Secrecy Shrouds Hahn’s Investigation of Bradley

Los Angeles City Atty. James K. Hahn’s investigation into Mayor Tom Bradley’s financial affairs is being conducted under a veil of secrecy, and interviews with current and former city officials reveal that Hahn has placed his trust in an unusually large team of relatively unknown lawyers.

The legal team, headed by Assistant City Atty. Charles Goldenberg and including four other lawyers and a retired police detective, is the largest assembled in the memory of current and past city officials. When the investigation is complete, it is widely expected to face more intense public scrutiny than any previous legal case handled by the city.

“I cannot recall any similar incident in the recent history of the office where so many lawyers and investigators were assigned to one case,” said Burt Pines, who was city attorney from 1973 to 1981. “With this commitment of resources, it shows the case is being given the highest priority possible in the office.”

The five lawyers and the retired detective work in the city attorney’s 24-member Special Operations branch. “Special Ops,” located on the cramped 16th floor of City Hall East, is a place where attorneys jockey for tiny window offices and labor over seldom-publicized civil cases and criminal misdemeanors in specialty areas such as consumer protection, slum housing, crack-cocaine houses, city campaign violations, environmental misdemeanors and obscenity.

While not glamorous, these are the jobs many of the city’s 348 lawyers angle for when they are ready to leave low-level positions prosecuting routine criminal cases.

But despite the close quarters and camaraderie in Special Operations, an unusual level of secrecy surrounds the Bradley inquiry. Attorneys who work only feet away from the team say they have no idea how it is conducting the investigation.

Comprehensive Inquiry

The investigation is to be a comprehensive look into all possible conflicts of interest by the mayor, beginning with his paid service to two financial institutions having business with the city and including the non-insider-trading aspects of his relationship with the troubled investment banking firm of Drexel Burnham Lambert and its indicted “junk bond” guru, Michael Milken. The inquiry is expected to take several months.

Several deputy city attorneys interviewed for this story said the normal flow of “shop talk” has been cut off. Hahn and Goldenberg have even refused to disclose basic details about their work to the City Council committee overseeing the inquiry. And Hahn has refused through a spokesman to discuss even routine aspects of the case, despite repeated attempts by The Times to contact him.

Mike Qualls, spokesman for Hahn, said last week that Hahn would not discuss how the lawyers investigating Bradley were chosen, what talents he thinks they bring to the case “or any other information.”

More than a dozen current and former city lawyers familiar with members of the Bradley team agreed to discuss day-to-day life in the city attorney’s office and the abilities of the team’s lawyers only with the understanding that their names not be used. They cited career concerns and fear of retribution from Hahn, who has refused to allow the Bradley team’s members to talk to the press.

The tight clamp on information has left many in and out of City Hall wondering how the case is progressing.

“I feel a tremendous discomfort,” Councilwoman Gloria Molina said at a recent City Council committee meeting. “I’m very nervous as a policy-making body--as members of the council--that (the investigation is) not going to be complete.”

Through Qualls, Hahn recently defended Goldenberg’s efforts but did not elaborate. “I have been very pleased with the progress and thoroughness of their work,” Qualls quoted Hahn as saying in response to queries from The Times.

Goldenberg, who took over Special Operations about two years ago, is best known for having overseen the city attorney’s only other major investigation of a city politician in recent years--the 1986 inquiry into City Councilman Richard Alatorre’s illegal campaign expenditures.

In that case, Alatorre and his campaign workers were found to have illegally transferred huge sums from the campaign chest he raised as a state assemblyman into his new campaign chest for his City Council race. Alatorre was charged with civil violations, and his campaign workers--including his sister--were cited for criminal offenses.

Hahn has said he chose not to seek criminal charges against Alatorre because evidence gathered by Goldenberg was insufficient to prove that the campaign fund transfers made by Alatorre’s sister and other staffers were ever approved by the councilman.

Today, some city lawyers say they were satisfied with the $141,966 civil fine that was levied against Alatorre, after which all charges in the case were dropped. The fine was paid largely from Alatorre’s campaign funds. But other city lawyers--and California Common Cause--still believe Hahn and Goldenberg did not come down hard enough on Alatorre.

Walter Zelman, executive director of California Common Cause, said in a recent interview that the city attorney did not prosecute Alatorre “to the fullest extent. . . . We thought they sold out pretty much.”

Hahn in the past has defended his office’s handling of the Alatorre case. Indeed, Hahn’s continuing confidence in Goldenberg is evidenced by his decision to hand him virtual control of the Bradley case.

While Hahn keeps in daily contact with Goldenberg, he is not directing details of the investigation, according to several deputy city attorneys. In fact, Qualls confirmed that the city attorney left even the choice of the legal team up to Goldenberg.

Goldenberg selected four attorneys from his Special Operations branch--all of whom joined the city as criminal trial lawyers. They were brought into Special Operations under Goldenberg in the past two years and are described by numerous other city attorneys as loyal to their boss.

Although a handful of the 24 attorneys in Special Operations have been catapulted into the public eye by highly publicized prosecutions, especially those involving slumlords or illegal toxic waste dumping, none of these attorneys are on the Bradley team.

