Another Car at Center of UCLA Investigation

These should be heady times for UCLA basketball, heady days for Bruin fans.

Instead, they are nothing less than turbulent.

Three weeks after the abrupt firing of Coach Jim Harrick and days after a season-opening loss to Tulsa, the Bruin program is embroiled in its second investigation in as many months by the Pacific 10 Conference.

The latest investigation, confirmed Friday by UCLA Athletic Director Peter T. Dalis, is similar to the earlier probe in that it includes the purchase of a car and the potential inducement of a UCLA recruit.

The first investigation ended with UCLA being cleared of wrongdoing in the sale of a Chevrolet Blazer owned by Harrick to Lisa Hodoh, the sister of UCLA recruit Baron Davis.

The new probe involves, among other things, whether the purchase of a car by Pat Barrett, a friend of Harrick’s and an area youth league coach, for Olujimi Mann in 1994 influenced Mann to orally commit to UCLA.

Pac-10 investigators will also be examining the link between Barrett and Frank Pritt, a prominent UCLA booster and boyhood friend of Harrick in Charleston, W.Va.

In quick summary, here are some of the elements of that link:

--Barrett, 42, is an Orange County resident who runs youth basketball programs out of his parents’ home. Barrett has two sources of income. He pays himself a small stipend for running Orange County Hoops, a nonprofit organization backed by donors. Barrett said he also receives funds from Nike Inc. to act as a consultant and run shoe company-sponsored tournaments and camps. Sources put his annual income at $100,000 from Nike, although Barrett denies it’s that high.

--Pritt, 54, is the owner of a computer company, called Attachmate, in Bellevue, Wash. He has homes in Bellevue and Newport Beach. In October, Forbes magazine listed Pritt in its Forbes 400, the 400 wealthiest people in the country. It put his net worth at $500 million.

--Harrick has known Barrett since his coaching days at Pepperdine. One of Harrick’s players then was Tom Lewis, and in those days Barrett was part big brother, part guardian to Lewis. Harrick has known Pritt since their childhood days in Charleston, where they went to the same junior high and high school.

--In the weekly football program sold at UCLA games, there is a listing of top donors to the athletic program. In the eyes of the NCAA, this listing labels these people as official boosters of the school. Pritt is listed under “Team Endowment.” UCLA officials said that means a donation of “at least $100,000.” UCLA officials say Harrick brought Pritt into the endowment program.

BARRETT AND HARRICK

When Harrick was questioned about Pat Barrett this summer, he wondered why his friend’s activities were worthy of extensive examination.

“Pat Barrett is like my son,” Harrick said then.

Months later, when asked to clarify that statement, Harrick said, “I was joking.”

Barrett said he has a symbol of his friendship with Harrick, proudly pointing out that Harrick gave him one of the 1995 UCLA championship rings after its victory over Arkansas. He said Harrick gave him the ring as a “thank-you” gift for helping work with some of the players.

Harrick, when questioned about the ring, said at first that he didn’t know how Barrett got the ring. Sources at UCLA said that Barrett didn’t get it from the school. The school ordered rings only for members of the athletic department, according to the sources.

On Friday, Harrick said he may have given Barrett a ring. “I bought some of the rings,” he said. “I didn’t pay for it [Barrett’s ring], it’s true. I don’t remember ordering or giving it to him. It may have happened. I don’t remember giving it to him, though.”

A steady stream of players have flowed from Barrett’s programs to UCLA. Among others, Charles and Ed O’Bannon, Jelani McCoy, Trevor Wilson, Don MacLean and Darrick Martin. Current controversial recruits, high school players Olujimi Mann and Baron Davis, both of whom verbally committed to UCLA, were at one time part of Barrett’s programs.

Not every one of Barrett’s top players ends up at UCLA. Kenneth Brunner, a highly recruited point guard at Compton Dominguez, who has played for Barrett, has signed a letter of intent to attend Fresno State.

Barrett does not deny his affinity for UCLA, or Harrick. Sources in UCLA’s athletic department said that UCLA’s coaching staff left passes for Barrett “for 75% of the Bruins’ home games in the last five years.”

Barrett maintains he has not pressured players to go to UCLA.

“I mean, I like UCLA, I like Jim Harrick,” Barrett said earlier this month. “I don’t know that I have that much influence over somebody to go there.

“I’ve always liked UCLA, I’ve always been a UCLA fan, ever since I played, ever since the Wooden days. I mean, why not go to UCLA? It’s in Southern California, big-time program, the exposure and TV. It’s pretty hard to turn down.

“I think the kids know that I’m a UCLA fan. I mean, I don’t browbeat them or turn a light on them or beat them in the head. I’ve always been a Harrick fan. I’m not ashamed to say that. There’s nothing wrong with that or illegal about it.”

The most high-profile connection, currently, between Barrett and UCLA is a car that once was owned by Barrett and eventually ended up in the hands of former UCLA recruit Mann. That is one of the subjects of the Pac-10’s current investigation.

