Veteran Harbor Official Resigns : City government: Jun Mori, a commissioner for 15 years, takes some colleagues by surprise. Allegations of conflict of interest have marked his tenure.

Jun Mori on Wednesday announced that he has resigned from the Los Angeles Harbor Commission, ending a 15-year tenure marked as much by his alleged conflicts of interest as his powerful role in the port’s success.

“I wanted to tell you all that I have asked the mayor to relieve me of my duties here as a member of the board. Today will be my last meeting,” Mori said at the commission meeting in a brief statement that caught even many top port officials by surprise.

“I leave with mixed feelings but a great deal of pride,” said the 61-year-old attorney, who has served on the commission longer than its other four members combined.

Mori’s announcement was made without explanation and came as The Times was inquiring about his law firm’s representation of a huge Japanese-owned company now seeking one port lease and involved in another multimillion-dollar port venture that Mori has championed for more than a decade.

The four-year relationship between the Hiuka America Corp. and the New York-based law firm of Kelly, Drye & Warren led the city attorney’s office to rule last month that Mori, a senior partner in the firm, could not participate in votes on a $100-million facility for dry bulk handling. Hiuka hopes to be one of the partners in the facility through another company, and is seeking a lease for a scrap metal yard on port property in Wilmington.

In an interview, Mori said his firm’s representation of Hiuka and the city attorney’s opinion were “insignificant” to his decision. The timing of the opinion and his announcement, Mori said, was “a coincidence.”

Rather, Mori said he had decided to leave the commission now--three years before his term expires--to devote more time to his business, his family and other interests, including his membership on the UCLA Foundation Board of Trustees.

In a statement, Mayor Tom Bradley credited Mori’s knowledge of international trade and particularly Pacific Rim countries with the port’s emergence as the nation’s busiest commercial harbor.

During Mori’s tenure, harbor officials noted, the port’s operating revenues rose from about $35 million a year to more than $160 million in fiscal 1991. The port’s container traffic more than tripled during his time on the commission, largely because of trade with Pacific Rim nations.

“He made the Port of Los Angeles No. 1,” said fellow Commissioner Floyd Clay, who credited Mori with almost single-handedly persuading one huge Japanese shipping company to build a new terminal in Los Angeles that brings the port an estimated $15 million annually in revenue.

Mori’s tenure was also marked by conflict-of-interest controversies involving the private, soft-spoken attorney and his clients.

In 1983, for example, the district attorney’s office investigated Mori for allegedly pressuring the harbor’s then-general manager into giving special treatment to one of his former law firm’s clients. The district attorney concluded that Mori had interceded on behalf of his client but that there was insufficient evidence of criminal intent.

For more than a decade, Mori’s client list has prevented the Harbor Commission from voting on various port matters, forcing leases and other business to be decided by a City Council committee impaneled only when any city commission has a potential conflict of interest.

And last month, Assistant City Atty. Anthony Alperin notified Mori that he could not vote on matters relating to the $100-million dry bulk terminal because his law firm represents Hiuka America. In a March 19 opinion requested by Mori, Alperin said the commissioner could not vote on the terminal project because Hiuka is a one-third owner of another port tenant, Kaiser International Corp., that hopes to provide cargo handling for the project.

Mori said the project had nothing to do with his decision, noting that he had faced far greater controversy over earlier conflict-of-interest questions.

“If I was bothered by something like that . . . I wouldn’t have been around” until now, Mori said.