Money Woes Plague Director of L. A. / Africa Task Force

Personal financial problems--including bankruptcy filings, foreclosure threats and tax liens--have dogged the head of Mayor Tom Bradley’s scandal-plagued Africa task force since the mayor first secured city funding for the trade group four years ago.

At the same time, The Times has found, none of those officially associated with the task force--not the mayor, his staff, task force board members or officers--assumed responsibility for supervising Juanita St. John, director of the Task Force for Africa/Los Angeles Relations.

The result, according to records and interviews, was that, while St. John wrestled with mounting personal financial problems, there were virtually no checks on how she managed a $400,000 infusion of city funds.

City and state officials now are investigating St. John’s handling of public funds, which allegedly were commingled with personal funds in St. John family checking accounts. City auditors specifically want to know what happened to $180,000 in unaccounted-for withdrawals made by St. John.

On-Call Advisory Group

Richard Parsons, an oil company executive, chaired the Bradley-appointed task force board in recent years, but insisted the panel had no executive responsibilities. “Juanita St. John is the task force,” Parsons said. “The board is merely an advisory group that remains on call.”

The task force listed Parsons in state corporation records as the organization’s president, but he told The Times he never held the post and was unaware he was registered as a corporate officer.

Aides to Bradley say supervising St. John and watching expenditures was not the mayor’s responsibility. They maintain it was up to the city controller’s auditors and task force board members to ensure funds were spent properly. “Why else do you have a board?” asked Deputy Mayor Michael Gage.

The task force--intended to promote stronger business and cultural ties between the city and Africa--has been a pet project of Bradley’s since he helped create it in 1978. He regularly attended board meetings, strongly defended it against critics at UCLA, where it was housed, and at City Hall, where it received most of its funds since 1985.

UCLA officially referred to it as the “mayor’s” task force. Bradley--who is not registered as a corporate officer--signed a key contract with UCLA on behalf of the nonprofit corporation. Later the university turned to Bradley and his staff in 1986 and 1988 after the task force repeatedly overdrew its account--perhaps the first sign of task force financial problems.

Bradley has declined to comment on the task force because of the pending investigations by the city controller, city attorney and the state attorney general. St. John and her attorneys declined to be interviewed for this article, but in the past she has denied misusing taxpayers’ money and said she can produce records to prove it.

Arraignment This Month

The city attorney’s office has filed criminal charges against St. John, saying she failed to supply subpoenaed records. She will be arraigned later this month. A city audit of the task force is expected to be released next week.

St. John and the mayor are friends, professional associates and business partners. In addition to supporting the Africa task force, Bradley has hired St. John’s daughter, Kathy, to work in his office. Bradley also is a partner in a Riverside County land venture with St. John, her daughter and several other investors.

St. John had both professional and personal financial problems when Bradley won the first infusion of city funds for the task force in 1985.

The task force was struggling. Federal and university grants that had paid St. John’s salary were drying up.

Money Problems

At the same time, records and interviews show, St. John had growing personal financial problems. A collection agency won a court judgment against her. An insurance company was suing St. John’s husband to collect on a $65,000 bounced check. And a mortgage company was threatening to foreclose on her home.

St. John and her husband, John, managed to fend of creditors and stay afloat by borrowing money, mostly against the equity in their Spanish-style, two-story home in north San Marino, recently valued at $800,000.

But as her debts continued to mount and, after a recent foreclosure action, St. John filed for bankruptcy. Last month a U.S. bankruptcy judge granted her permission to borrow another $250,000 against the house to pay off several creditors.

News reports about St. John’s problems with the handling of Africa task force financial matters have a familiar ring for Ed Kaleff, a neighbor two doors down from the St. Johns. “That’s Juanita,” he said. “She tells me the same thing. . . . I keep getting promised month by month . . . the check’s in the mail.”

Kaleff said he lent St. John about $32,000 two years ago after spotting a notice in the local paper that her house was in foreclosure. “I did it because she was a very pleasant person. I . . . knew them,” he said.

St. John said she was in a temporary bind; a mix-up had cut off her husband’s retirement income, Kaleff recalled.

But after “many, many” efforts to get St. John to repay the loan, Kaleff filed his own foreclosure action, now tied up in the bankruptcy case.

Several of those who worked with St. John on task force business, and attended parties at her home for visiting African artists and dignitaries, said they had no inkling of her personal financial problems until her bankruptcy was reported recently. “Not at all,” said Parsons.

