A Booster Mines Rich Vein of Connections at UCLA : Sports: Angelo Mazzone made $400,000 in Rose Bowl deal. He mixes passion for Bruins with personal business.

It was more than luck that allowed UCLA football booster Angelo Michael Mazzone III and his partner to reap a $400,000 profit as the middlemen for a large block of tickets to this year’s Rose Bowl game, a contest that drew some of the most intense fan interest in recent history.

Mazzone cashed in on his unusually rich connections to the Westwood school and its athletic program--connections that have allowed him for years to operate as the consummate insider, mixing a passion for UCLA sports with personal business, according to interviews and public records.

For years, his extensive network of contacts has been common knowledge in the circle of administrators, former jocks and hangers-on who thrive in the rah-rah culture of the Bruin athletic department, where Mazzone rose from football team equipment manager to second-in-command before going into private business.

At one point, Mazzone used those contacts to promote the idea of a privately sponsored national college championship game, on the order of the Super Bowl. Although that brash idea fizzled, he has invested in a pension management firm with former football players, started a computer venture with a UCLA vice chancellor, bought property with the athletic department’s publicity director and drilled oil wells with head football Coach Terry Donahue.

UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young said this week that he has investigated Mazzone’s dealings with university officials and found no conflicts of interest. The chancellor said he considers it proper for boosters to have close associations--helping recruit coaches and finding jobs for players--”as long as what a person is doing is not immoral, illegal and is not in any way compromising the university’s position.”

It took Mazzone’s behind-the-scenes role in the 1994 Rose Bowl game--remembered as much for its box office intrigue as its cardiac finish in which the University of Wisconsin defeated UCLA 21-16--to propel the booster and his special clout into the public spotlight, creating embarrassment and legal troubles for his beloved alma mater.

Young publicly apologized after angry alumni who were denied additional Rose Bowl tickets learned that he personally approved selling Mazzone 4,000 of UCLA’s allotted end-zone and goal-line seats before they were offered to the public. Young explained that he approved the unprecedented sale because Mazzone offered a $100,000 donation--in addition to paying the $184,000 face value of the seats--and Young’s subordinates feared being stuck with unsold tickets.

In the Midwest, the Mazzone deal enraged Wisconsin fans--whose team had qualified for the Rose Bowl for the first time in 31 years--because thousands paid scalpers up to 10 times the $46 face value for tickets to watch their Badgers beat UCLA. A Wisconsin attorney general’s investigation fingered the Mazzone transaction for much of the blame for the inflated prices, and a Madison, Wis., attorney has named UCLA in a pending class-action lawsuit.

Young subsequently disclosed that Mazzone and a Los Angeles ticket broker, Al Brooks Tours, made at least $400,000 reselling the tickets as tour packages to Wisconsin fans. Other records show that a small number of Mazzone’s tickets eventually changed hands for up to $485.

This is not the first time that questions have been raised about Mazzone’s role in the UCLA athletic program.

In 1977, he was the athletic department administrator in charge of athlete eligibility when 10 football players got credit for summer extension classes they did not take. After an investigation, the Pac-10 conference banned UCLA from the 1981 Rose Bowl and made it forfeit all 1977 victories. Mazzone was not sanctioned, and Young said this week that another UCLA official would have been responsible for verifying academic eligibility.

In 1978, Pac-10 officials also investigated allegations by basketball and football players that Mazzone bought complimentary tickets from them for triple the face value, at a time when National Collegiate Athletic Assn. rules said this was improper. Improprieties were found but no charges were filed against Mazzone, who the players said had brokered tickets since 1973.

Mazzone, 44, has repeatedly declined telephone and fax requests for interviews on the Rose Bowl flap and his UCLA years.

His friends, family and business partners say the publicity about the Rose Bowl tickets has besmirched the reputation of a die-hard Bruins fan who is likable, ethical and loyal--to the point of being devastated over how the controversy has hurt his UCLA “family.”

“The Angelo I know is not what (news reports) make him out to be . . . a greedy-type, unscrupulous villain,” said Gregory D. Taylor, one of Mazzone’s business partners, who played offensive line in UCLA’s 1976 Rose Bowl upset of top-ranked Ohio State. “This is not Angelo.”

Added UCLA Athletic Director Peter T. Dalis: “He’s very distraught. He loves UCLA and he’s obviously concerned about the outcome of this.”

