Embezzlement Link Probed in Killing at Carole Little : Crime: LAPD says a cover-up is one of many motives being explored in the slaying of the garment maker’s comptroller.

The Los Angeles Police Department is investigating the possibility that the May 4 killing of a top financial executive at garment maker Carole Little was carried out by someone trying to prevent the disclosure of possible embezzlement, police and company officials said.

Comptroller Rolando Ramirez was the most recent victim in a string of attacks on people tied to Los Angeles-based Carole Little and the second company executive to be killed in the past five months. Another executive survived three slaying attempts, and a Carole Little contractor was killed in 1993.

Police and company officials are conducting an internal audit to determine if there are any financial discrepancies. The audit could be completed in about a week but so far has not turned up evidence of embezzlement, LAPD Detective Fred Miller said.

“The audit is part of an ongoing internal investigation and it’s a component of the police investigation,” said Leonard Rabinowitz, co-chairman of Carole Little. “The audit started very shortly after the Ramirez murder.”

As comptroller, Ramirez oversaw all of the company’s finances and would have been in a position to spot financial irregularities. Police have not ruled in or out the possibility that all the killings and assaults are connected.

Authorities are also looking into the possibility that the attacks are related to Carole Little’s cutbacks in the use of garment contracting firms.

Rabinowitz said he does not know whether previous slayings and violence are the work of disgruntled contractors. However, he said he does not believe that the Ramirez shooting is a contractor reprisal.

“Rollie [Ramirez] had no responsibility in that area,” Rabinowitz said. “He had nothing to do with contracting.”

Rabinowitz also said he does not believe that Ramirez was involved in any wrongdoing. “We’ve known him for 17 years and we’ve known him to be a completely honest, upstanding family man,” he said.

LAPD investigators said an embezzlement cover-up is one of many motives being explored. Carole Little has also asked the FBI to investigate the possibility of such a cover-up.

“Every possibility is being investigated,” Rabinowitz said.

Ramirez was hit by multiple gunshot wounds as he sat in his car near the intersection of 33rd and Main streets in Los Angeles at about 6 p.m. May 4. He died at the scene.

Ramirez was killed just four months after Kenneth Martin--a Carole Little vice president who managed company relations with foreign and domestic contractors--was slain. Martin was shot several times in the upper body as he sat in his truck at a stoplight at Slauson Avenue and La Cienega Boulevard in Ladera Heights.

The string of violence began Nov. 2, 1993, when Hakop (Jack) Antonyan--co-owner of GAHA, a Glendale-based sewing contractor for Carole Little--died of gunshot wounds in what police described as an execution-style slaying.

Antonyan was killed hours before Karin Wong-Holzinger, then a Carole Little executive in charge of procuring domestic contractors, survived a bombing at her Long Beach home. She had also escaped uninjured from a previous bombing and a freeway shooting attempt.

Wong-Holzinger said the shooting occurred about a month after she received a telephone threat from someone who was among the contractors that Carole Little whittled from its ranks of suppliers. Carole Little reduced the number of contractors in a consolidation designed to help it meet demands of retailers to cut costs.

Wong-Holzinger, who has filed a wrongful-termination suit against Carole Little, has claimed there is a connection between the contractor consolidation and the attempts on her life.

Carole little is offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of anyone involved in the Ramirez killing. The LAPD has also released a composite sketch of a man seen near the site where Ramirez was shot and who may be a suspect or a witness.