Roth’s Disdain for Rules Seen as His Downfall

Orange County Supervisor Don R. Roth was quick to criticize when the news broke in August, 1990, that one of his political appointees may have broken state law by accepting too many golf outings and lunches from a local developer.

The stocky, silver-haired official--who announced his resignation Tuesday--said at the time that he was “completely shocked” by the allegations against his appointee. “I’ve been well aware of the (gift-taking) limit, personally. I follow it. Everybody should.”

Yet that very week, the cash-strapped Roth himself accepted what he called a “favor”--16 months’ housing in a mobile home park, allegedly rent-free, from a family that later relied on Roth’s vote on a $5-million condominium project.

That favor would set off an investigation into a string of influence-peddling allegations that this week cost Roth his job. The embattled elder statesman of Anaheim politics announced his resignation under fire Tuesday, saying that the investigation had eroded his ability to serve the county.

The two episodes offer a stark contrast between Roth’s public profile and his private persona. On the one hand, the ex-Navy aviator has built a reputation as a tough-talking, law-and-order legislator who has railed against government largess and abuse; on the other, a picture has emerged in recent months of a well-connected politician who critics say flouted ethics laws aimed at ensuring a measure of integrity in local government.

Roth denies any criminal wrongdoing; his lawyer has said he committed nothing more than “technical, inadvertent violations” of state laws that restrict the gifts politicians can receive and the votes they can cast on behalf of the gift-givers.

“A ‘50s-style politician,” some associates call him privately.

But in an age of ever-tightening regulations over government ethics, critics and supporters alike suggest that the 71-year-old supervisor may have gotten got caught up living by an outdated concept of the accepted relationship between politician and constituent.

“He talks about following the rules,” asserts Shirley L. Grindle, a prominent Orange County activist who has clashed repeatedly with Roth over campaign-reform issues. “But he’s just an arrogant guy who doesn’t think the rules apply to him. . . . One of his reasons for being in politics is to achieve the freebies available if you want to use your political pressure.”

Roth spent much of the day Wednesday cleaning out his Santa Ana office of the last six years and “looking for personal belongings among all his stacks of county reports,” said chief of staff Steven Malone.

The supervisor did not want to talk about his resignation, and Malone said the mood was “sober” in the office, despite several dozen calls throughout the day from well-wishers. “This is a devastating loss for him. He’s been a public person for a lot of years, and to leave office under these types of circumstances is a terrible burden for him,” Malone said.

Indeed, many friends and associates say Roth is losing what had been his crowning achievement--the job of county supervisor.

A former realtor and the son of a Republican precinct captain in Chicago, Roth became active in politics and civic affairs in Anaheim in the 1960s but had several false starts at elected office. He was appointed to the City Council in 1970 only to lose two later elections for the seat.

But as Roth’s ties with the local business community grew, so too did his political stature. By 1982, he was mayor of what was then Orange County’s biggest city, and in 1986 he successfully won a tough race for county supervisor.

“He felt very, very proud to get elected to that job,” said Jackie Roth, the supervisor’s ex-wife and now a potential witness against the former Anaheim mayor. “He had always commented on how his old man wouldn’t trust him with the car, and here he was supervisor over all these people.”

Roth was paid well--an annual salary of $83,000, even after the supervisors were forced to rescind pay raises for themselves in 1991 because of a public backlash. The county gave him use of his own car, a Lincoln Continental in recent years. He had a personal staff of at least seven to assist him.

And perhaps most critically, he had a job of high prestige, held historically by some of Orange County’s founders and sought now by both local and state officials.

The job brought the comfort and security of working on the powerful, all-Republican Orange County board, generally freed from many of the political quagmires that grip Sacramento and Washington.

Along with the power to help oversee a county budget of $3.6 billion and wield influence over such crucial local issues as the siting of a new jail came gifts from constituents that later would hasten Roth’s departure from a job he described as “the greatest honor of my life.”

Roth argues, for instance, that there was nothing wrong with a Los Angeles parking company executive taking the supervisor and his staff out for a $520 lunch at an expensive French restaurant in 1991--just a few days before Roth voted to give his company a $100,000 contract--because the supervisor had only a bowl of soup.

Orange County prosecutors, however, have taken a different view, asserting in a recent court filing that Roth is suspected of fraud, theft, money laundering, perjury and obstruction of justice in his political dealings.

Investigators are looking at potentially dozens of votes that Roth cast in favor of projects brought before the county by local business people who had given him a multitude of items--ranging from a 2% stock in a fledgling sunscreen company to an enlarged living room and a newly landscaped front yard, and more.

