Risque Photos of Holden Trip Raise Questions : City Hall: Partially clad women are shown entertaining the councilman and his staff on a ’91 visit to Korea. Holden says pictures depict a typical evening among Korean politicians.

When Los Angeles City Councilman Nate Holden flew to Korea four years ago, he was supposed to be forging bonds with a sister city, hobnobbing with politicos and wooing foreign investors.

But the obscure 1991 mission to Seoul and Pusan is being best remembered these days for a series of embarrassing pictures that turned up in the public record showing the lawmaker and his aides being entertained by scantily clad women dancing atop tables.

Snapshots from the trip, which was paid for by Korean government organizations, show a woman wearing only panties singing into a microphone, and other partially clothed women--legs and arms intertwined--perched on a table laden with drinks, fruit and nuts while Holden and other men sit around it.

Ironically, the councilman himself triggered the disclosure of the suggestive photos when he pressed prosecution of a house painter who allegedly stole them--along with two expensive rings and some cash--from a secret cubbyhole in Holden’s Marina del Rey apartment.

Holden recovered the pictures and valuables on his own, but called police when painter Hyun Tae Park denied having the negatives of the photos. Park has pleaded not guilty and claims that he took the items from the condo believing that Holden had accidentally left them behind.

The photographs have revived questions about Holden’s conduct as a representative of the city, coming on the heels of two sexual harassment lawsuits by former employees. Holden was exonerated in the first suit after a six-week trial, and the second suit was dismissed by a judge last week, though the plaintiff has promised to appeal.

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Jackie Goldberg, one of four women who sit on the 15-member City Council, said that what adults do on their own time “is nobody’s business,” but what politicians do while on duty should be held to public scrutiny.

“It’s offensive to women, and I think it’s offensive to men. It’s demeaning,” Goldberg said after reviewing the photos. “Most importantly, when we are on official business as council members, we are representing this city, and that’s the most offensive part of all.

“It’s more than bad judgment,” she added. “It’s not taking your responsibility as a representative of this city seriously.”

Holden and the three staffers who accompanied him on the trip said the pictures of a karaoke party in the port city of Pusan depict a typical evening among Korean politicians and businessmen, and that the strip show was not their idea.

“That’s the way you do official business there,” Holden shrugged. “They take you out and entertain you. They always tend to bring ladies in. We were guests of the people there. I don’t see any problem with their customs and cultures. It’s all wholesome as far as I’m concerned.”

But a wide array of people with expertise on such Korean expeditions--including two of the men who organized Holden’s trip--said the disrobing dancers were neither routine nor part of the official itinerary.

“Oh, no, I shouldn’t say so. That’s strictly personal. It must have been after everything was over,” said Sung Ki Park, vice chair of the Pusan International Sister City Committee. “The committee members, they’re all leaders of the community. They are all people of integrity. They don’t get mixed up with things like that.”

City Council President John Ferraro was part of the 1991 delegation but returned to his hotel after the traditional dinner that night rather than join Holden for karaoke. In several visits to Korea with Holden, former Mayor Tom Bradley and County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, Ferraro said he has never been serenaded by strippers.

“The last time I went to Korea, we had a dinner with the mayor and a couple of officials at our hotel,” Ferraro said. “There were no dancing girls.”

Former U.S. Ambassador to Korea Donald Gregg said that in scores of official dinners, he saw people get drunk enough to fall down but never was confronted by a woman wearing nothing but underwear.

“The menu exists from A to Z and the Koreans serve you what, in their best judgment, they think you want,” he said.

In both of the failed sexual harassment lawsuits against Holden, lawyers tried to use the pictures as evidence of the councilman’s alleged pattern of treating women as sex objects in and out of the office.

Lawyers in the first case tried unsuccessfully to subpoena the photos, and the longtime aide whose case was dismissed last week mentioned the pictures in her original complaint.

“After two different trips to Korea in 1990 and 1991, on a trade relations mission on behalf of the city, Holden and other male staffers bragged openly in the office about their sexual exploits with the Korean women,” former deputy Carla Cavalier said in legal papers.

