Purported Secret Checks to Robbins’ Girlfriends Probed : Grand jury: A possible link between payments the women received and money that the senator allegedly extorted is being studied.

A federal grand jury investigating state Sen. Alan Robbins’ role in an alleged extortion scheme is scrutinizing secret payments that the San Fernando Valley lawmaker purportedly funneled to several girlfriends through a public relations agency, sources have told The Times.

The grand jury became interested in the senator’s women friends as it looked for a possible link between checks they received and money that Robbins allegedly extorted from a San Diego hotel developer, according to these sources who are familiar with the investigation.

One of the women, Cynthia Kay, said she told the grand jury last month that Robbins gave her 10 checks totaling almost $10,000 from the Goddard Co., a public relations firm with ties to Robbins. Its offices were searched in November by the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service.

Kay said the checks helped cover her living expenses while dating the senator, although she did no work for the Santa Monica-based public relations agency.

Other girlfriends of Robbins also received payments from Goddard at the senator’s direction without working for the firm, according to the sources, who corroborated Kay’s story.

In its far-reaching investigation, the sources said, the grand jury has been examining almost every aspect of Robbins’ political and financial life, and now, in an unexpected turn, his personal life as well.

Robbins, who was reelected to the Senate by a comfortable margin last year, has not been charged with a crime, and he has denied that he acted illegally or improperly.

Robbins refused to comment about payments or gifts to Kay and other women, as did one of his attorneys. “My attorneys have advised me that the only subject I can discuss with you is legislation presently pending in the Legislature,” the veteran lawmaker told a reporter.

Specifically, the grand jury is focusing on whether the 47-year-old Democrat, who is divorced, used the Goddard Co. and other firms to launder as much as $250,000 extorted from hotel developer Jack Naiman. Naiman has told investigators that he paid more than $10,000 to the public relations company at Robbins’ direction, according to sources familiar with the probe. Authorities also are trying to determine how the remainder of the $250,000 was spent.

Investigators have been looking at a wide array of Robbins’ many business dealings, trying to determine whether he misused his public office for personal gain.

Kay told The Times that she has appeared twice before the federal grand jury, which questioned her about the Goddard checks and about a red Mercedes that the senator obtained for her from a rental agency specializing in expensive cars--MDR Enterprises, which operates the Beverly Hills Car Collection.

Kay said she drove the sports coupe for six months in 1988 and 1989 before she broke off relations with Robbins, but that she was never billed. She told a reporter that she knew little about the senator’s political or financial dealings.

“The truth is I don’t know anything about what was going on,” Kay said. “I was just there. I was just a girl he put out there as his girlfriend.”

In addition to Kay, a second former girlfriend of Robbins has told The Times that she was questioned by the grand jury about her relationship with the lawmaker. This woman, like other sources interviewed by The Times, asked that she not be identified. She too received at least one payment from the Goddard Co. without performing any work for the firm, sources said.

Jennifer Goddard, who in 1975 worked as an aide in Robbins’ Capitol office before starting up the Goddard Co., said she could not comment.

Her attorney, Gordon A. Greenberg, said: “The U.S. attorney is trying to unravel this. . . . There are good reasons for everything in Jennifer’s conduct, but at this time we think it’s inappropriate to comment.”

Kay described herself as naive when she began dating the veteran senator in 1987, soon after she arrived in Los Angeles from her native Texas.

Now 31, she said she was attracted to Robbins in part because he was 16 years older and because she enjoyed basking in the limelight that shines on a powerful politician.

Several months after she began dating Robbins, she quit her job as an apartment house manager and rented a unit in Club California North Hollywood, an apartment complex developed by a Robbins partnership. She said she also had a room in the lawmaker’s Encino home.

In the two years that she dated Robbins, Kay said, she accompanied him to a number of political functions, traveling with him on a fund-raising cruise to Bangkok and Singapore. However, she said she probably spent more time with the lawmaker’s two children than she did with Robbins himself. “I was more or less a baby-sitter,” she said.

She said she never questioned the fact that many of the checks she received from Robbins were from the Goddard Co. Kay said she told people--including the grand jury the first time she appeared--that she worked for the firm because she was embarrassed to be unemployed.

“I didn’t feel comfortable not working and having somebody take care of me,” she said.