An expensive Baccarat crystal vase. Lodging in Hawaii, Santa Catalina Island and Palm Springs. Tickets to Rams and Angels games. Frequent lunches at Orange County’s fanciest restaurants. Airline upgrades to first-class seats en route to Europe and Hawaii.

Roth has accepted these and many other items from local business people. Some things he has reported to the state in gift-disclosure statements, but others, interviews show, he has not.

Orange County Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi emphasized Tuesday that Roth’s resignation will not end the criminal investigation, saying for the first time that Roth could still face jail time if convicted.

Apart from the legal issues in the case, Roth’s political downfall may have come because of his “blurring” of the line separating personal friends from business associates who have a vested interest in county government, according to one Roth associate and supporter who asked not to be identified.

“This wasn’t a situation where someone walked up with a brown bag of money and put it down on the table for Don--that allegation has never been made,” the official said. “But the danger was that Don didn’t always discern the difference between his personal relationship and his professional ones.”

Roth’s closeness to business associates with government interests dates back years, to his days as mayor of Anaheim. Some ties have not come out during the district attorney’s investigation, interviews show.

For instance, in the early and mid-1980s, then-Mayor Roth made make frequent jaunts to Palm Springs for golf outings and weekend getaways, staying at the guest house of Southland developer Alexander Coler or taking a room at Coler’s hotel, always at a significantly reduced rate, Coler said.

It was during this same period that Roth and the Anaheim City Council were overseeing several key development agreements for the construction of the $150-million Anaheim Hilton and Towers, a project that Coler was financing.

Coler said he and Roth were just good friends. Neither saw the mayor’s frequent weekend stays at Coler’s Palm Springs guest house or hotel as having any connection to the developer’s business interests before the city.

“We never got anything from Don,” Coler said. “We’d just sit around and schmooze.”

Roth has refused to discuss the issue.

For many Anaheim associates past and present, Roth’s close ties with local business people like Coler offer an example of his “boosterism” approach to government.

On the Anaheim City Council, Roth helped make his mark as a friend of business by consistently opposing attempts to levy a park admissions tax--fiercely opposed by Disneyland. He solidified that image in later years, extolling the credo that government should leave the private sector alone.

Anaheim Mayor Tom Daly, an aide to Roth in 1988 and 1989, said Roth was in effect “a salesman for Anaheim,” intent on seeing it grow economically by helping bring the Freedom Bowl to the city in 1984, seeking to establish a high-speed train to Las Vegas, and pursuing other business ventures.

“Don was a tireless worker on behalf of a prosperous Anaheim. He was unabashedly pro-growth,” Daly said in a recent interview. “He’s a one-man economic development program--that’s Don.”

Roth’s free-enterprise philosophy also extended to campaign reform measures. He often argued vehemently against efforts to limit what constituents could donate to politicians. He was the only supervisor to oppose the effort to put a campaign-reform measure on the countywide ballot last year.

Voters approved the initiative overwhelmingly, expanding existing campaign restrictions and imposing new caps on allowable contributions.

Bob Cashman, a Villa Park businessman who has known Roth for years and helped him with campaign work, said the criminal investigation has given the public a skewed perception of Roth as a man of fancy tastes.

“I’m telling you, this is a ‘go down to the bar and have a beer and a hamburger’ guy. He’s not a wine and fillet man,” Cashman said in a recent interview. “This whole thing is sad. It’s impossible to buy him breakfast now--he won’t allow it. He’s dotting every i and crossing every t .”

Roth’s popularity as a politician, many suggest, grew in part from the common touch that Cashman describes.

In lashing out publicly at budget problems or jail proposals, Roth rarely displayed the type of smooth oratory skills honed by Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez in school years ago. Nor did he employ the type of pounding, vitriolic style of public questioning that has made Supervisor Roger R. Stanton feared by many staff members who have faced him at board meetings.

Roth’s words were often blunt, his edges coarse.

“He’s a working-class guy,” said Disneyland President Jack Lindquist, who has worked with Roth on Anaheim issues for the last two decades. “He’s a fairly average person who gets a lot of people to believe in him and vote for him. I think it’s the old door-to-door thing--he just goes out and beats the bushes.”

Roth’s ex-wife, Jackie, remembers beating those bushes in the half-million person North County district that surrounds Anaheim, when Roth ran for supervisor in 1986 while still mayor.

“It was him on one side of the street and me on the other,” she said. For hours, the pair would pound on doors from Buena Park to Orange, coaxing--sometimes imploring--people to vote for a man much like themselves.

After a bitter divorce and a few unkind words about her from Roth’s lawyer, Jackie Roth agreed last year to “cooperate fully” in the case against her ex-husband, offering some potentially damning allegations to the district attorney. Ironically, most Roth associates point to her as having played a pivotal role in his political ascension as well, always pushing behind the scenes.

