Ex-Workers in Perot’s O.C. Campaign Seek FBI Probe

Just as a flurry of criticism about Ross Perot’s political organization has begun to die down nationally, new charges of campaign irregularities have surfaced in Orange County, one of Perot’s major strongholds during his unsuccessful drive for the presidency.

Former campaign workers who have grown disillusioned with the quirky Texas billionaire now contend that his state and county campaign offices in Irvine were riddled with problems, so much so that they have asked the FBI and Federal Election Commission to investigate.

Among other things, they suspect that campaign funds were not properly accounted for, that payments for election-related work went to companies that cannot be traced and may not have even existed, and that numerous political contributions and expenses in California have been left off campaign disclosure statements in violation of federal law.

“Perot has been asking government to be accountable, but he is not accountable to anyone,” said Gretchen Marszalk, a Newport Beach businesswoman and member of a loosely knit group of former Perot backers. “There were grave concerns from many volunteers who saw what they thought was the mishandling of campaign funds.”

Local loyalists and officials of United We Stand America, Perot’s Dallas-based political organization, admit there were some problems with the grass-roots effort, a situation greatly aggravated by Perot’s decision to drop out of the campaign in July and re-enter it in October.

Whatever mistakes occurred were inadvertent, Perot backers say, and they did not hamper the Orange County and state operations, which ran relatively well considering that the volunteers possessed a low level of political experience.

Perot officials also downplayed the local complaints as the handiwork of a few individuals bearing grudges from the campaign or with hidden agendas to undermine Perot’s phenomenal success in the political arena.

“Anytime you have an organization as large as ours, you will have unhappy people. This is coming from a small minority,” said Sharon Holman, a spokeswoman for United We Stand America in Dallas. “Dissatisfaction is common in other groups. It just doesn’t get on TV like Perot’s critics have.”

Though formal complaints have been lodged with the FBI and Federal Election Commission, federal authorities say they can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any investigation. United We Stand officials say they will cooperate fully with any inquiry that might ensue, and Perot has the right to correct without penalty federal campaign disclosure statements if honest mistakes are found.

While criticism of United We Stand has been broadcast by the national media for the last several months, the recent complaints are the first to come out of Orange County, where 24% of the presidential vote went to Perot, the highest percentage for a county in the nation.

From Maine to California, former campaign volunteers and officials have charged in interviews that United We Stand is poorly organized. Information about membership and finances is hard to come by, they say, and the organization’s headquarters is not forging the groups into an effective national machine.

The critics blame Perot’s authoritarian style, contending that he has never lived up to United We Stand’s democratic principles, which he has repeatedly enunciated across the country. Policy positions flow almost exclusively from top to bottom, with little input from the grass roots up.

In Orange County, more than a dozen former Perot volunteers told The Times that a host of problems began to plague his state and county campaign offices after a very strong petition drive in early 1992 succeeded in getting Perot’s name on the November ballot.

Undermining the momentum, they said, were bitter power struggles, frequent resignations by high-ranking officials, and a lack of simple accounting controls to track expenditures and political contributions.

Marszalk and other former Perot supporters contend that the state and county headquarters were so badly run that many thousands of dollars in donations and expenditures remain unaccounted for. Few procedures existed, they said, to accurately log the large volume of receipts generated from the sale of Perot books, T-shirts, bumper stickers and other mementos.

“No regulations were set for a long time about the handling of cash,” said Eileen Anderson, a former bookkeeper in the county office. “I believe, as others do, that there are thousands of dollars that might be missing.”

Specifically, Perot’s local critics charge that a vast number of contributions and expenditures were not reported on campaign disclosure statements for the months leading up to and after the election. Under federal law, political candidates must publicly disclose all donations and expenditures of more than $200.

Marszalk said that during the time period in question, virtually no campaign contributions and payments to only four companies--an unusually low number considering that the race was at its peak--were reported for the entire state of California.

Others said they were concerned about the possible misappropriation of campaign funds for a variety of expenses, including $6,500 to rent a beach-area duplex on Balboa Peninsula for three state campaign officials, who received salaries.

David Adamson, a state official who shared the duplex, said the place was rented to avoid the higher cost of hotel rooms. Adamson, a computer specialist, dismissed the complaints about the expenditure as ridiculous: “We’re professionals who were not going to live in squalor.”

In another state expense reported on Perot’s disclosure statements, Marketing Concepts in Modesto reportedly was paid almost $9,000 in 1992 for promotional services. According to the Modesto city clerk’s office and the Stanislaus County recorder, no such company is listed on the county’s business name index nor does it have a business license on file. There is no listed telephone number.

The firm’s listed post office box, according to the U.S. Postal Service, is assigned to Western Pipeline Co., which the former owner, Dennis Morgan, says no longer exists. The only Marketing Concepts on file with the Stanislaus County Recorder was established in 1988, but the former owner, John Diaz, now of Idaho, says the company was closed in 1989.

Morgan and Diaz said they never received any money from Perot’s state campaign.

Former Perot campaign workers also say the local Perot offices had two bank accounts for a while, when the campaign was required to have only one. Canceled checks from the campaign show that two bank account numbers existed for at least a short time. Activity in one of the accounts, they say, might not have been reported on campaign disclosure statements.

Mike Altman and Marshall Norris, both former co-chairmen of the county campaign office, said the charges of missing funds and poor record-keeping are spurious and motivated by people who did not get their way during the campaign.

“What a joke. The idea that there was a lot of money to pilfer is just silly,” said Altman, who estimated that only about $60,000 came into the local operation from September through the election. “Sure, we could have done things better. You bet. But we are real proud of what happened in this country. . . . If the FBI is looking into this, they will find nothing.”

Norris said he kept all copies of bills, checks and receipts coming into the county office, which was responsible for raising funds for the state operation. A daily inventory was made of all merchandise, he said, and at the end of the day, the cash received always coincided with the value of the merchandise sold.

If there were any problems, Norris said, it occurred before he took over as treasurer in August, 1992. He recalled that he could never find the original accounting books for the county office when he assumed his position.

“The missing money is a lie,” Norris said. “No one got anything out of this.”

Norris said there might have been two bank accounts, one for the Perot petition drive in early 1992 and one for the campaign. The petition account, he said, was phased out and might have overlapped for a short time with the campaign account until all checks drawn on it cleared the bank.

Robert F. Hayden, the former state coordinator for the Perot campaign, further disputed the contention that many contributions and expenditures in California were left off campaign disclosure statements during the height of the campaign.

Donations of more than $100 were discouraged, and suppliers in California were receiving fairly large contracts coordinated out of Dallas, not Irvine, Hayden said. “I would not expect to see a lot of items reported for that time.

“I don’t know all the answers, but let the allegations be reviewed,” Hayden said. “We had an adequate level of control over the operation and a well-staffed financial group. The checks and balances were in place. Maybe there were minor losses of things, or minor theft. But from an accounting standpoint, things did not fall apart.”