Barrett’s 1991 Honda Accord, purchased in 1994 for $13,265, was signed over to Mann in January 1995, two months before he committed verbally to play for UCLA starting this fall. Mann was a highly regarded point guard from Santa Ana Valley High whose academic deficiencies never allowed him to play at UCLA.

Mann’s father, Richard, said that he paid $5,000 for the car, meaning Barrett would have taken an $8,265 loss on the transaction. Records from the Department of Motor Vehicles, however, show that Barrett gave Olujimi Mann the car as a gift.

“Pat likes to help people,” Olujimi Mann said. “People don’t look at Pat for who he is away from the court. I’ve seen him give a bum $20. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do with it, never going to see him again, but he does it and I’ve seen him do that a few times.”

BARRETT AND PRITT

While Pritt was rising to prominence in the computer world, Barrett was becoming one of the more powerful figures in Southland youth basketball.

The connection between Pritt, Harrick and Barrett was completed when Barrett was introduced to Pritt by Orange County businessman Stan Castleton, according to Barrett. Castleton, who once played for Harrick at Morningside, remained close to him while Harrick coached at Pepperdine.

In 1993, Barrett started Orange County Hoops, a nonprofit organization set up to establish basketball camps, youth leagues and traveling all-star teams. Pritt’s accountant, Robert Shaw, said Pritt donated $80,000 to Orange County Hoops in 1993. Shaw said Barrett’s request for increased funding in 1994 was approved by Pritt, who donated an additional $110,000 to the group.

In 1995, Barrett said Pritt assumed greater control of the organization, adopting the name Values For A Better America. In March of that year, Shaw said he was brought in by Pritt “to find out where the funding had gone in the previous years.”

Shaw, who would not discuss the conduct of any specific employees, said that poor financial record-keeping made it impossible for him to obtain documentation for how Pritt’s funds were spent before Shaw’s arrival.

In conjunction with his nonprofit groups, Barrett became one of the most powerful basketball figures in Southern California by running Nike’s grass-roots program in the Southland. The shoe company, according to sources, provides Barrett with a consulting fee believed to be about $100,000, in addition to a vast supply of the company’s athletic shoes and apparel.

Nike has no business relationship with UCLA, which is aligned with Reebok in a long-term deal.

With youngsters, however, the draw of Nike equipment and Barrett’s reputation for coaching the area’s best players is a powerful pull and his teams have attracted, among others, future NBA players Ed O’Bannon, MacLean and Chris Mills and current Southland prep standouts Schea Cotton and Davis.

Davis, a senior at Crossroads High in Santa Monica, was the subject of a recent Pac-10 investigation after his sister, Lisa Hodoh, purchased a 1991 Chevy Blazer registered in Jim Harrick’s name and driven by Harrick’s son, Glenn. The purchase occurred two days after Davis verbally committed to play at UCLA, starting with the 1997-’98 season. UCLA and Harrick were cleared of any wrongdoing by the Pac-10.

In August 1995, Barrett resigned from VBA after a rift developed between him and Shaw. The resignation came shortly after Barrett included nine family members on a VBA trip to Hawaii, which he booked with VBA funds without Shaw’s consent, according to Shaw.

The trip was canceled by Shaw and Pritt when they learned of the expanded travel party. Although VBA players did not make the trip, Barrett’s family members did travel to Hawaii. Barrett said he is reimbursing VBA, making 18 monthly payments that will total $6,800.

HARRICK AND PRITT

The childhood friends from Charleston had an almost-parallel climb up the ladder of success.

Harrick went from a job coaching basketball at Inglewood’s Morningside High to the head coaching job in 1988 at UCLA, perhaps the nation’s most-heralded basketball program.

Pritt walked away from a job at a national computer marketing company in 1982, and became a major force in the computer world in the mid-1980s. He built a software program that allowed personal computers to communicate with mainframes.

His Attachmate Corp. soared from sales of $5.3 million in 1986 to $123 million in 1992 and the privately held company has explored going public.

The tight bond--Harrick was the best man at Pritt’s wedding to his first wife, Julia, some three decades ago--survived professional struggles and enabled the two men to celebrate their twin successes.

“All I know is whenever Frank would come back [from California], he would talk at length, and excitement, of UCLA basketball,” said Matt Highsmith, who was Attachmate’s vice president of marketing for six years.

Highsmith, who left Attachmate for another company in April, describes Pritt as a “charismatic leader and savvy marketing strategist. Everybody who works for him loves him.”

That’s not to say Pritt was a soft touch, Highsmith said: “If anybody crossed the line, they were out of there. If Frank sensed anybody was not above board, he’d cut right to the chase and they were out of there.”

According to Harrick, after a visit to the White House honoring UCLA’s NCAA championship in 1995, he returned home on Pritt’s private jet.

*

Contributing to this story were Times staffers Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, Greg Sandoval, George Dohrmann, Lisa Dillman, Jason Reid, Steve Springer, Eric Shepard, Tim Kawakami and Bill Dwyre and Times researcher Paul Singleton.