Kay said she was asked last month by the grand jury whether Robbins had instructed her to say she had worked for the Goddard Co. She told a reporter that she could not recall whether Robbins made such a request.

The Goddard checks varied in amount from $400 or $500 to $2,500, Kay said. Robbins also gave her checks drawn on his personal account and sometimes handed her cash to cover expenses, she said.

Records show she also received $9,500 from a political committee financed by Robbins in 1988 to support Proposition 99, which slapped a 25-cent-per-pack tax increase on cigarettes. The committee produced two television commercials featuring Robbins, whose deceased father had been a heavy smoker. The committee reported that its sole source of income was $44,325 transferred from the Alan Robbins Campaign Committee.

Kay said that she performed such chores for the campaign as picking up photographs of Robbins as a boy for use in the commercials.

Now married and trying to launch a career as an actress, Kay said that it upset her to have to talk to FBI agents and the grand jury. She said she hopes that publicity surrounding the Robbins investigation would help her gain an appearance in Playboy or Penthouse.

When Kay finally broke with Robbins in the spring of 1989, she said, the senator told her she needed to call Allan J. Siemons, president of the car rental company, to make arrangements for taking care of the Mercedes.

Eventually, a new boyfriend bought the 1980 car for $17,000, she said.

In 1988, Siemons came to the Capitol to lobby against a bill by Assemblyman Lloyd G. Connelly (D-Sacramento) that, as initially drafted, would have prevented California car rental agencies from recovering damages from a customer’s insurance company in event of an accident.

Robbins asked the Senate Rules Committee to refer the bill to the Insurance, Claims and Corporations Committee, which he chairs, according to a Senate source. However, the bill was sent instead to another panel, which dropped the controversial insurance provision.

Connelly’s chief of staff, Timothy Howe, recalled that Robbins may have played a behind-the-scenes role in developing an amendment to the bill that would have exempted agencies that specialize in “exotic cars”--sporty and expensive automobiles like those leased out by Siemons’ company.

The bill was changed during a combative hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which dropped the key insurance provision. Robbins did not testify before the committee or play any public role in the committee’s action. Federal authorities have examined the committee’s files on the bill, a source said, trying to determine if Robbins had a conflict of interest.

The revised measure was approved in the Senate on a 38-0 vote--with Robbins voting in favor--and signed into law by the governor.

Siemons was not available for comment because of illness, according to one of his business associates. Contacted last year, he refused to discuss allegations that his agency provided cars to Robbins’ girlfriends.

For more than two years, Robbins has been a subject of an ongoing federal investigation of political corruption in the Capitol. To date, it has led to the conviction of two elected officials on extortion and racketeering charges--ex-Sen. Joseph B. Montoya (D-Whittier) and Board of Equalization member Paul B. Carpenter.

The probe of Robbins has intensified over the last year. Last November, FBI and Internal Revenue Service investigators searched his house and the home of California Coastal Commissioner Mark L. Nathanson. The grand jury is looking at allegations that Nathanson and Robbins used their offices to extort San Diego hotel developer Naiman--a charge denied by attorneys for both public officials.

The agents also raided the offices of the Goddard Co. The firm has periodically been hired to do public relations for Robbins and his various business enterprises.

The Robbins-backed Yes on Proposition 99 Committee paid the firm $14,300 in 1988, records show. The company also worked for Robbins while one of his partnerships was assembling property for a multimillion-dollar development near Marina del Rey.

A source familiar with the company said Robbins frequently referred business to the firm, and, as a result, Jennifer Goddard was willing to write checks at Robbins’ direction.

All during his years in the state Senate, Robbins and his various partners have been actively developing property in Los Angeles and Ventura counties--ambitious transactions that appear to have made Robbins a multimillionaire.

Now loans that made some of those deals possible are being examined by federal authorities as part of a separate federal investigation of Mercury Savings & Loan in Huntington Beach, according to sources.

Last February, federal regulators seized the insolvent S & L, ousting its officers and board chairman, Leonard Shane.

One former Mercury official, who asked not to be identified, said the financial records related to Robbins’ loans were subpoenaed by a federal grand jury in Sacramento almost two years ago.

Shane told The Times he was not aware of the investigation and maintained that Robbins “never got preferential treatment” in obtaining the loans.