School Bus Driver Hid Past Crimes, D.A. Says : Investigations: Authorities say a school bus driver charged with drunk driving had a suspended license and used an alias to hide his past.

A school bus driver, who was charged with trying to pick up children from an Encino school while drunk, obtained the job by using an alias to hide a lengthy criminal record including five drunk driving convictions, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office said Friday.

Harold Keith Lone, an employee of Laidlaw Transit, was arrested by Los Angeles police Tuesday afternoon on his arrival at Lanai Street Elementary School to pick up 57 children.

Lone was staggering, his speech was slurred and he appeared confused, police said. A breath test showed that he had a blood-alcohol level of 0.27%--more than three times the new legal limit of 0.8%, police said.

A motorist called police on his car phone after he saw Lone’s bus--occupied only by the driver--weaving across three lanes of the northbound Hollywood Freeway at speeds up to 70 m.p.h., said Detective Sandra Hendricks.

The motorist told police he grew alarmed and followed Lone from the Cahuenga Boulevard off-ramp to the school at 4241 Lanai Road. At one point, the motorist said, a car had to swerve to the freeway shoulder to avoid the bus.

Lone, 40, of Los Angeles, was charged Thursday with two counts of felony drunk driving. He pleaded not guilty to the charges and is being held in County Jail in lieu of $5,000 bail, said James A. Baker, Van Nuys assistant head deputy district attorney.

Department of Motor Vehicle records show that Lone has five prior drunk driving convictions dating back to 1982, Hendricks said. His driver’s license has been suspended since 1983, but he has continued to drive despite repeated warnings not to do so, Hendricks said.

“He shouldn’t be on the road, much less driving school kids,” the officer added.

Lone also has an extensive criminal arrest record dating back to 1972, for crimes including robbery, burglary and auto theft. In March, 1987, he was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon, Hendricks said.

Apparently seeking to hide his criminal record, Lone used the name Harold Keith Holmes to apply for a driver’s license, Hendricks said.

Lone also used the name Holmes to seek a job as a bus driver with Laidlaw, one of six private companies providing transportation services on a contract basis to the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Lone was hired as a $7.75-per-hour school bus driver last September after he presented himself to Laidlaw as a self-employed handyman with valid credentials and a clean driving record under the Holmes identity, said Dave Daley, Laidlaw’s vice president of operations.

Lone also gave as job references a now-closed community center and a company that had relocated to Pittsburgh. Company officials did not pursue the matter further or seek personal references, Daley acknowledged.

As to why no one noticed Lone’s drinking, Daley said that “alcoholics are probably the best deceivers and liars in the world and certainly become very expert at concealing the symptoms. So when you have 75 to 100 drivers reporting to the dispatch office, you don’t have the opportunity to spend a lot of time with each person.”

Bud Dunevant, the school district’s director of transportation, said bus drivers hired by the district are fingerprinted by the district as well as by the California Highway Patrol. Those hired by the private companies such as Laidlaw are fingerprinted only by the Highway Patrol, a process that is supposed to reveal a bad driving history or criminality, Dunevant said.

Daley said company officials are seeking to determine “what happened with the fingerprint checks. That ought to catch this, and we’ve certainly got to figure out why it didn’t. That’s supposed to be the safety net for this type of thing.”

CHP officials did not return a phone call seeking more information about the fingerprint checks.

Dunevant said he knows of no other instance in which someone has falsified documents to obtain a job as a district school bus driver. “Doing it for some kind of job that pays a lot of money might make a lot of sense, but to do it to obtain a part-time job driving a school bus, that’s strange,” he said.

“Whether there is anything we can do to make sure it doesn’t happen again, I don’t know,” Dunevant said. “We will determine if there is a faster way to get results from fingerprinting.”

Laidlaw, a U.S. subsidiary of a Canadian corporation, is the largest school bus company in the world, operating about 20,000 routes in 16 states.

It has been the subject of some local controversy. Las Virgenes Unified School District officials were so unhappy with Laidlaw’s service that they decided not to renew the company’s contract in 1988. That same year, Laidlaw was more than three hours late in sending a van to pick up three mentally handicapped students, including a teen-aged girl, from special-education classes in North Hollywood and Pasadena.