A Leaky City Hall

It had to happen.

No sooner had the city attorney presented his top secret report on how to prevent leaks in Los Angeles government than the report itself leaked out.

“If hypocrites could fly, this place would be an airport. It’s a joke,” said Councilman Joel Wachs. “Anything that’s marked ‘confidential,’ the press always has it.”

The report on leak prevention--a document elaborately coded and numbered to prevent illicit copying--represents the culmination of an unprecedented five-month investigation that included 109 sworn interviews but came up empty-handed as to how Police Chief Willie L. Williams’ confidential personnel file landed in public hands last year.

The report provides a rare glimpse into a bureaucracy that bungled its attempts to keep track of the personnel documents despite extensive security precautions such as supervised copying and storage in locked cabinets outside government offices. Although it fails to find the culprit in the leak, the report does offer eight suggestions for clamping down on confidentiality from now on.

“No suspects were identified and no specific violations of the law can be charged,” City Atty. James K. Hahn wrote in presenting his murky findings to the City Council. “City Hall . . . will always be rife with rumors, speculations, divergent interests and personal conflicts. . . . It may be impossible to prevent future similar occurrences.”

Indeed, Hahn’s proposals--from logging distribution to labeling each copy with a unique gray and white overlay that says “Confidential Do Not Copy” and identifies its owner--failed their first time out: Using them on the leak investigation report did not keep it sealed past the day the council discussed it in closed session.

Deepening the irony is the timing of the report. City Hall has been rocked this week over another type of leak, with the City Council on Tuesday casting a vote of no confidence in a top mayoral aide who shared confidential documents with attorneys opposing the city in a legal dispute.

“I don’t know if there’s a foolproof way,” Councilwoman Laura Chick said when told that the city’s best new plan for keeping papers secret had failed on opening day. “It’s a sorry state that we can’t respect confidentiality.”

Wachs and several legal experts on the media and the 1st Amendment saw the situation from a different angle. Rather than spend taxpayers’ money on ensuring secrecy and investigating breaches, they said, city officials should simply conduct more of their business in public instead of behind closed doors.

Many of the documents in the Williams case--from the chief’s performance evaluation to a Police Commission reprimand--should never have been confidential in the first place, several attorneys said.

“Governments thrive on confidentiality. The general principle is that knowledge is power,” said Douglas Mirell, a downtown lawyer who argued on behalf of opening sealed records in the O.J. Simpson murder trial. “So long as the government controls the amount and character of information that is released to the public, the public will be disempowered.”

Besides, Mirell and others agreed, secrecy simply doesn’t stick.

“It has always been true that the more one attempts to suppress information, the greater the pressure is to have it released,” Mirell said, citing examples from the Pentagon Papers to Watergate to Iran-Contra to Whitewater. “Labeling something confidential is the surest way to ensure that interest in it is piqued.”

Led by Charles Goldenberg, assistant city attorney for special operations, the leak investigation used all of Hahn’s prosecutorial powers, for the first time unleashing them inside City Hall rather than on Los Angeles scofflaws to find out who had surreptitiously given information about Williams’ personnel evaluation and the Police Commission’s investigation of his Las Vegas trips to The Times.

After launching an investigation into whether Williams had inappropriately accepted free rooms in Las Vegas, the Police Commission determined that he had not violated the city’s ban on accepting gifts but nonetheless reprimanded him for being dishonest about the issue during the investigation. The City Council later overturned the reprimand.

The report notes that Times Editor Shelby Coffey III and staff writer Jim Newton, who wrote the articles, declined to be interviewed by city investigators, citing the U.S. Constitution and the California shield law protecting journalists from revealing their sources.

According to Hahn’s report, city officials took extraordinary precautions to keep Williams’ file secret, but inexplicably lapsed in several key instances.

While Mayor Richard Riordan and his attorney, Karen Rotschafer Sage, shared one copy of the documents--keeping it locked in a cabinet to which Sage had the only key, then turning it over to the city clerk for safekeeping--a former police commissioner retains a copy to this day, 10 months after he left his post.

While Police Commission press secretary Elena Stern had to sign an oath of secrecy before reading a draft of the documents, two private management consultants and three high-ranking police officers had unmonitored access to them.

While one secretary demanded identification from a messenger before releasing sealed boxes of the documents, which were later transported down a City Hall corridor in a hand truck by one of Hahn’s top deputies, another secretary cannot recall how many copies she shredded.

Other odd details also emerge in the step-by-step narrative of who gave which copy to whom: Police Commission Executive Director Rich Dameron was unable to find Riordan or his deputy mayor for public safety over a weekend, leaving messages and cellular pages to no avail; Williams only received the commission’s official decision of reprimand after being called by The Times for comment about it, according to Hahn’s report.

The chief faced the same situation Wednesday. Asked what he thought of Hahn’s investigation, Williams said he had not seen a final copy. Told that The Times had reviewed it, the chief just smiled.

“Let me withhold what I think of it right now,” Williams said. “There may or may not be some follow-up.”

The City Council discussed the report Tuesday in closed session, but Williams was not there. Sources said the council will take it up again and hear from him in two weeks.

The chief filed a $10-million claim against the city over the leaks, but dropped it on the condition that the council launch the investigation, which was unable to find the person who let the Williams file out.

Along with about 30 pages of detailed narrative, the report contains about eight exhibits: Times clips, an interview list and a thick timeline starting with Williams’ appointment April 16, 1992, and ending with the chief’s filing of the claim against the city over the alleged leaks.

When Williams dropped his claim, nobody said what would happen if the investigation turned up nothing.

“Each [person interviewed] denied leaking the information, denied contributing to the leak and denied knowing who, in fact, leaked the information,” Hahn and Goldenberg wrote of their long interview roster. “Leaks are common throughout all levels of American government and will never be totally eliminated.”