Contributions Played No Role in Permits, Gates Testifies : Lawsuit: The sheriff is confronted with gun permits issued to his campaign donors. He maintains that the same standards were applied to all applicants.

Orange County Sheriff Brad Gates, confronted with numerous concealed-weapons permits issued to his major campaign contributors, testified in court Monday that political donations had nothing to do with whether someone received a gun permit from his department.

Gates said some of the donors in question had good reasons for needing to carry concealed weapons, among them having supplied equipment such as cars for undercover work for his department or having provided sensitive information that helped criminal investigations.

But Gates’ testimony indicated that those reasons were known only to him and that they were at times completely different from what contributors had said in the official department records pertaining to their applications. The evidence suggests that in some cases, Gates overrode deputies’ recommendations that a permit be denied to a contributor for lack of a good reason.

“The same standards apply to everyone,” Gates said. “We look at every one individually and the individual circumstances on a case-by-case basis.”

The sheriff took the witness stand Monday in a civil rights lawsuit alleging that his procedures for granting concealed weapons permits were so tainted by cronyism and politics that they constituted a violation of the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution.

The 12-year-old suit, which seeks $10 million in damages, was brought by brothers Ty and Frank Ritter, two former Orange County bodyguards who were denied concealed weapons permits six times in the late 1970s. Their case is being heard here before U.S. District Judge William P. Gray.

During four hours of testimony, Gates staunchly defended his department as fair and evenhanded in its granting of concealed weapons permits to almost 2,000 people during his 16-year tenure as sheriff.

Gates said his department followed state law, which says that concealed weapons permits may be issued to people of good moral character who can show that their lives are in danger and that the threat cannot be prevented by law enforcement.

Gates did not waiver from that position, although the Ritters’ attorney, Meir J. Westreich, confronted him repeatedly with concealed-weapons permits that had been issued to campaign contributors, prominent people, supporters of the Sheriff’s Department and wealthy business people.

Armed with the sheriff’s own records, Westreich showed that 37 permits were issued to members of the exclusive Balboa Bay Club, which had contributed $11,000 to the sheriff’s campaigns.

Another 12 permits were granted to members of the Lincoln Club, an exclusive Republican organization whose membership includes some of the wealthiest and most influential business people in Orange County.

In another sample, 20 permits were correlated with the fact that the recipients had contributed a total of almost $40,000 to Gates’ campaign coffers. The records for those permits note that the applicants knew either Gates, former Sheriff James Musick or actor John Wayne, a friend and longtime supporter of Gates.

Other records presented as evidence suggested that several permits were granted by Shirley Taylor, the sheriff’s secretary, or issued to certain campaign donors who did not go through the full application review process.

The sheriff’s records also showed that Gates renewed a permit for a 71-year-old Santa Ana man who said in his application that he needed to protect himself from “niggers and Mexicans in front of my house.” A sheriff’s deputy, who recommended denial, noted that the man suffered uncontrollable shaking of his hands.

“I would not have approved it if I saw” the application, Gates testified. “He probably was someone who came in and talked to me about it.”

Overall, the evidence showed that about 95% of the more than 100 campaign contributors who applied for the permits received one for reasons no different from the Ritters’--self-protection.

“There was no differentiation for personal friends?” Westreich asked.

“That’s correct,” Gates answered.

“There was no differentiation for contributors to your campaign?”

“That’s correct.”

Later, under questioning by Eric L. Dobberteen, Gates’ attorney, the sheriff said he did not know that permit holders included as many as 100 contributors to his election campaigns.

Westreich challenged Gates’ testimony by citing six permit holders who had given Gates about $30,000 in contributions, saying that most of their applications had been recommended for denials by the deputies reviewing them.

The sheriff testified that he overrode the recommendations for reasons that were not written in any department record and that differed from the reasons given on the applications--”self-protection” or “carry large sums of cash.”

Gates said some of the contributors had provided equipment or sensitive information or had helped with narcotics investigations--that these were reasons that only he and the applicant knew about, and that none of these reasons were conveyed to deputies reviewing the applications.

Gates testified that he did not disclose those reasons because he wanted to protect the applicants from any public exposure. Gates acknowledged, however, that at the time, gun permit records were not public.

“All were major campaign contributors that happened to give sensitive information? Is that just coincidence?” Westreich asked.

Gates maintained that the permits were justified and that he would issue them again under the same circumstances.

In other testimony Monday, Gates said that after he became sheriff in 1975, his department re-evaluated its concealed-weapons permit procedures and began reducing the number it approved. During that time, he said, some elderly gentlemen who had had permits for decades personally pleaded with him to be allowed to keep them.

“Some would break down and cry,” Gates said.

Gates testified that in some cases, as long as there had been no problem with the permit holder, he would let that person keep the permit even though the applicant’s reason might not meet department criteria.