Campaign Whiz Shepard Back to Top of His Game : Politics: Coming full circle after J. David scandal, consultant is guiding Susan Golding’s bid for mayor.

After years of political exile caused by his link to a scandal that brought down one San Diego mayor, campaign consultant Tom Shepard is getting a chance to elect another in the latest--and most crucial--stop on his long road back to the peak of his profession.

As a top adviser to mayoral candidate Susan Golding, Shepard hopes that success in this fall’s runoff at last will bury the fading stigma of his indictment in the J. David scandal that shattered his career in the mid-1980s.

Win or lose, Shepard’s professional future is brighter than it has been in nearly a decade thanks to his recent formation of a new campaign consulting firm with public relations giant Stoorza, Ziegaus & Metzger.

Combined with the imprimatur of political acceptability that working on a mayoral campaign gives any consultant, Shepard’s partnership with Stoorza provides further proof of a remarkable restoration in an unforgiving profession, where even the hint of controversy can be fatal.

“In the depths back in the ‘80s, I thought Tom Shepard would never work in this town again,” said David Lewis, another local political consultant who has been on the other side from Shepard in several races. “Back then, he figured his career was ruined and he’d never get back to where he was. But overcoming that shows he’s got a lot of determination, and that he’s a quality consultant. If Golding wins, you’d have to say he’s climbed back to the top.”

For Shepard, the story line--working in a high-profile mayoral campaign, the political horizon sunny--is a familiar one. Indeed, explanations of Shepard’s current personal and professional felicity begin in 1983, when he found himself in strikingly similar circumstances.

Shepard himself concedes the parallels, but says that the trauma and maturation of the past decade cause him to view what one friend calls “Tom’s second shot at the brass ring” differently.

“If the question is whether it feels the same as it did before, the answer is no,” said the trim, mustachioed Shepard during an interview at Golding’s campaign headquarters. “A lot changes over 10 years for almost anyone, and that was especially true for me.

“Initially, I was motivated by the sense that I could play a part in changing the political system and making it more equitable. The sense that you can make a difference and make government better is still a factor, but other motivations drive me now that weren’t there a decade ago.”

Nine years ago, the then-34-year-old Shepard, a Bay Area native who moved here to attend UC San Diego, was poised to become one of San Diego’s premier political consultants. After helping Roger Hedgecock win the mayoralty over Maureen O’Connor and, only months later, orchestrating a successful ballot initiative for the downtown Convention Center, his fledgling consulting firm, Tom Shepard & Associates, had political and corporate clients clamoring for its services.

Ironically, however, the Hedgecock race, the most gleaming accomplishment on Shepard’s resume--which also included a brief stint in elective politics as a Del Mar councilman and mayor in the early 1970s--also precipitated his downfall.

A politically tantalizing detail unearthed by the collapse of the La Jolla investment firm of J. David & Co. in early 1984 was that Shepard’s company had been heavily bankrolled by funds from J. David principal Nancy Hoover, then a close friend of both Shepard and Hedgecock.

A subsequent criminal investigation into Hedgecock’s 1983 mayoral campaign culminated in a grand jury indictment charging that Shepard had conspired with Hedgecock, Hoover and J. David founder J. David (Jerry) Dominelli to use his consulting firm to funnel illegal contributions to Hedgecock’s campaign.

Within months, the controversy had dried up most of Shepard’s business and eventually led to his firm’s dissolution as clients hurriedly distanced themselves from him. Within political circles, where perception is as important as reality, and sometimes more so, Shepard watched with dismay as his reputation as a strategic wunderkind was transmogrified into that of a political pariah.

“Clients called me up and said, ‘Hey, we’re sorry about all this, but we don’t need these problems,’ ” Shepard recalled.

From late 1984 through the spring of 1986, Shepard was unable to attract a single client, forcing him to live off his savings and to sell his condominium and vintage Porsche while “going pretty deeply into debt.” Although a handful of local races began trickling his way in the late 1980s, it was not until 1990 that his business became profitable.

The impact on Shepard’s personal life was equally significant, as “a lot of wealthy, influential people who wanted to be my friend” in the heady days following Hedgecock’s victory “disappeared the moment the problems started.”

“That forced me to come to terms with who I was and what I wanted to do with my life,” said Shepard, 43. “When your integrity is called into question by respected individuals in the community and it’s printed on the front page of the newspaper, you rethink a lot of things. It also taught me that the people who really count are the ones whose relationship with you isn’t based on what you can do for them.”

From the outset, Shepard vigorously disputed prosecutors’ allegation that his firm was little more than a front for more than $350,000 in illegal J. David donations to Hedgecock’s campaign. Those funds, he argued, were routine business investments made by Hoover that were used primarily for staff and administrative overhead expenses.

Nevertheless, Shepard eventually pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor under a plea bargain in which he agreed to perform community service for several environmental groups. His guilty plea, however, arose primarily from “my need to put this behind me,” not from a sense of wrongdoing, he stressed.

“I didn’t have the resources, emotionally or financially, to continue fighting,” Shepard explained. “When you’re caught up in something like that, you get to a point where matters of guilt or innocence become irrelevant. You’ve got to find a way to survive.”

Most mutual acquaintances of Hedgecock and Shepard supported his decision, but the guilty plea produced a schism between the two former close friends that still exists. For his part, Hedgecock says that he could not countenance Shepard’s willingness to “say that something that I know was right and legal was wrong and illegal.” Although the two occasionally chat, after not talking for several years, Shepard concedes that “there’s not much of a personal relationship there anymore.”

