For Ex-Sen. Robbins, It Was Push the Rules to the Limit : Corruption: Self-described political maverick, caught in an FBI sting operation, is set to plead guilty today.

When state Sen. Alan Robbins resigned in disgrace last month, he wrote an eloquent letter of apology, describing himself as a political maverick who had given in to the temptations of power and gone astray.

But as the 18-year legislative veteran prepares to plead guilty to felony charges in U. S. District Court today, a review of his public record shows that from the very beginning he reveled in playing politics close to the line, and that he was often accused of impropriety on matters grave and trivial.

The San Fernando Valley Democrat is expected to enter a formal guilty plea to racketeering and tax-evasion charges growing out of a six-year federal probe of political corruption in the Capitol.

To those who have dealt with Robbins over his years in the Senate, his decision to step down and admit that he abused his elected office for personal gain came as a surprise, but not a shock.

“People are saying it was not a matter of if (he would be charged criminally), but a matter of when,” said a longtime Senate colleague who asked not to be identified. “The only surprise was that he’d given up.”

Indeed, it sometimes seemed that Robbins, 48, spent so much of his time scheming to achieve his own personal and political interests that he would have little time for the people he represented.

Yet he was an effective, unrelenting champion for his constituents in the Valley--winning them courthouses, a state office building, and an underground Metro Rail corridor--a share of the political pie that he maintained had long been denied them.

But from the very beginning, Robbins pushed the limits. To qualify as a candidate for his first election in 1973, he swore under oath that he had lived in his Senate district for a year, when documents show that he and his family had been living outside district lines. In that same race, his campaign put out a brochure plagiarizing a letter sent to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy by Kennedy’s father.

In ensuing years, he was repeatedly accused of using his office for personal gain--to get the price he wanted from the city of Los Angeles for a piece of land he owned in Pacoima or to win favorable treatment from government officials on property deals.

In land development schemes that made him a multimillionaire, he moved with an aggressiveness that often left his partners in the dust, including several who took him to court, accusing him of fraud and deception.

At perhaps his lowest moment until now, he was charged with sexual misconduct--of having sex with two underage women he met in the Capitol. A jury found him not guilty, but the 1981 trial, with its lurid testimony, left his reputation tarnished and his prospects for higher office in shambles.

Robbins’ style was never to let a charge go unanswered, always contending that he was the wronged party, that his critics were the culprits, motivated by greed or politics or--because he was Jewish--anti-Semitism. If he was sued, he would countersue. If he was accused, he would return the favor.

In the Senate, he was the master of the legislative maneuver, holding his vote until the last minute to put other lawmakers in his debt or delaying his own bills until the final hours of a session when few would bother to read the fine print or understand his purposes.

“Alan was a person who pushed the rules to the limit, more so I think than anybody else in the Legislature,” said Sen. Newton R. Russell (R-Glendale), the lawmaker most likely to rise to his feet to question a last-minute Robbins bill. “If he lost, the few times he did, I never saw him angry. That wasn’t his way. He’d just wait and come back at it again.”

Russell said that because of his own background as an insurance man, he had long wanted a seat on the Senate Insurance, Claims and Corporations Committee, but that Robbins, who chaired the committee, refused to allow him on unless he first pledged not to ask too many questions.

“I used to kid him about it,” Russell said. “He’d say, ‘I’d be happy to have you on the committee if you’d just agree to limit the number of questions.’ ”

One legislative aide described Robbins’ losing on an amendment to send federal law enforcement funds directly to the Los Angeles Police Department, bypassing the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Defeated at the outset, Robbins began amending other bills to accomplish the same goal--repeating it as many as 12 times until he finally won what he was seeking, the aide said.

He was that way in his personal and business life as well, never admitting defeat, beating back obstacles through a combination of perseverance, hard work and clever tactics.

His habit of pushing the rules to their limits--or beyond--seemed to pervade every aspect of his life.

He arranged to have girlfriends put on the payroll of a Santa Monica public relations agency, even though they did no work for the company, according to sources familiar with the federal investigation of Robbins.

Even something seemingly as trivial as buying a car could be an exercise in using the power of office for personal advantage.

In 1984, Robbins bought a red Ferrari convertible in Europe--probably saving more than $10,000 on the deal, according to one source.

His problem was that the Italian sports car, which he purchased in Germany, did not meet California’s tougher smog-control and safety standards and could not legally be registered or driven in the state.

But Robbins drove it nevertheless, a fact that came to light in 1985 when a state police officer backed into the car, still without license plates, when it was parked in the Capitol garage.

To solve the problem, Robbins met with top Department of Motor Vehicle officials in his Capitol office and wrote U. S. Department of Transportation officials on state Senate stationery.

But in the end, state officials refused to register the automobile. In 1988, Robbins was able to get the car registered in Florida in the name of a car dealership there. By then, the car that could not be driven legally in California had an additional 14,000 miles on it.

Robbins also used his political clout in his private financial activities, according to those who have done business with him.

