (R-Alaska) attempted to intervene on Ma’s behalf, at the request of American Legion regional headquarters in Anchorage. Ma was at the time commander of the Legion post that met at the Safari Club.

“I am sure he got out of jail because of the system of cultural grease,” said D. Edward Grove, judge advocate of the American Legion’s Alaska Department, which has jurisdiction over posts in Korea. Grove, who attended a Legion banquet at the Safari Club, remembers Ma as very quiet and low key.

“We never quite understood where he was coming from,” Grove said.

Also known by the name Eric Ma, he lived for a spell in Hawaii and had served in the U.S. Army from 1977 to 1980 after spending four years at Woodbury University in Los Angeles, where he studied international business without graduating.

It is not clear how Ma knew Northrop lobbyist Park, but he married the daughter of the woman who became the fourth wife of Jimmy Shin, a Honolulu bar owner with a history of financial trouble. Northrop hired Shin as a $102,000-a-year consultant in 1983 and it was Shin who introduced Northrop executives to Park. It was Shin who later alleged that Northrop invested $6.25 million in the hotel project as a way to divert funds for Park’s discretionary use.

Ma himself was a principal in the plan to build the hotel, Northrop said in a lawsuit it filed in Seoul District Court last December. Northrop claims that it was defrauded in the hotel deal by a shell company, Asia Cultural Travel Development (ACTD), controlled by Park and owned by members of his family. ACTD’s only known line of business has been holding the deed to the Safari Club property, where the hotel was to be built.

‘Doesn’t Like to Talk’

But construction permits were never sought and Northrop lost track of its money after wiring it to an ACTD bank account in Hong Kong. The attorney representing ACTD in Northrop’s suit said Park took the money and spent most of it, but he refused to say how. Northrop now holds a lien on the Safari Club, which has an estimated value of $1.7 million, along with other property owned by Park’s heirs.

Ma, meanwhile, is described by a confidant as traveling outside Korea with a 120-pound box of documents relating to Park’s business with Northrop, apparently dating from a period in 1986 when Ma briefly held power of attorney for Park’s heirs. Efforts to reach him were unsuccessful.

“I don’t really know what kind of business he’s involved in,” said Park Jae Shin, Ma’s cousin in the police force. “Ma is the kind of person who doesn’t like to talk about what he’s doing.”

Park’s quasi-official role as an Olympic organizer was particularly conspicuous during the years of his association with Northrop. He was a leading figure in South Korea’s sports establishment in the late 1970s as head of the Korean Shooting Federation, and he has gotten some credit for first proposing in 1979 that Seoul make a serious bid to host the 1988 Olympics.

As president of the Korean Olympic Committee, Park was a key player in the lobbying effort that led to the International Olympic Committee’s decision two years later to award the games to Seoul.

In the summer of 1984, during the Los Angeles Olympics, Park became an IOC member himself, ascending to what one veteran South Korean journalist described as the “highest position of honor available to a civilian,” one that carried considerable weight and influence at home. The Olympics have ranked at the top of South Korea’s national agenda for much of the 1980s, symbolizing a coming of age for the developing economic power and inexorably shaping domestic political events.

“I don’t know about his business, but he was very straightforward in his Olympic dealings,” said Chyun Sang Jin, a former U.N. ambassador who was Park’s deputy on the Korean Olympic Committee. “He loved sports and he was rather charismatic about it, very emotional. Sometimes he had grand ideas.”

What was not known to the general public was that Park, using his brother-in-law as a front man, had Olympian aspirations to earn money selling airplanes to the government.

Park entered into a sales representative agreement with Northrop in January of 1984 with a contract providing for up to $55 million in sales commissions. Northrop paid Park’s ACTD the $6.25 million for the purported hotel project that August.

The following year, Park wrote a letter to his friend Chun Doo Hwan, then president of South Korea, expressing appreciation in connection with his nomination to the IOC, according to one of Chun’s former aides. In the same letter, Park explained to Chun the terms supposedly offered by Northrop in its bid to sell the F-20, including a proposal to transfer technology and set up manufacturing operations in South Korea, the aide said.

Park’s Olympics thank-you note, the text of which has not been made public, led to Chun’s decision to meet with Northrop Chairman Thomas V. Jones at the Kahala Hilton in Honolulu that May on his return from a state visit to Washington, the aide said.

The lobbyist’s handling of the Northrop F-20 account was an example of how business can be practiced in South Korea’s milieu of cronyism and political patronage.

Park was a graduate of the elite Military Academy that spawned South Korea’s postwar leadership. They called him “Pistol Park” because he was a fanatic about handguns. He also had a hair-trigger temper, as evidenced by his propensity to rebuke and sometimes physically assault visiting generals and dignitaries at the Blue House, or presidential residence, when he was chief of security.

Accepted Blame for Killings

In one story, Park brazenly struck the head of the KCIA, Kim Hyung Uk, then believed to be the second most powerful man in South Korea after the president. Kim later went into exile and disappeared, mysteriously, in Paris.

Park resigned from the Blue House to take responsibility for a 1974 assassination attempt on Park Chung Hee in which the authoritarian president’s wife was mortally wounded. He also accepted blame for killing an innocent bystander in the shooting melee, even though officials said another bodyguard fired the deadly bullet. Park later held a seat in the National Assembly from 1978 until he was purged from politics two years later in an anti-corruption campaign.

But Park, a former career army officer, maintained friends in high places--including Chun.

“You have to look at business (in Korea) in terms of circles--circles of friends, circles of military academy classmates, family circles--and you have to work within that,” said David Grieshop, director of McDonnell Douglas Korea Ltd. “It all starts out with personalities, and that’s the underpinnings of doing business here.”

Although ownership of the Safari Club is in legal limbo because of Northrop’s lawsuit and court-ordered attachment, there are signs the building may return to life.

An individual named Shim Sun Ku took over a $400,000 mortgage on the property in May, land records show. Shim told The Times that he is preparing to reopen as a restaurant sometime soon, but he has not decided on a name.

On a recent afternoon, workers were cleaning up the building, which was in elegant disarray. Two stuffed wild boars were watching over the premises from what appeared to be a glitzy bar and game room on one of the lower levels of the building. One of the animals had been flipped irreverently on its back and was missing part of a leg.

The Safari Club days, and Northrop’s F-20 sales campaign, seemed part of the building’s murky past.

“Park Chong Kyu is dead,” said the Rev. Kim Kwan Suk, honorary president of the Christian Broadcasting System and a veteran social critic. “I think the truth lies buried with him in the cemetery.”

Karl Schoenberger reported from Seoul, and Ralph Vartabedian reported from Los Angeles.