Since 1981, Bradley has had a financial interest with St. John in a Riverside real estate partnership. The partnership was organized by then-UCLA Vice Chancellor Charles Z. Wilson. Now publisher of the Wave newspapers in South Los Angeles, Wilson is a Bradley friend who helped the mayor organize the task force at the university.

Despite the personal financial relationship, Gage, after checking with the mayor, said Bradley did not know about St. John’s financial problems until recently.

Bradley and St. John’s relationship developed through the formation of the task force 11 years ago, Gage said. The mayor recalled meeting St. John once before that at a UCLA event, and Bradley was not initially involved in selecting her for the task force job, Gage said.

A one-time string musician who friends say played with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, St. John worked in various mid-level administrative assistant jobs since 1965, including a stint as a Peace Corps coordinator. For several years before the formation of the task force, she served as an assistant to the director of the university’s Africa Studies Center.

When the university agreed to Bradley’s request to form the group, the job of pulling it together was assigned to St. John.

She seemed a logical choice, associates said. She was well-traveled and well-connected in Africa and she had a reputation for juggling challenging staff assignments, notably the difficult logistics of university academic tours through Africa.

“She could handle things . . . she was very creative,” recalled Prof. Boniface Obichere, a former Africa Studies Center director and St. John’s boss for much of the 1970s.

The 58-year-old St. John--described by friends and associates as “charming,” “gregarious,” “committed”--dived into the task force work and soon was assigned to the project full time, and moved to a separate suite of offices, where she worked for Wilson. One of her first tasks was to arrange a trip for Bradley and a group of businessmen to Africa. She also helped bring a Nigerian art exhibition to the county’s Museum of Natural History and organized local business seminars.

But tensions quickly began to build between the African Studies Center, which oversees most of the university’s Africa-related programs, and St. John, who was running the task force independently. “I could not discern any potential for benefit to the university,” said Prof. Peter Hammond, one of several critics.

Hammond said the educational aspects of the task force were never clear and housing it on campus took away scarce resources and space from other needy programs. “I think they wanted to accommodate the mayor,” he said.

The conflict came to head in early 1985, when separate delegations from the task force and the Africa Studies Center arrived in Liberia. “The left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing,” Hammond said.

As the controversy escalated, Bradley strongly defended the task force in an exchange of letters with university faculty members--at one point being moved to declare his pet project was not “an embarrassment to UCLA, nor any government.”

But with the departure of Wilson in 1984, university and federal support lapsed and the mayor turned to the city for “interim” funding to keep his task force alive.

“I think the mayor felt if they could (get) one or two years of funding, then the federal government would be more interested in coming in,” Wilson said. “It didn’t quite work out that way.”

After winning a city budget fight over the funds, Bradley signed an agreement on behalf of the task force with the university. Among other things, it called for city funds to go to the task force, with a portion to be deposited in a UCLA account that would pay St. John’s $40,000-a-year salary and other expenses.

The new financial arrangement gave St. John considerably more latitude over the financial affairs of the group. University accountants were no longer overseeing the task force’s expenditures.

“We had no administrative authority over it,” said Harlan Lebo, a UCLA spokesman.

Just who did have administrative authority over St. John was not specified. “I really couldn’t tell you,” said Robert Gordon, a bank executive and task force member. “It never came up in any of our meetings.”

Attended Meetings

Other board members say that while Bradley frequently attended board meetings, he rarely initiated discussions about policy matters.

University records show there was trouble in St. John’s handling of the city funds almost immediately. The UCLA account was overdrawn within months of the city’s release of the first $100,000 in summer of 1985. The problem would repeat itself several times and a year later frustrated university officials contacted the mayor’s office for help.

But Gage said Bradley only learned of the problem last year, when a vice chancellor wrote him directly to complain about the task force and “these irritating problems (that) continue to persist.” Gage said that the overdraw problem appeared to be resolved, and Bradley did not see it as a signal of larger financial problems with the task force.

Over the years, sources said, some of Bradley’s staff did have concerns about the task force--the political heat it generated each year when critics on the City Council questioned whether it should be funded. But aware of Bradley’s dedication to the project and his support of St. John, no one on his staff raised objections, sources said.

It was not until April of this year when the investigations of the task force and St. John were under way that Bradley withdrew his task force funding request for $121,000.

The task force office is now closed, the program is in limbo and UCLA says the group still owes it $40,000.