In court documents, Newport Beach entrepreneur Robert Blake charged that Robbins discouraged him from competing for land near Marina del Rey by telling him that only Robbins could win needed government approvals.

When Robbins dealt with state agencies, they were aware of his power as a state senator--someone who often sat on the Assembly-Senate budget conference committee that set priorities for state spending.

That was true of UCLA officials, who initially opposed Robbins’ plans to win city approval for a condominium conversion of a 213-unit apartment complex in Westwood, known as Club California, in which Robbins had a majority interest.

After meeting with Robbins in early 1980 and reviewing the plan, UCLA administrator Sam J. Morabito recommended that the university oppose the conversion because of the loss of rental units in an area that suffers from an extreme shortage of affordable housing. But he noted, “There may be other factors which affect this issue as a result of Sen. Robbins’ position in the Legislature and his possible impact on the university, of which I am unaware.”

Robbins persisted, eventually offering to pay $500,000 into a university housing fund or reserving 53 rental units for UCLA students at reduced rental rates for 10 years. UCLA accepted in 1984, assuring city approval--an act that immediately boosted the market value of the property by $3 million or more, according to a source familiar with the deal.

The Club Californias--the one in Westwood and another in North Hollywood--were among the first business successes of Robbins, a man described by friends and enemies as a restless, driven soul with enormous ambition and an immense capacity for work.

Those who know him best say that despite a veneer of confidence, Robbins is a lonely person, a man troubled by nightmares that leave him screaming in the night.

These friends say the key to understanding him is the attention his parents lavished on his brain-damaged older brother, who made great demands on his parents’ time.

“He was driven to succeed,” said one longtime friend. “He didn’t want to be poor. And it wasn’t enough to just be successful, so he drove himself.”

Born in Philadelphia to middle-class parents, Robbins grew up in the San Fernando Valley, where he attended public schools from grade school.

He graduated from UCLA in three years and had his law degree by the time he was 23. Seven years later, he became the youngest member of the state Senate after a 1973 special election in which he spent more than $300,000--a record at the time.

Robbins traced his zeal for politics to the 1950s, when as a boy he watched Sen. Estes Kefauver’s televised hearings on organized crime.

But he also said that before he moved into politics, he was determined to put enough money in his pockets so that he would be beholden to no one.

Politically, he was not content to be just another state senator. From the start he started pushing, unsuccessfully, for a committee chairmanship--something he achieved only when he joined in a legislative coup that made Sen. David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles) president pro tem of the Senate.

As a reward, Roberti made Robbins chairman of the insurance committee.

But Robbins had always set his sights on even more ambitious goals.

In 1977, he took on Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley in an unsuccessful bid in which he tried to make neglect of the Valley a central campaign issue. Along the way, he raised the specter of anti-Semitism, at one point comparing a Bradley brochure on what the mayor had done for the San Fernando Valley “to Adolf Hitler putting out a campaign brochure of what he did for the Jews and Gypsies.”

After his defeat in the mayor’s race, Robbins became a champion of the group that opposed the busing of children to achieve racial integration in the schools. He was the author of a popular 1979 state constitutional amendment that put limits on court-ordered desegregation plans.

Then came the sex charges that stopped him from seeking higher office, although in 1989 he began exploring a run for the Board of Supervisors.

Through all his adversity, Robbins was able to recover “like a cat who always lands on his feet,” a former aide said.

But his ability to survive was ended by federal investigators who launched a sting operation in 1986 that was aimed at corruption in the Capitol.

In 1988, an informant led the FBI to Robbins, who freely offered suggestions on the amount of money it would take to buy support from other lawmakers for a special-interest bill that was written as part of the sting.

As for himself, he said, “I don’t need to be taken care of on every bill that comes through.”

For a time, federal authorities doubted that they had enough evidence to convict Robbins.

But then San Diego hotel developer Jack Naiman came forward with a chilling story, telling authorities that Robbins and California Coastal Commissioner Mark L. Nathanson had extorted almost $250,000 from him. The developer said that he had paid out the money because Robbins threatened to block a La Jolla hotel project and to keep him from developing any property near the California coastline again.

Nathanson has not been charged in the case and has denied any wrongdoing.

Robbins eventually negotiated a plea-bargain with U. S. Atty. George O’Connell in which he admitted to five acts of racketeering, including the extortion of Naiman, and income tax evasion. In addition to resigning from office, Robbins also agreed to a five-year prison term, a $250,000 fine and restitution to his victims. And he cooperated with authorities for six months, at times wearing a hidden recording device.

In his letter of resignation submitted to the Senate, Robbins wrote about how he had spent his career in Sacramento as an outsider, someone who did not simply bend the rules but also broke them.

In the same letter he wrote what could be his own political epitaph: “When you are willing to walk close to the line, whether for political success, personal gain or to help your friends, you risk waking up one day to find out that you have long since crossed a boundary that you vowed you never would cross. That is where I find myself today.”