Bradley Ally Got Poverty Funds for Private Building

Bishop H. H. Brookins, a longtime Los Angeles church leader and political mentor to Mayor Tom Bradley, obtained $336,000 in federal poverty funds through a city agency to renovate a run-down office complex that he secretly owned in Southwest Los Angeles, The Times has learned.

The government loans were awarded to a non-existent church corporation created by Brookins, records show. City officials now say the funding would not have been approved if they had known that the bishop owned the property.

When Brookins failed to make payments on the government loans three years ago, a top Bradley aide asked two city administrators to use their positions to help Brookins with his financial problems, the officials said.

The building housed a program, headed by Brookins, that offered job training and education for poor residents of South Los Angeles. Through what city officials thought was an official church corporation, Brookins received a $336,000 interest-free loan to renovate the structure. The money came from federal funds intended to assist neighborhood projects, including poverty programs. But after a few years, the program moved from the renovated building to a dilapidated office next door. Brookins then leased the renovated building for $10,000 a month to a private trade school, and netted $250,000 when he refinanced the improved structure.

Today, the bishop personally owns the office complex, which loan records indicate is worth about $1 million.

Brookins, an influential black leader, served as the Los Angeles region bishop for the 2.2-million-member African Methodist Episcopal Church from 1976 until 1984.

He was awarded the $336,000 through the Los Angeles City Council between 1982 and 1985, and the loans were administered by the city’s Community Development Department (CDD). He repaid the principal owed on the loans in 1988, and the city forgave $50,000 in back interest.

Several of the jobs and education programs housed in Brookins’ three-story building in the Crenshaw area had problems, including fraud and mismanagement, according to a state audit and city monitoring reports. The programs were headed by Brookins and backed by an additional $2 million in government funds.

The district attorney’s office conducted a criminal investigation of the Brookins loan for almost two years before deciding last July to drop the case because the statute of limitations for fraud and embezzlement had elapsed, prosecutors said.

A 1988 search warrant for financial records on the property alleged that “through fraudulent misrepresentations and transfers of property title, Brookins has personally financially profited. . . . “

Last month, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in Los Angeles referred the Brookins case to its regional Office of Inspector General for possible investigation of misuse of government funds, said HUD spokesman Scott Reed.

Following inquiries by The Times, officials of the city Community Development Department said they will seek to recover tens of thousands of dollars in rent paid to a Brookins company by city-funded programs that he operated out of his own building.

“Somebody owes that money to the city,” said Susan Cleere Flores, manager of the city unit that oversees Brookins’ programs.

On Friday, Bradley announced plans for a series of public hearings on problems within city departments, starting with the CDD.

The mayor declined requests to be interviewed about Brookins.

Interview Canceled

Last week, Brookins abruptly canceled an interview with a Times reporter in Washington, where he has served since 1988 as AME Church bishop for Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia region. The bishop’s spokesman referred all questions to Los Angeles attorney J. Stanley Sanders, who said he did not know enough about the loan or the property to comment.

“I have heard some of the same things you have heard” about the building, Sanders told a reporter. “If (Brookins) has done something with public funds . . . that is at the least an impropriety and at worst criminal fraud, then obviously that’s a story.”

The Rev. Cecil Murray, a trustee of the Southern California AME Conference, told The Times recently that he was unaware that Brookins personally owns the property. Murray said that Brookins told church leaders in 1984 that ownership would revert to the church after renovations.

After Brookins was reassigned from Los Angeles to Little Rock, Ark., in 1984, he maintained a residence in Bel-Air and remained active in Los Angeles political affairs.

In the mid-1980s, according to district attorney’s investigative reports, Brookins used government funds to improve his deteriorating office complex and to pay off $30,000 in “personal obligations.”

Asked to Help

As questions about the renovation surfaced in 1986, a pair of Community Development Department administrators were asked to help the bishop by William Elkins, a longtime special assistant to Mayor Bradley and a friend of Brookins, the two officials told The Times.

Elkins said in an interview Thursday that he had “no involvement whatsoever” in trying to influence city officials to assist Brookins.

Bradley press spokesman Bill Chandler said the mayor did not speak to anyone on his staff about the Brookins loan and the matter “never came to his attention” until after it was repaid in May, 1988.

But Douglas S. Ford, the former general manager of the city’s Community Development Department, said he personally told Bradley that Brookins was under investigation before 1988. Moreover, Ford said he had “a heated discussion” with Elkins in 1987 after the mayor’s aide urged him to help Brookins while the development department was conducting an investigation into possible fraud and embezzlement.

“In my view, (Elkins) was trying to interfere with the investigation,” Ford said. “I told him to back off and not to do it.”

Elkins said he could “not recall” ever speaking with Ford about Brookins.

