A 1989 RETROSPECTIVE : CITY HALL UNDER SIEGE

Mayor Tom Bradley’s longtime reputation as a man in a white hat was sullied by a bottle of white-out. The correction fluid concealed a notation on a city document indicating that Bradley had instructed the city treasurer’s office to deposit $2 million of taxpayer money in the Far East National Bank--an institution that had employed the mayor as a $18,000-a-year consultant. The alteration, whose authorship remains unclear, was disclosed by a city auditor in dramatic testimony before a City Council committee investigating Bradley’s tangled financial affairs. Bradley, who resigned from Far East and a second local financial institution in 1989--paying back the $18,000--has repeatedly denied pressuring the treasurer’s office to make deposits in specific banks. The mayor also came under scrutiny for possible insider trading in stock and in high-yield bonds through Drexel Burnham Lambert, whose former “junk bond” department head, Michael Milken, was indicted in 1989. As a federal grand jury began to look into the mayor’s dealings, Bradley and a friend and business associate, Juanita St. John, were sued by the city attorney’s office. Bradley was accused of failing to disclose personal stock holdings. St. John was sued to recover $388,920 in city money paid to a Los Angeles-Africa trade task force that Bradley appointed her to head. The action against St. John was taken after she invoked the 5th Amendment more than 60 times before a City Council committee to avoid answering questions about the task force, which Bradley also helped create. At year’s end, Bradley was hit by additional disclosures that he offered preferential treatment to a personal friend, Mary Anne Singer, a contact lens technician who runs a small public relations firm out of her Beverly Hills residence.