Connie Collins, another former Holden deputy who accused him of sexual harassment in 1992 but has not pursued a lawsuit, said in a recent interview that male employees passed pictures from the Korea trips among themselves but would not show them to female colleagues.

“I just remember them saying they had pictures of naked women. They wouldn’t let me see them,” Collins said.

Holden has visited Korea several times, usually as a guest of the Young-Deung-Po District Council--which represents a neighborhood of glitzy nightclubs in the capital--and the Pusan Sister City Committee. During each visit, he has been accompanied by several aides and listed as absent from the council because of “city business,” not vacation.

Young-Deung-Po District Council President Jin Won Juong invited Holden on the 1991 mission in a letter noting that Los Angeles’ large Korean community was concentrated in Holden’s 10th District and that reforms were making the Seoul government more similar to the Los Angeles City Council.

“It is important that our two countries and our two communities continue the meaningful dialogue that has existed for many years,” he wrote. “Your presence will be greatly appreciated by the members of the national and local governments and the people of Korea.”

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Holden, Ferraro and Gene Kim--a Koreatown businessman who helped coordinate the 1991 trip--were all unable to locate any documents discussing details of the excursion, but said their activities during the weeklong visit consisted of meeting city officials, touring historic sites and factories, and dining with influential business leaders and politicians, with barely any free time for rest or play.

“We had official meetings, it was all very official,” recalled Ira Handelman, a businessman who accompanied Holden on the trip at his own expense and is shown in the pictures. “I’m not ashamed of anything I did. It was an official trip.”

Holden and the three staffers who joined him--then-chief of staff Herb Wesson, current chief of staff Louis White and former aide Bill Robinson--all said the pictures obtained by The Times depict the only occasion in which partly naked women entertained them while in Korea.

“That was the first time and the last time. We were shocked,” Robinson said. “In this case, it was something that just popped out of nowhere.”

The two most explicit pictures show just the women. One is a frontal view of a woman with her breasts exposed, wearing only underpants. The other is a woman wearing skimpy undergarments resembling a bikini, with a man’s hand reaching out for her midriff.

“She’s not completely stripped,” Holden noted when asked about the photo. “You can go to anyplace in Hollywood and see more than this.”

In other shots, the men and women are mixed together. One shows a woman leaning her head on Holden’s shoulder.

“These ladies just got up and moved stuff and started dancing on the table,” said White, who was among the defendants in the first sexual harassment trial and, like his boss, was exonerated. “It was not us going over there [to Korea] to have a good time. They were busy days. I tell you, we went to so many meetings, I said I never want to go back.”

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The eight photographs obtained by The Times were attached to a search warrant in connection with the August burglary in Marina del Rey, where Holden has lived at least part time for the past four years. According to the police report, they are just a few of about 50 pictures taken from the condominium; the others are expected to be subpoenaed as part of the burglary trial.

The alleged burglary happened after Holden moved out of his Marina condo and hired Sun’s Painting and Maintenance to paint it for $450. Two rings, cash and the photographs that had been stashed in an inch-high storage space in a closet turned up missing after the painters left, according to the police report.

In a series of meetings at a coffee shop, the painters handed over everything but the negatives--which they told police they never saw--to Steve Kim, a Holden aide. The police report indicates that Park, the painter, confessed to the theft, though he now denies that. He is scheduled for a preliminary hearing Dec. 29.

Sheriff’s Deputy John Vernon, who investigated the burglary, and Deputy Dist. Atty. Jim Grodin, who is prosecuting the case, both declined to comment.

Law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said they do not understand why Holden has pressed the case. Holden said he is willing to suffer the embarrassment of having the photographs made public to make his point.

“I resent the idea of somebody taking anything from me,” Holden said. Though he insists that the photographs depict a typical, traditional Korean evening of entertainment, Holden acknowledges that he purposely separated them from the rest of his mementos from the trip, stashing them in a cubbyhole at home rather than including them in voluminous photo albums commemorating his Korean visits that sit on the coffee table in his City Hall waiting room.

“You would get charged with sexual harassment if you put those in there!” he said. “You can’t do that.”