As the investigation continued, Elkins arranged for other CDD officials to waive $46,824 in back interest payments that Brookins owed the city and to conceal the deal from the City Council, said Harreld S. Adams, who replaced Ford on an interim basis in 1987.

Adams said Elkins told him: “The mayor would really appreciate it if you could help (Brookins) out.”

Elkins was not authorized to speak on Bradley’s behalf, Chandler said Friday. “The mayor did not speak with Bill Elkins or any other city employee regarding settlement of the loan,” Chandler said.

Brookins is one of several Bradley friends and supporters who have benefited financially from their relationships with the mayor:

Far East National Bank chairman Henry Hwang received city deposits while Bradley served as a paid adviser to his bank. Bradley helped Long Beach businessman Allen Alevy acquire surplus city land at a time when Alevy was organizing fund-raising carnivals for the mayor. And Bradley allowed Mary Anne Singer to capitalize on her personal friendship with him to build a public relations business.

Bradley remains under investigation by a federal grand jury for possible violations of public corruption and securities laws.

The 72-year-old Bradley owes much of the credit for his record five terms as mayor to the Rev. H. Hartford Brookins, a respected civil rights leader who worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., served as the leading black community spokesman after the Watts riot in 1965 and helped shape the careers of many politicians, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Brookins, 64, engineered Bradley’s election to the City Council in 1963. Over the next two decades, Brookins served as Bradley’s spiritual leader and chairman or co-chairman of every political campaign.

“I mean literally, if I may, I almost hand-carried Bradley up his whole political career,” Brookins told The Times in a 1985 interview.

The Bradley Administration has helped Brookins land three lucrative--and highly controversial--government contracts.

Last year, amid protests of “cronyism” by some city officials, Brookins was among six prominent minority group members with close ties to Bradley whose lobbying and participation helped a team of developers win a $200-million contract to expand the Los Angeles Civic Center.

Brookins has received approximately $300,000 as an ethnic minority business partner in a Los Angeles International Airport concessions agreement that was approved in 1985 by Bradley appointees on the Airport Commission. A recent city audit found that Brookins, contrary to city regulations, had no involvement in the management or operation of the concessions business.

The Bradley Administration supported the city’s loan of $336,000 to improve the Crenshaw property, records show.

The building and an adjacent parking lot, located in the 4600 block of Crenshaw Boulevard, are the former site of Windsor University. Clark E. Parker, the school’s former chancellor, told district attorney’s investigators that in 1977 he donated the property through Brookins to the AME Church in memory of Parker’s late parents, reports show.

Brookins said in a 1985 interview with The Times that Parker “needed a tax write-off and psyched me into taking (the building) in the name of the church.” Parker recently said he had no comment on the transaction.

County real estate records indicate that Parker sold the property for $210,000 to the Southern California Conference African Methodist Episcopal Church Inc. (SCCAMEC). Brookins is listed in the property records as the sole corporate director of SCCAMEC Inc. even though the secretary of state’s office says the entity was never incorporated in California.

When questioned in 1988 about the non-existent church corporation, Brookins told the district attorney’s office that he believed it had been “properly incorporated,” investigation records show.

In 1978, Brookins put up the Crenshaw property as collateral to obtain a $250,000 loan for SCCAMEC Inc. through the Bank of Finance, a minority-owned financial institution whose board of directors at the time included Brookins and Councilman Gilbert Lindsay.

Brookins told district attorney’s investigators that he spent the $250,000 on building improvements and an unspecified financial obligation but was unable to account for the expenditures, according to district attorney’s reports obtained by The Times. He personally paid off the loan in 1988.

Brookins then lobbied the City Council to pay for renovation of his building, which housed federal- and state-funded programs. The council instructed the Community Development Department in 1982 to provide a $238,000 loan to SCCAMEC Inc. with the first payment due in five years.

The council vote was “political,” and the council acted without considering any competing projects, said Ford, the CDD general manager at the time. “That money isn’t there to fund friends.”

Once the contract was awarded, city administrators failed to take action when Brookins repeatedly refused to provide required financial information and abide by city regulations:

- City officials, violating their own contracting rules, neither confirmed that SCCAMEC Inc. was a legitimate corporation nor required Brookins to furnish a list of corporate directors before issuing the loan. Thus, the city did not learn that Brookins personally owned the building until four years later--after the statute of limitations for fraud had run out.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Stephen S. Licker said the city should have investigated the true ownership of the property back in 1982. “That’s when they had knowledge or should have had knowledge” that a crime may have taken place, Licker said.

“We made a serious mistake,” said Roy Revelles, a CDD manager who monitored the contract. “I don’t know where it fell through the cracks because everybody looked at that project.”

- When it was discovered in 1984 that Brookins had taken $30,000 from the government loan to pay a personal debt, CDD officials did not report the finding to their own investigators or the district attorney. Instead, they merely instructed Brookins to put the money back.

