Guile and a Dry Wit Helped Carpenter Climb Political Ladders

Schooled in psychology and trained in politics, Paul Carpenter used guile and a dry wit to propel himself from a two-time electoral loser into a powerful legislator and then an influential if little-known member of the State Board of Equalization.

Carpenter has spent most of the last three decades in California politics, starting as a volunteer campaign worker and rising steadily through the ranks. He kept a low profile even while serving as a Democratic Party leader in the state Senate and then helping to transform the key tax board on which he now serves.

But Carpenter’s days in obscurity ended Thursday, when a federal grand jury here indicted him on four counts of racketeering, extortion and conspiracy. The charges cover the years between 1980 and 1986, when he was a state senator from a district in Los Angeles and Orange counties. In all, Carpenter was a legislator for 12 years, starting in 1974 when he was elected to the Assembly.

Conversations with Carpenter’s friends, enemies and political associates paint a picture of the 62-year-old Iowa native as something of a loner, a calculating person who picks his friends carefully and expects nothing less from them than total loyalty. He is a risk-taker who likes to gamble at poker, thoroughbreds and volatile stock market options. He climbs mountains in his spare time.

Carpenter as a senator used unusual gestures--one year he sent a birthday card to every registered voter in his district--in a strategy designed to broaden his popularity and identification with the voters so he could win election to statewide office.

But the strategy failed, and Carpenter settled in 1986 for a seat on the State Board of Equalization, an obscure but highly paid panel controlling cases and appeals that can mean hundreds of millions of dollars to the individual taxpayers or corporations involved.

Carpenter has used the board post as a forum for his long-held tax-cutting views, criticizing the board’s professional staff for its aggressive enforcement of the state’s tax codes. “They would tax the smile on the Mona Lisa if they could figure out a way,” he once said.

Aligning himself with board members Conway Collis and Ernest J. Dronenburg Jr., Carpenter has voted against the recommendations of the agency’s staff on various tax cases. Their stance on the tax issues has put them at odds with longtime board member William M. Bennett, who contends that the majority’s real motive has not been to help the small taxpayer but the big corporate interests that contribute to campaigns.

Frequent angry exchanges between Carpenter and Bennett over cases and issues have helped make the State Board of Equalization one of the most contentious panels in state government.

“To disagree with Bill Bennett is to be corrupt in his mind,” Carpenter said in a recent interview. “He feels that any time anybody disagrees with him on any subject that there can be no honest explanation for it.”

Carpenter has used the board’s influence over the business community to raise campaign money. Last year, he invited lobbyists to a $500-a-person event to explore their thoughts “on how the board can be more responsive to California business leaders and taxpayers.”

That solicitation fit a pattern that Carpenter established in the Senate. There, lobbyists and aides said, he was known to peer across his desk at a lobbyist while fingering a computer keyboard, implying that a computerized list in front of him showed that the lobbyist’s employers had failed to offer sufficient campaign contributions. Often, an aide said recently, the computer screen was blank. Carpenter was bluffing.

Friends and enemies alike said such were the mind games that occupied Carpenter, a graduate of the University of Iowa, the University of Missouri and Florida State University, where he received a Ph.D. in experimental psychology. At Florida State, he wrote a doctoral dissertation titled “The Effects of Sensory Deprivation on Behavior in the White Rat.”

Not long after leaving school, Carpenter moved to Orange County, where he soon immersed himself in Democratic politics. He worked briefly as a psychologist for an aircraft company and as director of an Orange County health planning agency. He lost a race for Congress in 1964 and two years later an Assembly primary race to Ken Cory, who went on to become state controller. Finally, in 1974, after a bitter primary fight, Carpenter captured the Assembly seat Cory vacated when he ran for higher office.

As a lawmaker, Carpenter pushed for property tax relief long before California voters did it themselves by passing Proposition 13 in 1978. He authored the act that established a state “superfund” to clean up toxic wastes. And he was among the first to advocate toll roads for traffic-choked Orange County.

But few who served with Carpenter know him very well. His unusual background, personality and mannerisms set him aside from the crowd. He is not one to chit-chat and he never courted the press.

Even Carpenter’s friends acknowledge that he is unique to the point of seeming odd. In conversation, he presses his fingers together and stares intently into the eyes of the speaker. Then he responds in a slow, methodical voice.

“The small number of us who know him can hear the wheels spinning, because we’re familiar with his thought processes and his behavior patterns,” a friend of 25 years said of Carpenter in 1988. “If you’re not, it’s off-putting, and you wonder whether you’re being set up, lied to or something else. It’s just not natural.”

Times staff writer Virginia Ellis contributed to this story.