“She was a master-sergeant type of wife,” Cashman said. “You’ll find Jackie’s footprints on Don’s fanny.”

But Jackie Roth says she merely gave Roth a new look back in his days in Anaheim politics, putting him in new suits and getting him a styled haircut to help him achieve his electoral ambitions.

“He wanted to go up as high as he could, and I helped him get there,” she said. “The guy had the potential, but it took something to put it together. . . . It’s sort of sad to see it all end like this.”

Behind the Resignation

Orange County Supervisor Don R. Roth, a fixture on the Orange County political scene for two decades, announced his resignation on Tuesday.

Authorities are nonetheless pursuing their probe, seeking to determine whether Roth engaged in a pattern of influence peddling by trading political favors for thousands of dollars in unreported gifts from local business people. Roth denies any criminal wrongdoing.

These are some of the main issues in the Roth case:

The Doughers

The Times disclosed last April 18 that Roth, in apparent violation of state law, failed to report in government disclosure statements that he had accepted three trips to Santa Catalina Island and what amounted to an $8,500 interest-free loan from the Dougher family of Laguna Beach. The newspaper’s reports prompted the district attorney’s office to open its investigation.

Roth stayed at a Dougher-owned mobile home park in Anaheim for 16 months following the breakup of his marriage in mid-1990, paying $8,500 in back rent only after he moved out. Roth said the rent deferral had been agreed upon in a lease dated Aug. 15, 1990. But The Times reported that documents and interviews indicate that the agreement was not signed until December, 1991, and that Roth initiated the 16-month backdating of the agreement. Prosecutors have alleged that the backdating may constitute obstruction of justice.

Roth said he did not believe the trips or the rental loan had to be reported.

Roth voted on Dec. 10, 1991, with the other four supervisors, to override a Planning Commission decision and approve plans for a $5-million condominium project on Dougher-owned land.

Home Improvements and Landscaping

Roth received more than $15,000 in free or undervalued improvements to his new Anaheim Hills home from the Presley Cos. Neighbors in the tract-home community said they were not allowed such upgrades.

Roth’s lawyers have maintained that Roth paid a fair market value for the home of nearly $350,000, regardless of the improvements that may have included. Presley officials have declined to comment.

Soon after Presley began the improvements, Roth helped kill a measure that would have forced the company and other developers to put fire-safety sprinklers in new homes. Authorities are investigating whether the home improvements and the death of the measure are linked.

The Times also reported, in November, that the Baldwin Co. had paid another firm $1,950 to landscape Roth’s front yard. Roth never paid for the work, but Baldwin Co. officials say it was an oversight. Roth later reported that he had paid the firm $975, leaving the other half of the bill for his ex-wife.

Soon after the work on his home was done, Roth voted on several county matters affecting both the Presley and Baldwin companies.

Technology Tour of Europe

In March, 1990, Roth led a delegation of local business people on a European tour as part of his efforts with the California-Nevada Super Speed Train Commission to bring high-speed rail to Southern California.

Roth billed nearly $2,900 for his air fare to both his campaign funds and the bistate public commission, The Times disclosed last July. Acknowledging the double-billing, Roth later paid the money back to his campaign account. Authorities alleged that Roth “laundered” the money through a local travel agent.

Roth also received a free upgrade to first class on the flight to Europe, worth $2,236, along with a similar upgrade on a 1987 flight to Hawaii arranged by the county’s airport manager.

The upgrades were not reported as gifts in state filings, and they appear to pose legal problems under a state Constitution amendment banning politicians from accepting “passes or discounts” from transportation carriers.

The airport manager, George A. Rebella, received an extra $28,000 in disputed sick pay in 1990 after he threatened to publicly disclose the receipt of upgrades by unnamed officials.

Company Stock

Last May, Roth failed to disclose in state economic disclosure statements that a prominent local consultant was the source of his 2% ownership in a fledging sunscreen company. The consultant, Harvey Englander, has represented several corporate clients before the supervisors. Roth has declined to discuss the issue.

Similarly, Roth received numerous meals, trips and other gifts that were either underreported or did not show up at all on state filings, interviews and records have shown.

Charity Auction

At a charity auction held at the Don R. Roth Golf Classic in 1991, the supervisor outbid all competitors for a weekend trip to Atlanta, including air fare for two, hotel accommodations and tickets to a Rams-Falcons pro football game.

The money for his $1,200 bid, The Times reported earlier this month, came from Roth’s political campaign account. Politicians are barred from using campaign funds for personal affairs. Roth’s lawyer has said the expense was legitimate because the money was paid to a charitable cause.