Campaign Gift Totals Checked Against Legal Limits

Thousands of dollars in political donations to Mayor Tom Bradley and three City Council members from attorneys in major Los Angeles law firms and officers and employees of large development companies are being audited by the Los Angeles city clerk to determine whether they violated a city law limiting the size of contributions, The Times learned Tuesday.

City Clerk Elias Martinez said auditors from his office will examine lists of thousands of contributors to determine compliance with a statute declaring that “no single source” can give more than $500 to a candidate for the council and $1,000 to someone seeking citywide office, such as mayor.

Aside from Bradley, the investigators are reviewing contributions made to Council members Zev Yaroslavsky, Michael Woo and Joy Picus.

A Times computer study of the campaign contribution reports submitted by all four city officials show that representatives of the law firms, developers, other companies and families have contributed to the same candidate, with the totals far exceeding the legal limits.

Century City Owner

For example, employees of JMB Realty Co. of Chicago, owner of a sizable portion of Century City, donated $16,250 to Yaroslavsky’s campaign when he was running for mayor and $2,000 to Bradley’s mayoral campaign.

In another instance, members of the prestigious Los Angeles law firm of O’Melveny & Myers donated $5,700 to Yaroslavsky and $4,500 to Bradley. Members of another major law firm, Wyman, Bautzer, Kuchel & Silbert, gave Yaroslavsky $13,750 and Bradley $2,800.

Martinez, in an interview, said these and other multiple contributions are the target of his auditors.

All of the individual contributions met the limit. But when the amounts coming from the firms were taken together, the limit was surpassed.

Such multiple contributions have been criticized by campaign reformers as a way of getting around the city campaign finance law, which was approved in 1988.

Donors reply, however, that the contributions are individual, not made at the behest of the firms. A spokesman for JMB Realty Co. said that the owners of the firm did not order the contributions to the councilman’s mayoral campaign--and thus did not violate the law.

And Martinez said “prosecution is very difficult and offenses are hard to prove.”

The city attorney’s office, which prosecutes such offenses, would have to prove that an employer ordered an employee to give to a candidate--and then reimbursed the worker.

“You need a confession, an order and a reimbursement,” Martinez said.

His auditors will begin by talking to finance officials of the campaigns and examining the donation checks to see whether they came from company accounts or individual accounts, Martinez said.

The fact of the investigations were previously disclosed, but not their scope.

Seven From One Firm

Steve Afriat, who managed Woo’s successful reelection campaign, said the investigation of the councilman’s campaign donations centered on 14 contributions of $500 each from seven executives of the Lyon Group, a development firm, and from their children.

“We returned half of the contributions, those from the children, because they seemed to go against the law because the money actually appeared to come from the parents,” he said. Afriat said he was confident the case would be dropped because the money from the children was returned.

The Picus probe was begun on the complaint of a defeated opponent, who questioned the legitimacy of contributions from a developer, his wife and a son.

The Yaroslavsky investigation, Martinez said, was begun at the suggestion of City Atty. James K. Hahn but a spokesman for Hahn denied that. He said Martinez first expressed interest in the Yaroslavsky contributions, asking for legal advice on how to handle the councilman’s mayoral contributions after Yaroslavsky dropped out of the race.

Yaroslavsky had begun a campaign against Bradley and collected more than $1 million in contributions. But when he quit in January, choosing to run for another term on the City Council, he returned the money to his contributors.

A source in Hahn’s office said the probe into Bradley’s campaign treasury was initiated after a complaint was received about multiple contributions from Calmark, a firm which is backing construction of a new hotel near the downtown convention center.

The Times study showed the firm gave $5,500 to the Bradley mayoral campaign in February, 1989. There were five contributions of $1,000 each and one of $500.

The multiple contributors to Bradley, Yaroslavsky, Picus and Woo include:

Bradley: Galletti Bros, a food wholesaler, $9,000; developer Alexander Haagen, his employees and his family, $5,000; Johnson Wax Development Co., $9,000; Watt Industries, $3,650; BKK Corp., $8,000; Daniel, Mann, Johnson, Mendenhall (DMJM), an engineering firm, $3,500.

Yaroslavsky: Law firms Irella Manella, $16,125; Manatt, Phelps, Rothenberg & Phillips, $1,700, and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, $3,830. Financial firms Bear Stearns, $6,000; Drexel Burnham Lambert, $4,500, and First Boston, $11,400. Also, one real estate company, Casden Co., $7,000.

Woo: Bank of Trade, $4,000; Cathay Bank, owned by his family, $1,700, and Western Continental Inc., $1,500. Real estate firms Condor West Corp. $2,500; G.H. Palmer Associates, $3,500, and Watt Industries, $2,000. Also, Almo Investments, $1,400.

Picus: Casden Co., $2,500; G.H. Palmer, $4,000; Voit Companies, $1,250, a land development firm.

Times researcher Cecilia Rasmussen contributed to this story.