Colleagues said the team’s members reflect the wide mix of lawyers working for the city, having both strong and weak points.

“I don’t think it is an overwhelmingly impressive group, but it is also not an embarrassing group or one that would look like it was put in there to dance around,” one city lawyer said.

The Bradley team includes:

* Goldenberg, 39, who joined the city in 1980 as a trial deputy in the criminal branch after working as an assistant district attorney for Middlesex County, Mass. He received a bachelor’s degree from Clark University in 1971 and a law degree from Suffolk University in 1974. Goldenberg rose to supervisor of the city’s Central Trials division before getting his current job.

Qualls, Hahn’s spokesman, described Goldenberg as “a very straight-arrow prosecutor” and one of the office’s “top managers.” Former City Atty. Pines said he is “solid, competent and effective.”

Goldenberg is widely viewed by supporters and critics alike as a person who is extremely ambitious and who does not act or take a stand without backing from his superiors.

One supporter said he has “alienated some city attorneys who see only the part of him that is always polishing his star. . . . He is, granted, a person who has a certain degree of opportunism, but he is also a can-do kind of person, and it’s really refreshing to see that in the city attorney bureaucracy,” the friend said.

* Ellen Taratoot Friedmann, 38, Goldenberg’s closest associate, who moved to Special Operations when Goldenberg was named its chief. Earlier, she assisted Goldenberg in the Alatorre prosecution, and in the wake of that case was assigned to write amendments to strengthen the city’s law limiting campaign contributions. She now handles violations of that law.

Friedmann received a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University in 1971 and a law degree from Loyola University in 1983. Before law school, she was a researcher on weapons systems for RAND Corp. She has had relatively little trial experience, joining the city in 1985 as an entry-level trial deputy in the criminal branch and being promoted two years later to Special Operations to work on campaign violations.

Although respected for her intellect, Friedmann has alienated some co-workers for at times accepting non-lawyer duties as an aide to Goldenberg.

* Kevin T. Ryan, 36, who joined the office in 1985 as a trial deputy and moved into the new narcotics abatement unit of Special Operations a few months ago. He recently prosecuted six successful drug cases, in which he obtained temporary restraining orders against building owners to force them to eliminate crack-cocaine dealing on their premises. He is described by colleagues as “hard working.”

Ryan received a bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York in 1975 and a law degree from the University of San Diego in 1980. Before joining the city, he was a deputy district attorney in Kings County, Calif., and a lawyer for the South East Legal Aid Center in Compton and the Watts Health Foundation.

* Edmund E. Fimbres, 37, who joined the office in 1977, is the longest-serving member of the team. He is considered a solid legal writer but has not prosecuted any recent major cases and has not risen rapidly in the city bureaucracy. His most recent assignment was to write the city’s brief to the state Supreme Court on Proposition 103, the auto insurance initiative.

Fimbres received a bachelor’s degree from Pomona College in 1974 and a law degree from Stanford University in 1977. He joined the city as an entry-level criminal trial deputy and recently served as civil lawyer for the Department of Water and Power. He moved back to City Hall to join Special Operations late last year and is said to be “working extremely hard” on the Bradley case.

* Henry (Buzz) Burr, 35, who only recently was assigned to the Bradley team, joined the office in 1979 as an entry-level criminal trial prosecutor and now works for the narcotics abatement section. In partnership with Ryan, Burr has successfully pursued a number of landlords for allowing crack houses, and several similar cases are pending. Before that, he worked in the civil branch on workers’ compensation cases.

Burr received a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University in 1974 and a law degree from USC in 1977. He took a leave from the office in 1985 to earn a master’s degree in public administration at Harvard University.

* Paul Franey, 57, a 23-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department, retired in 1979 from the prestigious Air Support Division. He was hired in 1987 to assist Special Operations lawyers on cases requiring investigative legwork.

Because few lawyers in the city attorney’s office have investigative backgrounds, Hahn also requested a separate investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department. It is being conducted by two veteran Los Angeles police detectives from the bunco-forgery division who are reporting to Chief Daryl F. Gates.

Despite the police assistance, some are questioning Hahn’s decision to leave the nuts and bolts of the daily probe to Goldenberg and his team of lawyers, given the potentially far-reaching implications of the case.

“This is the kind of thing where Hahn should be involved in it daily, hourly by hourly,” said one former city lawyer who oversaw several high-profile civil prosecutions. Another former city lawyer, who worked closely with Goldenberg, said there is some concern that he will be overly cautious.

“Goldenberg is a pure government employee . . . who doesn’t take action on his own,” that attorney said. “I am sure that he is petrified of something coming down on him over this Bradley investigation.”

Yet another view is that because Goldenberg is operating under public scrutiny in the Bradley case--which has generated far more interest than Alatorre’s troubles did in 1986--his team will turn every stone and consider every legal aspect.

“Whatever internal tendencies the city attorney’s office might have, they are going to be ignored, given the visibility of the matter at hand,” said Zelman of Common Cause.