Poverty Fighter Lost Battle With Himself : Charity: Longtime crusader Scott Mather gave so much of himself fighting for causes that his own family suffered for it. Gradually, he found himself taking from the poor instead.

When Scott Mather sank into a chair across from six of his closest associates one cloudy afternoon in mid-March, he had a good idea of what was about to unfold.

The group, all of them leaders in the California Homeless Coalition that Mather chaired, had gathered in the fifth-floor conference room of the United Methodist Church building in downtown Los Angeles.

The first to speak was the Rev. Gene Boutilier, who had come to admire and respect Mather for his skills in articulating the needs of the homeless.

“We have reason to believe that your insurance business has been in disarray on at least a couple of occasions,” Boutilier told Mather.

The conversation that followed was painful for all of them, according to interviews with several participants. They told Mather they knew that he had taken insurance premiums from a charity that he helped establish, but they could find no evidence that an actual policy existed. It seemed he had lied to his customers, his friends. Was it true, they asked?

Mather, by now in tears, abandoned the plan he had formulated on the drive up the Santa Ana Freeway from Orange County, of attempting to con his way out of any direct admission.

“Yes,” he answered. “I’ve been doing some things that I shouldn’t have, and I’m going to have to deal with it.”

The unraveling of the web of deceit and secrecy he had maintained for five years had begun.

On Monday, Mather, 46, a former chairman of the Orange County Homeless Issues Task Force, is scheduled to meet with state insurance investigators. He said he will surrender his insurance broker’s license. After that, he is not sure what awaits him. Possible criminal prosecution, maybe a jail term.

His family is devastated. Both he and his wife, Kay, also an insurance agent who had managed her husband’s independent business, said they are out of work. And the couple have taken out a second mortgage to repay the more than $27,000 in premiums Mather has admitted taking. The family, including two teen-age children who still reside at home, is in counseling. Mather is reluctant to divulge details of the children’s problems, he said. He is still working to accept his own responsibility for their behavior.

Their savings might hold out for 90 days; beyond that, all is a question mark, Mather said.

“I have no livelihood. I’m going to have to go out and create something,” he said last week, sitting at the kitchen table of his comfortable, if cluttered, Costa Mesa home.

He is a short, husky, bearded man with heavy-lidded eyes that, despite glasses, give an appearance of sadness. But his voice, even after weeks of stress, is lively.

“At this point, I plan to stay here--I’m not going to go and hide my head or shave my beard, but I don’t know if I’m employable after something like this,” he said.

The story of Scott Mather has the makings of a classic tale of a determined rise followed by a tragic downfall. Even colleagues who were victimized by Mather believe he was--and still is--genuinely devoted to helping the poor and needy.

But they also believe he became hooked on the gratification and appreciation engendered by his efforts--he became obsessed with public accomplishment.

His growing involvement with the homeless movement, which had prompted friends to marvel at his willingness to sacrifice his personal success, came with a heavy price, they now realize.

“Those of us who kept welcoming his participation contributed to the fact that he didn’t have the time to devote to his business,” Boutilier, a minister with the United Church of Christ, said in a recent interview. “So he cut corners in his business rather than give up his community service. Once his business was in trouble, it was his problem and ours.”

After years of developing model shelters and poverty relief programs in Orange County, Mather emerged as a star in the statewide homeless movement. He was chairman of the California Homeless Coalition and was active with the California Right to Housing Campaign, which is pressing for passage of an initiative to provide money for low-income housing programs. In fact, Mather is the signer of the rebuttal argument that accompanies the Housing and Homeless Bond Act--Proposition 107--on the June ballot.

He acted as a guide and consultant when nationally known homeless advocate Mitch Snyder toured California last year. As the 1980s progressed, characterized nationally by affluence and indifference, he turned into a sort of “super-volunteer,” according to associates.

“We all sat and cheered him on, a little like cheering on a gladiator,” said friend Allen Baldwin, executive director of the Orange County Community Housing Corp. “He filled a void that exists in almost every community in this country. Other areas have never had a Scott Mather, people who were in positions of such leadership on social issues.”

Indeed, Mather acknowledges that he was driven by visions of a more equal distribution of society’s favors, yet he proved capable by his actions of subverting that cause.

“I think I recognized that I had gifts and talents that could be used to make a difference,” said Mather, who attended college sporadically but never attained a degree.

But he began to believe that the good cause justified expediency. “I was taking shortcuts, and that’s not healthy,” he said.

The public Mather is genial and knowledgeable. Closer scrutiny reveals shimmering contrasts: hard-working, articulate, generous, tenacious, impatient, compulsive, proud and racked with self-doubt.

The nagging insecurity may relate to his upbringing. He was born in the Mesabi Range in northern Minnesota, hills veined with rich iron ore deposits, to a family of prosperous shopkeepers.

At the end of World War II, his father, who had served in the Army, decided to move the family to the West Coast. They lived first in Roger Young Village, a huge encampment of Quonset huts built for returning veterans on the grounds of the Los Angeles Zoo in Griffith Park.

The family then moved to Long Beach, to another housing project called Truman Boyd, near the oil fields on the west side of the city.

Mather said he does not remember his childhood years as being especially poor, but he concedes they were tough times.

“There was a city park next to us, and I remember going to the lending library to get toys to play with,” he recalled. “And I had to work to go to (a Catholic grammar) school.”

He worked in the cafeteria, doing dishes, mopping the floor. His father had opened a grill on Ocean Boulevard--”It was before the fleet pulled out and it was pretty rowdy”--and he worked there at nights.

