City Official’s Past--or Lack of It--Was His Undoing

When Carl P. Malone applied to become the public works director of Hermosa Beach last year, he had a rock solid excuse for leaving his previous job. After all, how could he stay in a position directing development projects in Kuwait with Iraqi troops rolling across the border?

“He said he had a couple of hours to get his things, grab a ride and get out,” Acting City Manager Steve Wisniewski said. “As the tanks were rolling in on one end, he was rolling out on the other.”

But inconsistencies began to appear in Malone’s resume and, when confronted by city officials this week, he opted to resign rather than prove he ever set foot on Kuwaiti soil. He went to his office, typed out a one-sentence resignation and left.

Malone could not be reached for comment. Still up in the air is whether the most exotic tidbit on Malone’s resume--that he had outstepped the vaunted Iraqi Republican Guard--is a dramatic real-life war story or a tall tale.

“If it wasn’t so serious it would be very funny,” said Councilman Robert Benz, who had opposed the hiring of Malone. “The thing that bugs me about the whole thing was that there seemed to be such a rush to hire. We yelled and screamed about this hire. We objected to it and now this comes out.”

Councilman Robert Essertier, who supported Malone’s hiring, called the resignation “tragic” for both the city and Malone, because he had handled the job so well during his brief tenure.

When the 41-year-old engineer’s resume arrived in the mail, he had appeared well qualified for the position.

He said he was a Hermosa Beach native who had gone on to earn degrees in engineering and public administration from the University of Nevada. He said he had spent years as city engineer in Las Vegas and North Las Vegas, had been deputy director of public works for Clark County and had owned his own development firm.

But what really stood out were his four years on the job as manager of project development for the Kuwait Institute for Development. The position was cut short, Malone had said, by none other than Saddam Hussein.

A preliminary background check uncovered no discrepancies. The educational background checked out. So did his employment with the various governmental agencies in Nevada. Former bosses offered glowing recommendations.

Some on the council wanted to wait until a permanent city manager came on board before filling the job. But the majority of the council decided that there were too many pressing projects to wait.

So in late February, after Malone had been named a finalist by the Civil Service Commission, Wisniewski offered him the job. But within weeks, city officials discovered that Malone did not tell the whole truth about his engineering career.

He never mentioned, for instance, controversy that surrounded his tenure in Las Vegas, where there had been charges that he improperly sold a house adjacent to the Las Vegas Expressway while he was city engineer and had been forced out of office.

On May 28, 1986, the Las Vegas Review-Journal noted that “Carl Malone has been fired as Las Vegas city engineer, apparently because his credibility as a city employee was damaged when a dispute over his sale of a condemned house came before the Clark County Commission last week.”

That did not agree with Malone’s contention on his application that he left the job in August, 1986, to take a “career opportunity in a foreign country.”

During a trip to Las Vegas last week to determine the truth, Wisniewski said he found official records that backed up Malone’s contention that he had resigned. But Wisniewski said he would have liked Malone to have been more candid about the circumstances of the resignation.

Then city officials began looking into Malone’s employment in Kuwait.

They couldn’t find any record of a Kuwait Institute for Development, but they did find records that show Malone had been in a traffic accident in Las Vegas during the time he was supposed to be in Kuwait.

They asked Malone to provide them with references. He responded that the Gulf War made it difficult to track down former employees.

When pressed for documentation, Malone finally resigned.

Wisniewski said the city’s hiring process did not completely break down because the truth was discovered during Malone’s probationary period. Nonetheless, he said such an episode should not happen again.

“This tells us that we probably need to do a better background check than we’ve done in the past,” he said, “but hindsight is always better.”