Not in dispute, however, is Mazzone’s extensive web of connections to the athletic department, a high-profile enterprise that shapes the school’s image and brings in $21 million a year in gifts, game ticket sales and broadcast revenue. At this year’s Rose Bowl, his influence was underscored when he watched the game from the UCLA sidelines.

“He has been Mr. UCLA for a really long time,” said Bill Walton, a UCLA basketball star during the 1970s before going on to the Portland Trail Blazers and Boston Celtics, and currently a broadcaster. “He’s a really wonderful person who has nothing but UCLA’s best interests at heart.”

Records show that Mazzone--whose personal wealth he estimated at more than $5.8 million in a 1991 filing with Riverside County--has donated more than $188,000 to the UCLA athletic department since 1977, including the gift he made last December in exchange for being allowed to purchase the 4,000 tickets.

He has also assisted the school in contract negotiations with coaches and has taken a prominent role in fund-raising drives, helping to persuade five people several years ago to donate $75,000 each toward scholarships, Dalis said.

Mazzone’s generosity has also extended to the use of his Sunset Boulevard house, lending school officials the poolside back yard for retirement parties, wedding showers and booster gatherings. One of these officials was Dalis, who played a key role in Mazzone’s tickets-for-donation transaction.

The athletic director, whose office calendar shows frequent dinners and lunches with Mazzone since 1989, said the booster first approached him about the deal in mid-November, about 10 days before UCLA secured the Rose Bowl berth by defeating rival USC.

Dalis said he ultimately urged UCLA’s chancellor to take the offer, in part because the athletic department was reeling from a $660,000 loss in an unrelated radio broadcasting deal.

Three months earlier, records and interviews show, Dalis and his bride used Mazzone’s back yard for their wedding reception.

A university document shows that while it was by far the largest, last year’s controversial Rose Bowl ticket deal with Mazzone was not the first for UCLA. The booster bought 200 to 614 of UCLA’s allotted tickets each year between 1990 and 1993--years in which the Bruins did not make the game and fan interest was waning.

UCLA officials said they considered his purchases at the time as acts of loyalty, although they knew he wanted the tickets to sell his Rose Bowl tour packages.

“He came forward and purchased the tickets when we literally could not give them away,” said Dalis. “I know he’s also taken a bath a couple of years when there was no demand.”

In many ways, friends and relatives say, Mazzone has embraced UCLA athletics as if it were a surrogate for the close-knit, extended Italian family he left behind in Elmwood, the affluent Chicago suburb where his widowed mother, his sister and his uncle still live.

“When you have a conversation with Angelo, it’s all about how he’s involved in the athletic department,” said the uncle, Lou Mazzone. “That’s all you hear is football from Angelo.”

Afflicted by seizures and too small to strap on the pads--he is 5-foot-6 as an adult--Mazzone came into the locker room through the back door, indulging his boyhood love of sports by serving as the equipment manager for the football, basketball and hockey teams at Fenwick High, an exclusive Catholic school in Oak Park, Ill.

It was Mazzone’s friendship with Fenwick’s all-state quarterback, Dominic Mancini, that provided the road to Westwood. UCLA recruiters working to land Mancini offered Mazzone a scholarship as the Bruins’ equipment manager.

Years later, Mazzone would downplay the offer as a sop for Mancini, but the former star quarterback said then-UCLA football Coach Tommy Prothro was impressed with Mazzone in his own right. “I think he’s probably a genius in interpersonal communications,” Mancini said.

At UCLA, Mazzone earned a bachelor of arts degree with honors in psychology in 1972 and a law degree in 1975, but never joined the State Bar. That same year, Athletic Director J. D. Morgan made him assistant athletic director.

In a reshuffling after Morgan’s death in December, 1980, Mazzone became the department’s No. 2 man, responsible for all men’s sports programs.

During his tenure in the department’s upper echelon, Mazzone helped conduct internal investigations of potential NCAA violations and, after hints about athlete ticket abuses, designed a system to better track the use of athlete complimentary tickets, said Elwin V. Svenson, then vice chancellor in charge of athletics.

After he quit in 1981, however, Mazzone told the Daily Bruin student newspaper that NCAA rules discriminate against athletes and invite cheating by sports programs. “There isn’t a school in the country that follows every NCAA rule, so if the NCAA wants to catch a school, they’re going to catch it,” he said.

Mazzone said he wanted to pursue a business career and to start a family. Ever the bachelor, Mazzone never saw his plans for a family materialize. But his entrepreneurial career has blossomed, thanks in great part to business contacts he nurtured while still at UCLA.