Despite the personal upheaval traceable to his political involvement, Shepard said that he never considered a career change, even in the bleakest moments.

“In retrospect, I probably should have thought that on a number of occasions,” Shepard said, chuckling and smiling wryly. “But, in the immediate aftermath, I was so angry at what I perceived to be the inequity of the whole situation that I had this attitude: ‘I’ll be damned if I let the bastards get me down.’ I would have continued out of spite if for no other reason.”

Nancy Chase, a former Hedgecock fund-raiser who remained close to Shepard during the dark days of the mid-1980s, said she was “always amazed, frankly, that he wasn’t suicidal” during that period.

“Tom lost the most in all this, undeniably,” Chase said. Indeed, although Hedgecock suffered the ignominy of being forced to resign the city’s top elective office, the former mayor remains a popular public figure and, with his well-paying radio talk show, is financially much better off today than he was as mayor.

“Roger bounced back immediately, but it’s taken Tom almost 10 years to get back to where he was,” Chase added. “A lot of people would have just given up, but, despite everything that happened to him, Tom is still starry-eyed and idealistic and believes in the process. And now he’s getting another chance.”

Chase’s husband, Richard, was one of Shepard’s first post-Hedgecock saviors, hiring him to work on behalf of a controversial ballot measure to create a trash-to-energy plant in San Marcos. Narrowly approved, the 1987 measure remains one of the few electoral successes that such proposals have achieved nationwide.

The following year, Shepard teamed up with consultant Larry Remer on a stunning 51%-49% victory for another ballot initiative establishing district elections in San Diego City Council races--a proposal that city voters had rejected four previous times.

That long-shot victory drew other clients to Shepard’s and Remer’s Primacy Group consulting firm--among them, San Diego City Council candidates John Hartley and Valerie Stallings, both of whom upset incumbents who heavily outspent them. In those contests, Shepard enhanced his image as an expert at finely honing campaign themes and shrewdly targeting those messages to receptive, likely voters.

Some of Shepard’s past opponents, in both initiative and candidate races, unsuccessfully tried to resurrect his Hedgecock and J. David ties as a campaign issue. Both Hartley and Stallings admit, however, that they pondered the potential liabilities before hiring Shepard.

“I thought about it, but any concern was outweighed by Tom’s brightness and our friendship,” said Stallings, who met Shepard through the UCSD Alumni Assn. “I finally decided if I lost because they campaigned against him, so be it.”

Golding’s selection of Shepard is particularly telling in illustrating how time--and, perhaps more importantly, his impressive winning record--have largely eliminated such concerns. With her former husband’s conviction on federal money-laundering charges making Golding potentially vulnerable to questions about her personal integrity, she could not afford to have her selection of a consultant also raise eyebrows.

“Golding couldn’t risk people saying, ‘Oh, she always hangs out with crooks,’ ” said Bob Meadow, Shepard’s former partner in Tom Shepard & Associates. “If she wasn’t worried about the past, then no other candidate should be, either. Tom’s again being judged like other consultants--on his record. In getting clients, consultants are only as good as their last campaign. If you win, they will come.”

Past opponents’ lingering enmity, however, ensures that Shepard’s past will not totally be forgotten. O’Connor, who won the special 1986 mayoral race necessitated by Hedgecock’s resignation, still caustically uses the term “Tom Shepard-type tactics” to describe what she regards as hardball, underhanded campaign techniques.

Severing his 3 1/2-year partnership with Remer to join with Stoorza, Ziegaus & Metzger leaves him with bittersweet feelings, Shepard acknowledges, noting that the two “fought some real wars that contributed to some important changes.”

But Stoorza, the state’s largest independent public relations firm, offers Shepard the opportunity to expand his consulting efforts, particularly in the San Francisco Bay region. That factor is as important for personal as professional reasons: Since his marriage last October to a woman with whom he became reacquainted at their 25th high school reunion, Shepard usually splits his week between San Diego and Berkeley.

The new consulting firm, to be called the Campaign Strategies Group, will operate independently of Stoorza’s public relations activities, focusing strictly on campaign management.

That division of responsibility, Shepard argues, could help preclude a conflict of interest facing most consultants, who often solicit commercial and legislative advocacy clients to produce income betweencampaigns--accounts that sometimes bring them before the very public officials they helped elect.

“The public perception is that somehow your private clients have special access to an elected official, and the (official) might wonder whether the advice you’re giving him is motivated by your commercial clients’ interests,” Shepard said. “On both fronts, you’re doing a disservice to your clients. It’s better to stay on one side of the process.”

The optimism with which he again regards the future has helped Shepard, who also serves as a consultant to county supervisorial candidate Dianne Jacob, to become philosophical about the past.

“I do feel I lost a sizable chunk of my adult life, but I really don’t think about it that much,” Shepard said. “Intellectually, I decided that being angry served no useful purpose and didn’t constructively contribute to the things I still wanted to do with my life.”

There is, however, one poignant regret that persists for Shepard. His father died in 1986, and his mother passed away two years later, depriving them of a chance to witness his recent change of fortune.

“The worst part of it for me is that they didn’t live long enough to see me recover completely,” Shepard said, speaking softly. “It was very difficult for them, living in Northern California, to see the stories in the newspaper but not very much of what went on behind the headlines. It would have been nice if they could still be here now to see this. But things don’t always work out how you’d like.”