Seeking Trust in a City of Strangers

The spring migrations are upon us. Along the freeways, outbound U-Hauls cross inbound U-Hauls. New Angelenos roll in on the singing wheels of hope, old Angelenos ride off on the dented rims of frustration and disgust.

The sheer freewheeling, merry chaos keeps people coming--to a city new as paint, land and wealth moving fluidly from hand to hand, sometimes on the up-and-up and some not. A Horatio Alger could prosper here; so too could the land-scam artists who stuck oranges onto Joshua trees and sold off the desert as fructuous paradise.

Life can be loose and uneasy in these daunting big spaces awash with citrus and equity. Try to find a neighborhood, much less neighbors, in the undifferentiated metropolitan mass. Put up signs to say, This is Carthay Circle, This is Harbor City. Build a picket fence in your head, around school, church, ethnic, work circle. If one deep need is to prosper, another, old as a cave fire, is the craving for a place peopled by the trustworthy. By others like you.

Fortune and fellowship, like migrating U-Hauls, now cross in an Alhambra courtroom. The defendant in 66 felony counts of fraud, grand theft and money-laundering is Rodney Swanson, a man with game-show-host good looks, a man the alleged victims would see, reassuringly, at the YMCA or the church baseball games or in the choir on Sundays--a Christian man, a family man, a man like them.

Over two months of trial, the victims--an LAPD detective, a fireman, a clinical psychologist, a banker, Swanson’s father’s boyhood friend--have testified, plenty embarrassed and plenty aggrieved.

Either the sums of money they entrusted to Swanson just blew away like smoke in a Santa Ana, in one of those capricious deflating winds that plague the L.A. real estate market . . . or they were hoodwinked and snookered by one of their own, a “leader of the church,” as one victim said, the man who, if the church had staged “The Last Supper,” would have played the role of Christ.

*

The bright brick and evergreen-painted steeple give to Emmanuel Evangelical Free Church in Burbank the look of a neighborhood church, even though the neighbors may drive for miles to get here.

And here, Swanson, 47, real estate salesman and investor, met many of the neighbors he allegedly fleeced of as much as $10 million in a paper scheme so intricate that investigators bored through more than a million pages of documents. There was a Ponzi scheme of properties Swanson didn’t own or owned only in part, transfers that went unrecorded, 11th trust deeds and reconveyances--an origami edifice of paper folded and bent to appear to be what it was not.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Anthony Colannino painted a betrayer parlaying his churchgoing into a financial fraud, a Judas with a pen, “except Judas only betrayed one person, and he did it for less money.”

California, which has birthed so many laudable and awful notions, has the edge on “affinity scams,” where like feed on like. Who better to trust than one of your own? So health-care professionals, nurses and doctors, buy into a long-term-care facility that never existed. Christian Chinese Americans in the San Gabriel Valley lose millions to a fellow Chinese American. A character actor invests unwisely with a fellow Friars Club member. Iranian Americans lose millions to a countryman and kinsman.

In any language, the laments are the same: “He wouldn’t do that to me, would he?” “He was my cousin; I trusted him.” “Chinese people cheat Chinese people; I felt so sorry.”

In the days of perestroika, President Reagan loved to repeat a Russian proverb: Trust, but verify. Would we apply the same caution to our allies the British, as to the Soviet strangers?

*

Rod Swanson, who once drove a Mercedes and lived in San Marino, was driving a Hansen’s soft drink delivery truck and living in Sierra Madre when he was arrested. Some parishioners at his new church in Pasadena put up their own houses to help bail him out.

There is blame enough on both sides, says Gary Baker, who has known Swanson for 25 years and now sits in court on his behalf. “Why would you allow someone to have so much say over your financial situation?” The matter of greed must certainly be considered, Baker says, and not just on one side. “Rod himself would probably say, I fouled up. I’m sure he’s thought about the quest for riches.”

Judy and Jim Herling have left the Burbank church, left California and the un-fillable $200,000 hole that something--and they do not believe it was a bad real estate market--left in the life finances they invested with Swanson.

Loss hurts. Forgiveness eases. Betrayal abides.

Don’t let friendship blur your vision to sound and ethical business practices, they say. A couple of phone calls might have saved a lot of hurt.

Trust, but verify.

And whatever course the law takes, they have faith that “it will be a higher authority who Mr. Swanson will one day have to account to.”