One of Mazzone’s first real estate partners was Fulton Kuykendall, a standout UCLA linebacker who went on to play for the Atlanta Falcons and San Francisco 49ers. The two bought a house in Bel-Air in 1976 and sold it several years later.

In 1979, Mazzone and three others bought a six-unit apartment building in West Los Angeles. The investors included Glenn Toth, now UCLA associate athletic director in charge of marketing.

They sold the apartments and bought another six-unit building in Playa del Rey in 1986. The partners sold that building two years later and reinvested their money in a mini-storage facility in Palm Desert, Toth said.

Mazzone formed three other partnerships for mini-storage projects, including one in Honolulu that failed. Investor David Pick of Dana Point said it was a sign of Mazzone’s honor that he insisted the partners be repaid in full with interest.

During the mid-1980s, Mazzone became a partner in a pension consulting firm created by Greg Taylor and John Sciarra, UCLA’s 1976 Rose Bowl quarterback who later played for the Philadelphia Eagles. Eventually, Mazzone bought out Sciarra, taking a 50% share of the firm, Qualified Benefits Inc. in Woodland Hills.

Mazzone and former Fillmore geologist Ted L. Bear--another Bruins loyalist who met Mazzone when he was still team equipment manager--also put together nine partnerships between 1986 and 1991 for gas and oil exploration in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Texas. Bear said the wells have all paid 10% to 17% returns.

Among the investors, he said, was Donahue, the Bruins’ longtime football coach and one of Mazzone’s best friends.

The two met in 1971, when Donahue was a coaching assistant. UCLA officials made use of the friendship during the initial stages of delicate contract negotiations to keep Donahue from moving to the professional Atlanta Falcons in 1986 and 1987.

With the knowledge of Chancellor Young and other top athletic administrators, Mazzone became a behind-the-scenes “facilitator,” sounding out Donahue and his wife and passing along other intelligence he learned from former UCLA coaches and players dispersed through the National Football League, said Svenson.

“He had access to information through contacts that he’s had in the NFL, that sort of thing,” said Svenson. “We found it useful.”

Donahue stayed. A year later, Mazzone once again played pipeline when former basketball Coach Larry Brown, coming off an NCAA championship at the University of Kansas, tried to get his old job back.

“Larry Brown contacted Angelo Mazzone to signal us, meaning UCLA athletics, that he was interested in applying for the job,” said Dalis, adding that such indirect messages are designed to give participants press deniability. Talks broke down, however, and Brown became a coach in the National Basketball Assn.

Meanwhile, Mazzone went into business with former boss Svenson, creating Atos Ventures Ltd., a partnership to produce computer “smart cards.” The business union built a prototype, but the venture foundered, said Svenson.

In 1991, Mazzone called on UCLA officials for help in putting together what could have been one of his biggest deals ever. Representing the so-called National College Football Championship Game Group, Mazzone appealed to Dalis and Young for help in forwarding a proposal to the NCAA for a privately sponsored football championship game.

“He was very hot to trot to make this happen,” said Rick Kulis, president of Event Entertainment, a Los Angeles-based firm that puts together pay-for-view packages.

Kulis said Mazzone wanted to combine Event Entertainment’s television savvy with the Home Shopping Network’s merchandising prowess to present the “crown jewel” of college football, a game the booster once estimated could yield $30 million for NCAA schools.

Bob Sutton, then president of Home Shopping Network, remembered Mazzone coming to his Orlando, Fla., offices and making it clear that he was “close” to Young and that the chancellor favored the proposal. Sutton said Mazzone also showed interest in controlling the ticket sales.

Young acknowledged forwarding Mazzone’s proposal--which was summarily dismissed by NCAA officials--but emphatically said he did not endorse it.

“I said, ‘Angelo, I think this is totally out of the question. I don’t believe there is any support for playoffs at this point in time, but I’d be happy to forward it to the people in the NCAA,’ ” Young recalled. “I forwarded it with no letter of support.”

Many of Mazzone’s friends say they were unaware he had been peddling Rose Bowl tickets. They maintain that the recent controversy has not changed their opinion of the UCLA supporter.

“What amazes me is that 95%--no, 99%--of the people who know him, no matter whether it’s through business, religion, social or whatever, would feel about Angelo the way I do,” said Donahue. “He’s a great guy. He’s been a tremendous personal friend for 23 years, and he has honesty and integrity.”

Times staff writers Steve Springer, Michael Granberry and Jim Hodges contributed to this story.