His family could not afford to send him away to college, so he became an ironworker. He plied his trade all over the country, but it was while building a power station in the Bunker Hill section of downtown Los Angeles in the mid 1960s that the homeless problem first entered his consciousness in what must have been a searing image.

“The sun would hit the hills and hundreds of people would emerge. They were living under bridges and trees, in the tunnels--that really affected me and I never forgot it,” he said.

But his active involvement was longer in coming, say friends. Jean Forbath, founder of the Orange County charity Share Our Selves and herself a prominent advocate for the needy, met Mather 15 years ago when both worked in religious education programs at the same church.

She enlisted Mather’s help in moving some donated furniture into an impoverished household and “he said it was too hard for him because it reminded him of his own childhood.”

Forbath said she was most impressed with Mather’s intelligence--he was a voracious reader hungry for knowledge. His lack of a formal education was a frustration to him, Mather conceded.

“At one time he wanted to enter a master’s program in religious education, but he lacked a B.A.,” Forbath recalled. “I wrote a letter of recommendation--I thought he would have done wonderfully--but he wasn’t accepted.”

By the mid 1970s Mather had gone through a divorce and was physically drained from years of heavy labor. After meeting Kay, who was rooted in church and home, he discovered a stability he had never known. He decided to change his profession and entered the insurance business because he thought it was something he could do without a college degree.

By then, having succeeded in establishing several church programs, he was deeply involved in poverty issues. He became chairman of the Orange Coast Interfaith Shelter; he was on the board of SOS; he helped develop the Orange County Homeless Issues Task Force; he was asked to travel and lecture on the art of preparing applications for federal and state grants; he helped to establish the California Homeless Coalition and HANDSNET, a statewide computerized charity information network.

All the while, Mather was devoting less and less attention to his business. He sold business, auto, liability and homeowners’ insurance but primarily handled large manufacturing businesses and shopping centers. However, he pulled out of the commercial market about seven years ago, after losing a major shoe manufacturing account.

When the national insurance market went soft soon after, his business took a nose-dive, he said. He began to concentrate instead on “mom-and-pop stuff”--autos and homeowners--and began doing business with several of the charities he was involved with. It was a mutually satisfactory arrangement, nearly everyone agrees.

The family decided that he must maintain his commitment to his causes, that sacrificing a certain amount of income was an acceptable price to pay.

But the damage was already done. He could see the effects of his almost fanatical activity in his teen-age children. They had begun to act out, sometimes aggressively, sometimes passively, Mather said. They became involved in drugs and alcohol. He would not talk in detail beyond saying, “There were hospitalizations.”

“I worked all day, then I was gone most nights with charity work,” he said. “Even on the weekends when I was home, I was writing proposals for grants.”

Amid the chaos that had become his life, it was easy to rationalize using some of the money he received--funds that were to be used for insurance premiums--for his personal needs. He acted not out of greed but of expediency, he said.

He does not remember--or chooses not to relate--the first instance in which he appropriated charity premiums for his own use.

In some instances, he said, he accepted premiums, thinking he could place them easily with insurance companies, but could not. He put things off, did not get back to them.

“There’s no way to justify it,” he said. “It’s like a rolling thing. You put some back to take care of someone else. Then, I got so busy. Sometimes I think some of the activity was just so I wouldn’t have to think about it.”

To date, five organizations in Orange and Los Angeles counties have indicated they paid premiums for bogus insurance policies. They include the Anaheim Interfaith Shelter, SOS, Orange Coast Interfaith Shelter in Costa Mesa, Friendship Shelter in Laguna Beach and Harbor Interfaith Shelter in San Pedro.

Directors of the Anaheim Interfaith Shelter discovered as early as last October that they did not have authentic policies. Several months later, directors of the San Pedro shelter, which Mather had helped to found, also discovered they had paid for polices that were never issued. Questions began to be raised among Mather’s associates, which led to the Los Angeles meeting. Even after Mather’s confession, his colleagues admitted they were reluctant to publicize his transgressions for fear the news might tarnish the image of their causes.

Still, two of the shelters filed formal complaints with the state insurance commissioner, and members of the homeless coalition who had confronted Mather at the Los Angeles meeting issued an insurance fraud alert over HANDSNET, the computer network Mather had been instrumental in forming.

Mather admitted there is still much denial to overcome. He did not tell Kay or the children about his improprieties for several days after the Los Angeles meeting. “I still thought maybe there was some way to pull it off quietly,” he said.

Mather has retained an attorney but said he does not regret his confessions.

“I feel sad and sorry about what I have done,” he said. “But I’m trying to do my best to fix things. My big concern is that I have not done damage to the groups I worked so hard for.”

CHARITIES THAT PAID MATHER FOR INSURANCE

To date, five charities in Orange and Los Angeles counties have indicated they were without insurance or were issued questionable insurance policies by Scott Mather:

* Anaheim Interfaith Shelter paid Mather $5,000 for liability and property insurance over a two-year period.

* Orange Coast Interfaith Shelter paid Mather $5,000 in premiums for a supplemental liability policy that was not issued and subsequently found to duplicate a policy the group already had.

* Share Our Selves paid $1,350 for liability insurance to cover the agency’s medical clinic.

* Harbor Interfaith Shelter of San Pedro paid Mather $16,000 in premiums over a five-year period for general liability and property insurance.

* Friendship Shelter in Laguna Beach was without general liability and fire insurance policies that were supposed to have been provided by Mather. Agency directors declined to specify how long they were without insurance or the amount paid to Mather.