Brookins Sells Stake at Airport

Bishop H. H. Brookins recently was paid $130,000 for his interest in a controversial food concessions contract at Los Angeles International Airport, bringing to at least $500,000 the amount he has received since 1985, the concessionaire disclosed Thursday.

Officials with Host International Inc. also said they were “surprised” that Brookins refused to share his lucrative investment in the city-approved contract with other minorities.

“My personal feeling was that Bishop Brookins felt if he could acquire meaningful participation in the airport, he would expand the opportunity to (other) blacks in Los Angeles,” said Arthur Spring, senior vice president of Host. “(But) he chose to retain that opportunity solely for himself.”

Host officials appeared at a hearing of the City Council’s Government Operations Committee into airport contracts that have paid $7.3 million in profits to Brookins and other minority partners, including the wife of House Ethics Committee Chairman Julian Dixon (D-Los Angeles). A city audit concluded that the minority partners, including Brookins, paid no money out of their own pockets and did little or no work.

The arrangement was roundly criticized by committee members.

“You were buying political influence,” Councilman Ernani Bernardi said to Host officials. “That is what you were doing when you bought this well-connected person at City Hall.”

Bernardi later added: “This thing stinks more every day.”

Host officials told the committee that they have been negotiating with airport officials for the past year to give their minority partners a “hands-on” role in the food and beverage concessions. This would include replacing the joint-venture partnership with a sublease arrangement at Terminal 6 and making operations at Terminal 3 available to a new group of disadvantaged businesses as envisioned by the city’s minority and women business enterprise program.

The new arrangement would direct about $17 million in Host food and beverage sales at Los Angeles International Airport to minority-owned and operated firms, said Host President Robert M. Dorfman.

Councilman Marvin Braude applauded the changes.

“I’m very pleased to hear that Host is a very different company today than it was years ago,” he said. “You’ve learned a lot of lessons. I think the city of Los Angeles has helped you mature” in developing business opportunities for disadvantaged minorities and women.

Host officials said they first met Brookins in the mid-1980s when he frequently appeared at the airport to speak out about the need to include blacks in airport contracts.

“He had a high public profile,” Spring said. “Everyone knew who the bishop was.”

The firm sought Brookins’ help to recruit minority partners to compete for duty-free gift shop concessions, Spring said.

“We wanted his name and credibility to go into the Los Angeles community in a short time and pull together a group of minorities to compete for a contract that we wanted desperately to win,” he said.

Brookins performed splendidly, Spring said, but Host failed to win the contract. As part of a previous agreement, the company later offered the bishop a significant share in its food and beverage contract at the airport.

Dorfman said the firm “assumed” that Brookins would split his interest in the food and beverage concessions among the minorities he had recruited for the duty-free contract.

Instead, Brookins kept the more than $65,000 per year exclusively for himself, Host officials said.

“The intent (of the city’s minority business program) was for businesses to be involved, not for Brookins,” Bernardi said.

Brookins told The Times recently that his payments from the concession were for previous lobbying work on the duty-free shops contract.

Within the last several months, Host officials said, Brookins sold his share of the food concession to other minority partners for $130,000.