Controversy Followed Embezzlement Suspect : Museum: But deputy director of natural history facility was never charged in incidents at previous jobs. He is now accused in scheme that pocketed $2.1 million.

Controversy seemed to follow Marcus A. Rodriguez as he bounced from job to job in county government. He was accused of investigating colleagues on a state computer, he was rumored to be illegally driving a car with police sirens and he was harassed by anonymous death threats.

But none of these problems stuck, and none of them derailed his career in public service--until county prosecutors this week charged Rodriguez and two others with embezzling $2.1 million from the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History over more than five years.

Even as the museum was firing dozens of employees and cutting back on programs, Rodriguez, its deputy director, was allegedly siphoning funds to buy a pile of personal goodies, from a BMW to Raiders tickets to cellular phone service.

“I thought he must have gotten a nice raise,” Rodriguez’s mail carrier, Ken Eggen, said, commenting on the shiny new cars he noticed outside the suspect’s Glendale home.

Investigators believe Rodriguez stole the money to pay for three new cars--and for auto insurance--while working among the scowling skeletons of saber-toothed tigers in the Exposition Park museum and near the burbling ooze of the La Brea Tar Pits at the satellite George C. Page Museum in the Mid-Wilshire district. Officials suspected, but could not prove, that he may also have pocketed artifacts from the museums’ fabled collection.

Rodriguez is scheduled to be arraigned Monday, along with Cristina Elizabeth Coleman, 41, his former secretary, and Marissa Meroney, 41, the former chief accountant for the Museum of Natural History Foundation, which Rodriguez oversaw. The arraignment was originally scheduled for Thursday, but Rodriguez, 53, who suffers from diabetes, was getting treatment in the county jail’s medical ward.

At a court hearing Thursday afternoon, Municipal Judge Craig E. Veals refused to lower the defendants’ bail--set at $2 million for Rodriguez, $600,000 for Meroney and $50,000 for Coleman.

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Rodriguez allegedly masterminded the embezzlement scheme, diverting county funds, admission receipts and private donations into museum bank accounts he controlled at Wells Fargo and Bank of America.

Authorities also allege that he risked $625,000 of the museum’s money in the stock and bond markets. Meroney, they said, helped him hide “several hundred thousand dollars” of pilfered funds in the money markets to prevent Rodriguez’s wife from learning about the cash.

According to Coleman’s husband, Rodriguez sought to “overwhelm” her with gifts because of their warm relationship.

“She protested, but because of the relationship, she felt guilty protesting,” John Coleman said in a brief interview.

With county supervisors threatening to lay off workers, slash museum budgets and close public hospitals, news of the alleged embezzlement seemed to hit a nerve Thursday, even on the quiet block where Rodriguez lives.

“It’s awful, it’s awful,” said Seda Boudaghian, who lives a few doors from Rodriguez. Boudaghian’s family used to hold a membership to the Natural History Museum, she said. “But as a matter of fact, we did not renew our membership this year because they cut back so much, because of money shortages,” she said.

Sherri Gust, who as a graduate student and museum volunteer first blew the whistle on shaky financial practices at the museum in 1992, said Thursday that she believes the matter is far from over.

“People have asked me if I feel totally vindicated,” Gust said. “No. Because there are others. . . . This is not the end of it.”

Even while he was allegedly taking huge sums from the museum’s coffers, Rodriguez last year was one of four county employees who complained they were being cheated out of mileage expenses.

The four employees, all top-level managers, filed a lawsuit late last year claiming the county had reneged on a promise to reimburse them for using their personal cars rather than county vehicles. They claim to represent 400 other employees in what they hope will be a class-action lawsuit.

The case is pending. Rodriguez had worked in an assortment of administrative jobs before joining the museum staff about 10 years ago. He served as an aide to Supervisor Mike Antonovich, and worked in the county marshal’s office and for the county assessor.

His post with the Museum of Natural History was lucrative: As recently as a year ago, Rodriguez was being paid $151,300 a year, a salary funded by both the county and the private foundation that supports the museum.

But in June, 1994, the museum’s new director decided Rodriguez had been given too much power--and too much pay--under the previous administration. He cut Rodriguez’s duties and eliminated his $58,750 annual foundation stipend, leaving only the county salary of $92,500 a year.

Still, mail carrier Eggen recalled seeing “a bundle of new stuff” turn up at Rodriguez’s address, a beige one-story ranch house on a palm-lined boulevard in Glendale. “I thought he was doing quite well,” he said.

Museum Director James Powell said Thursday that the crisis had shaken employees. “The people in this building are still reeling from the shock,” he said. “But business is still being done. We are still doing the good work we are supposed to.”

That work includes overseeing a massive permanent collection of 25 million specimens, the third-largest natural history archive in the country, which includes such curiosities as pink-toed tarantulas.

The museum attracts all ages, from schoolchildren to senior citizens. They come to gawk at the toes of a horse that pranced in northern Mexico 100,000 years ago, the skeleton of a blue whale killed in Los Angeles Harbor, the half-ton skull of an Amazonian crocodile that waddled through the swamps millions of years after the dinosaurs vanished.

Behind the exhibits, however, the museum has reeled from various crises: the budget crunch, of course, and administrative turnover, controversy about the firing of a veteran curator, and allegations of sloppy bookkeeping.

The museum’s former director, Craig C. Black, was accused in 1993 of using county personnel to renovate his home and allowing a museum employee to remain on the payroll even as she pursued full-time graduate studies in Northern California. Black retired several months later, after 11 years on the job.

Powell, who took over the top job last year, said he hopes this incident will be the last to rattle his institution. “I hope it will all be over soon,” he said. “We will rebuild it into the fine museum that Los Angeles deserves.”

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Whistle-blower Gust first told county supervisors, and later investigators, in 1992 that money was disappearing from the museum and that other funds were misdirected.

“It was clear that money was coming in and not being spent at the museum,” said Gust. But the county auditor-controller’s office, hampered by limited access to documents, found no evidence of embezzlement at the time.

Eventually the district attorney, who has wide powers to subpoena documents, raided the museum offices and got the documents needed to show a pattern of embezzlement.

Rodriguez’s attorney, Alan H. Yahr, said his client plans to plead not guilty.

Coleman’s attorney, Trent Copeland, said he is aware of no evidence “to suggest my client was involved in any criminal wrongdoing.”

Coleman, who doted on her son and her green parrot, shunned flashy jewelry and designer clothes, drove a modest Ford Explorer and spent her annual vacations with her family, according to James A. Fawcett, who supervised her for the past three years at the county Department of Beaches and Harbors.

“She was pretty pedestrian--a very competent professional,” he said. “I didn’t have a clue anything was going on until [Tuesday],” when she was arrested in her Marina del Rey office.

Prosecutors say the embezzlement scheme began in July, 1988, and continued through May, 1994. During that period, Rodriguez received death threats when the museum began to lay off employees.

He was also the target of two criminal investigations. The first involved his reserve police officer status, which allowed him to carry a gun and drive a car equipped with flashing lights and a siren. Investigators found that he had not been properly certified, but decided Rodriguez had no criminal intent.

In the second instance, the district attorney’s office looked into allegations that Rodriguez was using state Department of Justice computers to conduct illegal investigations of museum personnel. Rodriguez denied the charges and the district attorney again declined to prosecute.

Times staff writers Stephanie Simon and Patricia Ward Biederman and correspondent Richard Winton contributed to this story.