Tragedy Hits Home at Parsons

Parsons Corp., a global provider of engineering and construction services that specializes in helping strife-torn nations rebuild, itself had to quickly regroup Wednesday after learning that its top executive, Leonard J. Pieroni, was among those presumed dead in the crash of an Air Force plane in the Balkans.

Pieroni, 57, was among several executives traveling with U.S. Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown when their airplane crashed on a hillside in Croatia, the company said.

“Everybody is just stunned,” Bob Watson, a Parsons design engineer, said outside the company’s Pasadena headquarters.

As the employees listened to TV and radio news reports of the crash, the company was notified by the State Department that Pieroni was among those aboard the airplane, Parsons spokesman Ron Wildermuth said at a brief news conference.

“It is basically a waiting game” to find out Pieroni’s fate, Wildermuth said earlier in the day. “At this point, we are hoping for a miracle.”

The executives were accompanying Brown on one of his tours to promote U.S. goods and services overseas, in this case to Bosnia and Croatia. Pieroni particularly was looking to line up bridge-reconstruction work in the war-ravaged Balkans.

Pieroni was “asked to go on this trip by Secretary Brown, because the Parsons Corp. is one of the leading engineering firms and has a great deal of experience in reconstruction, following disasters or . . . wars,” Wildermuth said.

Parsons said its president, Thomas L. Langford, was at his office Wednesday and overseeing the company’s operations.

Founded in 1944 and now owned by its 10,000 employees, Parsons is among the few companies that handle often-unglamorous but highly specialized, difficult and large-scale engineering and construction projects that help countries and big corporations operate more efficiently, or that help them recover from natural disasters and wars.

With annual revenue of about $1.6 billion, Parsons is among the five largest private companies in Los Angeles County, and a major employer in the San Gabriel Valley. Parsons was also ranked the 91st-largest private concern in the nation last year by Forbes magazine.

Parsons has helped design, build, inspect or manage such projects as Los Angeles’ subway system, John Wayne Airport in Orange County, the first permanent energy production complex in Arctic waters and hydroelectric-power facilities at Niagara Falls, N.Y. The company is also helping Saudi Arabia and Kuwait build oil-production facilities.

Indeed, a group of Saudi Arabian engineers was at Parsons’ headquarters Wednesday and one of them, Ahmed al-Subaey, called Pieroni “the visionary of this company. I used to have lunch with him, and he seemed to be a very powerful personality.”

Other colleagues said Pieroni, the holder of two college degrees in chemical engineering, was a man with the forthrightness of a trained engineer and one committed to achieving goals.

Pieroni was “just a wonderful person and a very bright engineer,” said Ronald Tutor, president of the Sylmar-based construction firm Tutor-Saliba, which has worked with Parsons on the Los Angeles subway line.

He was “a very direct person,” added the Rev. Thomas O’Malley, president of Loyola Marymount University in Westchester, where Pieroni was a board trustee for the last three years. “You knew exactly where you were with him.”

O’Malley, who noted that Pieroni recently had been named chairman of the board’s facilities committee, called him a “prodigious worker” and a “very penetrating questioner,” adding that he was “the ideal trustee.”

Joseph P. Nally, a Los Angeles insurance broker and friend of Pieroni’s, said that “if you were in the trenches, you’d want him next to you.” Nally called him “terribly goal-oriented. If he said he’d do something, you could go to the bank on it.”

The trip with Brown reflected Pieroni’s high hopes for landing more contracts in the emerging markets of the former Soviet Union and other East Bloc nations, particularly because their infrastructures--including highways, airports and energy and chemical production plants--are in sore need of repair or expansion.

Pieroni, a 24-year veteran of Parsons, became its chairman and chief executive in May 1990. A Chicago native, he was named industrialist of the year in 1995 by the California Museum of Science and Industry.

Pieroni, who lived in La Canada, was also on the board of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, and was president-elect of the Boy Scouts’ San Gabriel Valley Chapter. He is survived by his wife, Marilyn, and two grown children, Len and Vicki.

Parsons made corporate fiscal history in 1985 when its top executives engineered a $518-million buyout financed by its employee stock ownership plan--then the largest such ESOP-financed deal in U.S. history. Pieroni was president of a Parsons’ subsidiary at the time.

The buyout became controversial, however, when a group of employees charged that it was designed to enrich top executives at the expense of the employee shareholders. A group of 13 employees later filed a class-action lawsuit challenging the plan, but the case was dismissed in 1990 by a federal judge who ruled that the terms of the deal were fair.

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Leonard J. Pieroni

Parsons Corp. Chairman Pieroni, 57, has said he considered himself to be more an engineer than an executive.

* Company growth: Since Pieroni was named CEO in 1990, company revenues have grown from $1 billion to $1.6 billion last year. The number of employees has increased from 8,500 to more than 10,000. The firm has also moved from fifth place in the Engineering News Record’s annual survey in 1990 and 1991 to first place last year.

* Management style: Pieroni championed bottom up management, letting his managers set their own goals, as has been known for his direct communication with employees.

* Education: He attended the executive program at Stanford University and held a master of science in chemical engineering from Northwestern University and a bachelor of science in chemical engineering from University of Notre Dame.

* Community involvement: Pieroni was on the board of directors of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce and the executive board of the San Gabriel Valley chapter of the Boy Scouts of America.

Researched by JENNIFER OLDHAM / Los Angeles Times

Parsons’ Rise Under Pieroni

Leonard J. Pieroni, chairman and chief executive of Pasadena-based Parsons Corp., was among the American executives accompanying Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown when the aircraft went down in Croatia. A brief look at Parsons--one of California’s largest engineering firms--and its work:

* Employees: The 52-year-old company is owned by its 10,000 employees.

* 1995 revenues: More than $1.6 billion.

* Business rankings: Parsons was named the top U.S. design firm in 1995 by the Engineering News Record. It was ranked 91st on Forbes magazine’s 1995 list of the 500 largest private companies in the U.S.

* Contracts: Parsons works in the petroleum, chemical, transportation and environmental industries. It also holds contracts for infrastructure, government, industrial and commercial development projects. A sampling:

** The company is building 2,500 housing units designed for demobilized Russian soldiers returning from the Baltics and other regions throughout the former Soviet Union.

** Through a joint venture known as Parsons-Dillingham, the company has supervised construction of the Metro Rail Red Line’s troubled Hollywood leg.

** Parsons is among a group of companies selected to oversee a $200-million expansion of the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport.

** As part of a third wave of reconstruction since the Persian Gulf War, it landed a $100-million contract to lead Kuwait’s drive to increase oil production.

** The firm helped with design work on the two major freeways in the San Francisco Bay area damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta quake.

** Parsons built the 103-mile Washington Metro system.

Researched by JENNIFER OLDHAM / Los Angeles Times