“I told (Brookins) this was not legal and I did not want to know about it,” CDD analyst Bob Frechman wrote in a May, 1984, memo. “I cannot in good conscience condone or agree with this type of expenditure of federal funds.” Frechman later advised that Brookins not reimburse the city through his personal checking account because “it would look unusual in eyes of an audit,” according to the same memo. Brookins then reimbursed the city by submitting a check drawn on an AME Church account.

Licker said that Brookins had “technically” embezzled the $30,000, but the statute of limitations had expired a few months before the city presented its case to prosecutors.

- CDD staffers said they were ordered by superiors to let renovation work proceed on the Crenshaw building even though SCCAMEC Inc. had violated city bidding procedures. CDD analyst Arnold C. Garcia said in an interview that he repeatedly warned his immediate supervisors about compliance problems, but no one was willing to halt the project.

“The reality was that (Brookins) was politically connected and the contract came down through those channels, and we were in a position where we had to implement it,” Garcia said.

When the project ran out of money in 1985, Brookins successfully lobbied the City Council to loan his organization an additional $90,500, bringing the total to $336,000, records show.

City officials assigned the new contract to analyst Richard Gallegos, who soon discovered that Brookins had failed to provide the city with numerous documents, including loan papers, property deeds, articles of incorporation and the agency’s board of directors.

“I smelled a rotten egg,” Gallegos said.

Gallegos said that when he threatened to hold up the additional $98,000 in funds until Brookins conformed to the original contract, his supervisors ordered him to issue the money anyway.

The CDD’s current general manager, Parker Anderson, who met with Brookins to arrange the loan, said he had “no idea” how the bishop obtained the money through a non-existent corporation. “We need to go back and determine where in the process things went awry,” he said.

CDD administrators say they first learned in 1986 that SCCAMEC Inc. did not exist.

In a call to Harreld Adams, Brookins asked the city to “soften” the terms of the loan because “the church” could not afford the payments of nearly $10,000 per month due to start in February, 1987, Adams wrote in a memo. The bishop also admitted that he had acquired the Crenshaw property on his own, not through the AME church as city officials were led to believe.

Brookins’ startling admission was followed by a series of phone calls to CDD officials from Elkins, the mayor’s special assistant, according to two administrators who said they received the calls.

Adams said that Elkins contacted him at least three times between 1986 and 1988. In each conversation, Elkins said the mayor would “appreciate” any assistance the department could offer in granting concessions to Brookins, Adams said.

During the first call, in early 1986, Elkins encouraged Adams to “soften” the loan terms, Adams said. Adams said he later notified Brookins that the city would consider renegotiating the loan.

In 1987, Elkins pressured Adams and Ford to subordinate the city’s position on the loan so that Brookins could refinance the property, the two administrators said. Ford said Elkins asked him to “lean in Brookins’ favor” on the refinancing issue.

But Ford rejected the request in a June, 1987 memo: “It has not been our policy to subordinate public funds in a way . . . which would provide a substantial profit to (Brookins) with no apparent public benefit.”

After being turned down, Brookins failed to make monthly payments on the city loan until May, 1988, when he arranged to refinance the property through a private lender. But the lender informed city officials that Brookins had no intention of repaying the $46,824 in back interest, Adams said.

That is when, according to Adams, he received another call from Elkins, this time to get the development department to waive the $46,824 that Brookins owed the city. Adams said he first had to get City Council approval--which would reveal the problems surrounding Brookins’ building.

“The mayor did not want that,” Elkins said, according to Adams.

CDD officials then changed the due date on the loan so Brookins would not owe any back interest or penalty payments, records show.

Asked to explain the change, Adams said: “When the mayor’s office asks us to do something in its executive capacity, if we can do it in a way that is not illegal, we will do it.”

The interest waiver was authorized by Deputy City Atty. Frank Orozco, who also decided that council approval was no longer needed.

Months earlier, Elkins had summoned Orozco to the mayor’s office to discuss the Brookins matter. But Orozco said the meeting had no bearing on his decision.

“Elkins was very concerned about the effect (the Brookins case) might have on the mayor,” Orozco recalled. “He was trying to nip it in the bud if it was a problem.”

Elkins denied that he ever met with anyone in the city attorney’s office to discuss Brookins.

Orozco said that he and CDD officials decided to refer the Brookins matter to the district attorney’s office for investigation.

In July of 1989, after almost two years of investigation, prosecutors concluded that the statute of limitations had expired in 1985 for the alleged fraud and in 1987 for the alleged embezzlement.

Allen Field, head deputy of the major fraud unit, said his office “would have looked deeper” into the Brookins case without the statute of limitations problem. “If it’s a case where you can’t prosecute it anyway, you don’t spend the time.”